Grossesnoise. His fame had already preceded him from Vienna, and
remembering that she had once seen him at Marienbad, Molly
Howard-Britten wrote to him boldly and rather splendidly at the Ritz,
reminding him of their meeting (he had stepped on her toe and apologized
with a magnificent hat-wave), and begging him to come and dine any day
next week except Thursday, which she knew was the evening of his first
concert. She wrote--and here her fatal horizontality came in--on paper
with a coronet and another address on the top, hoping that she might
strike some streak of snobbism. She had come by this paper quite
honestly, having stayed in the house and having taken a sheet or two of
the paper put on the writing-table of her bedroom, obviously for the use
of guests. So now she used it, crossing out the address, and
substituting for it 25A Brook Street, Park Lane. A favourable answer
came, addressed to the Highly Noble Lady Howard-Britten (for he prided
himself on his English), on which the Highly Noble scrawled a couple of
dozen notes to musical friends and acquaintances (chiefly
acquaintances), asking them to dine on the forthcoming fatal Friday,
which was the day after Herr Grossesnoise’s first recital, to meet the
illustrious Austrian.
So far all was prosperous and the climbing weather stood at ‘set fair.’
It is true that she had changed horses in mid-stream, for in intention
she definitely unharnessed poor Mr. Harbinger, and put the unsuspecting
pianist in her shafts. But the fatal thing about changing horses in
mid-stream is that the coachman usually puts in a worse horse, which
Mrs. Howard-Britten had not done, since Mr. Harbinger could not at the
present time be considered a horse at all. Already musical London was
interested in the advent of her new mascot, for he had been well
advertised, and of her twenty-four invitations, nineteen guests
instantly accepted, who with her husband and the Herr would cause
‘covers to be laid,’ as she was determined the fashionable papers should
say, for twenty-two. Then she settled to have an evening party
afterwards, and though on the couple of hundred invitations which she
sent out she did not definitely state that Herr Grossesnoise was going
to play, she wrote on the cards ‘To meet Herr Grossesnoise.’ But when
you see a pianist’s name on an ‘At Home, 10.30. R.S.V.P.’ it is not
unnatural to suppose that he is going to be a pianist in very deed.
Among these two hundred she asked a fair sprinkling of people she wanted
to know, but at present didn’t, and had a Steinway Grand precariously
hoisted through the window into her drawing-room and retuned on arrival.
But in these arrangements her potential horizontality came out more
glaringly than ever, for she took a middle course which no climber ever
should. She was indefinite, she did not actually know whether Herr
Grossesnoise would play or not. Either she ought to have engaged him to
play at any fee within reason, if she meant (as she did mean), to make a
real spring upwards to-night, or she should not have mentioned the fact
that he was coming. As it was, every one supposed he would play, and
since his recital the day before had roused a _furore_ of enthusiasm in
the press, almost all her two hundred evening-party invitations were
accepted. A whole section of Brook Street was blocked with motor-cars,
and several aspiring Americans who found it impossible to get to their
hotel for the present looked in unasked until the road was clear. But
as Mrs. Howard-Britten knew no more than a high percentage of her guests
by sight, the gratuitous honour thus done her passed undetected.
The evening was a failure of so thorough a description as to be almost
pathetic. Herr Grossesnoise played, but not the piano. He came up from
the dining-room, slightly rosy with port and altogether inflated with
his success, into the drawing-room, set with row upon row of small gilt
chairs, and proceeded to do conjuring-tricks in a curious patois of
German, French, and English. He insisted on people taking cards from
him, and on guessing the cards they had chosen, pressing them
continually on his hostess and exclaiming, ‘That is the Funf de piques,
Lady Howard-Britten.’ His colossal form and his iron will permeated the
room, while he insisted on doing trick after trick and pointedly
addressing his hostess as Lady Howard-Britten, till she got almost to
hate the sound of that desired prefix, while all the time the Steinway
Grand yawned for him. More bitter than that was the fact that he asked
Lady Howard-Britten to play a little slow music (‘You play, hein,
miladi?’) while he did the most difficult of his tricks, and there the
poor lady had to sit, when it was he who should be sitting there, and
try to remember ‘White Wings they never grow whiskers,’ or some other
waltz of her youth. By degrees the growing fury of her guests generated
that force of crowds which no individual can withstand, and in mass they
rose and went downstairs, so that by half-past eleven the rooms were
empty but for the pianist and his host and hostess. Even then he would
not desist, but went on with his ridiculous tricks till she could have
cried with fatigue and thwarted ambition.
