lose a little more blood before we actually interfered; but Miss
Darling flew to the rescue and stopped a second round by saying that
the dear Mayoress had been so sweet with the children on Empire Day,
and that no one knew what a powerful force the Mayor was among the
inebriates of the city. She hoped it was not going to rain: it was
looking rather threatening. But what a lovely colour the leaves were
at this time of year. It seemed so sad that they must all come off.
“We will drive you to the reception, dear,” said Mrs. Merchant
gratefully; and then we all rose, and I escaped into the garden to have
a cigarette behind the lobelias.
When Mrs. Bushytail had driven off in a robust brougham, her two obese
horses guided by an apoplectic old man, and Mrs. County had departed
on foot to whatever cross-bred residence her husband’s particular
brand of ketchup provides for her, Miss Darling, Mrs. Cambridge (who
was also going to the reception), Mrs. Merchant and I spread ourselves
comfortably in the Rolls-Royce, and were driven to the Town Hall.
Numbers of people were in the great hall, waiting to meet their
friends. There was a large sprinkling of Bushytails and Countys, but
most of the crowd were of another type, which I have not met before.
I took them to be honest tradesmen of the oblong and erratic shapes
which seem inseparable from commerce. But several of them turned out
to belong to the best society, and the dumpiest one of all, dressed in
the most creased and stained frock-coat and the worst trousers, was
Mrs. Cambridge’s husband. I have sometimes wondered why both commercial
and professional men are often so incurably slovenly, and I begin to
think it must be owing to some instinct of self-preservation which
leads them to shun the sort of women who would look after their clothes
by force. To make a busy man look tidy when he does not want to, it
must be necessary to worry him all day, and no doubt women who have the
firmness and pertinacity for the task are recognized by naturally baggy
men in the same way as the presence of a cat is scented from afar by
even the most absent-minded mouse.
At the top of a wide staircase decorated with palms we found the
Mayor and Mayoress. Bessie would have called them “fairies,” but you
know how inappropriate her descriptions are. Anything from a round of
beef to a rainbow may be a fairy if it excites her imagination. But,
indeed, they were wonderful! Have you ever seen a mayor? If not, take
a stockbroker and stuff him quite tight until he creaks. Dress half
of him for a wedding--not forgetting spats--and the other half for
“standing at the plate” outside a Scotch kirk (he wears a white tie
and a frock-coat). Dab bits of fur on his eyebrows, but not on his
head--you leave that quite bare--and then hang a heavy locket and chain
round his neck. For a mayoress, take a gentle, timid old lady out of a
woolshop. Dress her regardless of expense, and frighten her to death.
Then hang another locket and chain round her neck, and there you are!
[Illustration]
They were both shaking hands with the rapidity of an experienced cook
shelling peas. Each of us was emptied out of our identity and cast
into the room beyond, pressed on by the growing mass of those who had
fulfilled the object for which they came. By and by we reached the
edge of the heap and looked about us. Mrs. Bushytail and Mrs. County,
each the centre of a group, were dispensing the milk of their several
words with reckless liberality. Presently Mrs. Merchant drew me to a
small table covered with plates of bread-and-butter, mixed biscuits,
and wedding cake. Then she artfully picked two or three of her friends
out of the different groups, and formed them into a small private
tea-party. A maid-servant brought us tea--so strong that it tasted like
beef-juice and tobacco mixed--and while we were drinking it I saw for
the first time that a really nice girl was making herself frightfully
hot by singing at the top of her voice. None of us had realized what
was happening, only it seemed to me that it was becoming more and more
difficult to make oneself heard.
Mrs. Bushytail came to our table, and there were also a German and his
wife, both of whom I liked very much. It was he who first noticed the
poor girl singing.
“_Ach, was!_” he said, “der is music, and we knew not. Let
us listen.” We all listened hard, but all I could hear was,
“blows--part--rose--heart--” and Mrs. Merchant said, “That lovely
thing! I always like it so much.”
“She has a goot voice,” said the German lady, “but not str-r-r-ong.”
“Absurd!” Mrs. Bushytail informed us. “They should have had a man to do
it.”
The noise was fearful. You know what a party is always like--a yapping
and drumming that never stops, and every one stuffing something down
holes in their faces--you don’t notice this effect unless everybody is
eating at once--and the room began to smell like an oven full of mice.
