We went into a house and into a large empty room with whole streets of
coggley chairs and a kind of pulpit thing in the middle. A jug of water
and a tumbler stood on it. There was a governessy-looking person
present, presiding over this emptiness, whom Lady Scilly immediately
began to order about. She was the secretary of the club, and Lady Scilly
is a member of the committee.
"Where will you sit, Lady Scilly?" said this person, and she asked a
good many other questions, using Lady Scilly's name very often.
"I shall sit quite at the back this time," Lady Scilly answered. "Too
many friends immediately near him might put the lecturer out!" As she
said this she looked at me wickedly, but I could not think why.
We then went away and read the comic papers for a little until the place
had filled. In the reading-room we met a gentleman, who seemed to be a
great friend of Lady Scilly's. He spoke to me while she was discussing
some arrangement or other with the secretary, who had followed her.
"How do you like going about with a fairy?" he asked me.
"I'm not," I said. "She's a grown-up woman, old enough to know----"
"Worse!" he interrupted me. "She is what I call a fairy!"
"What is a fairy?" I asked, though he seemed to me very silly, and only
trying to make conversation.
"A fairy is a person who always does exactly as she likes--and as other
people sometimes don't like."
"I see," I said, as usual, although I did not see, as usual, "just as
grown-up people do."
"But she isn't pretty when she is old! I wonder if you will grow up a
fairy? No, I think not, you don't look as if you _could_ tell a lie."
"I beg your pardon," I said. He then remarked that Lady Scilly had sent
him to take me into the room where the lecture was to be given, and we
went. Of course I politely tried to let age go first, but he didn't like
that, and said "_Jeunesse oblige_," and "_Place aux dames_," and
"_Juniores ad priores_"--every language under the sun, winding up with
that silly old story about the polite Lord Stair, who was too polite to
hang back and keep the king waiting.
"Oh yes, I know that story," I said, just to prevent him going on
bothering. "It's in Ollendorff."
The lecture-room was quite full, and we--Lady Scilly and I--squeezed
ourselves in at the back in a kind of cosy corner there was, and we were
almost in the dark.
"Sit tight, child, whatever happens!" she kept saying, and held my hand
as if I should run away. When among a rain of claps the lecturer came in
I saw why, for it was George!
Lady Scilly grabbed my arm, and said, "Don't call out, child!"
As if I was going to! But now I saw why she had kept calling him the
lecturer instead of saying his name whenever she had spoken of him
before. Now I saw why she was so full of nods and winks and grins, and
had brought me to the lecture so particularly. Now I saw why the old
gentleman had called her a fairy--that meant a tease, and I wasn't going
to gratify her by seeming upset or anything. Not I! So I sat quite still
as she told me, and George began.
I borrowed a pencil of the Ollendorff man, and put down some notes to
remind me of what George said, for Ariadne. It took me some time to get
used to the funny little voice George put on to lecture with, quite
different to his Isleworth voice. Presently when I began to catch on a
little I found that the lecture was all about novels and the good of
them, as Lady Scilly had said. This is the sort of thing--
"_A novel_," said my father, "_is apt to hold a group of quite ordinary,
uninteresting characters, wallowing in their clammy, stale environment,
like fishes in an aquarium, held together by a thin thread of narrative,
and bounded by the four walls of the author's experience. His duty is to
enlarge that experience, for to novels we go, not so much for amusement
as for a criticism of Life. That portion of life which comes under the
reader's own observation is naturally so restricted, so vastly
disproportionate, to the whole great arcana_." (I do hope I got this
down right!) "_The novelist should be omniscient and omnipotent._" (Once
I got these two great words, all the rest seemed child's play.) "_A
great responsibility lies with the purveyors of this necessary panorama
of existence, the men who monopolize the furnishing and regulating of
the supply._" (Loud applause.) "_The right man, or peradventure, the
right woman_" (he bowed at Lady Scilly), "_knows, or ought to know, so
many sides, while the reader, alas, knows but one, and is so tired of
that one!_"
Everybody sighed and groaned a little to show how tired they were, and
George went on--
"_I see my audience is in touch with me. It works both ways._" (What
works both ways? I must have left something out.) "_A Duchess of my
acquaintance said some poignant, pregnant words--as indeed all her words
are pregnant and poignant_" (he bowed to an old corpulent lady in
another part of the room)--"_to me the other day. She said that her
novel of predilection was not a society novel. 'I know it all, don't I,
like the palm of my hand?' she objected. 'I know how to behave in a
drawing-room and how not to behave in a boudoir!' So she complained. The
substance of her complaint, as I understand it, is this;--what she wants
is worlds not realized! She wants to see the actress in her
drawing-room, the flower-girl in her garret, the laundress at her tub,
the burglar at his work_----"
Here George made a little bob at Mr. Aix in the audience, for there he
was, and there was another fit of clapping. Then he went on--
"_I mean to say that what we mostly seek in fiction is to be taken out
of our own lives, and put into somebody else's--to temporarily change
our moral environment. High life is deeply interested in what is going
on below stairs. Bill Sykes and 'Liza of Lambeth, if they have any time
for reading, want to know all about countesses and their attendant
sprites._" (Fancy calling Simon Hermyre that!) "_The Highest or the
Lowest, but no middle course, is the novelist's counsel of perfection.