But no climber sits down over a reverse even as crushing as this, and
Mrs. Howard-Britten determined to wipe out her failure with a ball. She
got hold of a good cotillion-leader, and gave him practically _carte
blanche_ as regards the presents, engaged her band, and issued a
thousand invitations. When the dancing was at its height there were
precisely ten couples on the floor, and every one went home laden like a
Christmas tree with expensive spoils.
All that season she was absolutely indefatigable: she tried charity, and
engaged a fifty-guinea supper-table at Middlesex House for the evening
party on behalf of Lighthouse keepers. She lent her ball-room for a
conference on Roumanian folk-songs given by the idol of the Mayfair
drawing-rooms, and standing by the door as the audience arrived shook
hands with as many of them as she could. She tried to be original, had a
wigwam erected in the same room, and hired a troupe of Red Indians from
the White City, who danced and made the most godless noises on
outlandish instruments, but somehow the originality of the entertainment
was swamped in its extreme tediousness. She tried to be conventional and
took a box at the opera, where twice a week she and two or three
perfectly unknown young men wondered who everybody was. She hired a
yacht for the Cowes week and a depopulated grouse-moor in
Sutherlandshire, but for all her exertions she only got a little further
out on the horizontal branch of the tree she so longed to climb. Nothing
happened: she made no mark and only spent money, which, after all, any
one can do, if he is only fortunate enough to have it.
She labours on, faint and rather older, but pursuing. She is always
delighted if any one proposes himself to lunch or dinner, because, with
the true climber’s instinct, she always thinks it may lead to something.
But it is to be feared that all it leads to is that slight drooping of
the horizontal bough at the end, and not towards the birds that sing
among the topmost branches. She lacked something in her equipment which
Nature had not given her, the _flair_ for the people who matter, the
knowledge of the precise ingredients in the successful bird-lime.... But
her husband never regrets the Brook Street house with the ball-room. He
plays Badminton in it by electric light on his return from his office.
CHAPTER NINE
CLIMBERS:
II. THE PERPENDICULAR
If you are an observant person addicted to washing your hands and face,
you can hardly fail to have noticed the legend ‘Whitehand’ imprinted on
your basin and soap-dish, and indeed on every sort of crockery.
Probably, if you thought about it at all, you imagined that this was a
trade-name, alluding to the effect of washing, but it is not really so
at all. Mr. Whitehand is the kind American gentleman who supplies so
many of us with these articles of toilet, and as a consequence Mr.
Whitehand is rich if not beyond the feverish dreams of avarice, at any
rate, as rich as avarice can possibly desire to be in its waking
moments.
This fortunate gentleman began life as a boy who swept out a public
lavatory in New York, and this accounts for his turning his attention to
hardware. When he had made this colossal fortune he set about spending
it, though he had no chance of spending it as quickly as it came in, and
with a view to this bought a large chocolate-coloured house in Fifth
Avenue, a cottage at Newport, an immense steam-yacht, a complete train
in which to go on his journeys, and ordered a few dozen of Raphael’s
pictures and some Gobelin tapestry. He was never quite certain whether
Gobelin had painted the pictures and the firm of Raphael the tapestry,
but that did not matter, since he had them both. He then expected his
wife to get him into the very best New York society, and enter the
charmed circle of the Four Hundred. She had been his typewriter, and in
a fit of moral weakness, of which he had never repented, since she
suited him extremely well, he had married her. But whether it was that
the Four Hundred had seen too much of Mr. Whitehand’s name on their
slop-basins, or whether he had not bought sufficient Raphaels, they one
and all turned their ivory shoulders on him and his wife, and banged the
door in their faces. As Mrs. Whitehand had just as keen a desire to
shine among the stars of the amazing city as her husband, she was
naturally much annoyed at her inability to climb into the firmament, the
more so because she was convinced that with practice she could become a
first-rate climber. She had the indomitable will and the absolute
imperviousness to rebuffs that are the birthright of that agile race,
and felt the inward sense of her royalty in this respect, as might some
Princess over whom a wizard had cast a spell. But somehow, here in New
York, she got no practice in climbing, because she could make no
beginning whatever. She could only stand on tiptoe, which is a very
different matter. And when at the end of her second year of standing on
tiptoe, Nittie Vandercrump, the acknowledged queen of Newport, cut her
dead for the seventeenth time, and with her famous scream asked her
friend, Nancy Costersnatch, who all those strange faces belonged to,
Mrs. Whitehand began to think that New York was impregnable by direct
assault. But in the manner of Benjamin Disraeli, she vowed that some day
she would attract attention in that assembly, and with Nittie
Vandercrump’s scream ringing in her ears, sat down to think.
