most ludicrous, extravagant, and delirious parties, and thus be
acclaimed sovereign among hostesses. Amelie, as challenger, had flung
the gauntlet in the shape of a midnight lawn-tennis party, with hundreds
of arc lamps hung above the courts, the nets covered with spangles, and
the lines made of ground glass faintly illuminated by electric lights
beneath, while, by way of contrast with this brilliance, a number of men
dressed like mourners at a funeral, with top-hats and black scarves,
picked up and presented the lawn-tennis balls to her guests in
coffin-shaped trays. Here was a high bid for supremacy, and it was felt
that Mrs. Cicero B. Dace would have to do something great in order to
eclipse the brightness and originality of this entertainment. But bright
and original she was, and when, two nights later, she gave her
marvellous canary ball, it was thought that her throne had not yet
tottered. On this occasion her admiring guests were thrilled to find
that all round the walls of her ballroom had been planted mimosa trees,
among the branches of which three thousand canaries had been let loose,
after being doped with hard-boiled egg soaked in rum and water. These
chirped and sang in a feverish and intoxicated manner. At the end of the
ball the men of the party, dressed as huntsmen and armed with air-guns,
shot these unfortunate songsters and presented the spoils to their
partners in the cotillion.
Amelie had two answers to that--the first an indignant letter, printed
in large type throughout the American press, denouncing this massacre,
and the second another ball. The letter Mrs. Cicero B. Dace did not
object to at all, since it but enhanced her notoriety, but she objected
to the ball very much indeed, since Amelie’s ingenious mind hit on the
simple and exquisite plan of dispensing with the band, and having in its
place a choir of three hundred singers, who, in batches of one hundred
at a time, sang the dance tunes. The effect was contagious, and dancers
joined in also, producing, as the press said, the “most stupendously
lyrical effect since the days of Sappho.”
Then Mrs. Cicero B. Dace sat down and thought again, lighting upon the
famous idea of the auction ball, in which a real English Duke acted as
auctioneer, and before each dance put up the ladies for auction, to be
bid for by the men who wished to be their partners. But Amelie swiftly
sent for Arthur Bolney Ross, and he and a friend of hers, who was
backing her in this struggle for sovereignty, continued to bid for her
for so long that, out of sinister compassion for her hostess, she
stepped down from the rostrum and refused to dance with either, for fear
that there should be no more dancing for anybody. This completely
spoiled the success of the auction ball, and while Mrs. Cicero B. Dace
was still staggering from its failure, Amelie annihilated her altogether
by giving her inimitable glacier ball on the hottest night of the year.
A refrigerating apparatus was rigged up on the walls of her ballroom,
and their entire surface thickly coated with real ice. Glass channels,
fringed with blue gentians, were made round the margin of the floor, to
carry off the melting water, while accomplished members of the band
yodelled at intervals to carry out the Swiss illusion. She and the
auctioneer Duke--whom she had captured from under the nose of Mrs.
Cicero B. Dace--dressed in knickerbockers, with a rope round his
shoulder and an ice-axe in his hand, led the cotillion, and Mrs. Cicero
B. Dace, having in vain tried to point out that the gentians were three
parts artificial flowers, retired at 1 A.M. in floods of tears.
Such were Amelie Ross’s social achievements when, unlike Alexander the
Great, she bethought herself that there were more worlds to conquer, and
decided to extend her dominions over England. Her godmother, of course,
knew her history, having, indeed, assisted at the history she had
already made, and on the night of her arrival at the Ritz Hotel, dined
with her there in her charming room looking over the Green Park, before
going with her to her box at the opera. As regards this first appearance
of her god-daughter, Violet Brackenbury had laid her plans very
carefully, and explained them as they dined.
“I have asked nobody else at all, dear Amelie,” she said, “because I
want everybody to be wild to find out who you are, and nobody will be
able to say. Curiosity is the best sauce of all.”
Amelie became thoroughly American for a moment.
“My!” she said. “Don’t you mean that your folk over here haven’t seen
hundreds and hundreds of pictures of me in the papers?”
“Probably not one, my dear. And I’ve only told one woman that you are
coming. You are going to burst on everybody to-night, you and your
lovely face, and your six feet of height, and your wonderful hair, and
your wonderful pearls, and the most wonderful gown that you’ve got. I
want all London for an hour or two to be wild to know who you are, and I
have told the box-attendant to take your name off the door, and not to
let anybody in between the acts. Afterwards I shall take you to the
dance at Alice Middlesex’s, which, luckily, ever so luckily, is
to-night. She is the one person I have told.”
