We never used to go away for more than a week every summer to Brighton
or Herne Bay, but now that we live in the heart of the town, as of
course St. John's Wood is, it has been decided that we want a whole
month at the sea. This year Mother and Aunt Gerty chose Whitby in
Yorkshire. It is convenient for Aunt Gerty--something about a company
that she is thinking of joining in the autumn. George didn't care where
we went, as he isn't to be with us. He just forks out the money as
Mother asks for it; he trusts her implicitly not to waste it, and to do
things as cheap as they can be done and yet decently, because after all
we _are_ his family, and everybody knows that now.
I sometimes think he would come with us himself, if Aunt Gerty wasn't so
much about.
Ariadne and Aunt Gerty haven't got an ounce of country fibre in them.
They get at loggerheads with the country at once. The mildest cows chase
them, they manage to nearly drown themselves in the tiniest ditches, the
quietest old pony rears if they drive him. If they pick a mushroom it is
sure to be a toadstool; if they bite into a pear there's a wasp inside
it; if they take hold of a village baby they are sure to drop it. They
haven't country good manners, they leave gates open, they trample down
grass, they entice dogs away, they startle geese and set hens running,
and offend everybody all round.
So they weren't particularly happy in the first rooms we took, at a farm
just out of Whitby. There was one stuffy little best parlour, sealed up
like a bottle of medecine, and one mouldy geranium looking as if it
couldn't help it on the window-sill, and the "Seven Deadly Sins" in
chromo on the walls, and Rebecca at a well of Berlin wools over the
mantelpiece. They covered the family Bible with an antimacassar, and
Aunt Gerty's theatrical photos without which she never travels, and
suppressed the frosty ornament in a glass case of one of Mrs. Wilson's
wedding-cakes. Mrs. Wilson married early, she says, and I say she
married often, for there are three of them! It _was_ uncomfortable.
Mother didn't complain, Aunt Gerty did. She had nowhere to hang up her
dresses; they were all getting spoilt; she couldn't see to do her hair
in the wretched little scrap of looking-glass, and the room was so small
that she twice set fire to her bed-curtains, curling her hair, which she
did twenty times a day, for there was always wind or rain or something.
The walls were so thin that she could hear every word Mr. and Mrs.
Wilson said to each other in the next room, quarrelling and arranging
the bill and so on. She couldn't sleep with the window shut, and all
sorts of horrid buggy things came in if you left it open. It was so
dreadfully lonely here, and she had never "seen so much land" in her
life.
Aunt Gerty has been on tour often enough to get used to uncomfortable
lodgings, lodgings not chosen by herself, very likely, and her luggage
all fetched away the day before she leaves by the baggage man! But it is
in a town, and that makes all the difference. Give her a strip of mirror
in the door of her wardrobe, and a gas-jet ready to set fire to her
window-curtains, and a row of shops outside to cheer her up, and she
won't think of grumbling.
The landlady didn't consider us a particularly good "let." I used to
hear her in bed in the mornings explaining to Mr. Wilson, who is a
railway porter, how glad she would be to be "shot" of us if it wasn't
for the money. "Ay, lass!" he would answer, and then I used to hear him
turning over in bed and going to sleep again.
"They're better to keep a week than a fortnight!" she used to say. "What
with their late dinners and breakfasts in bed, and their black coffee,
and all sitting down for an hour o' mornings polishing up them ondacent
brown boots--they darsen't trust the help, no, not since she went and
rubbed them with lard--poor girl, she meant well,--and she fit to rive
her legs off answering the parlour bell every minute! Well, the sooner I
see their backs, the better pleased I shall be!"
We took the hint and gave up the rooms, and got some nicer ones in town
on the quay. Aunt Gerty left off bothering Mother to have late dinner
and strong coffee, and we lived on herrings and cream cheeses, the
cheapest things in Whitby. I mean the herrings. When they have a good
catch, they sell them at a halfpenny each on the quay-side, or slap
their children with them, or shy them at strangers. Anything to keep the
market up!