Well, there were other places in the world besides New York, places
where there grew social trees of far greater antiquity and magnificence,
and she settled to climb the London tree. But she felt that she would
get on better there at first without her husband. He was rather too fond
of telling people what he paid for his Raphaels and how fast his special
train went. When she had climbed right up among the topmost branches,
she would send for him, and let a rope down to him, and he might quote
as many prices as he chose, but she felt with the unerring instinct of
a born climber that he would be in the way at first, even as he had been
in New York. She talked it over quite amicably with him that night,
while the still air vibrated with the sound of the band next door and
the screams of Nittie, and he cordially consented to the experiment.
Money _ad libitum_ was to be hers, and it was to be her business to get
somewhere where the screams of Nittie would be no more to them than the
cries of the milkman in the street. He, meantime, was to amuse himself
with the special train and the Gobelin tapestry and the steam-yacht, and
make himself as comfortable as he could, while his wife made this broad
outflanking movement on New York.
So one May afternoon Sarah Whitehand, with twenty-two trunks and a
couple of maids and her own indomitable will, arrived at the Ritz Hotel
in Piccadilly, and set about her business. She dined alone in the
restaurant, read the small paragraphs in the evening paper, and ordered
a box at the opera. She was an insignificant little personage in the way
of physical advantages, being short, and having a face which owned no
particular features. She had, it is true, two eyes, a nose and a mouth,
for the absence of any of them would have made her conspicuous, which
she was
[Illustration: Climbers: The Perpendicular]
not, but there was nothing to be said about them. They were just there:
two of them greenish, one of them slightly turned up, while the other
was but a hole in her face. She was not ugly any more than she was
pretty; she was merely nothing at all; you did not look twice at her.
But if you had, it might have struck you that there was something
uncommonly shrewd about the insignificant objects which supplied the
place of features. Also, when she was determined to do anything, you
would have seen that she had a chin.
But to-night this face of common objects rose out of the most wonderful
gown in shades of orange that was ever seen. It was crowned too in a
winking splendour of diamonds that shouted and sang in her
sandy-coloured hair, and round her neck were half-a-dozen rows of
marvellous pearls. While the curtain was up she sat close to the front
of her box with her eyes undeviatingly fixed on the stage, and when the
curtain fell she stood there a minute more, so that the whole house
should get a good view of her. She did not look about her; she merely
stood there, seemingly unconscious of the opera-glasses that were turned
on her from all quarters of the house. All round, everybody was asking
everybody else who the woman with the diamond Crystal Palace was, and
nobody knew. Nor did anybody know, not even Mrs. Isaacs, the fashionable
clairvoyante, who exposed a considerable portion of her ample form in
the stalls, that through the mists of the horizon there faintly shone
to-night the star of surpassing magnitude that was to climb to the very
zenith, and burn there in unwinking splendour.
For the next week Sarah took no direct step forward, but sat in the Ritz
Hotel, or in her box at the opera, or drove about on shopping errands.