There is no second class in the literary railway._
"_Yet there is a serious issue involved in this proposition. If, for
instance--only for instance, for I am very sure that most of us here
will have to rely on imagination, not fact, to support my
illustration--if our home is a suburban one, and our wildest actual
dissipation a tea-party in Clapham or Tooting--even Clapham Rise or
Upper Tooting--we must transport ourselves in seven-league boots to the
better quarters of London, to visualize the giddy cultured throng in the
halls of Belgravia, and set down accurately the facile inaccuracies of
the small talk of Mayfair. It is the tale of the mad, bad great world
that sets the heart of the matron of Kennington Common aflame, and makes
her waking dreams 'all a wonder and a wild desire.' Que voulez vous? She
is our staple standing reader. She does not want to bend her chaste
thoughts towards Hornsey Rise and Cricklewood, to envisage, stimulated
by the novelist's art, its bursten boilers, its infant woes, its humdrum
marrying and giving in marriage. No, she prefers, in her grey unlovely
Jerry-built parlour, to gloat over the morbid, rose-coloured sins that
are enacted in the halls of fashion; the voluptuous sorrows of the
Bridge-end of the week; the mystery of Royal visits postponed are her
chosen pabulum. To all these novelists whose ways are cast in safe and
humdrum middle-class places I would say that they had best ignore their
entourage as a help to local colour. In this case, character drawing,
like charity, should not begin at Home. Go out, go out, young man, from
thy homely nest in the suburbs, where the females of thy family hang
over their flaccid meat teas in faded blouses----_"
I think it was about here that I half got up, quite determined, and Lady
Scilly pinched me in several places at once.
"Don't nip me, please," I said. "I think somebody ought to get up and
tell George he's drivelling, and if nobody else does, I will."
"Bless the child!" she said. "You may answer him when he's done, if you
like, and can. It will be quite amusing."
I think that she really was a fairy, but never mind! I did think
somebody ought to stop George, and take Mother's side. So I waited,
though I stopped my ears and would not listen to any more till George
sat down and the secretary lady asked if some one would care to answer
Mr. Vero-Taylor's speech? Lady Scilly poked me up, and I got up so that
George and all of them could see me, and I didn't feel a bit shy--no,
for I had something to say, and off I went, to speak up for Mother who
wasn't there to speak up for herself.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," I said--I noticed that George began like
that--"I don't agree at all with what the gentleman--who is my
father--has been saying about Tooting--Upper Tooting, I mean. He ought
to be more patriotic, as he lives at Isleworth, which is pretty nearly
the same thing, part of his time anyhow, and I suppose he needn't do it
unless he likes. And as for what he says about Mother, why, I can tell
everybody that Mother doesn't read novels about Duchesses or anybody.
She hasn't time, she's much too busy in the house, bringing us up, and
cooking specially for George, and so on. That's all!"
I sat down with a bump. George seemed to subside, and I lost him, but I
hardly expected him to come and hug me. Lady Scilly went and comforted
him, perhaps! I don't know what happened, except tea and coffee, but I
didn't feel inclined, and I asked Mr. Aix to take me home.
He did, in a hansom. He held my hand all the way. We didn't talk, but I
am sure he wasn't cross with me, and held my hand to show it. He seemed
to know I was going to have a bad time.
I did. Even Mother scolded me.
Papa didn't come near us for a week, and when he was due I asked if I
might have a cold and be in bed. God sent me a real cold to make me
truthful. Aunt Gerty nursed me. It wasn't so bad. She read to me about
Thumbelina and Boadicea, my two favourite heroines, one big and the
other little, and poetry about my painted boy, which I love and that
always makes me go to sleep. I believe it is spelt with a u, and doesn't
mean a child at all. But, I like it best my way--
"We left behind the painted buoy
That tosses at the harbour-mouth,
And madly danced our hearts with joy
As fast we fleeted to the South."
While I was ill, though, I missed all the discussions about moving, and
the results of the lecture and all that. Ariadne reported what she
could. She said that Mother and George never mentioned me, but talked as
if the drains had gone wrong, or a pipe had burst, or as if George had
lost a lot of money somehow. Everything is to be altered and the world
will be topsy-turvey when I get down-stairs again. Though I don't
suppose that even if I did get a chance of putting my word in, I could
alter anything as I wished it? These grown-ups, once they get the bit
between their teeth----!