I wonder if other families have got tame countesses, who come bothering
and interfering in their affairs? I don't mind our having a
house-warming party at all, but I do hate that it should be to please
Lady Scilly.
"A party! A party!" she said to George, clasping her hands in her silly
way. "My party on the table!" like the woman in the play of _Ibsen_.
"Ask all the dear, amusing literary people that I adore. And I'll bring
a large contingent of smart people, if I may, to meet them. Please,
_please_!"
I don't know what a contingent is, but I fancy it's something
disagreeable. Lady Scilly is George's friend, not Mother's. She has only
called on Mother once, and that was in the old house, and then Mother
was not receiving as they call it, so she has never even seen the
mistress of the house where she is going to give the party. Christina
Mander, George's secretary, says that is quite the new way of doing
things, and she has been about a great deal, and ought to know.
Miss Mander is a lady. She is very thin, one of those lath-and-plaster
women, you know, that seem to live to support a small waist that is
their greatest beauty, but when we first knew her, she was plump and
jolly-looking. We practically got her for George. Years ago, when we
were quite little and had had measles, we were sent down to a sort of
boarding-house at Ramsgate to an old lady, an ex-dresser in some theatre
Aunt Gerty knew, and who could neither see to mend or to keep us in
order, though she got thirty shillings a week for doing it. They never
got us up till nine; I suppose the slavey thought sufficient for the day
was the evil thereof, and tried to make the evil's day as short as
possible. One morning when it was quite nine, and the sun was shining
in, Ariadne and I were feeling frightfully bored, so we got up in our
night-gowns, moved a wardrobe, and found a door behind it into another
house. It was quite a smart house, with soft plush carpets and
nicely-varnished yellow doors. We went all over it. Only the cat was
awake, licking herself in the window-seat. The bedroom doors were all
shut except one, and we went in and found a nice girl in bed with her
gold hair all spread over the pillow. She didn't seem shocked at us, but
laughed, and when we had explained, she wished us to get into the bed
beside her. It had sheets trimmed with lace, and her initials, C. M., on
the pillow. We did this every morning till we went away. She kept us up,
afterwards sending us Christmas cards and so on, and when George
advertised for a secretary to help him to sub-edit _Wild Oats_, she
answered it, among the thousand others, and we remembered her name and
made George engage her.
She had been to Girton, and to a journalistic school, and Mr. D'Auban's
dancing academy, and to Klondike--where all her hair got cut off, so
that she hasn't enough to spread over the pillow now--and behind the
scenes at a music-hall, and a month on the stage, and edited a paper
once and wrote a novel. All before she was thirty! At every new
arrangement for amusement she made her people opposed her, and prayed
for her in church. But she always got her own way in the end. Her
mother, Mrs. Stephen Cadwallis Mander, came here to sniff about when
George first took Christina on. She is a woman of the world,
tortoise-shell _pince-nez_ and all, but she took to Mother at first
sight, and talked to her quite naturally about this "new move of dear
Christina's."
She spoke in a neat, sighing voice, and told us that Christina had
developed early, and was so different to her other children; she kept on
saying the name of George's new magazine, as if it shocked her very
much.
"_Wild Oats!_ Such a crude name! Though I suppose she must sow them
somewhere, and best, perhaps, in the pages of a magazine. You'll look
after her, won't you? Is there any danger"--she looked towards the
study-door"--of her falling in love with her employer?" She laughed
carelessly.
"Not the slightest!" said Mother, laughing too. "She will have her eyes
opened, that's all, to the seamy side of artistic life."
"My daughter is so absurdly curious about that wretched seamy side.
After all, it's only the side that the workers leave the knots on, they
must be somewhere, just as plates must be washed up in a scullery. But
we don't need to go in and gloat on the horrid sight!"
"I quite agree with you," said Mother. "Only if one happens to be the
scullery-maid----"
Aunt Gerty came in just then and took her part in the conversation. I
was glad to see she was dressed more quietly than usual.
"And," said Mrs. Mander, "she buys everything that comes out, especially
badly-executed magazines that talk about the fore-front of progress and
look just as if they were produced in the dark ages. I know that she
came to your husband entirely because she wanted to help to edit his
magazine--_Wild Oats_. Is not that its name? From what Chris says, it
sounds so _very_ advanced!"
"Oh, very," said Aunt Gerty. "But it won't live!"
"You don't say so?" Mrs. Mander put up her _pince-nez_ and looked at
Aunt Gerty, whom she already didn't like.
"None of my brother-in-law's things do!" Aunt Gerty went on calmly. "He
is a prize wrecker--of women and magazines!"
Mrs. Mander looked startled, and Mother tried to change the
conversation.
"Oh, he's a law unto himself, my brother-in-law is," went on Aunt Gerty.
"But I don't think he'll convert Miss Mander to his views."