Mrs. Bennison, our new landlady, isn't a Whitby woman, but her husband
is, and owns a boat, and takes Ben out sailing, and tries to make a man
of him. We hardly ever see him, so we know he is happy. Mother and Aunt
Gerty sit one on each side of the bow window the greater part of the
day, and make blouses, and read at the same time. George would throw
their books into the harbour if he caught them in their hands; they are
the sort he disapproves of. I won't say who the authors of these are, as
being a literary man's daughter it might give offence, but they are by
women mostly. George vetoes women's books too, for they are generally
bad, and if they are good, they have no business to be.
Just now, George isn't here to object, he is at Homburg, doing a cure.
He always gets brain fag towards the end of the season like his other
friends. It seems to me the smartest illness to have, except
appendicitis. The moment Goodwood is over, they all troop off to Germany
or Switzerland and pay pounds to some doctor who only makes them leave
off eating and drinking too much, and go to bed a little before
daylight. It is kill and then cure with the smart set, every year.
George does what is right and usual--bathes in champagne at Wiesbaden,
and drinks the water rotten eggs have been boiled in at Homburg. He does
it in good company, to take the taste away. Mr. Aix drew us a picture of
George and a Duchess walking up and down a parade, with a glass tube
connected with a tumbler, in their mouths, talking about emulating "The
Life of the Busy Bee" as they went along.
About the middle of August we heard he had come back to England and was
paying his usual round of visits to Barefront, and Baddeley and
Fylingdales Tower. Nearly all these places have real battlements and
ghosts. Fylingdales Tower is near here. Mother and I and Aunt Gerty
joined a cheap trip to it, the other day, and were taken all over the
house for a shilling. I don't even believe The Family was away, but
stowed away _pro tem._ and staring at us through some chink and loathing
us. I did manage to persuade Aunt Gerty not to throw away her sandwich
paper in the grate of the fire-place of the room where Edward the Third
had slept on his way to Alnwick, but kindly keep it till we were got
into the Park. But she was very irreverent all the same, and insisted on
setting her hat straight in the glass of Queen Elizabeth's portrait, and
that was the only picture she looked at at all. I don't care for
pictures much. I like the house, which is old and grey and bleached, as
if it never got a good night's sleep. Too many spirits to break its
rest. I don't believe in ghosts really, but I often wonder what are the
white things one sees? I don't see so many as I did when I was quite a
child. Aunt Gerty shivered and went Brr! She hated it all, she is so
very modern. She admitted that she only went with us because she had
hoped George might be actually staying there, and would see his own
sister-in-law among the trippers and get a nasty jar. Mother is a lady,
and knew quite well that he wasn't there, or else she would not have let
Aunt Gerty go, or gone herself, even _incog._ George _had_ been there
recently, though, for the black-satin housekeeper said so, and that she
read his books herself when she had time, or a headache. "He's quite a
pet of her ladyship's," she told Aunt Gerty, who had spotted one of
George's books on a table and asked questions. She was dying to tell the
old thing that we were relations of the great Mr. Vero-Taylor, but
dursn't, for Mother's eye was on her. Mother looked as pleased as Punch
though, and gazed at the chairs (behind plush railings) that her husband
had sat on, and at the portrait in Greek dress, by Sir Alma Tadema, of
the lady who "made a pet of him."
George had written from Homburg once or twice to me, and I used to read
his letters out to Mother, who naturally wanted to hear his news. She
was a little annoyed because he didn't mention if he was wearing the
thicker vests as the weather was getting chilly, and begged me to ask
him to be explicit in my next, but I did not, because it might have
shamed him in the eyes of his countesses if he left the letter about, as
of course he would. George respects the sanctity of private
communication so much, that he never tore up a letter in his life; the
housemaid collects them when she is doing his room, and brings them to
Mother, who hasn't time to read them, any more than the housemaid has.