Among these latter must be included a quantity of visits to
house-agents, who had in their hands the letting of furnished houses in
such localities as Grosvenor Square and Brook Street, and what seemed to
interest her more than the houses themselves was the question of who was
wishing to let them. But she was in no hurry: she was perfectly well
aware that the first steps were of the utmost importance, and before she
stepped at all, she wanted to find the largest and strongest
stepping-stone available. The evening usually found her alone in her
opera-box, seemingly absorbed in the presentation of Russian ballet, and
unconscious of the opera-glasses levelled at her. She gave the
opera-glasses something to look at too, for she never appeared twice in
the same gown, but in a series of last cries, most stimulating to the
observer. One night she wore a sort of bonnet of ospreys on her head,
and again everybody asked everybody else who the Cherokee Indian was.
But again nobody knew, and so they all supposed that the ospreys were
made of celluloid. But they had an uncomfortable idea that they might be
genuine. But if so, who’s were they? London began to be genuinely
intrigued.
After about a week of this, she suddenly lighted upon exactly what she
had been looking for in the books of the house-agents. A certain new big
house in Grosvenor Street, which externally recalled a fortress made of
stout sand-bags was to be let by Lord Newgate (marquis of), the eldest
son of the Duke of Bailey. Sarah had already seen Lady Newgate, a tall,
floating dream of blue eyes, golden hair and child-like mouth, at the
opera, and knew her and her husband to be among the true white
nightingales who sing and play poker at the very top of the tree she was
pining to climb. A less Napoleonic climber than she might have thought
that to take the Newgates’ house was a passport to London, but she knew
that it would only carry its cachet among the people who could not
really be of any use to her, namely, that well-dressed esurient gang of
Londoners who find it quite sufficient to be fed and amused at other
people’s expense. Sensible woman that she was, she fully intended to
feed and amuse them, but it was not they that she was out for: at the
best they were like the stage army which marches in at one door and out
at another, and in and out again. They were not the principals. You
were, of course, surrounded by people whom you fed and amused, if you
were on the climb, just as you were surrounded by footmen and
motor-cars, but she looked much further than this. She argued, again
correctly, that if such conspicuously melodious songsters as the
Newgates wanted to let their house during the very months when they
would naturally be needing it most, they must be in considerable want of
money, and would be likely to give some valuable equivalent for it. So,
seeing her scheme complete from end to end, as far as the taking of this
house was concerned, she told the slightly astonished agent that she was
willing to take the house for the next three months or the next six at
the price named, but that she wished to make her arrangements with Lady
Newgate herself. The agent, seeing that she was just a wild American,
politely represented to her that this was not the usual method of doing
such business in civilized places, but she remained adamant.
‘If I don’t settle it up with the Marchioness of Newgate,’ she said, ‘I
won’t settle it up with anybody else. Kindly give that message over your
’phone, please, to the Marchioness, and say that if she feels disposed
to entertain my proposals, I shall be very happy to see her at the Ritz
Hotel this afternoon. And if she don’t care to come, why, I don’t care
to take her old house. That’s all. You may say that my name is Mrs.
Whitehand, and that my husband’s the head of the firm, which she maybe
has heard of.’
Now simple as this procedure appeared, it had the simplicity of genius
about it, not the simplicity of the fool. As far as houses went, she did
not care whether she had Lady Newgate’s house or a house in Newgate.
What she was going for was Lady Newgate. It was possible, of course,
that on receiving this message, Lady Newgate would simply say, ‘What on
earth does she want to see me for? She can settle it through the agent.’
If that was the case, it was not likely that Lady Newgate would be any
good to her. But it was quite possible that Lady Newgate might say,
‘Hullo: here is _the_ Mrs. Whitehand going about looking for a house,
and probably unchaperoned.’ Anyhow there was a chance of this, and
since Sarah Whitehand had nothing to lose, she took it. For there might
be something to gain, and these are the best chances to take.
Now the price asked for this fortress of marble and cedar-wood was an
extremely high one, and the Newgates would have been perfectly willing
to take about half of the sum named, after a little genteel and lofty
bargaining. Consequently the prospect of immediately obtaining the full
price, not for three months only, but for six, including August and
September, when an aged caretaker usually had it for nothing, was
irresistibly attractive. Toby Newgate, it is true, momentarily demurred
against his wife’s waiting upon the peremptory Yankee at the Ritz, but
she had seen much further than him with her forget-me-not coloured eyes.