"I hope not," said Mrs. Mander, "for I notice that if you make a law
unto yourself, you generally have to make a society unto yourself too!
At least as far as women are concerned."
"People will always let you go your own way," said Mother; "but the
point is, will they come with you--join with you in a pleasant walk?"
"Well," said Mrs. Mander, "my daughter is the most headstrong of young
women. I can't control her, or you may be sure I should not have allowed
her to undertake this post of secretary to Mr. Vero-Taylor."
"I gathered as much," said Mother, not offended a bit. "But I will look
after her well!" She does; she gives her cod-liver oil every day to make
her fat, and breakfast in bed once a week.
Christina says Lady Scilly is a female Mecænas! Ben says she a minx. Ben
hates her, because she makes a fool of George, and he says Ariadne is a
cad to accept her old dresses and wear them, and go out with her, but
then, what is Ariadne to do? She likes to go to parties, and Mother
won't go anywhere, she is quite obstinate about that. I must say that
George doesn't try to persuade her much. You see, he isn't used to
having a wife, socially speaking, after going about as a bachelor all
those years!
George agreed to have a party here, to please Lady Scilly, but Christina
is quite sure that the idea had occurred to him already, for why should
he build a house for purposes of advertisement, and then hide it under
a bushel? A successful party is more good than fifty interviews, so she
says, and sells an edition. She knows a great deal about geniuses. She
says the hermit-plan would not suit George. I asked her what the
hermit-plan was. She said she had known an artist, who took a lovely old
house in the suburbs of London, and lived there, and never went out;
anybody who cared must come out to see him, and then it was not so easy,
for his Sundays were only for a select few--very selected. He only gave
tea and bread-and-butter--very little butter--and no table-cloth--plain
living, and high prices, for his pictures cost a lot, though he
pretended he did not care if he sold them or not; in fact, it cut him to
the heart to see any of them go out into the great cold brutal world,
and he never exhibited in exhibitions, but in an empty room in his own
house. He said, in fun, I suppose, that if the Academy were to elect him
to be an R.A., he should put the matter into the hands of his
solicitors. The end of that man was, she said, that he did become a
Royal Academician, quite against his will, and princes and princesses of
the blood used to come and have tea with him, without a table-cloth. But
that would not do for George, for he isn't at all hermit-like, and he
can make epigrams! They say that is his _forte_. I hate them myself, I
think they are rude, and only a clever way of hurting people's feelings
so that they can't complain, but then, of course, the family gets them
in the rough; epigrams, like charity, begin at home.
George began to talk a great deal about the duty of entertaining. He
said a man owed it to his century. And his party must be something out
of the common run; it must be individual and exceptional. He thought he
would give a party like the ones they gave in the Middle Ages. Judging
from what he said, I think that it must have been very uncomfortable,
and very expensive, for to be really grand you had to have cygnets and
peacocks to eat. People stood about round the sides of the room, or sat
on the floor or on coffers, and before the evening was half over the
smoke from the flambeaux made it impossible for them to see each other's
faces! That didn't suit Ariadne at all, and she snubbed the idea as much
as she could.
Luckily, George changed his mind, and then it was to be a supper, still
Mediæval, at six o'clock. We should have had to eat with our fingers,
because only the carver has a fork, and he sometimes lends it, but it
can't go all round. That's the reason we have finger-bowls now, and
little bits of bread beside our plates instead of big bits of brown to
eat off. And when you were done, did you eat the plate? As far as I can
see, everybody handed everybody they loved nice pieces off their own
trenchers and drank out of the same glasses, so the fewer persons that
loved one the better I should have liked it. You should have seen
Mother's face when the middle-aged menu was explained to her! She said
she would do what she could, but how was she going to put the grocers'
and the butchers' shops back a century?
The first course, George explained, was quite easy--it was little bits
of toast with honey and hypocras.
"Perhaps they will know what that is at the Stores?" Mother said,
meaning to be funny. "There's a very civil young man there might help
me?"
"Next course, smoked eels," went on George. "Any soup you like, only it
must be flavoured with verjuice. That is the third course. Then you have
venison, rabbits, pigeons, fricasseed beans, river crabs, sorrel,
oranges, capers in vinegar----"
"It will relieve us for ever of the burden of entertaining for ever and
ever, that's one good thing!" Mother said, "for nobody will care to try
that _menu_ twice!"
"It would look well in the papers, though," George said. "What do you
say to barbecued pig?"
But Mother would have nothing to say to barbecued pig, and George and
Lady Scilly finally settled that it was to be a masked ball, costume not
obligatory, but masks and dominos imperative, with a cold collation at
twelve o'clock, and all the guests to unmask then.