The third week in August George wrote to me, and told me to engage him
rooms in Fylingdales Crescent on the East Cliff. You might have knocked
me down with a feather!
Mother was hurt at George's having written to me, not her, on such a
pure matter of business, until I explained that he merely did it to
please the child! One doesn't mind making oneself out a baby to avoid
hurting a mother's feelings. I don't know if Mother quite accepted this
explanation, but she said no more about it, and told Mr. Aix the good
news. He is in lodgings here, to be near us--Aunt Gerty thinks it is to
be near her, and he lets her think anything she likes. He looks forward
to George's coming with great interest, and says he will look like some
rare exotic on the beach, such as a humming-bird or a gazelle. Aunt
Gerty at once got hold of the visitors' list.
"Let's see which of his little lot is coming to Whitby?" she said, and
hunted carefully through three columns till she found that Adelaide
Countess of Fylingdales, Mr. Sidney Robinson, nurse baby and suite, were
at the Fylingdales Hotel, on the East Cliff. Lord Fylingdales, her
eldest son, is the widower of a Gaiety girl who actually died after she
had been a Countess a year, poor dear! Aunt Gerty knew her. He is Lord
of the Manor here, and his portrait is all over the place.
"Old Adelaide's a shocking frump, Lucy; you needn't distress yourself
about her!" said Aunt Gerty consolingly to Mother.
"I am not distressing myself about her, Gertrude," replied my Mother,
and she didn't look at all distressed in her neat short blue serge
seaside dress, and shady hat. She looked ten.
"I know her son," Aunt Gerty went on. "A fish without a backbone. I very
nearly had the privilege of leading him astray myself. It is Irene
Lauderdale now, I hear."
"I wish you'd stow your theatrical recollections, Gerty," said Mother.
"Come, Tempe, get your things on, we will go and take rooms for your
father and my husband."
"Brava!" said Mr. Aix. "Capital accent there."
"Oh, you go along!" said Mother, and we went off at once and engaged
George's rooms. We got very nice large ones, with dark green outside
shutters to the windows, and took a great deal of trouble to explain
George's little ways to them, for their sake as well as his. Ben will
valet him. Mother told the people that he is bringing his man, who will,
however, sleep out. George never gets up till twelve, French fashion.
Poor Ben, he may as well make himself useful, for he certainly isn't
ornamental just now. He can't speak, he can only croak, and though he
isn't very big, he seems to have the power of burrowing inside himself
and bringing up a great voice like a steam-roller. He is not a manly
man, yet, but he certainly is a boily boy. He has got some spots on his
face that he thinks much bigger than they really are, and he keeps them
and himself out of sight as much as possible. He says just now he
doesn't care at all what he does, he doesn't even mind playing servant
for a bit, if George would like it. Mother tells him he is a good boy
and the comfort of her life, and that if she can manage it, she will get
him sent to college after this, only he had better please the mammon of
unrighteousness all he can. So he means to be a good valet to the
Mammon.
The Fylingdales Hotel is in the best part of the town, on the East
Cliff, and they dine late there every evening, and don't pull the blinds
down, and the townspeople walk backwards and forwards, and watch the
people dining at seven-thirty, dressed in their nudity. I think evening
dress looks quite wrong at the seaside. Aunt Gerty and Mother put on a
different blouse every evening, and look nice and cosy and comfortable,
though George does say sarcastic things about the tyranny of the blouse,
and the way Aunt Gerty will call it Blowse. I wash my face, that is all
the dressing _I_ do. Ben puts on an old smoker of George's, and flattens
out his hair to support the character of being the only gentleman of the
party, unless Mr. Aix is there to supper, and the less said about Mr.
Aix's clothes the better.
Ben makes boats all day, when he isn't in one, and Ariadne makes poetry.