Mrs. Merchant asked whether I had noticed the portraits hung round the
room. She added that they were considered very good.
“They are all Mayors, _hein_?” said the German, peering through his
spectacles.
“Kings,” Mrs. Bushytail explained angrily, “all kings. We don’t keep
the Mayors here; they are in the Council Chamber.”
“So we keep our Kaisers,” said the German’s kind wife. “You are
patriotic too? That is good. They look very nice standing so.” She
puffed out her chest, and thrust a gloved hand into the front of her
mantle.
“Were the pictures presented to the Town Hall?” Mrs. Cambridge inquired.
“No,” said Mrs. Bushytail, with reasonable pride, “the city paid for
them; immense sums. They are a great deal larger than any at the
Guildhall. What do you think of them?” she asked me. “You ought to be a
judge of art.”
“I think they are beautiful,” I said. “They make me feel, for the first
time in my life, that I should like to be married to a king. I love
splash and rolls of parchment and thunderstorms. I quite see what you
like about them.”
I do not know whether I meant to tease her or not. The pictures are
just what I said, but I think that if I had liked her better I might
have said the same thing in a different way. Anyhow, it did not do
at all. My German made it worse by saying critically, “Yes, that is
so, you have it quite. Now in Germany we care for the skill, for the
worthiness of the picture. We make, perhaps, too much of it. And you,
you care more for the sentiment--the ‘splash’ you call it? What the
common people shall understand. Very good. You are quaite r-raight.”
Mercifully the fact that he had not been introduced to Mrs. Bushytail
prevented her from using other weapons of destruction than a look,
which glanced off his spectacles as harmlessly as summer lightning.
But Mrs. Merchant was clearly uneasy, scenting trouble, but uncertain
in which direction it lay. She therefore slipped away, taking me with
her. Heavens! the dressing gong! and I was just going to tell you
something more amusing about the Cambridges. I will write again.
Yours ever,
GEORGINA.
CHAPTER XVII
UNITY SQUARE, MILLPORT.
My dear Louise,--I am sorry that you are getting out of breath with
my experiences; but just think what it must be for me to have to go
through them! If I had not a better-balanced mind and a more stable
temperament than yours, I should probably have been returned dead
on your hands a week ago, and you would have found that far more
disturbing than reading my letters.
I am writing from the University, because the Merchants’ eldest child
has got measles. The higher powers are so ingenious in devising these
little bits of action to brighten up the plot of one’s life! Measles is
not the sort of thing I should ever have thought of for myself, but it
has varied my days here to an extent that I should have supposed to be
quite out of the range of a few spots.
I have had measles myself, and was therefore quite prepared to go on
with my work. I was even looking forward to brightening the monotonous
pallor of the children’s complexions by painting in a pink rash, but I
was not allowed to. Mrs. Merchant has a warm heart, and said that it
would not be safe to trifle with illness. This means that instead of
everything going on as usual, as it might quite well do, every one in
the house has to run up and down stairs all day--except the hospital
nurse, who stands just inside the child’s door and heads the runners
downstairs again.
It was suggested at first that I should go home for three weeks and
then come back here, but instead of that I am staying with Mrs.
Cambridge. I have forgotten why she asked me to come to her, or why
I accepted. The last week has been like a dream, where one begins by
salmon-fishing, and then suddenly finds oneself in a motor accident on
the top of the Alps. The connecting links have faded.
Most of the Dons, or whatever their local equivalent is, live in a
square round the University, which is a big building like a cross
between an office and a church. I have told you that the Merchants’
house is a mixed-looking erection; the whole town is like that. The
offices are half hotels, the churches suggest schools or offices,
the private houses have borrowed a feature or two from dovecots,
mausoleums, and even castles on the Rhine. The Town Hall has a
compromising resemblance to the Stock Exchange, which, in its turn,
is tricked out in what looks like pink gingham trimmings from the
seaside lodging-houses. The Cambridges’ house is designed for the
greatest comfort of the few, and the greatest inconvenience of the
many, the many being a large staff of maid-servants. All the rooms are
beautifully large and airy, the stairs narrow and steep, the bedrooms
infinitely removed from the apparatus by which they are kept clean.
