No one was kinder to me at that time than Rose Waterford. She combined
a masculine intelligence with a feminine perversity, and the novels she
wrote were original and disconcerting. It was at her house one day that
I met Charles Strickland’s wife. Miss Waterford was giving a tea-party,
and her small room was more than usually full. Everyone seemed to be
talking, and I, sitting in silence, felt awkward; but I was too shy to
break into any of the groups that seemed absorbed in their own affairs.
Miss Waterford was a good hostess, and seeing my embarrassment came up
to me.
“I want you to talk to Mrs. Strickland,” she said. “She’s raving about
your book.”
“What does she do?” I asked.
I was conscious of my ignorance, and if Mrs. Strickland was a
well-known writer I thought it as well to ascertain the fact before I
spoke to her.
Rose Waterford cast down her eyes demurely to give greater effect to
her reply.
“She gives luncheon-parties. You’ve only got to roar a little, and
she’ll ask you.”
Rose Waterford was a cynic. She looked upon life as an opportunity for
writing novels and the public as her raw material. Now and then she
invited members of it to her house if they showed an appreciation of
her talent and entertained with proper lavishness. She held their
weakness for lions in good-humoured contempt, but played to them her
part of the distinguished woman of letters with decorum.
I was led up to Mrs. Strickland, and for ten minutes we talked
together. I noticed nothing about her except that she had a pleasant
voice. She had a flat in Westminster, overlooking the unfinished
cathedral, and because we lived in the same neighbourhood we felt
friendly disposed to one another. The Army and Navy Stores are a bond
of union between all who dwell between the river and St. James’s Park.
Mrs. Strickland asked me for my address, and a few days later I
received an invitation to luncheon.
My engagements were few, and I was glad to accept. When I arrived, a
little late, because in my fear of being too early I had walked three
times round the cathedral, I found the party already complete. Miss
Waterford was there and Mrs. Jay, Richard Twining and George Road. We
were all writers. It was a fine day, early in spring, and we were in a
good humour. We talked about a hundred things. Miss Waterford, torn
between the aestheticism of her early youth, when she used to go to
parties in sage green, holding a daffodil, and the flippancy of her
maturer years, which tended to high heels and Paris frocks, wore a new
hat. It put her in high spirits. I had never heard her more malicious
about our common friends. Mrs. Jay, aware that impropriety is the soul
of wit, made observations in tones hardly above a whisper that might
well have tinged the snowy tablecloth with a rosy hue. Richard Twining
bubbled over with quaint absurdities, and George Road, conscious that
he need not exhibit a brilliancy which was almost a by-word, opened his
mouth only to put food into it. Mrs. Strickland did not talk much, but
she had a pleasant gift for keeping the conversation general; and when
there was a pause she threw in just the right remark to set it going
once more. She was a woman of thirty-seven, rather tall and plump,
without being fat; she was not pretty, but her face was pleasing,
chiefly, perhaps, on account of her kind brown eyes. Her skin was
rather sallow. Her dark hair was elaborately dressed. She was the only
woman of the three whose face was free of make-up, and by contrast with
the others she seemed simple and unaffected.
The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very
severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which
were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with
their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in
the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees,
suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the
chimney-piece. At that time there must have been five hundred
dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was
chaste, artistic, and dull.
When we left I walked away with Miss Waterford, and the fine day and
her new hat persuaded us to saunter through the Park.
“That was a very nice party,” I said.
“Did you think the food was good? I told her that if she wanted writers
she must feed them well.”
“Admirable advice,” I answered. “But why does she want them?”
Miss Waterford shrugged her shoulders.
“She finds them amusing. She wants to be in the movement. I fancy she’s
rather simple, poor dear, and she thinks we’re all wonderful. After
all, it pleases her to ask us to luncheon, and it doesn’t hurt us. I
like her for it.”
Looking back, I think that Mrs. Strickland was the most harmless of all
the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of
Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk. She had led a very
quiet youth in the country, and the books that came down from Mudie’s
Library brought with them not only their own romance, but the romance
of London. She had a real passion for reading (rare in her kind, who
for the most part are more interested in the author than in his book,
in the painter than in his pictures), and she invented a world of the
imagination in which she lived with a freedom she never acquired in the
world of every day. When she came to know writers it was like
adventuring upon a stage which till then she had known only from the
other side of the footlights. She saw them dramatically, and really
seemed herself to live a larger life because she entertained them and
visited them in their fastnesses. She accepted the rules with which
they played the game of life as valid for them, but never for a moment
thought of regulating her own conduct in accordance with them. Their
moral eccentricities, like their oddities of dress, their wild theories
and paradoxes, were an entertainment which amused her, but had not the
slightest influence on her convictions.
“Is there a Mr. Strickland?” I asked
“Oh yes; he’s something in the city. I believe he’s a stockbroker. He’s
very dull.”
“Are they good friends?”
“They adore one another. You’ll meet him if you dine there. But she
doesn’t often have people to dinner. He’s very quiet. He’s not in the
least interested in literature or the arts.”
“Why do nice women marry dull men?”
“Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women.”
I could not think of any retort to this, so I asked if Mrs. Strickland
had children.
“Yes; she has a boy and a girl. They’re both at school.”
The subject was exhausted, and we began to talk of other things.