fact that his maternal grandfather had turned the scale at twenty
stone, that his mother, Lady Fanny, hadn’t seen her own shoe-buckles
for eighteen years, except when the shoes weren’t on--don’t you
twig?--and that he possessed what Quox pleased to call ‘a record of
family obesity.’ So Shelmadine, who, in spite of rigorous diet and
redoubled physical exercises, kept getting more and more uncertain in
his outlines, rushed frantically off to Klümpenstein in the Tyrol,
with what was, for him, quite a limited wardrobe. He drank the
water--infernally nasty, too--and climbed the Rittenberg religiously,
without finding his lost silhouette. Only on the Dolomittenweg, a
pine-shaded promenade of great promise in the flirtatious line, he did
find--a girl. And, despite his anxiety with regard to his silhouette,
they had an uncommonly pleasant time together.”
“He had left his lady’s-maid behind, I presume?” hinted the listener.
“He had,” said Bonson. “When he got back to London, though, Mariette
met him with a shriek. ‘Heavens!’ cried she, throwing up her hands,
‘the figure of Monsieur--the silhouette on which he justly prided
himself, where--where has it gone? Hélas! those beautiful clothes that
have arrived from the tailor’s during the absence of Monsieur--_jamais
de la vie_ will he be able to get into them, _j’en suis baba_ in
contemplating the extraordinary _embonpoint_ of Monsieur.’
“‘Hang it, Mariette!’ said Shelmadine, quite shocked; ‘am I so beastly
bulged as all that comes to?’ Mariette broke down at that, and went
into floods of tears. It took the best part of a bottle of Cognac
to bring her round, and then Shelmadine set about overhauling his
wardrobe.”
“Nothing would meet, I presume?” hinted the man who had been listening.
“Not by three finger-breadths,” said the man who was telling the story.
“Plowondllellm Wells in North Wales has got a kind of reputation for
making stout kine lean. Shelmadine got extension of leave on account of
bereavement....”
“When a man loses his figure he may be said to be bereaved!” nodded the
listener.
“Shelmadine tried the Wells, without success. All he ate was weighed
out in ounces, all he drank measured out with the most grudging care;
nothing was allowed to enter his system that contained anything
conducive to the accumulation of the hated tissue, but nothing could
keep him from putting it on!”
“Poor brute!” said the hearer.
“He had gone to the Wells a distinctly roundabout figure. He came back
a potty young man! Despair preyed upon his vitals without reducing his
bulk, however. He saw ‘Slimaline’ advertised.”
“I know,” said the listener. “A harmless vegetable compound which
reduces the bulkiest middle-aged human figure of either sex in the
course of a few weeks to the slender proportions of graceful youth.
Three-and-sixpence a bottle, sent secretly packed, to any address in
the United Kingdom. _Bis!_”
“He then,” continued the narrator, “went in for ‘Frosher’s Fat-Reducing
Soap.’ Perhaps you are not acquainted with that compound, which is
rubbed briskly into the--ah--the----”
“Personality,” put in the other man.
“... Until a strong lather is obtained. The lather proved ineffectual;
Shelmadine took to stays.”
“Phew!” puffed the other man.
The first man continued:
“As the weary weeks went on he was compelled to return to his desk at
Whitehall--crouching in a taxicab to avoid observation. But concealment
was useless. From the Department allotted to the Second Division
Higher-Grade clerks the secret crept out, and Society pounced upon it
and tore it to shreds, shrieking.”
“Like ’em,” said the listener--“like ’em!”
“That night, as Shelmadine sat in his dainty dressing-room surrounded
by mountains of costly and elegant clothes, which, though only of the
previous season’s make, would no longer accommodate his proportions,”
went on Bonson--“lounging clothes, shooting clothes, walking clothes
of all descriptions--London did not contain a wretcheder man. The
exquisitely chosen waist-coats, the taffetas shirts of the once slim
dandy of the War Office--a world too narrow for the fat man who now
represented him were in piles about him. Dozens of lovely gloves in
all the newest shades--squirrel-gray, dead-leaf yellow, Havana-brown,
chrysanthemum-buff--were scattered around by the hands that were now
too stout to wear them. Piles of boots--afternoon boots, with uppers
of corduroy leather, gray, fawn, or the white antelope, emblematical
of the blameless pattern of virtue; walking boots, shooting boots, and
shoes of all descriptions; slippers in heliotrope, rose-petal pink,
and lizard-skin green, obscured the furniture. The pedal extremities
that had bulged beyond all reasonable limits must now be accommodated
in large Number Nines. Even Shelmadine’s dressing gowns--foulard silk,
lined with cashmere--had declined to contain him.”