Her one idea, having come to the sea for her health, is to avoid it,
and seek the rather scrubby sort of woods which is all you can expect at
the seaside. So every afternoon nearly we take a donkey to Ruswarp or to
Cock Mill, and "ride and tie." We used to pick out a very smart donkey,
but a very naughty one. He was called Bishop Beck, perhaps for that
reason, and he went slow,--that was to be expected, but when he stopped
quite still and wouldn't move for an hour or more in the middle of Cock
Mill Wood, long, long after one had stopped beating him (for he looked
at us and made us feel ridiculous), Ariadne said she would rather do
without adventitious aid of this kind, for it interfered with her
afflatus.
She walks up and down in the wood paths, finding rhymes, which seems the
hardest part of poetry.
"Dreams--streams--gleams--" she goes on.
"Breams?" I suggest.
"Not a poetical image!"
"It isn't an image, it is a fish."
"It won't do. Am I writing this poem or are you?"
I don't argue. It doesn't really matter much how Ariadne's poems turn
out. Being Papa's daughter she is sure to find a hearty reception for
her initial volume of verse.
We used to stay out till what Ariadne called Dryad time. She thought she
saw white figures hiding behind the trees in the dusk. Little pellets
made of nuts and acorns and dead leaves, and so on, used to fall on us
out of the thickets, and Ariadne said it was the Dryads pelting us. She
thinks trees are alive, and that one of the reasons you hear ghosts in
all old houses, is the wood creaking because in the night it remembers
it was once a tree. I prefer to believe in ordinary solid ghosts instead
of rational explanations like that. But still Ariadne's funny ideas make
a walk quite interesting. Of course we never talk of such things at
home, among materialists and realists like Aunt Gerty and Mother and
George. George makes plenty of use of birds in his books, but he once
came home from a visit to St. John's College at Cambridge, and told us
that he had been kept awake all night by a beastly nightingale under his
window. Now I have never heard this much-vaunted bird, but I am sure,
from Matthew Arnold's poem where he calls it Eugenia, it must be a
heavenly sound, quite worth while being kept awake by.
Ariadne and I stay out very late till it is getting dark, hoping to hear
it, in Cock Mill Wood, and then we go home and race through supper, and
then go out again, on the quays and piers this time. We don't know or
care what George and his friends are doing, up above us, in the smart
hotel on the cliff. What I should just love would be for some of them
and George to come down for a walk in the dark and perhaps meet us, and
for George to say, "Who are those little wandering vagabonds flitting
about like bats? Why doesn't their father or mother keep them at home in
the evenings?" It would be so nice, and Arabian Nightish!
At very high tides, we stay out very late, and take a shawl, and sit on
a capstan and tuck it round us, and listen for a certain noise we love.
It is when the water gets into a little corner in the heap of stones by
the Scotch Head, and gets sucked in among them somehow, and then we hear
a sort of sob that is better than any ghost. Ariadne and I put our heads
under the shawl when we hear it, but not quite, so as to prevent us
hearing properly.
The harbour smells at low water, and the town children yell and scream,
and it isn't poetical then. So Ariadne and I like to go away on the
Scaur and put our fingers in anemones' mouths, and pop seaweed purses,
and pretend we are lovers cut off by the tide, as they are in novels. In
the afternoons when the harbour is full we sit on the mound above the
Khyber Pass, and watch the water filling up the hole between the
opposite cliff and the cliff ladder. It is all quite quiet then. We
don't hear any town cries, for the children that make the noise are
turned out of their playground, and their mothers out of their good
drying-ground, and the boats begin to go out of the harbour in a long,
soft, slow procession--
_And the stately ships go on_
_To their haven under the hill._
I am sure Tennyson meant Whitby when he wrote that.
One night we could not sleep because the woman next door had had her
"man" drowned, and cried and moaned for hours. He was a fisherman, and
we had seen his boat go out third in the row the day before. He is
supposed to have fallen overboard in the night? Next day, Mother went in
and gave her five shillings and she stopped crying.