The date was chosen to please her, and it was changed three times, but
at last it was fixed, and George got some cards printed that he had
designed himself. They were quite white and plain, but with a knowing
red splotch in one corner, which signified George's passionate Italian
nature. I was in the study when the first dozens of packets came, with
Miss Mander, and she undid them. Secretaries always take the right to
open everything!
"My Goodness!" she said.
"Isn't it right?" I asked, getting hold of it, but when I had looked at
it I was no wiser, for I couldn't see what was wrong. There it was,
written out very nicely, "_Mr. Vero-Taylor At Home. Wednesday the
twenty-first_," and the address in the corner, and all those rules about
the dominos, and that was all.
"Oh, dear darling Christina," I begged, deadly curious, "do tell me what
is wrong with that? I cannot guess."
"It's just as well, perhaps," she said. "Preserve your sublime
ignorance, my dear child, as long as you can."
And not another word could I get out of her! I suppose she calls that
being loyal to her employer.
I told Ben, and he said he knew, and what was more, he would go one
better. He got hold of one of the cards, and altered it. And then it was
_Mr. Vero-Taylor and Lady Scilly At Home_! I think that was absurd, for
though Lady Scilly meddles in all our affairs, she doesn't quite live
here yet! and Mother does, and what's more, Mother never goes out at all
except to take a servant's character, or scold the butcher, or something
of the sort, so she is really the one at home! Christina took it from
him, and looked at it, and I'll swear I saw her smile before she tore it
up. So Ben had me there, for he still wouldn't tell me what was wrong
with the first card.
We began to write in the names of the people. It took us a whole
morning, Ben, Ariadne, Miss Mander and I. I offered to help, and really,
though I write rather badly, I can spell better than any of them, but I
don't believe they valued my help very much, and only gave me a card now
and then to keep me quiet. There were six young men that Ariadne wanted
asked--six, no less, if you please--and she's only been out six months!
And she kept trying to force them on George, same as you do cards in a
card trick! But he didn't take any notice, and kept walking up and down
the room mentioning the names of all sorts of absurd people that nobody
wanted, except himself. It was really going to be a very smart party;
there were to be detectives and reporters, and what more can you have
than that? All the countesses and dukes and so on were to come, of
course, but I must say I had thought that George knew a great many more
of them; he managed to scratch up so few, considering all the talk there
had been about it. I kept saying, "Oh, do give me a Countess to ask. You
give me all the plain people to do."
Somehow or other, George did not seem to be pleased, and he sent us all
away after fifty had been written.
Next day, he told us that he had thought it all out, and he was going to
do an original thing, and instead of sending out cards for his party, he
was going to announce it in the pages of _The Bittern_, and that all his
friends, reading it, must consider themselves bidden. Mother said how
should she know how many to prepare for? I suppose the answer to that
depends on the number of friends George has got, and whether they know
that he considers them his friends. For think how awkward to assume that
you were a friend and had a place laid for you, and then to come and
find that you were only an acquaintance. I suggested that the real
friends should have a hot sit-down supper, with wine, while the
acquaintances should only go to a buffet and have cold pressed beef and
lemonade. There should be a password, _Hot with_, and _cold without_,
and they roared when I told them this, but I didn't see why. Then the
party would really be of some use, for after it people would know where
they were! But how about the newspaper people? They couldn't call
themselves friends, or even acquaintances, so they wouldn't be able to
come at all, and what would George do then? I said all this, which seems
to me very sensible, but no one noticed it. And the detectives! They
have to be paid for coming, surely, and I'd rather see them than any of
the others. "If they don't come the party will be spoilt for me," I said
to Christina.
"It will be all right," she said, and Ariadne was quite pleased, for of
course, this way, her six young men can come, a dozen if they like.
Ariadne and I had costumes. I was the little Duke of Gandia, that
brother of Cæsar Borgia that he killed, and Ariadne had the dress of
Beatrice Cenci with a sort of bath-towel wound round her head. The funny
thing is that she looks far younger than me in it, quite a little girl,
while I look like a big boy. My legs are very long. George has a monk's
costume, one of the Fratelli dei Morti, and it is much the same sort of
looking thing as a domino. Nobody would ever know him, and he looks very
nice.
I am told that at masques you have to speak a squeaky voice or alter it
somehow. George will have to, because he has a very peculiar voice, that
anybody would know a mile off; people call it resonant, nervous,
bell-like--I call it cracked. It is one of his chief fascinations, but
he will have to do without it for once, and rely on the others.
The study was to be the ball-room, only George preferred to leave signs
of literary occupation in the shape of his desk, which he just shoved
away on one side, with the proofs of his new novel left negligently
lying on it. We sprinkled copies of his last but one about the house, in
moderation; it was rather fun--I felt as if I were planting bulbs.
George likes these sort of little attentions, and I knew I was not to be
put off by his finding one, as he did, and scolding me and telling me to
put it on the fire.