“’Pon my word, you make me sorry for the idiot,” said the listener;
“mere clothes-peg, as he seems to have been!”
“Suicide--the thought of suicide had occurred to him.”
“He ought to have swallowed a set of enamel evening buttons or a set of
five jeweled tie-pins,” suggested the listener, “and taken leave of the
world in an appropriate manner.”
“I won’t go so far as to say that he would not have done something
desperate,” continued the man who was telling the story, “had not
Mariette--who may or may not have suspected that things were getting
to a desperate pitch--appeared upon the scene. ‘Poor lamb! thou art in
despair’--thus she addressed Shelmadine in the affectionate idiom with
which her native language abounds--‘confide in Mariette, who alone can
restore the silhouette that seems for ever lost to thee. Seems only,
Monsieur; for at the bidding of me, myself, it will return. A little
condition is attached to the recovery of thy figure, my child--not
to be carried out if I cannot be as good as my word. _Passe moi la
casse, je te passerai le séné._ All I want, Monsieur, is senna for my
rhubarb--your written promise to marry Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of
Marius Duchâtel, druggist of Geneva, if within three months you recover
your beautiful figure. What do you say? Is it a bargain? Will you be
fat and free, or slim and no longer single? Speak, then! You agree?
_Pour sûr!_ I thought you would!’”
“And did he marry his lady’s-maid?” asked the listening man quite
eagerly.
“He did not,” said the teller of the tale, “though he was very near it.
Fortunately for Shelmadine, the girl he had met on the Dolomittenweg
Promenade stepped in. She was an American, original, independent, and
determined. When Shelmadine wrote--on Ordnance Office paper--to her in
Paris, saying that Fate had stepped in between them, and that she never
could be his, she asked the reason why. Not getting a satisfactory
answer, she ran over to London to see for herself ... bringing her
mother--a vast person, who wore a diamond tiara, mittens, and diamond
shoulder-straps in the evening, and carried them in a hip-bag by
day--with her.”
“The American mother is an appendage,” said the listener, “rather than
a necessity.”
“The sight of Shelmadine, who had expanded like a balloon in the
filling-shed since the happy days at Klümpenstein, was to Miss Van
Kyper--Miss Mamie Van Kyper was her complete name,” went on the man who
had been called Bonson--“an undoubted shock.”
“Of course,” agreed the man who was being told the story.
“They met at the Carlton Hotel, where she had engaged a suite of
reception-rooms for the interview.”
“Not being quite certain whether one would hold Shelmadine?” suggested
the other.
“And the matter was thrashed out satisfactorily in five minutes, where
an English girl would have taken five weeks. ‘I guess there’s a good
deal more of you than ever either of us expected there would be,’ said
Mamie; ‘but I’ve got to choose between having too much of the man I
love, or nothing at all. And it seems mighty unreasonable--when I felt
plum-sure at Klümpenstein that I could never have enough of you--that I
should be miserable here in London because there happens to be a good
deal more than there was then.’ With a gush of warm and affectionate
devotion she twined her arms as far round Shelmadine as they would go,
and he, in accepting the fate that made him the husband of Miss Mamie
Van Kyper, renounced his silhouette for ever!”
“But you said he got it back again!” said the second man.
“He has,” said the first man.
“Without the assistance of Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius
Duchâtel, herbalist, of Geneva?” queried the second man.
“Mariette,” said the first man, “on finding Shelmadine indisposed to
accept her offer, first attempted to commit suicide in a cistern; then
threw up the sponge and made a clean breast of everything. A peculiar
vegetable preparation, the secret of which she had had from her father,
the herbalist of Geneva, administered in Shelmadine’s food, had caused
the extraordinary accumulation of adipose tissue. The antidote, which
she had promised to administer in the intervals of her own designs on
my poor friend’s freedom, she confided to him, with bitter tears and
many entreaties for forgiveness, before she went out of the Bond Street
flat and Shelmadine’s life for ever.”
“He married Miss Van Kyper immediately. He has an Assistant-Principal
clerkship at the Ordnance Office; he has recovered his silhouette, but
he no longer cares for clothes. You could scare rooks with him as he
dresses now. Fact!”
“Facts are confoundedly rummy things!” said the man who had been told
the story.