Mr. Aix had a try to paint the view in front of our windows. At least he
said there was no such thing in nature as a "view," and left out the
Church and the Abbey, because they "conventionalized" things so. He
belongs, he said, to the Impressionist School, if any. He got quite
excited about his drawing, and at last went and borrowed a station truck
to sit on; it raised him a little. One day a chance lady sat down on one
of the handles, and over he went. It served him right for leaving out
the two best things in Whitby.
When George came, Ariadne and I used to take turns to go and lunch with
him at his breakfast, where we had French cookery. There were leathery
omelets that bounced up like the stick in the boys' game when you
touched the end of them with a spoon, and fillets that you wouldn't have
condescended to have for a pillow, but still, it was French.
We were dressed nicely and took our clean gloves in our hands, and
George wasn't ashamed of us, and introduced us to his friends. Lady
Fylingdales' Mr. Sidney Robinson said I was like George--that I had his
nose. I went to bed that night with a clothes-peg out of the yard on it,
to improve its shape. But the old lady was half blind, and all made of
manner. I also saw the Lord Aunt Gerty might have led astray, and he
hadn't a manner of any sort, and his nose wanted to run away with his
chin.
George had no fault whatever to find with the arrangements Mother had
made for his comfort, and he told her so, the first time he saw her, in
Baxter Gate, coming out of the Post Office. The first place George flies
to in a town is the Post Office, to send telegrams. He corresponds
entirely by telegram with some people; he says it is paying five-pence
more for the privilege of saying less. We had been shopping. George
spotted us, and Mother thought he had rather not be recognized, but he
was good that day and he actually left Mr. Sidney Robinson--a commoner,
married to a countess, and that exactly describes him, Aunt Gerty
says--to say a word to his own wife. It was market day, and we had
bought several things in the Hall across the water. A pound of
blackberries and a cream cheese, and a chicken and a cabbage, each from
a different old woman with a covered basket. Mother had a net and I a
basket to put them in. I was glad that George did not offer to "relieve"
us of them, like the young men Aunt Gerty picks up here; but he stopped
and talked to us quite nicely for a long time. He and Mother seemed to
have a great deal to say to each other, and the basket-handle began to
cut my arm in half. Also it was a very hot day. George had on a white
linen suit, and a straw hat from Panama. He looked quite cool, and like
Lohengrin or the Baker's man. Mother didn't. She looked hot. I touched
her elbow, not so much because of my arm that ached, but because she
looked like that, nor did I think it looks well to stand talking in the
street to gentlemen, even if it is your own husband.
"Well, George," she said, taking my hint at once, "we must be going on.
The butter is melting and the chicken grilling and the cabbage wilting
while I stand here talking to you."
"Charming!" said George, but he wasn't thinking of us, but of Mr.
Robinson, who was champing a few yards away. We said "Good-bye" without
shaking hands. George, I think, might have lifted his hat. I have read
of fine gentlemen who lifted their hat to an apple-woman, let alone
their wife and child.
George and his friend walked off together. I suppose the Robinson man
was too well-bred to ask George who his lady-friend was, as any of Aunt
Gerty's men would do, but he certainly stared a good deal. Of course he
knows who we are, everybody in Whitby does, I should think, and they
most likely conclude that it is less unkindness than the eccentricity of
genius. If you haven't got that blasted thing called genius, I suppose
you can bear to live in the same house with your wife!
We walked slowly home with our purchases. Mother had a headache all
dinner, and lay down in the afternoon.
"I met your father, Ben," she said at supper. "His boots want a little
attention."
"I don't believe," said Ben crossly, "that any one ever had a more
tiresome man to valet. He will wear his clothes all wrong, and then is
always ragging and jawing at a fellow because they don't look nice."
"Hush, Ben, he is your father."