“The Duchess of Middlesex?” asked Amelie.
“Yes; and she is quite certain to ask you if you know Lady Creighton,
that dreadful countrywoman of yours who is climbing into London like a
monkey and hopping about it like a flea. She tried to patronize Alice,
and Alice won’t get over it either in this world or the next. So tell
her that Lady Creighton is not received in New York--which I believe is
the case, isn’t it?--and look very much surprised at the idea of knowing
her. I can’t tell you how important that is.”
Amelie frowned slightly.
“But Elsie Creighton telephoned to me half an hour ago,” she said,
“asking me to lunch with her to-morrow to meet----”
“It doesn’t matter whom she asked you to meet. If she asked you to meet
the entire Royal Family, you would be wise to refuse. You don’t want to
climb into London on the top of a hurdy-gurdy.”
“My! What’s a hurdy-gurdy?” asked Amelie, whose English lessons had not
taught her that word.
“Hurdy-gurdy? Street organ. It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to know
people, if you understand; you want to make people want to know you. My
plan is not that you should climb up, but that you should spread down.”
Amelie instantly caught this.
“I see,” she said. “I’m to begin at the top. But Elsie Creighton said
there was a Prince coming to lunch to-morrow. I thought that was a good
beginning.”
“Not so good as the Creighton woman is bad. Did you accept, by the way?”
“Why, yes.”
“Then telephone to-morrow exactly at lunch-time to say you are ill, and
lunch with me very obviously downstairs in the restaurant. In fact, it
couldn’t have happened better. It will mark you off very definitely from
her and her crowd. I don’t mean to say that there are not charming
people among it, but it would never do to enter London under her wing.
Perhaps just at present, darling, you had better ask me before you
accept invitations. It is so important to cut the right people.”
Amelie was completely cordial over this.
“I expect that is what I have got to learn,” she said. “And now for
to-night--will my dress do?”
Lady Brackenbury regarded this admirable costume and shook her head.
“No, I don’t think it will,” she said. “It is lovely, but you want
something more arresting. You, with your wonderful complexion, can stand
anything. Orange, now--haven’t you got a hit-in-the-face of orange? I
want everybody to be forced to look at you, and you’ll do the rest. You
see I have made myself as plain and inconspicuous as possible, to act as
a foil. It is noble of me, but then I am noble. And all the pearls,
please, just all the pearls, with the big diamond fender on your head.
To-morrow, at the French Embassy, you shall wear the simplest gown you
have got, and one moonstone brooch, price three-and-sixpence.”
* * * * *
Such was the opening of Amelie’s amazing campaign, the incidents and
successes of which followed swift and bewildering. Under Violet’s
capable guidance she began, not by collecting round her that brisk and
hungry section of well-born London which is always ready to sing for its
dinner, and by giving huge entertainments to bring together a crowd at
all costs, but by attracting and attaching a small band of the people
who mattered. Lady Brackenbury knew very well that even in the most
democratic town in the world certain people, not necessarily Princes or
Prime Ministers, were large pieces in the great haphazard game of chess;
the crowd meantime, after whom Amelie secretly hankered, would only get
more eager to be admitted. In particular, Lady Creighton starved for her
entry. She asked Amelie to dine any Tuesday in June, when she was giving
her series of musical parties, but Amelie found, to her great regret,
that she was engaged on all those festive occasions. But she gave a
musical party herself--London was prey this year to a disordered
illusion that it liked music--and Melba and Caruso sang
there--informally, so it seemed, just happening to sing--to not more
than fifty people, who sat in armchairs at their ease, instead of
elbowing each other in squashed and upright rows. In vain did Lady
Creighton spread an assiduous report that the artists had sung out of
tune and that the peaches were sour. Everyone knew that she had not been
there, and that she alluded to another sort of fruit. Violet Brackenbury
was successful in persuading Amelie not to send any account of this
brilliant little affair to the papers, and to refuse all scraps to the
writers for the press. But she was careful to provide for a far more
telling publicity.
Gradually, craftily, a reef at a time, Violet allowed her friend to let
out her sails. She left her flat at the Ritz and rurally installed
herself in a spacious house in the middle of Regent’s Park. There was a
big field attached to the house, and, yielding to a severe attack of
Americanism, which she thought it might be dangerous to suppress, Violet
permitted her to give a haymaking party of the Newport type. Hay was
brought in from the country and scattered over the field, and mixed up
with roses and gardenias, while the guests on arrival were presented
with delightful little ebony pitchforks with silver prongs, or
cedar-wood rakes. But this symptom caused her a little uneasiness, for
it was obvious that Amelie thought her haymaking party a much brighter
achievement than the previous concert.