A NOCTURNE
“You look,” He said nastily, as She raised her disheveled _coiffure_
and tear-blurred features from the center of a large muslin-flounced
and covered cushion that sat at the end of the lounge that opened like
a box, and held frilled petticoats--“you look like a wilted prize
chrysanthemum.”
She mechanically put up one hand to drive home deserting hairpins
into the mass of hair He had, in the lyrical days of early passion,
celebrated as Corinthian gold-bronze, in a halting sonnet of which
he was now profoundly ashamed. Stifling the recurrent hiccough that
accompanies a liberal effusion of tears, she stared at him blankly.
A silver timepiece, a wedding present from His mother, who had objected
to the match, struck the midnight hour. The thin sound of the last
stroke, spun into tenuity by silence, died, and the clanking, hooting,
nerve-shattering scurry of racing motor-buses went by like a wild
hunt of iron-shackled fiends. A private car passed with its exhaust
wailing like an exiled banshee, a belated hansom or two bowled along
the sloppy asphalt, the raucous screech of a constable-defying nymph
of the pavement rent the muggy air. He hardly heard it; he had been
agreeing with his mother ever since the clock had struck. To-morrow
he would go and look in at 000, Sloane Street, and tell her that she
had always known best. In imagination he was telling her so, when the
sable-bordered tail of a dove-colored Indian cashmere dressing gown he
had worshiped during the honeymoon swept across the feuille-rose carpet
in the direction of the boudoir; Sada Yacco and Abé San, snub-nosed,
blue-and-pink-bowed canine causes of the conjugal quarrel, joyously
yelping in its wake.
“Aren’t you going to bed?” He demanded.
“You did not seem inclined to go to your dressing-room,” She returned
with point, “and as I have to write an important letter, I may as well
do it now!”
He knew that the letter would be addressed to Her mother, who had also
objected to the match, and would contain a daughter’s testimony to the
correctness of the maternal judgment. Sada Yacco and Abé San, sitting
on their haunches, with their pink tongues lolling, looked as though
they knew it too. How he loathed those Japanese pugs! As he glared at
them she gathered them up, one under each arm, protectingly.
“Don’t be afraid!” He said, with the kind of laugh described by the
popular novelist as grating; “I am not going to murder the little
brutes, after paying thirty pounds for the pair.” This was a touch of
practical economy that made Her lip curl. “What I say is, I decline to
have those animals galloping over me in the middle of the night.”
“It is the middle of the night now,” She said, concealing a yawn behind
three fingers--his wedding ring and keeper upon one--“and they are not
galloping over you. Men are supposed to be more logical than women. I
have often wondered why since last May.”
“We were married in May,” He said, folding his arms after a method much
in favor with the popular novelist when heroes are grim.
“It seems,” She said, rather drearily, “a long time ago.”
“If I had told you last May,” He retorted, “that I object to wake in
the middle of the night with one Japanese pug snorting upon my--ah--my
chest, and the other usurping the greater part of my pillow, you
would have sympathized with my feeling, understood the objection, and
relegated Sada Yacco and Abé San to their comfortable basket in the
corner of the kitchen--or anywhere else,” he added hurriedly, seeing
thievish early errand-boys on the tip of her tongue, “except your
bedroom!”
The popular novelist would have described her pose as “sculpturesque,”
her expression as “fateful,” and her tone as “icy,” as She said:
“The bedroom being mine, perhaps you will permit me to remind you that
you possess one of your own, and that it is nearly one o’clock!”
It was, in fact, a quarter-past twelve. But the door closed behind Him
with such a terrific bang that the thready little utterance of the
silver timepiece was completely unnoticed.
She put her hand to her throat, as a leading actress invariably does
in moments of great mental stress, and uttered a choking little laugh
of sorrow and bitterness. Men were really like this, then! Fool, oh,
fool, to doubt! Had she not read, had she not seen, had not other
women whispered?... And had her mother not plainly told her that
this man--now her husband!--was more like other men than any of the
other men resembled others? She sobbed a few sobs, dried her eyes,
and prepared for bed. But when arrayed in white samite, mystic and
wonderful, with the traces of tears effaced by perfumed hot water, the
pinkness of nose and eyelids ameliorated by a dab or two of powder,
the gold-brown tresses He had once sonneted, and now sneered at,
brushed out and beautiful, she took up the double basket owned by Sada
Yacco and Abé San, placed it in the boudoir, returned for the canine
couple, deposited them inside it, and then, resolutely shutting the
door of communication upon their astonished countenances, got into bed,
cast one indifferent glance at the twin couch adjoining, shrugged her
shoulders, and switched off the light.