"Hah, I was forgetting!" said Ben, and gave one of his great laughs, as
if you were breaking up coal, or something. Ben is now so changeable and
nervous that you never know where to have him. He is growing up all
wrong, but what can you expect of a boy brought up by women? He never
sees a boy of his own position, though I know that in London he has some
low companions he daren't bring to the house. The Hitchings are his only
respectable friends, but they live such a long way off now. Jessie
Hitchings is devoted to Ben, but she is only a girl like Ariadne and me.
Mr. Hitchings told mother, years ago, that the boy was being ruined, and
Mother cried and said she knew it, but could do nothing, for his father
was by way of educating him at home till something could be settled.
Snaps of Latin, and snacks of Greek, that is all George gives the poor
boy when he has a moment, and that is never.
This is the only grievance Mother has, although Aunt Gerty is always
trying to persuade her she has several, and putting her back up. Mother
ends by getting cross with her.
"For goodness' sake, you Job's comforter, you, leave off your eternal
girding at George. Can't you see, that as long as a man has his career
to establish--his way to make----"
"His blessed thoroughfare is made long ago, or ought to be. That is what
I can't get over----"
"You aren't asked to get over it. It is not your funeral, it is mine, so
shut up. A man like George, who is dependant on the public favour, needs
to be most absurdly particular, and careful what he does lest he injure
his prestige. Look at yourself! You know very well in your own
profession how very damaging it is for an actor to be married; that if
an actress marries her manager, he has to pay dear for it in the
receipts. She had better not figure as his wife in the bills, if she
wants him to get on. You can't eat your cake--I mean your title--and
have it. No, it's bound to be Miss Gertrude Jennynge on the bills, even
if it is Mrs. What-do-you-call-it in the lodgings, with a ring on her
finger, and every right to call herself a married woman. The public
don't care for spliced idols. An artist has to stand clear, and preserve
his individuality, such as it is!"
"And run straight all the time. I'll give George credit for that. But
there, whatever's the good of it to you? A man can make a woman pretty
fairly miserable, even if he is stone-faithful to her. It's then it
seems all wrong somehow, and doesn't give her a chance of paying him in
his own coin!"
I think Aunt Gerty is the reason why George fights so shy of his family.
He hates her style, and yet he can hardly forbid Mother seeing as much
as she likes of her own sister. The trail of the stage is over us all.
Not that I see anything a bit wicked about the stage myself! I have
never noticed anything at all wrong, and actors and actresses are the
kindest people in the world! But there is a queer, worn, threadbare,
rough, second-rate feeling about them. Off the stage--and I have never
seen them on--they are tired and slouchy and easy-going. Aunt Gerty is
most good-tempered and will do anything to help a pal, and takes things
as they come; those are her good points. But she talks such a lot about
herself, and never opens a book that isn't a novel, and wears cheap
muslins and beaded slippers in the street, and lots of chains that seem
to be always getting caught on men's buttons. She calls men "fellows."
She is always going to play Juliet at one of the London houses. Meantime
she puts up with provincial companies. She makes the best of it, and she
tells us she is going to play Nerissa in the Bacon Company, as if she
had got engaged for a parlourmaid in a good house, and discusses Ariel
as if Ariel were a tweeny or up-and-down girl between the sky and the
earth, and Puck a smart clever Buttons. She speaks of her nice legs as a
workman might of his bag of tools. She can sing and dance, when she
isn't asked to act. She has cut all her hair short to make it easier for
wigs. Her great extravagance is in wigs. She calls them "sliding roofs"
for convenience in talking about them in trains and omnibuses. When she
did wear her own hair she dyed it, so I like the wigs better, as there's
no deception.
