full programme of events was published, and then invitations to this
and that were issued. There was nothing unseemly about the Millport
manœuvres before the great battle of Exclusive Rights. No one admitted
that there had been, was, or would be any demand for invitations to
anything; not even for the big garden-party where the King and Queen
were to be present. There was a semi-private luncheon too, but that
was a sacramental feast. No one spoke of it beforehand, any more than
a duke would rush into his club, shouting, “I say! I’m going to get
the Garter--are you?” No. One read about it in the paper next morning;
that was all. But there was a wider choice of behaviour with regard
to the other invitations. People behaved like the animals in the
Ark, each one after his kind. The sort who are at their best early in
the morning, and are therefore unpopular with liverish hosts, were in
great spirits about the whole thing. They applied early for tickets
for everything. The appointed day lay before them as a rosy picnic.
But this was not the attitude of quite the best people. They did all
their spade-work by moonlight, when the busy revellers were in bed,
dreaming happy dreams, with medallions of their Majesties put out with
the clean shirts for the morning. But in those dark hours the county
families worked for promotion like heroes, appearing next day spruce
and unconcerned as usual, with the suggestion, “Shall you be going to
the garden-party? We might drive out together--Oh, haven’t you? How
extraordinary! These things are frightfully badly managed. I expect
they haven’t got half the invitations out yet; ours only came last
week.” In the case of those whose midnight labours had been unblessed
with cardboard fruit the formula was a little different. There was
no pretending that the fruit was unpalatable and had been rejected.
Millport is not so crude as all that. The formula was to the effect
that invitations were being issued on a purely official basis, and
mismanaged at that, and that there would be an awfully queer crowd
there. How would they behave?
Reginald was on the committee of the hospital which the King and Queen
were to visit, so, of course, Polly would be provided with a good
place. One thing was quite clear, that the occasion asked for, if it
did not actually demand, a new dress.
“My dearest life,” said Reginald, “to begin with, the Queen is
short-sighted, and to go on with, you will be hidden by abler and
stouter persons than yourself in the front row.”
Polly argued that there would be the tea afterwards, and, besides,
anyhow----Reginald gave her a cheque at once, because when women begin
saying, “besides, anyhow,” it is far wiser to give in. Such words
never preface the truth, and the business of hearing what follows is
generally very long and tedious. Polly had an almost new afternoon
dress which, had it been a success, she would have worn; but it was
not altogether right, and Mrs. Henry, whose husband was also on the
committee, had been in the shop when she bought it, and would remember
its age. Also she had since been given a hat which was not quite right
with the dress. It would need all a woman’s life as a context to show
up trifles like these so that they would figure as reasons before a
husband’s mind. Therefore, we invent reasons which look solid, rather
than bring forward the nebulous truth which would probably be met with
contempt.
“I want a dress for the King’s visit, Miss Price,” said Polly, standing
next day in a small room at the top of a dingy little house. Miss
Price, very minute, very wizened, very commanding, stood beside a round
table on which were a vase of artificial flowers, several photographs
of worn, though cheerful, faces, and some fashion papers of remote date.
“I am afraid I shan’t be able to manage it, Mrs.--er--” she said, “I am
so rushed already, I can hardly get through the orders I have.” Polly
took no notice of this. “Are you making for a lot of people?” she asked
with deep interest.
“There’s Mrs. Beehive,” began Miss Price. “She’s ordered a very nice
dress.”
“Oh, has she?” said Polly, “what fun! I shall look out for it. Is it
very new?”
“Well, no,” Miss Price said hesitatingly, “the new styles would hardly
suit Mrs. Beehive. She is all shapes and sizes, you would think,
according to the weather.”
Polly sopped this up like nectar, and retailed it to Reginald when she
got home. “Great Scot!” he said, “I hope Beehive doesn’t go and look
over my waistcoats at the tailor’s, and ask the fitter how much he has
let out since last year. What curious creatures you are.”
“It’s all right,” said Polly, “I love to know beforehand what people
are going to wear, and then I know what to avoid.”
“But I think you told me that Miss Price said she couldn’t make it?”
said Reginald.
“Oh, that is just a little nervous habit of hers,” Polly assured him,
“like nice-mannered people wanting to be pressed to a second helping.