* * * * *
The expansion continued. Amelie and her friend strolled into Christie’s
one morning, and found a tussle going on between two eminent dealers
over the possession of a really marvellous string of pearls. At a
breathless pause, after the first “Going!” that followed a fresh bid,
Amelie said in her most ringing American voice, “I guess I’ll sail in
right now,” and began bidding herself. The crowd of dilettante London,
which delights in seeing other people spend large sums of money, parted
for her, and she moved gloriously up the auction-room and took her stand
just behind one of the Mosaic little gentlemen who wanted the pearls so
badly.
The recognition of her spread through the place like spilled
quicksilver, and the auctioneer, with an amiable bow, caused the pearls
to be handed to her for her inspection. With them still in her hand, as
if it was not worth while returning them to the tray, she sky-rocketed
the price by three exalting bids, the third of which was as a fire-hose
on the ardour of her competitors. Her cheque-book was fetched from her
car outside, and she left the room a moment afterwards, having drawn her
cheque on the spot, pausing only to clasp the pearls round her neck....
And Violet, with a strange sinking of the heart, felt as if her pet
tiger-cub had tasted blood again after the careful and distinguished
diet on which she had been feeding it.
Amelia had a fancy to leave London early in July, and give a few parties
at an immense house she had taken near Maidenhead for the month. She had
had some gondolas sent over from Venice, with their appropriate
gondoliers, and London found it very pleasant to float about after
dinner, while the excellent string band played in an illuminated barge
that accompanied the flotilla. Exciting little surprises constantly
happened, such as the arrival one evening of artists from the Grand
Guignol, who played a couple of thrilling little horrors in the
ballroom, while on another night the great Reynolds picture belonging to
the Duke of Middlesex was found to have put in an appearance on the
walls. Amelie said that it was her birthday present to her husband, and
made no further allusion to it. The frame had gone to be repaired, and
it was draped round in clouds of silvery-grey chiffon that extended half
over the wall. And had Violet Brackenbury known the outrage that her
friend had planned, the frenzy of suppressed Newportism that was ready
to break forth, it is probable that she would gladly have returned the
cheque which she had that morning received from Amelie.
As it was, she felt wholly at ease, and inclined to congratulate herself
on the unique and signal character of Amelie’s success. Never before, so
she thought, had a woman so dominated the season; never, certainly, had
one of her countrywomen so “mattered.” And all this, with the exception,
perhaps, of the haymaking party and the incident of the pearls at
Christie’s, had been gained in quiet, unsensational ways; and, lulled to
content, she did not realize that the spirit that inspired the queen of
hostesses was ready to flare up like an access of malarial fever. Poor
unsuspecting godmother, who fondly believed that those gondolas from
Venice, those Grand Guignol artists from Paris, this gem of Reynolds’s
pictures, were a safety-valve, not guessing that they were but as oil
poured on the flame!
The cotillion that night was to begin at twelve. Amelie was leading it
herself with one of the Princes, and the big ballroom was doubly lined
with seated guests, when on the stroke of twelve she entered, dressed in
exact facsimile of the glorious Reynolds. As she advanced with her
partner into the middle of the room, the band in the gallery struck up,
and simultaneously a tongue of fire shot through the flimsy draperies
round the picture, instantly enveloping it in flames. The canvas
blistered and bubbled, and in ten seconds the finest Reynolds in the
world was a sheet of scorched and blackened rag.
The crowd leaped to its feet, but before the panic had time to mature,
the cause of it was over. There was nothing inflammable within range of
the swiftly-consumed chiffon, and only little fragments of burned-out
ash floated on to the floor. But the fervent and instantaneous heat had
done its work.
Then for a moment there was dead silence, and Amelie’s voice was heard
in its quietest, most English tones.
“Oh, isn’t that a pity!” she said.
Then arose a sudden hubbub of talk, drowning the sound of the band,
which, at a signal from Amelie, had started again.
* * * * *
Violet stood with her friend before the blackened canvas next morning in
the empty room, drawing on her gloves.
“I don’t think you understand yet the effect of what you have done,” she
said. “No one doubts that the fire was intentional, and--and I think
that Lady Creighton will be of more use to you in the future than I can
possibly be.”