If Mother was ever an actress, which I don't somehow believe, though
Jessie Hitchings said once that she had heard people say so, it has all
been knocked out of her. She dresses very well, always in simpler things
than Aunt Gerty. She left off her waist years ago, to please George, and
now that it is the fashion not to have one, she is in the right box--I
mean stays. Her hair is brown, and she mayn't frizzle it, so it is soft
and pretty like a baby's. She generally wears black, over lovely white
frilled petticoats that she gets up herself to keep the bills down. She
has such little hands that she can pick her gloves out of the
five-and-a-half boxes at sales, which are always much reduced. So few
people have small hands. She may not wear high heels, and that is a
grief to her, as she isn't very tall, but hers are very pretty feet, and
she can dance.
George doesn't know that she can dance. I do. Once Mr. Aix asked her to
dance for him when I was in the room. Aunt Gerty played on the
tin-kettle piano. Mother danced a cake-walk, which I thought very ugly,
and then a queer step that a friend had taught her when she was a child.
In one part of it she was dancing on her hands and her feet at the same
time. It was the queerest thing, and she left her dress down for that
and it lay in swirls about the carpet. Mr. Aix said it was the dance
that Salome must have danced before Herod, and he quite understood John
the Baptist, and where did she get it? But Mother wouldn't tell him.
She said it was a memory of her stormy youth in the East End.
Mr. Aix said that she could make her fortune doing it as a turn at a
Society music hall, as it would be something quite new and decadent.
That is just what Society wants--the slight, morbid flavour! Then Mother
put on her short skirt and did the ordinary vulgar kind of dance they
teach now, and I liked it best. She was everywhere at once, smart and
spreading out in all directions, like spun glass on a Christmas card.
Her eyes danced too. Ben said he couldn't have believed she was his
mother!
Then Aunt Gerty performed, and she is professional. But it was not the
same thing. Aunt Gerty's legs are thick, and compared with Mother's like
forced asparagus to the little pretty, thin, field-grown kind. Mother's
dancing was emphatically dramatic, Mr. Aix said.
I asked him if Mother could act, and he answered, "My dear child, your
mother can do anything she has a mind to."
"Then why doesn't she have a mind?" I at once said, forgetting how it
would upset our household and George if she were to go on the stage.
Mother naturally remembers this, and stays domestic out of virtue.
"I wish you would write a play for me, Mr. Aix," said Aunt Gerty, "and I
would get a millionaire to run it. I wonder, now, what one could do with
Mr. Bowser?"
She went off in a brown study, and Mr. Aix said rudely, "I will write a
play for Lucy sooner," looking at Mother, who was sitting fanning
herself with her pocket-handkerchief. "She has got the stuff in her, I
do believe. Gad! What a chance! What a lever! What a facer--!"
And he dropped off into a brown study too! Mother went and mended Ben's
blazer.
Mr. Aix isn't staying with us, we have no room in our house; he has a
room over the coast-guard's wife, but he comes in to us for his meals. I
don't believe George realizes this, or he would tell him he is throwing
himself away, and losing a good chance of advertising his books. Mr.
Aix's books seem to go without advertising, more than George's do--I
suppose it is because they are so improper.
At any rate, he prefers to throw in his lot with us. One day we were all
having a picnic-tea at Cock Mill. The party consisted of Mother, me and
Ariadne, Aunt Gerty and Mr. Aix, and an actor friend of hers and his
wife, who was acting for a week at the Saloon Theatre. Mr. Bowser, whom
Aunt Gerty wants either to marry or get a theatre out of, was with us
too. They call him the King of Whitby, because he owns so many plots in
it, and is going to stand for it in the brewing interest next election.
We had secured the nicest table, the one nearest the stream, and had
just tucked our legs neatly under it, when a carriage drove up. Aunt
Gerty and the King of Whitby were at that moment in the old woman's
cottage who gives us the hot water, toasting tea-cakes.
The Fylingdales' party got out of that carriage, and George got slowly
down off the box. They trooped into the enclosure, and Mr. Sidney
Robinson, trying to be funny, asked the old woman if she could see her
way to giving them some tea.
"Here o' puppose, Sir!" said she, as of course she is. She pointed out
the table that was left and that led them past us.