Would you believe it if your tailor said he hadn’t time to make you a
new coat?”
“I never heard of any tailor saying such a thing,” Reginald replied.
“No, of course not,” retorted Polly contemptuously, “because you order
your clothes in March, and they come home the year after next. I might
undertake to make you a pair of boots if I could wait to deliver them
until after you were dead. And I don’t suppose you ever complain, do
you?”
“Oh yes,” said Reginald. “Haven’t you seen boys tearing along the
Exchange with large cardboard boxes under their arms? If you got on to
the Flags you would find the place littered with tissue paper, and
Beehive, and Henry and I trying on each other’s trousers. That means
that we complained of the delay and sent a boy to fetch the things at
once.”
[Illustration]
One rather sad feature of the traffic that went on in Miss Price’s
dingy apartments was the immense pains which were taken by all the
ladies to find out what was the very last word in fashion, and so
attire themselves for the delight of their Sovereigns. Little did they
suspect that a creation from the Rue de la Paix will avail a woman at
the gates of Buckingham Palace no more than a pair of blue corsets will
soften the heart of Peter. In both cases the facts would very likely be
used against her. The desire to please nearly always contains elements
of pathos.
The programme of the great day’s proceedings was dull enough reading.
It not only left one with a strong belief in the divine right of kings,
but also suggested that Providence went a step further and provided
rulers who, though human in many respects, were fashioned of immortally
tough material. We read about the woman’s heart beneath the queenly
robe, of the home life of monarchs, and the birthday festivals of
princes. The papers assure us that the King frequently expresses regret
at the loss of his collar-stud, and that the Queen enjoys a chat with
her intimate friends. Anecdotes are related of how an emperor once
remarked to a gamekeeper whom he met traversing the park, “I expect you
find plenty to do towards the middle of August,” and how the wife of
a reigning Sovereign entered the cottage of an old woman and observed
with a smile, “I see you have been peeling onions; you must remember
not to cut your husband’s bread with the same knife.” All these
incidents show, beyond any doubt, that the same heart beats alike for
rich and poor. But there is one heaven-sent quality which distinguishes
rulers from the common herd, and that is an insensibility to boredom
and the pangs of platitude which transcends all mortal endowments.
Human nature has the power to endure; the higher and royal nature, I
hope and believe, does not mind.
How much the Imperial pair observed of all the labour which had been
expended for their pleasure it is impossible to say. Whether it ever
struck her Majesty that Polly’s sleeves were cut from a more exclusive
design than Mrs. Henry’s, or whether she was startled by Mrs. Beehive’s
superior knowledge of the habits of the Court, no one will ever know.
But probably the fact that all sorts of hidden details had been
attended to with enthusiasm by every one, that a spider on the roof of
the hospital had been dislodged from his perch, that the chairman had
given extra attention to the parting of what hair he possessed, that
the matron had on her last new underbodice, and that the address which
was to be delivered by the Recorder had been carefully prepared: all
these trifles, if unrecognized separately, must yet have combined to
express a general sense of happiness and welcome.
[Illustration]
The morning of the great day dawned gloomy and cold, the first wet
day there had been for three weeks. A chilly north-west wind brought,
alternately, penetrating fine rain and short intervals of greeny-grey
sky, through which the sun peeped without interest. On the first moment
of these intervals macintoshes and umbrellas were eagerly put aside,
the enthusiasts lining the streets emerging gay as a rainbow, until
the fretful clouds gathered once more, and everybody with one voice
exclaimed, “Dear me! What a pity!”
Inside the hospital there had been very little sleep for anybody. It
would be interesting to know whether persons marooned on a desert
island, with the whole day before them, begin to get in a hurry when
the time comes to dish up what frugal meals are available--say, two
bananas and a sweet biscuit. It is certain that the importance and
extent of preparations to be made for an occasion have no bearing on
the amount of time needed to complete them. There will be a scurry at
the end, whether the occasion is the beanfeasting of a thousand people,
or the getting off of one man and his papers for an early train.
Whether we allow half an hour for the one (and make the beanfeast
impromptu), or whether we prepare for the other six months beforehand
(reminding him every hour that the time is getting on, and finally
ourselves putting the tobacco-pouch in his pocket), the result will be
the same; the thing will get done with equal hurry and impatience.
