It was Reggie Bruttle’s own idea for converting what had threatened to be
an albino elephant into a beast of burden that should help him along the
stony road of his finances. “The Limes,” which had come to him by
inheritance without any accompanying provision for its upkeep, was one of
those pretentious, unaccommodating mansions which none but a man of
wealth could afford to live in, and which not one wealthy man in a
hundred would choose on its merits. It might easily languish in the
estate market for years, set round with noticeboards proclaiming it, in
the eyes of a sceptical world, to be an eminently desirable residence.
Reggie’s scheme was to turn it into the headquarters of a prolonged
country-house party, in session during the months from October till the
end of March—a party consisting of young or youngish people of both
sexes, too poor to be able to do much hunting or shooting on a serious
scale, but keen on getting their fill of golf, bridge, dancing, and
occasional theatre-going. No one was to be on the footing of a paying
guest, but every one was to rank as a paying host; a committee would look
after the catering and expenditure, and an informal sub-committee would
make itself useful in helping forward the amusement side of the scheme.
As it was only an experiment, there was to be a general agreement on the
part of those involved in it to be as lenient and mutually helpful to one
another as possible. Already a promising nucleus, including one or two
young married couples, had been got together, and the thing seemed to be
fairly launched.
“With good management and a little unobtrusive hard work, I think the
thing ought to be a success,” said Reggie, and Reggie was one of those
people who are painstaking first and optimistic afterwards.
“There is one rock on which you will unfailingly come to grief, manage
you never so wisely,” said Major Dagberry, cheerfully; “the women will
quarrel. Mind you,” continued this prophet of disaster, “I don’t say
that some of the men won’t quarrel too, probably they will; but the women
are bound to. You can’t prevent it; it’s in the nature of the sex. The
hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world, in a volcanic sense. A woman
will endure discomforts, and make sacrifices, and go without things to an
heroic extent, but the one luxury she will not go without is her
quarrels. No matter where she may be, or how transient her appearance on
a scene, she will instal her feminine feuds as assuredly as a Frenchman
would concoct soup in the waste of the Arctic regions. At the
commencement of a sea voyage, before the male traveller knows half a
dozen of his fellow passengers by sight, the average woman will have
started a couple of enmities, and laid in material for one or two
more—provided, of course, that there are sufficient women aboard to
permit quarrelling in the plural. If there’s no one else she will
quarrel with the stewardess. This experiment of yours is to run for six
months; in less than five weeks there will be war to the knife declaring
itself in half a dozen different directions.”
“Oh, come, there are only eight women in the party; they won’t pick
quarrels quite so soon as that,” protested Reggie.
“They won’t all originate quarrels, perhaps,” conceded the Major, “but
they will all take sides, and just as Christmas is upon you, with its
conventions of peace and good will, you will find yourself in for a
glacial epoch of cold, unforgiving hostility, with an occasional Etna
flare of open warfare. You can’t help it, old boy; but, at any rate, you
can’t say you were not warned.”
The first five weeks of the venture falsified Major Dagberry’s prediction
and justified Reggie’s optimism. There were, of course, occasional small
bickerings, and the existence of certain jealousies might be detected
below the surface of everyday intercourse; but, on the whole, the
women-folk got on remarkably well together. There was, however, a
notable exception. It had not taken five weeks for Mrs. Pentherby to get
herself cordially disliked by the members of her own sex; five days had
been amply sufficient. Most of the women declared that they had detested
her the moment they set eyes on her; but that was probably an
afterthought.
With the menfolk she got on well enough, without being of the type of
woman who can only bask in male society; neither was she lacking in the
general qualities which make an individual useful and desirable as a
member of a co-operative community. She did not try to “get the better
of” her fellow-hosts by snatching little advantages or cleverly evading
her just contributions; she was not inclined to be boring or snobbish in
the way of personal reminiscence. She played a fair game of bridge, and
her card-room manners were irreproachable. But wherever she came in
contact with her own sex the light of battle kindled at once; her talent
of arousing animosity seemed to border on positive genius.
Whether the object of her attentions was thick-skinned or sensitive,
quick-tempered or good-natured, Mrs. Pentherby managed to achieve the
same effect. She exposed little weaknesses, she prodded sore places, she
snubbed enthusiasms, she was generally right in a matter of argument, or,
if wrong, she somehow contrived to make her adversary appear foolish and
opinionated. She did, and said, horrible things in a matter-of-fact
innocent way, and she did, and said, matter-of-fact innocent things in a
horrible way. In short, the unanimous feminine verdict on her was that
she was objectionable.