SPOOK STORIES
THE CASE OF FRANK HAMPDEN
There was a light visible from the chinks and crevices of drawn curtains
in the window of Dr. Roupert’s study as I passed it on my way back from
dinner one night. He lived some six doors farther up the same street as
I, and since it had long been a frequent custom for us to smoke the
“go-to-bed” cigarette together, I rang and asked if he was at leisure.
His servant told me that he had already sent a message across to my
house, asking me to look in on him if I got home while the evening was
not too far advanced for a casual conversational quarter of an hour; and
accordingly I took off my coat, and went straight into the pleasant
little front room, about which hung the studious fragrance of the books
that lined it from floor to ceiling.
Arthur Roupert was not alone this evening; there was sitting on the near
side of the fire, which sparkled prosperously in this clear night of
early December frost, a young man whom I was sure I had never seen
before. As I entered, he stopped in the middle of a sentence, turning
towards the door, and I looked on the most handsome and diabolical face
that I had ever beheld.
Simultaneously Roupert got up.
“I hoped you would look in,” he said. “Let me introduce to you my
cousin, Mr. Hampden, who is spending a day or two with me. This is Mr.
Archdale, Frank, of whom I was speaking just now.”
As the other rose, I saw that Roupert’s almost foolishly amiable
fox-terrier shrank away from where she had been sitting by her master’s
chair, instead of giving me her accustomed and effusive greeting, and
retreated into a far corner of the room, where she sat quivering with
raised hackles, and with vigilant eyes full of hate and terror fixed on
young Hampden. His right arm was in a sling, and he held out his left
hand to me.
“You must excuse me,” he said, “but I am only just recovering from a
broken arm. My cousin’s dog doesn’t approve of it; she would like to get
her teeth into it.”
“The oddest thing I ever saw, Archdale,” said Roupert. “You know Fifi’s
usual amiability. Call her, Frank.”
Frank Hampden whistled, and clicked his fingers together in an
encouraging manner.
“Fifi--come here, Fifi!” he said.
For a moment I thought that this most confiding of ladies was going to
fly at him. But apparently she could not find the courage for an attack,
and, snapping and growling, retreated behind the window curtains.
“And that to me,” said Hampden, licking his lips as he spoke. “Me, who
adore dogs. Don’t you, Mr. Archdale?”
As he said that I knew that he lied; that Fifi’s detestation of him was
met with a hatred quite as vivid but more controlled. I can no more
account for that conviction than for the sense of hellish evil that my
first glance at him had conveyed to me. He was quite young, twenty-two
or twenty-three for a guess, and yet from behind the mask of that soft
boyish face there looked out a spirit hard and malignant and mature, an
adept in terrible paths. The impression was quite inexplicable but
perfectly clear. Then, looking across to Roupert, I saw he was watching
his cousin with eager intentness.
I had to answer the direct question he had put to me, but it required an
effort to speak to him or to look at him.
“No; personally I don’t care about dogs,” I said. “I rather dislike
them, and so enjoy a most unwelcome popularity among them. Fifi, for
instance: your cousin will tell you how blind is her adoration for me!”
“See if Fifi will come to you if I stand by you,” said Hampden. Fifi had
half-emerged from her ambush behind the curtains, and I called to her.
But she would not leave the retreat where her rage and terror had driven
her. She gave a little apologetic whine, as if to signify that I was
asking an impossible thing, and beat with her stumpy tail on the
carpet.
“Now go back to your chair again, Frank,” said Roupert.
Fifi needed no further invitation when he had left my neighbourhood. She
bundled herself across the room to me, her thin white body curled like a
comma, wriggling with delight and making incomprehensible little
explanations of her previous conduct. But the moment that Hampden moved
in his chair, she bolted away from me again.
He laughed and got up.
“Well, I think I shall go to bed now that you have come to keep Arthur
company,” he said. “By the way, where’s your cat, Arthur? I haven’t seen
her about all day.”
He was facing sideways to Roupert as he spoke, and I noticed that he did
not turn his head towards him. This gave a certain casual cursory tone
to his question, making it appear a mere careless inquiry.
“I haven’t seen her either,” said Roupert. “Perhaps, after taking
counsel with Fifi, she has thought it prudent to fly from your baleful
presence. Good night, Frank. Can you manage for yourself with your
bandaged arm, or shall I come and help you?”