Everything had been quite ready the day before this visit of the King
and Queen; yet no one in the hospital went to bed, except the patients,
who were in bed already, and they got very little sleep. The visit,
which it was reckoned would take half an hour, was timed for eleven,
and by nine o’clock the invalids were all washed and had ribbons in
their hair; the wards were spotlessly tidy, and such windows as were
to be occupied by guests were already nearly filled. There was to be
a short reception in the hall when their Majesties arrived, and a few
people were to be presented.
* * * * *
When the moment was over, and the royal couple had passed on their
way through the wards; when they had been ushered past the fluttering
windows; when they had re-entered their carriage, and disappeared,
methodically bowing, along the glittering, bobbing, trotting, waving,
cheering vista, which is to most of us the whole life of our King
and Queen, then, happy and relieved, we returned to the official tea
downstairs, and resumed our several natures.
_CHAPTER X_: FIDELITY
“I wish that people wouldn’t write these ridiculous letters,” said
Polly, laying aside a bundle of about eight closely written sheets.
“It’s Octavia Sinclair. She says she is quite sure that I have
forgotten her. I have not forgotten her in the least, only she doesn’t
fill the whole of my landscape; it is so absurd that people should want
to.”
“It is almost barbaric to want a landscape to remain the same always,”
I agreed. “One runs up villa residences everywhere now, of course, and
the place looks different; but the old earth is the same underneath, if
people would only have the sense to understand.”
“Do you think I run up lots of villa residences?” Polly asked wistfully.
“I was trying to help you, dear, not to criticize,” I replied.
“You see,” Polly explained, “if you are making anything, no matter
what, the pieces you are making it with don’t all stay in the same
place. When the world was being made it would have been dreadful if all
the mountains and countries had been made in succession and just stuck
down one in front of the other, and if each tree and each animal had
stayed where it was----”
“My dearest Polly,” I begged, “stop just one minute. You don’t see
trees as men, walking, do you?”
“If you are going to be like the serious raconteur’s comic brother
in the pantomime, I’ll stop,” she answered. “You must either follow
me or stay at home. I see, in my mind’s eye, the Almighty evolving a
perpetually changing order out of the chaos that occurs every day. You
don’t make a world out of a hill, and then a tree, and then an ocean,
stuck down like salt-cellars on the table. The sea is being made into
rain to wash the ground into different shapes: the trees settle down
into coal, or we cut them up to build things with, and we clear the
ground for villa residences to hold the new people whom Providence
sends. Sometimes there is an earthquake which throws up the dead
whom we have forgotten and swallows up the living. It is all like a
kaleidoscope making different patterns of the same bits.”
The door opened and Reginald looked in, decided that the moment was not
for him, shrugged his shoulders, and went out.
“You can’t play a game with every one staying in the same place,”
resumed Polly. “You can’t embroider if you don’t use first one thread
and then another; you can’t paint a picture without adding new colours
to the old ones; you can’t make music with one note; you can’t----”
“I’ve got that point, dear,” I said. “You can go on. You can’t make a
hotel a lively place with only one guest. Yes?”
“I am not talking of enjoyment,” said Polly, “but of any work of
construction. I am constructing my life, and even though I were a
hermit (so you may dispose of your vulgarities about hotels and
villas) I could still add new experiences to the old without being
accused of infidelity.”
“But suppose you repented of your past experiences?” I suggested.
“I shouldn’t wish them undone,” said Polly calmly. “I should merely see
them in a new light, and they would fall back into their place in the
background of my life’s pattern.”
“Poor experiences! Alas! Octavia, my poor friend!” I murmured.
“I feel the same thing about men,” said Polly; “they are in the pattern
too. Sex is merely a matter of colour in the threads.”
“Which is what colour?” I asked.
“They are both all colours,” she said; “that is why they make such a
good picture together.”
“Well, what do you mean by saying that it is the same with men?” I
asked. “What is the same?”
“I mean that it takes a great many men to make one husband, just as it
takes a great many Octavia Sinclairs to make one person’s life,” she
explained.
“How many husbands have you besides Reginald?” I asked with some
hesitation.
“It is very difficult to be patient with you, Martha,” replied Polly.