There was no question of taking sides, as the Major had anticipated; in
fact, dislike of Mrs. Pentherby was almost a bond of union between the
other women, and more than one threatening disagreement had been rapidly
dissipated by her obvious and malicious attempts to inflame and extend
it; and the most irritating thing about her was her successful assumption
of unruffled composure at moments when the tempers of her adversaries
were with difficulty kept under control. She made her most scathing
remarks in the tone of a tube conductor announcing that the next station
is Brompton Road—the measured, listless tone of one who knows he is
right, but is utterly indifferent to the fact that he proclaims.
On one occasion Mrs. Val Gwepton, who was not blessed with the most
reposeful of temperaments, fairly let herself go, and gave Mrs. Pentherby
a vivid and truthful _résumé_ of her opinion of her. The object of this
unpent storm of accumulated animosity waited patiently for a lull, and
then remarked quietly to the angry little woman—
“And now, my dear Mrs. Gwepton, let me tell you something that I’ve been
wanting to say for the last two or three minutes, only you wouldn’t give
me a chance; you’ve got a hairpin dropping out on the left side. You
thin-haired women always find it difficult to keep your hairpins in.”
“What can one do with a woman like that?” Mrs. Val demanded afterwards of
a sympathising audience.
Of course, Reggie received numerous hints as to the unpopularity of this
jarring personality. His sister-in-law openly tackled him on the subject
of her many enormities. Reggie listened with the attenuated regret that
one bestows on an earthquake disaster in Bolivia or a crop failure in
Eastern Turkestan, events which seem so distant that one can almost
persuade oneself they haven’t happened.
“That woman has got some hold over him,” opined his sister-in-law,
darkly; “either she is helping him to finance the show, and presumes on
the fact, or else, which Heaven forbid, he’s got some queer infatuation
for her. Men do take the most extraordinary fancies.”
Matters never came exactly to a crisis. Mrs. Pentherby, as a source of
personal offence, spread herself over so wide an area that no one woman
of the party felt impelled to rise up and declare that she absolutely
refused to stay another week in the same house with her. What is
everybody’s tragedy is nobody’s tragedy. There was ever a certain
consolation in comparing notes as to specific acts of offence. Reggie’s
sister-in-law had the added interest of trying to discover the secret
bond which blunted his condemnation of Mrs. Pentherby’s long catalogue of
misdeeds. There was little to go on from his manner towards her in
public, but he remained obstinately unimpressed by anything that was said
against her in private.
With the one exception of Mrs. Pentherby’s unpopularity, the house-party
scheme was a success on its first trial, and there was no difficulty
about reconstructing it on the same lines for another winter session. It
so happened that most of the women of the party, and two or three of the
men, would not be available on this occasion, but Reggie had laid his
plans well ahead and booked plenty of “fresh blood” for the departure.
It would be, if any thing, rather a larger party than before.
“I’m so sorry I can’t join this winter,” said Reggie’s sister-in-law,
“but we must go to our cousins in Ireland; we’ve put them off so often.
What a shame! You’ll have none of the same women this time.”
“Excepting Mrs. Pentherby,” said Reggie, demurely.
“Mrs. Pentherby! _Surely_, Reggie, you’re not going to be so idiotic as
to have that woman again! She’ll set all the women’s backs up just as
she did this time. What _is_ this mysterious hold she’s go over you?”
“She’s invaluable,” said Reggie; “she’s my official quarreller.”
“Your—what did you say?” gasped his sister-in-law.
“I introduced her into the house-party for the express purpose of
concentrating the feuds and quarrelling that would otherwise have broken
out in all directions among the womenkind. I didn’t need the advice and
warning of sundry friends to foresee that we shouldn’t get through six
months of close companionship without a certain amount of pecking and
sparring, so I thought the best thing was to localise and sterilise it in
one process. Of course, I made it well worth the lady’s while, and as
she didn’t know any of you from Adam, and you don’t even know her real
name, she didn’t mind getting herself disliked in a useful cause.”
“You mean to say she was in the know all the time?”
“Of course she was, and so were one or two of the men, so she was able to
have a good laugh with us behind the scenes when she’d done anything
particularly outrageous. And she really enjoyed herself. You see, she’s
in the position of poor relation in a rather pugnacious family, and her
life has been largely spent in smoothing over other people’s quarrels.
You can imagine the welcome relief of being able to go about saying and
doing perfectly exasperating things to a whole houseful of women—and all
in the cause of peace.”
“I think you are the most odious person in the whole world,” said
Reggie’s sister-in-law. Which was not strictly true; more than anybody,
more than ever she disliked Mrs. Pentherby. It was impossible to
calculate how many quarrels that woman had done her out of.