“Oh, I’m all right, thanks,” he said; “good night. A kind good night,
Fifi. We shall be good friends before long.”
* * * * *
Arthur Roupert had retired some two years before from regular medical
practice, in which, as all the world knows, he was undoubtedly the
first authority on disease and aberrations of the brain and nervous
system, devoting his attention more particularly to those riddles of
obscure and baffling disorders to which he so often supplied strange and
correct answers. He was possessed of an ample competence, and so,
finding that his large professional practice did not permit him the
leisure which was necessary for these exploratory studies, he had,
though always willing to be consulted by his colleagues, thrown up an
active career for one of research. He wanted to learn rather than to
practise, and without precisely mistrusting the methods which had earned
him so brilliant a success, had inferred the presence of huge fields of
the unknown, huge expanses of further possibilities which would perhaps
put utterly out of date the most advanced of theories and treatments
hitherto recognized in his profession. At the time of his retirement he
had once talked to me about the uncharted seas on to which he proposed
to push forth.
“The most advanced of actual practitioners,” he said, “are but groping
in the dark on the threshold of real knowledge, feeling for the handle,
fumbling for the bell. At the most, that is to say, in cases of brain
disease and nerve disorder we try to get at the mind of the patient, and
influence that, so that it, not we, may exert its healing power, and
cure the imperfect functioning of the material part. Of course that is
a tremendous step forward when we look at what medical science was
twenty years ago, when doctors prescribed tonics, tonics to heal the
physical damage caused by a disordered mind. But mind itself is but a
very subordinate denizen in that house of mystery which we call man.
“Mind is no more than the servant who comes to the door, and takes your
hat and coat, and tells you in a word or two how the patient has been.
Mind is not the master of the house, whom you have really come to see,
and who sits there alone, mortally sick, perhaps, and in terror and
darkness for the master of the house is the spirit. We have got to
examine him before we can touch the source of these diseases. For the
farther that science advances, the more certain it is that there is a
master sitting within to whom the mind is only the servant. As for the
body, the tissues, the nerves, the grey matter, what shall we say that
is? Why, it’s no more than the servant’s clothes, his jacket, or his
boots. I’m not going to stay talking in the hall to ‘mind,’ the servant,
any longer. I shall leave him there, and go straight up to the
sick-chamber. I shall be called all sorts of names--charlatan,
spiritualist, what you will--but I don’t care two straws about that.
Besides, I know quite well that my colleagues will still be glad to call
me in when they are puzzled, and I hope to be better equipped to help
them.... I won’t reject any jungle-path without exploring it, not
witchcraft, nor demoniacal possession, nor all the myths which science
thinks she has exploded. In its first origin everything must be
spiritual, be it comet or toothache or genius. Just as mental suggestion
has taken the place of tonics, so must spiritual healing take the place
of mental suggestion. The spirit is the original manifestation of God in
man, and it is on prayer and on faith that the whole science of healing
will some day rest. But first we have to investigate the conditions, the
environment, the life....”
For these two years, then, which had followed his retirement, Roupert
had given himself to these studies of occult and spiritual influences,
learning about the healing powers contained in mental suggestion, and
trying to get behind that into the more elemental and essential
mysteries of man; leaving the servant, as he had said, in the hall of
the house, while he went further into the presence of the master of the
house. Often, during these “go-to-bed” cigarettes that multiplied
themselves into the night, he told me tales that did not make going to
sleep any easier. Nothing was too extravagant for his investigations;
witchcraft, spiritualism, Satanism, the healing touch, and, above all,
demoniacal possession were the subjects of this study that went deeper
into the human organism than mind. There was no myth or exploded
superstition that he did not examine, to see whether the explosion had
been complete and shattering, or whether among the débris there did not
remain some grains of solid stuff that were still solid, though science
had affirmed that a puff of scattered smoke was all that was extant....
Consequently this evening, when Frank Hampden had gone to bed, I was
quite prepared to find that Roupert had something to tell, some guess to
hazard that had illumined his inquiries, the more so indeed because I
had not seen him for some dozen nights.
“Did you receive the message I left at your house?” he asked abruptly as
the door closed behind his cousin.
“No; I haven’t been home. But your servant told me you had asked me to
come in,” said I.
“Yes, I did. You have done just what I wanted. In my note I asked you to
come in and observe my cousin, and tell me your impression. I saw you
couldn’t help observing him, so now let us have the impression.”
“Quite frankly? All?” I said.
“Of course.”