She had seen in fact just as far as Mrs. Whitehand.
‘My dear, it’s flying in the face of Providence to neglect such a
chance,’ she said, ‘and if she’d told me to wait at the bottle entrance
of the Elephant and Castle I should have gone.’
He shuffled about the room a little.
‘Don’t like your being whistled to by the wife of the manufacturer of
hardware, just for six months’ rent,’ he said.
She laughed.
‘My dear Toby, it isn’t only six months’ rent that’s at stake,’ she
said. ‘I’m not going to be landlady only, I expect, but godmother.’
‘Godmother?’
‘Yes, dear, and you godfather to Mr. Hardware, if he is here. But you
needn’t buy any presents. Good American godchildren give the presents
themselves.’
Toby had some vague sense of her position, she only the necessity of his
poverty.
‘You mean you’re going to trot them round?’ he asked.
‘Yes, if possible. I think her message means that. Why else should she
want to see me, or take the house for August and September? It’s a
bribe, a hint, a signal.’
The interview between the two ladies was extremely satisfactory, as is
usually the case when there is no nonsense about the conversationalists,
and each of them is willing and even eager to give exactly what the
other wants. The business of the house was very soon relegated to a firm
of solicitors, and the godmotherly aspect began to show through the form
of the landlady, as in some cunning transformation scene, faintly at
first but with increasing distinctness.
‘Your first visit to London?’ asked Madge Newgate.
‘Yes: I’ve been here but a week, and have done nothing but hunt round
for a house and go to the opera.’
Instantly Lady Newgate remembered the solitary and dazzling figure in
the box. She, too, had wondered who the woman in orange and diamonds
was. Mrs. Whitehand’s face had made no impression whatever on her.
‘Ah, then I am sure I saw you there,’ she said. ‘We were all wondering
who you were. You must allow me to put some of my friends out of their
suspense by letting them know.’
Mrs. Whitehand laughed.
‘I should be very pleased for your friends not to strain themselves,’
she remarked. ‘And I’m in suspense too, as to who your friends are. I
don’t know a soul in London.’
This was rather a relief to Madge Newgate. Sometimes a perfectly
impossible tail was attached to these strange Americans, and you had to
encounter the riff-raff of the Western world _en masse_. She laid her
hand on the other’s knee.
‘My dear, you must get some friends at once,’ she said. ‘You might dine
with us to-night, will you? I have two or three people coming.’
This was quite sufficient. Mrs. Whitehand spoke shortly and to the
point.
‘I want to be run,’ she said.
Madge Newgate was a perfectly honest woman, and now that all ambiguity
had been cleared away, she explained what she could do and what she
would expect to receive. She could give Mrs. Whitehand the opportunity
of meeting practically any one she wished, and she could repeat and
again repeat that opportunity. She could bring people to Mrs.
Whitehand’s house, and within limits get them to invite her to theirs.
But more than that, she frankly admitted she could not do.
‘I can’t make them your friends,’ she said. ‘I can only make them your
acquaintances. The other depends on you. You must show yourself useful
or charming or striking in some way, if you want more than just to go to
balls and dinner-parties. Luckily in London we are very hungry, so that
you can always feed people, and very poor, so that you can always tip
people, and very dull, so that you can always amuse people.’
‘I see: I quite see that,’ said Mrs. Whitehand.
Madge felt that she understood: that it was worth while explaining.
‘I’m sure you will forgive my plain speaking,’ she said, ‘but it is
never any use being vague. And there’s a lot of luck about it.
Sometimes a very stupid woman “arrives” and a very clever agreeable one
doesn’t, and the Lord knows why. I should be quite American do you know,
if I were you; Americans are taking well just now. About--well, why
should I beat about the bush?--about what I am to receive for my
trouble. I imagine you don’t want my house in the least for the three
months after July, and I am willing to take a good deal of trouble for
your renting it then. And when some more rent is due, I think I had
better tell you, hadn’t I? I am not greedy, I am only very poor.’