The kitchens are so remotely buried in the bowels of the earth that,
even if the smell of boiled cabbage travelled as quickly as a ray of
light, it would take, probably, some weeks to reach the noses of those
fortunates engaged at meals in the dining-room.
I have already described the Cambridges to you. I should like to add
that I am beginning to be very fond of the beetle-like Mr. Cambridge.
As for her, it is a delight to see her handle the town. I never in my
life saw such skill. Her “at-home” day makes me think of one of the
days of creation--about the middle of the week--when huge lizards,
giant toads, and queer-faced monstrosities of all sorts were being
delivered by the million at the front door of Eden, and there was no
one to show them what to do next. Mr. Cambridge would have made a bad
Adam. He would have looked at them through his spectacles and said:
“No, really, I can’t think of a name for that fellow. Let’s try this
fat old girl. Let me see--h’m, ha!”--(he gives his little old--maidish
cough)--“er--Pobblyomniba Jessica perhaps----”
[Illustration]
“May I introduce Mrs. Blot?” Mrs. Cambridge would then have said in her
quiet voice, and the matter would have been settled for all time, or
until the Blots died out or were replaced by a more agile species, the
Trots.
On her last Thursday I pinned myself into a corner behind the heaviest
mammoth of the lot--a massive woman with a hairy face, and arms like
a prize-fighter’s legs. I have never recovered from my first alarm
sufficiently to ask her name, but I have since gathered that she lives
alone with a widowed nephew, and is at once the terror and delight of
the junior staff of the University. People of strong character are not
afraid of her, but the younger and less definite individuals cower
before her, although her mighty hands shower sugar-plums, excellent
dinner-parties, and the kindest advice upon them.
I was resting for a moment on an ottoman near the window when she sat
down upon me, and looked about her through a pair of lorgnettes. Then
she began to fan herself, and the motion which this gave to her body
caused me such acute agony in my knees that I gave a faint scream, and,
I think, moved a little. She looked round. I can’t think how she did
it--but, in fact, her face came quite close to the top of my head. I
could feel her breath distinctly.
“God bless me!” she exclaimed. “It’s a child! A young person! I beg
your pardon most heartily, my dear child. I hope I have not injured
you.”
“No, indeed, I don’t think so,” I answered when I could speak. “I shall
be quite all right in a minute.”
I gave her my seat, and was beginning to feel my legs again, when she
said suddenly: “Do you live here? I see you are not wearing your
hat.” I explained all that I have told you, and she became very much
interested. She said one especially amusing thing.
“I hope, my dear, that you don’t paint still-life?”
I said that I didn’t, because I dislike anything that sits still and
looks heavy while I am working. “That’s right, that’s right,” she said,
patting my hand. “Now do you see that woman over there? Dirty creature!
I believe she has come out again without washing her neck. She gave an
exhibition of her work the other day; it seemed to me most deplorable.
There was one picture in particular which really vexed me. A glass
of water (a very ugly glass too--a common bedroom tumbler), a book
(shamefully dog-eared), half a melon, and a boot that a scavenger might
have been ashamed to wear, unlaced, and with a great bulging hole in
the toe. I more than half suspect that she got it out of her husband’s
dressing-room, because that is the sort of woman she is. I was quite
frank about it. ‘No, my dear,’ I said, ‘I don’t like it, and I’m not
going to flatter you. Art is meant to ennoble us, and there is nothing
ennobling about untidiness and sloth. If ever you see things of that
sort about in your house, don’t immortalize them--burn them. We don’t
want to recall such things. Don’t even give them to the poor!’”
I longed for her to go on, but a disagreeable, boasting woman came up
and laid a bold hand upon my mammoth. Such a woman has no excuse for
braving danger, because, whichever place she goes to, she is bound
to be unpleasantly situated when she dies. But to my great surprise,
nothing happened; she was not trampled upon as I expected. In fact, any
fool may tamper with these immense creatures, who very rarely exercise
their strength. Their real anxiety is not to break anything, and the
desire of their hearts is to inspire confidence.
I have seen the other woman--a brazen serpent in my opinion--at every
house to which I have been lately. She seems to be an object of
superstitious veneration in the town. Whether she ever did any good or
cured people who had been bitten by adversity I do not know, but now
she is nothing more than a fetish. Sometimes she shows a more active
vulgarity, and mixes among us as an ordinary moral bounder, a sort of
“’Arry” of the Christian religion. I have seen religious “Algernons,”
too, more effete and less noisy, but this woman, when she is at her
worst, clothes herself in virtue as though it were a loud check suit,
and wears her blameless life like a buttonhole of dahlias.