“I have only one husband, as you know, but he is compounded of all the
men I ever met. When I meet a man who is bad-tempered, I weave the
thread of his ill-temper beside that of Reginald’s amazing patience,
and you can’t imagine how Reginald’s colours glow. When I meet another
who admires what Reginald calls my waffle-headedness (which he
dislikes, by the way), I enjoy a perfect orgy of waffle-headedness,
and use it all up before Reginald comes back, and then he restores
the balance on the other side, and there, again, we have proportion,
which is the art of life. I know several men whose trousers are either
perfectly creased or not folded at all, and between them I realize that
Reginald’s are the nearest to the ideal trouser, showing thought for
the temple of his spirit without the exaggerated anxieties of you,
for instance, Martha. Wasn’t there some poet who spoke of ‘the need of
a world of men for me’? The lady whom he mentioned there had lost her
husband or her lover, or whoever he was, and she felt, I suppose, that
it would take several men to replace him. Now I have not lost mine, and
his beauty is immensely enhanced by the qualities of all the rest of
his sex. As for embracing and that kind of thing, that is quite beside
the mark. I dare say that if we were all in the garden of Eden I might
occasionally salute the marbled brow of one or two of the most perfect,
just to emphasize some point in what I was saying, or as the expression
of some passing emotion; but the thing has got to mean so much more
than Nature intended, that one doesn’t do it, and it is no special
deprivation to me to do without.”
“And suppose the threads of your pattern get restive,” I asked, “and
won’t stay in their proper positions. Are you never confronted with a
blazing flower of the tropics when you were at work on a daisy?”
“No,” she replied quite seriously; “but if I were, of course I should
work it in somehow.”
[Illustration]
“Does Reginald embroider on the same plan?” I asked after a pause.
“I expect not,” she answered; “because I don’t think that men are so
wrapped up in themselves as we are--I don’t mean fond of themselves, I
mean wrapped up. And another thing. I never think that there is much
substance in my mind except what other people put in--and that, I
admit, I develop very nicely--but Reginald has stuff of his own which
he spins out of his inner consciousness, and which takes shape when it
encounters facts. I don’t know whether that is the difference between
other men and women, but I have an idea that if Moses had been a woman
he would have come back from the wilderness rather bereft of ideas, and
not having done any useful thinking at all. Perhaps his (or her) mind
would have ‘turned on itself,’ as they say, and he (or she) would have
been at loggerheads with all the fowls of the air. ‘There was a most
impertinent vulture,’ the female Moses would have told the children of
Israel, ‘who made a point of settling down first on whichever rock I
had arranged to sit on. Of course if I had been a man he wouldn’t have
dared. It has taken me forty years of intense thought to dodge him, but
I believe I could manage it now if I went back.’”
“But Moses had no society, either, to help his great thoughts to take
shape,” I said pettishly; “and when he did get back he was a kill-joy,
and finally died of temper.”
“Well, my dear,” said Polly, “you find taking two children to the
seaside quite as much as you can manage. I don’t know, I’m sure,
what you would say to forty thousand, or whatever the number was whom
Moses took. If you got through as well as he did you’d be lucky. And
remember, he had to keep them amused for more than a month.”
[Illustration]
Polly is like that; it is impossible to take any of her arguments to
a logical conclusion. I tried to make her see that Reginald was very
forbearing to find all his ideals of womanhood in her without seeking
outside inspiration, and she said that “men were like that”; they had
no ideals, and were prepared to take just anything and muddle along
with it provided it fulfilled some of its purposes. “Have you ever
watched them shopping?” she asked; “they never turn out a whole shop as
we do. They say, vaguely looking round, ‘Is this all you have?’ and
the girl, of course, grins and says, ‘Yes, it is the very best, and the
other kinds are never asked for now’; and he says, ‘Oh, very well then,
just send it up, will you, please,’ and he pays far too much for it.
Now we, even when we have bought a thing, often see something else that
would have done far better, and then we fret over it, or take steps to
alter it. That is idealism.”
“Oh, Polly!” I remonstrated. “You make my head ache so. Do you mean
that men are never discontented with their wives? And, besides, you
said yourself that all the other men you saw only made you admire
Reginald the more.”
“Martha, Martha,” said Polly, reprovingly. “You have that worst type of
mind--if it can be called a mind--that labours a point until it breaks.