“S’n’ff!”
That was Abé San snuffing inquiringly at the bottom of the door. Sada
Yacco joined him, and they snuffed together. It was impossible to
sleep, especially when they began to discuss the situation in whimpers
and short yelps. Then they began to race round the boudoir, barking
in whimpers. Then, just as She had made up her mind to buy peace by
letting them in, there was a sharp bark from Sada Yacco, a joyous
scrape at a distant door, and a rattling of claws as the couple,
emancipated from vile durance in the boudoir, joyously galloped down
the passage. Then sleep soporifically stole over the senses of a
wronged and brutally injured woman. It was not chilly, sloppy December:
it was radiant July. She was not in a London flat. She was in a
well-known back-water above Goring-on-Thames, cosy in a red-curtained
punt, with a Japanese umbrella and two Japanese pugs and a husband,
very handsome, almost quite new, madly devoted, not the quite plain,
absolutely sulky, unspeakably disagreeable He now conjecturally snoring
on the opposite side of the passage. And so She slept and dreamed.
He was not asleep. Propped up in his own beautiful little bed in his
own cosy dressing-room, he was smoking a long cigar, and, as a further
demonstration of bachelor independence, a brandy and Apollinaris stood
untouched beside him. By the electric light dangling over his head,
where sardonically hung suspended a wooden Cupid--ha, ha!--he was
perusing a book. She objected to reading in bed, that was why--ha, ha!
again. The thin-paper volume, supposed to be an enlightening work on
Oval Billiards, proved, by a tricky freak of Fate, to be an English
translation of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. This is what he read:
“Calm is the bottom of my sea:
Who would divine that it hideth droll monsters?
Unmoved is my depth, yet it sparkleth with swimming enigmas and laughters.
An imposing One saw I to-day--a solemn One, a penitent of the Spirit....
Should he become weary of his imposingness, this imposing one....”
There came a scratch at the bottom of the door, a snuffling sound,
and a sneeze he knew well. What did Abé San straying about draughty
passages by night? But it was no business of his. Let the beast’s owner
see to it. He read on:
“Gracefulness belongeth to the generosity of the magnanimous.”
Sada Yacco had joined her lord. Together they burrowed, mutually they
snuffed. It was not to be borne. He got up and opened the door. Sada
Yacco and Abé San rushed in, their tongues lolling, their eyes bulging
with curiosity, and, after a brief excursion round the apartment, which
they found small, fawned upon him with a sickening devotion. He scowled
on the small black-and-white silky handfuls. Then he yielded to the
impulse that plucked at his maxillary muscles and grinned. The little
brutes were so painfully sorry for him. They were so clearly under the
impression that he was in disgrace.
He got back into bed, and lay there, grinning still, if unwillingly.
Sada Yacco, with the forwardness of her sex, scrambled up and sat upon
him. Abé San scratched at the coverlet imploringly, until, hoisted
upward by the scruff, he, too, gained the desired haven. They had
plainly come to stay, so He resigned himself with a sigh, switched off
the electric light, and fell asleep before Abé San had turned round the
regulation number of times.
Meanwhile She, wakened by the toot of a belated motor-taxi, began to
wonder whither the Japanese couple had strayed. Urged and wearied by
the unbroken silence, she rose, arrayed herself in her dressing gown,
armed herself with a lighted wax taper in a silver candlestick--another
wedding present--and began a tour of discovery. The pugs had vanished.
Had the maids yielded to their entreaties and taken them in? She
listened at two doors; the steady snoring of the sleepers within was
unmingled with snort or slumbering whimper of Sada and her mate. Then,
returning, she noticed that His dressing-room door was open.
Taper in hand, She went in. He was sound asleep, Sada Yacco sweetly
slumbering on the surface covered by daylight with a waistcoat, Abé
San curled up, a floss-silk ball, on the pillow by his ear. If he had
seen her eyes as she bent over him, shading the light, he would have
regained his old opinion of them in the twinkling of the tear She
dropped upon His cheek.
Don’t say there are no such things as guardian angels. His woke him up
just as She kissed him--the kiss was so light it would not have wakened
him by itself.