Unfortunately she happened to catch sight of my mammoth, who was
swaying in a leisurely manner above the heads of the crowd, and,
thrusting aside her worshippers, she plunged across the room. She
was full of some pompous, trivial rubbish about a churchwarden and a
stained-glass window. “Of _course_, the dear Bishop would never find
anything objectionable in it. They were all _Protestant_ saints that
we chose. John has been _most_ particular on that point.”
The wretched woman contrived to make a mess of the whole tea-party in
about five minutes. Her brawling attracted other loiterers to the spot
by the well-known dodge of the Park preacher. If you get on a chair in
the Park, and in a high-pitched voice address the baby and perambulator
that are nearest to you, and if you then rope in an errand boy, and
two maiden ladies, and a tramp, you will soon have an audience that a
prophet might be proud of. I don’t think that she stood on a chair,
but I know that she began with one harmless, deaf old lady whom she
caught on the hearth-rug. When she was removed by an indulgent and busy
husband, she left behind her the absurd impression that we had all
been edified and improved. I meet her constantly, wherever we go, and
her behaviour always reminds me of a temperance lecturer explaining
limelight views of a drunkard’s liver to an assembly of school
children. She assumes that every one in the audience is either drunk
or likely to become drunk very soon if she is not there to interfere.
[Illustration]
The mammoth stayed to dinner that evening, and I felt that for the
moment chaos was over and the earth resting. She swept us all into our
places with a gentle overpoweringness, and we knew at once just where
we were. The large animals nibbled their food, the small ones frisked
about unharmed. If any of us wandered for a moment from the broad path
of reason, the mammoth drove the offender back again into his place
with irresistible common sense and kindness. Mr. Cambridge teased her
because she goes to lectures.
“My dear professor,” she said, “I like to improve my mind. I was never
educated as a girl, and I like to know what is going on. You young
people know so much that I have never heard of. I should be sorry to
go into another world having missed so much of what is to be seen in
this one. The clergy are all very well: they mean excellently--I am a
Churchwoman myself--but it seems to me that they spend too much time in
laying plans for what can only be a visionary future, before they have
mastered the wonders of our actual past and present. How can they fit
their immortal souls for what is to come when they know so little of
what has gone before? Their ignorance is lamentable, if you consider
that their object in life is to adapt us for association with beings of
the highest intelligence.”
I said at dinner how much I disliked the woman whom I had met that
afternoon, and when they understood from my description who she was,
they all had so much to say that I disentangled the facts with great
difficulty. I now understand that she has declared herself a sort of
Queen of Morality in the town, and that her following consists of those
who will believe anything that any one says so long as it is said loud
enough and often enough.
This is a queer, self-conscious place. The people who inhabit it are
neither living in a state of natural warfare, nor is there any domestic
harmony between the species. They walk in the glaring publicity of a
small community, and each says to the other, “I am I. Who are you?
Well, that won’t do at all; you must be somebody quite different, or
I shan’t like you.” Mrs. Cambridge has something of the contemptuous
nonchalance of a Persian cat, which is always sufficient unto itself,
and would rather, almost, that the common herd were not cats, because
their inclusion in her tribe would lower its exclusiveness. But my dear
mammoth can never look on while a bird flies, or a mole burrows, or a
squirrel leaps from bough to bough, but she must exclaim, “Bless my
soul! What a splendid idea! I must learn to step more lightly, and to
know more of the wonders of the underworld.”
The city wives and the wives of the University may not see eye to eye,
but they both have their value, and people like the mammoth (for there
are others like her) provide a medium of common sense in which these
two very different elements may combine for the benefit of what my
chemist calls the “pill-swallowing public.”
[Illustration]
“Then, my dear, you ought to,” says the mammoth (so Mrs. Cambridge
tells me), when some satin-coated Ichthyosaurus, spangled with
diamonds, boasts that she has not made the acquaintance of a certain
little spoon-backed mouse with spectacles and a family. “She would do
you a world of good. If you had to educate your own dear children as
she has, you would have no idea how to set about it. And as for myself,
I should be quite helpless without my _chef_. I could never learn to
prepare a dinner equal to the one that she and her little maid cooked
for me last week. Quite admirable, I assure you, and I am a greedy
woman.”