If Aunt Gerty had been there with Mr. Bowser she would certainly have
claimed George as a relation and said something awkward, but she was
luckily toasting tea-cakes, and had perhaps not even seen them. I saw
George just look at Mother, and I saw her smile a very little, and make
him a sign that he was to go right past us, and not speak or seem to
know us before. Of course Mr. Aix never spoils any one's game, not even
George's. So he went on talking hard to the actor's wife, though I saw
his lip curl. I, of course, never need be given a cue twice, so I kicked
Mother hard under the table for sympathy, but preserved a calm superior.
Aunt Gerty and Mr. Bowser came out with plates full of tea-cakes they
had cooked, and I didn't know if it was the fire or Mr. Bowser had made
Aunt Gerty's cheeks so red--I hoped the latter for her sake. They had no
idea of what had happened while they had been toasting and flirting, it
appeared from their manners, which were bad. Aunt Gerty always puts an
extra polish on hers when George is present, and even Mr. Bowser would
have added a frill or so to suit the aristocracy.
Our party was very gay. Actors all can make you laugh if they can do
nothing else, and our shrieks of laughter must have made the other party
quite envious, for they were as quiet as a mouse and as dull as the
stream all overshadowed with nut-bushes and alders that grew over it
just there.
Suddenly George got up, and left them, and came over to us, and Aunt
Gerty swallowed her tea the wrong way round, and had to have her
shoulder thumped.
George took no notice of her, but put his hand on Mr. Aix's shoulder and
said something to him in a low voice.
"Not if I know it!" Mr. Aix answered, quite violently, adding, "Many
thanks, old fellow, I am happier where I am."
George looked awfully put out. Of course I knew what he wanted. Those
smart people up at the other table had expressed a wish to see Mr. Aix.
He is a successful though painfully realistic novelist, and George had
told them he was actually sitting at the next table, and had promised to
bring him over to them to be introduced. In his disappointment, he
glared at us all, especially the actor, who didn't care a brass farthing
for George's displeasure, and went on eating tea-cake _ad nauseam_.
"Oh, all right!" said George, to cover his vexation, "if you prefer to
bury yourself in a----"
"Easy all!" Mr. Aix said. "Leave everybody to enjoy themselves in their
own way. And we are depriving your delightful friends of----"
George had turned and gone back to his delightful friends long before
Mr. Aix had finished his sentence, and Aunt Gerty patted the poor man on
the back till he wriggled.
"Loyal fellow!" she said several times. She had got well on to it now,
and she started a fit of giggles that lasted all the rest of the time we
were there. It didn't matter much, for we were all quite drunk on weak
tea and laughter.
But we turned as silent as mice as the Fylingdales' party, having had
enough of their dull tea, streamed past us, and got into their carriage,
and rolled away. George was not with them. I dare say he had got over
the hedge and gone round to meet the break by the road, not wanting to
walk past our party again, and to avoid unpleasantness. I supposed he
had paid for the tea; but no, this grand party forgot to do that, so
that in the end Mr. Aix paid for their refreshment for the old woman's
sake that she should not suffer.
When they had gone, we felt relieved; but it sobered us somehow. Aunt
Gerty and the gentlemen smoked quietly, and we were so still that we
could hear the little beck bubbling over the loose stones beside us.
Then Aunt Gerty was persuaded to recite something, and she did "Loraine,
Loraine, Loree!" in a shy, modest voice. You see these were all her real
bosses, and she valued their approval, and the actor's wife is
considered very stiff in the profession. She herself sang "The banks of
Allan Water" very sadly and solidly, and Aunt Gerty cried. To cheer us
all up again the actor--rather a famous one, Mr. D--L----, did one of
his humorous recitations out of his London repertory for us, so that we
nearly died with laughing, and Aunt Gerty dried her tears, and whispered
to me that trying to laugh like a lady was so painful that she longed to
take a short cut out of her stays.