Everything that I have said to you is perfectly true, but if you pick
the whole of it to pieces you will find that none of the bits match,
and that none of them are alike on both sides. Character study is not
a science--it is an art; and you have to keep one eye closed very often
while you work.”
“Anyhow,” I said, “to return to the original subject, Octavia Sinclair.
What are you going to say to her?”
“Tell her not to be an ass,” said Polly.
“Is that your best way of making her understand that you ‘love her
still the same?’” I inquired.
“Well, I don’t love her the same when she is an ass,” said Polly. “She
was a duck when I loved her first. I tell her not to be an ass, because
I can’t love her under that disguise. When she stops being an ass she
will become a duck again--at least, I hope so--and if she is the same
duck I shall find a nice pond for her in my heart; not necessarily the
same pond, because that may be filled up by now--I forget--but one
quite as good as the old, if not better. And if she has any sense, she
will get out of it sometimes and walk about on the grass by herself.”
“I shall go home and write a chapter on ‘Fidelity,’” I warned her.
“It is not fidelity to your friends to put them into books,” she said
severely.
“It is not worse than putting them into embroidery-frames,” I answered
snappishly, “and then luring them into that monster hotel of yours,
where you even forget their numbers, and don’t answer their bells.”
“Never mind, don’t let’s quarrel,” said Polly. “You repeat in your book
what I say to you in confidence----”
“Not at all,” I assured her; “I am merely assimilating other people’s
ideas in the elegant way you described just now as being the habit of
women, and when they emerge again you won’t know your own. They will
have taken life in an entirely original shape. I can’t spin new stuff
out of nothing, as you say your husband does----”
The door opened, and the parlour-maid announced, “Mrs. Beehive and Mrs.
Henry.”
_CHAPTER XI_: THE RETURN OF THE BRIDE
Polly had invited several of us to meet a young bride. Mrs. Henry said
that when her brother William heard of the party he said at once, “Of
course you won’t go until you know _who she was_.” His sister assured
him that it was a matter of indifference to us who the girl was; we all
knew her husband, and that would speak for her.
“I don’t believe that was the end of Mr. William.” This was the little
bait I offered her, and it landed a beauty.
“The end of William!” she exclaimed; “not a bit of it. He said that if
the girl was a nonentity to begin with, marrying Mr. Spicer wouldn’t
galvanize her into anything worthy of the name of life; and that if
she was anybody before she married, the fact that we knew Mr. Spicer
wouldn’t alter the shape of her immortal soul. And what do you think
he said after that?” she added rather breathlessly.
“What?” we asked all together, with round eyes.
“That we were evidently going to meet to-day in the spirit of vultures
on the track of food, and that if the girl happens to be rather dead
stuff we shall probably like her better than if she is a frisky lamb!”
Mrs. Beehive confessed that she “didn’t quite follow his idea.” Polly,
who was looking out of the window, remarked, “Mr. William would make
the world an awful place if he had his way. Imagine the menus he would
write! Your talking about carrion--well, you said something very like
it--reminded me.--
“Soup. Odds and ends off people’s plates.
“Fish. Brill. Not absolutely fresh. Has fallen once on to the pavement
and innumerable times on to the floor of the shop before it got here.
“Cutlets. (Then there would be a short history of the lives of the
lamb and the butcher who killed it--very unfavourable to the butcher.)
“Pudding. Batter made of eggs a week old, margarine, milk (chock-full
of germs), flour--Oh, here she comes.”
We were talking like monkeys when the bride was announced. She was
small and pale and pretty. We gave her tea, and then invited her to
unbosom herself, which she did.
“Do you find it awfully dull when your husband goes down town in the
morning?” she asked.
We looked at one another, and Mrs. Beehive, who is never at a loss,
replied pompously, “No, I can’t say I have ever felt dull for a moment;
not even when I was first married. I was always a great housekeeper,
and attended to everything myself; and after I had paid the books and
been to give my orders at the shops, the morning seemed to have flown.”
“Oh dear!” said the poor bride. Polly made a comforting little muddle
with the cups and winked at me.
“And in the afternoons, of course, there were social duties,” continued
good Mrs. Beehive. “My husband and I were, I think I may say,
exceedingly popular, even in the early days.”
“Oh dear!” sighed the bride again, “but this is the first social duty I
have had at all yet.”