But last night she spoke with equal frankness on the other side. “You
mustn’t misunderstand dear Sarah Plummins,” I heard her say to Mrs.
Cambridge; “her kindness is beyond all description. She would give the
clothes off her back--yes, I know what you are going to say, and it is
very witty, and you shall not say it--she would give the clothes off
her back to help a friend or an enemy, and say nothing about it. Her
abrupt manner is just shyness. You see, I am shy myself, and I know how
awkward it is to be thrown among people with ideas to which we are not
used. But I don’t mind your chaff, and I tell Sarah that she is to come
and see your lovely collections, and take Mr. Cambridge out in her
motor. It will do them both good.”
I went to tea with Mrs. Merchant yesterday, just to see how the child
was, and I asked her whether she knew the mammoth. She said that she
had always been a little afraid of her. “Tom likes her,” she said,
speaking of her husband, “but she overpowers me sometimes.” I said
that she was like an oak among shrubs, and the literal creature
reminded me that a moment ago I had called her a mammoth. Which did
I mean? Mammoths were not a bit like oaks. I was cross, and replied,
“Yes, they were, because they both had trunks,” and she went shrieking
off to “Tom” in his smoking-room, and said that I had made such a
good joke, fit for _Punch_. I came back here before they had reached
the inevitable sequel of a mammoth in a tight boot being like an oak
because it is sure to have a-corn. By the way, I also mentioned the
brazen serpent to Mrs. Merchant, who rose at once to my bait.
“Oh, I am so glad you have come across her,” she exclaimed, “she is
such a delightful woman!”
“Whom does she delight?” I asked, determined to get at the bottom of
this legend. “Not the police, I’ll be bound, for she takes the bread
out of their mouths.”
“Oh, what nonsense,” said Mrs. Merchant. “Has she been scolding you? I
expect you deserved it.”
“Who first started the idea that she was anything in particular?” I
asked. “Did she tell you she was in the confidence of the angels?--and,
if so, can she produce any evidence of such favouritism?”
I could get nothing more definite than the same vague rumours of her
merit repeated again and again. It is evidently just as I thought. The
idea has got about that she does a lot of good. I am inclined to put an
advertisement in the local papers:
SUSPECTED DISCOVERY OF A GIGANTIC SOCIAL HOAX
£5 reward to any man, woman or child, who will give satisfactory proof
of having received moral, spiritual, or financial benefit at any time
from the well-known society leader, Mrs. Evangelette de Rougemont (or
whatever her name is).
I believe that the mammoth would provide funds for a commission to
investigate the whole matter, if she were persuaded that it were for
the good of the town. Most probably, though, she would do nothing of
the sort. She would say that we all stand in need of improvement, and
that a borrowed twopenny dip strapped to the back of a blind weasel may
be tiresome and even dangerous in society, but it all helps to keep up
the idea that there is a good fire burning somewhere. I can imagine her
saying it with perfect conviction.
Yours ever,
GEORGINA.
_CHAPTER XVIII_
UNIVERSITY SQUARE, MILLPORT.
My dear Louise,--I am still hard at it and shall probably be here
for ages. No more of the Merchants’ children got measles, and he is
so pleased with his portrait that I am to begin on his wife’s when
I go back to Longmoor to-morrow. I have so enjoyed being with the
Cambridges, and shall miss the peace of being able to Be or not to Be,
as I like, without complications. I once read a medical book called,
“My System of Elimination,” and it seemed to me the simplest possible
cure for all evils. If any one would eliminate from the recollections
of the Millport belles everything that they have seen without seeing
and heard without understanding they would be so nice; really nice
dears. But it makes them so fussy and nervous to masquerade as
delicately bred, and intuitive, and things of that sort, when they are
bound to be found out by even the most weevily specimens of the real
article.
I have been helping Mrs. Cambridge to sell at a bazaar, where the
special form of masquerade practised was “smart setting.” I do wish you
could have seen Mrs. Bushytail being a duchess; the kind of duchess
that you get in newspaper feuilletons and cheap Sunday stories--stout,
short-sighted, crisp, impertinent, and great friends with the well-bred
young girl who is not afraid of her.