THE LAST EXPEDITION
I
Suppose that you see Captain Arthur Magellison, late of His Majesty’s
Royal Navy, with the eyes of the writer’s remembrance, as a thick-set,
fair man of middle height, neat in appearance and alert in bearing. His
skin was a curious bleached bronze, and his wide-pupilled pale gray
eyes, netted about with close, fine wrinkles, had looked on the awful
desolation of the Arctic until something of its loneliness and terror
had sunk into them and stamped itself upon the man’s brain, never to
be effaced, or so it seemed to me. For his wife, once the marble Miss
Dycehurst, who had not married a semi-Celebrity for nothing, took her
husband much with her into London Society, and at gossipy dinner-tables
and in crowded drawing-rooms; on the Lawn at Ascot and in a box on
the Grand Stand at Doncaster, as on a Henley houseboat, and during a
polo tournament at Ranelagh, I have seen Magellison, to all appearance
perfectly oblivious of the gay and giddy world about him, sitting,
or standing with folded arms and bent head, and staring out with
fixed and watchful eyes, over Heaven knows what illimitable wastes of
snow-covered land or frozen ocean....
I have described Captain Arthur Magellison as a semi-Celebrity.
Erstwhile Commander of the Third-class Armored Destroyer _Sidonia_,
he became, after his severance from the Royal Navy, and by reason
of the adventures and hardships by him undergone as leader of the
Scottish Alaskan Coastal Survey Expedition of 1906-1908, something
of a hero. A series of lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh Hall of
Science, in the course of which the explorer, by verbal descriptions
as well as cinematographic effects, completely disposed of the theory
regarding the existence of a range of active volcanoes to the north of
Alaska, previously accepted by the illuminati, made a sensation among
scientists, and induced, in the case of Sir Jedbury Fargoe, F.R.G.S.,
M.R.I., a rush of blood to the cerebrum, followed by the breaking out
of a Funeral Hatchment over his front door, a procession in slow time,
with wreaths, palls, and feathers, and a final exit _per_ trolley into
the Furnace at Croking Crematorium.
The Public, never having bothered about the volcanoes, remained unmoved
by the intelligence of their non-existence, but the Professors and the
Press shed much ink upon the subject. Upon a wave of which sable fluid
Captain Arthur Magellison was borne, if not into the inner court, at
least into the vestibule of the Temple of Fame. Then the wave, as is
the way of waves, receded; leaving Magellison, by virtue of certain
researches and discoveries in Natural History, Botany and Physiology, a
Member of the Royal Institution, Associate of the Zoological Society,
Fellow of the Institute of Ethnology, and the husband of the marble
Miss Dycehurst.
Never was a more appropriate sobriquet bestowed. Down in Clayshire, her
native county, the statuesque Geraldine, orphan heiress of a wealthy
landholder not remotely connected with the Brewing interests of his
native isle, dispensed, under the protective auspices of a maternal
aunt of good family--Miss Dycehurst’s mother’s deceased papa had wedded
a portionless spinster of noble blood--dispensed, I say, a lavish but
stony hospitality. In London she went out a great deal, looking like
a sculptured Minerva of the Græco-Latin school, _minus_ the helmet but
_plus_ a tower of astonishing golden hair, received proposals from
Eligibles and Ineligibles, petrified their makers with a single stare,
and proceeded upon her marmorean way in maiden meditation, fancy free.
Until she attended that series of lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh
Hall of Science by the eminent Arctic Explorer, Captain Arthur
Magellison.
Society in Clayshire and Society in London expressed ardent curiosity
to know how the engagement had been brought about? All that is known
for certain is, that after the lecture, when the Explorer held a
little reception in a draughty enclosure of green baize screens, Miss
Dycehurst, looking rather like a mythical goddess of the Polar Regions,
her frosty beauty crowned with its diadem of pale golden hair, and her
fine shape revealed in greenish-blue, icily-gleaming draperies, asked a
local magnate to present the lecturer, and met him at a public dinner
given in his honor upon the following night. Later on in London, where
the lecture was, by invitation of the learned heads of the nation,
repeated, Miss Dycehurst with a large party occupied the second row
of stalls. Later still, Magellison dined with the heiress at 000,
Chesterfield Crescent, her town address, and later still the couple
were Hanover-Squared into one flesh. It was in May, and the sacred
edifice was garlanded with white Rambler roses and adorned with lilies
and smilax and palms. A Bishop tied the knot, and the choir rendered
the anthem with exquisite effect, as well as “Fight the Good Fight” and
“The Voice that Breathed----.” And the Bride, in dead white, with a
swansdown train and a Malines veil, and ropes of pearls and brilliants,
and a crown of diamond spikes that might have been sparkling icicles,
gleaming and scintillating on the summit of her wonderful tower of
hair, looked more like the Lady of the Eternal Snows than ever.