“with her,” as the bazaar notices said, were two or three of the
fattest flowers of Millport. They were all as nervous as lambs at
Easter. Even Mrs. County’s beautiful pale face was hot, and her dress
looked tight, although it was one of the new, very sloppy kind. Her
particular Marchioness had on a dress of just the same shape, and it
looked as if she had been to bed in it for years and yet had managed
to keep it quite fresh, because she was so self-possessed that none
of her ever came through her skin. Mrs. County’s garment was equally
loose, but it looked about as convincing as a Greek dress does on
a school-mistress in three pairs of combinations and a lamb’s-wool
bodice. Mrs. County never gets flurried like this except when she is
masquerading--well--like the dickens.
Mrs. Bushytail’s stall belonged to a duchess who didn’t turn up; so
although for some hours Mrs. Bushytail, like good dog Tray, grew
very red, and would have growled and bit her till she bled, had she
happened on the duchess just then, yet, when the first shock was over,
she began, like a sensible woman, to count her blessings. She soon
discovered several. One was that she would be able to run the stall as
she liked, and bully every one else as the duchess might have bullied
her. Another substantial blessing was that strangers coming round to
the stall would probably mistake her for the duchess. It must have
been after the discovery of this second blessing that I caught her
pretending to be short-sighted and peering at people in a supercilious
way. Her expression suddenly reminded me of a cook we once had who was
not quite sober, and that finished it! I had to go back to my stall and
hiccup in lonely pleasure, for I did not dare to show Mrs. Cambridge;
she exaggerates sometimes.
We were one of thirteen stalls who were all selling what you might
class together under the head of “mats.” Mats (by which I mean
embroidery on things that are not of much use to anybody) are the
special industry which the bazaar was laying itself out to promote.
They are made by the natives of some island in the Archipelago where
Mrs. County’s boss-marchioness’s husband has some land; she says that
the natives are very poor, and that she is going to try and get our
Government to do something for them. The bazaar was to help to make
the industry known. One of the other three stalls sold native tobacco,
one Home Produce (that is, all sorts of eatables and uneatables),
and the third sold books about the Industry. The boss-marchioness got
some one to go out to the islands and paint pictures of the country,
and her husband is building a big hotel there, and is going to run
it himself. It will be a sort of paying house-party, with golf and
mixed bathing and gambling, and all sorts of games, and cost a good
deal to go to. You can imagine the whole gang exploiting the ladies
of Millport. If you had only seen Mrs. Bushytail sitting so happily
in her trap, shelling out pounds and pounds for the privilege of
looking short-sighted and _de haut en bas_! Her three daughters--really
nice girls of eighteen to twenty-five--were there, taking it all as
innocently as puppies take it when their mother does tricks for a piece
of cake. Mrs. Merchant, as good as gold, had another stall of mats, and
I helped between her and Mrs. Cambridge. Our marchioness (I forget who
she was) didn’t turn up either; and Mrs. Merchant had Lady Lacey, who
is a Quaker and wouldn’t hurt a fly, so none of us had to pretend to
be tired, or deaf, or immoral, or any of the things that Mrs. County
and the others were playing at.
I think that the natives would have been amused if they had seen who
bought their things, and why. Of course the Millport ladies are very,
very kind; you must never lose sight of that for a moment. They have
all--or most of them, at any rate--“come through” a good lot themselves
in the way of ordinary domestic care. They live nearer to the workings
of their houses than one would suppose from their wealth. They keep
comparatively few servants, and those they have stand in a very human
relation to their masters. The angry butlers and huffy parlour-maids,
who are so confident about what is “done in the best houses,” are
often quite as devoted as any aged Highland retainer to be found in
literature. This means that the Bushytails and Countys, if they would
only leave off being so absurd, have lots of stuffing in them. It is
the nonsense on the top of the stuffing that makes Mrs. Bushytail look
so tight. I have wandered off from what I meant to say, which was that
they have great sympathy with any form of work, and they were really
much keener about the natives than were most of the marchionesses, who,
on the whole, looked as if all they asked was to be taken “back to
Dixie” and their illicit unions. Most likely they are all as virtuous
as Penelope, and the loose-living, passionate doll expression that they
all have is as much a pose with them as it is with Mrs. County when she
imitates it. I have seen really good young girls do it right up to a
tennis-net, until they became busy and forgot.
We all did a roaring trade. Mrs. Cambridge made up for her lack of a
marchioness by her own talent for making people do what she wants.
You know the sort of old wretches who haunt bazaars? I do not know
whether the number of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised,
or whether they are more nuisance than they are financially worth. It
is certain that they don’t spend much individually. But then a horde
of locusts lay a field bare very quickly; so, owing to their numbers,
they may be valuable, though I have grave doubts. Anyhow, you know
them, don’t you? With long lines down the sides of their mouths, and
snuffy green coats and skirts, and hats like one’s morning tea-tray,
with one cup, a little jug, and some bread-and-butter on it. Mrs.
Cambridge catches them with her eye, and then begins to arrange the
most offensive things on her stall. The prey she intends to catch
always loves any appliances for discomfort: cosies to make the good tea
strong and bitter and horrible; or useless objects with a picture of a
detestable cock making noises to wake every one up; or garments--but
we can’t go into that. These old ladies make me shiver and feel grey,
like an eclipse of the sun does; and I remember all sorts of depressing
things, such as hair in brushes. They seem to bring these suggestions
with them, and to be searching for horrors. They are the scavengers of
every bazaar, and are really a very morbid class, I believe.
Myself I can do nothing with them, but Mrs. Cambridge is as impervious
to sentiment as they are, and equally obstinate; and having her mental
powers in more efficient order than theirs, she generally gets rid of
more than they intended to buy--and they have to be nice about it, too,
or they don’t get the things.
I enjoyed seeing Lady Claneustrigge, at the next stall, in the grip of
one of these scavengers. The wretch had been to us for toast-warmers (I
think she called them), and we had not got any.
“Toast-warmers?” said Lady Claneustrigge helplessly, looking about her.
“Have we any toast-warmers, Mrs. Trotter?”
Mrs. Ritz-Trotter hurried up, all smiles, and took possession of Mrs.
Cambridge’s lost prey.
“No, I am afraid not,” she said; “I don’t think that the natives,
you see, _use_ so much toast as we do. They live on a peculiar sort
of bread which they carry next the skin, in these bags--aren’t they
quaint? Two-and-six. Not at _all_ dear, are they?”
[Illustration]
The prey waved her aside without ceremony, and ran her experienced,
mauve eyes up and down Lady Claneustrigge in silence--the sort of
silence there is at whist.
“Have you any handkerchief-shams?” she asked at last.
Lady Claneustrigge backed nervously down the stall, and then lost her
head altogether. “This is it, isn’t it?” she stammered, shaking out
a yellow table-centre embroidered in shells. “They work beautifully,
don’t they?” she added, with a smile of obvious fear and mistrust. “It
is quite worth helping them, isn’t it, to make such lovely things? It
is such a splendid industry.”
“I said handkerchief-shams,” said the prey in her flat, patient tone,
“that’s a table-centre; my table wouldn’t hold that.”
“It wouldn’t do for a wedding present for Lizzie, would it, auntie?”
whispered a kindly girl who came with her.
“Wouldn’t stand wear,” said the prey tersely.
“I am afraid we have none of those things just _now_,” Mrs.
Ritz-Trotter said, throwing a protecting arm across Lady Claneustrigge,
who looked on the verge of tears under this inexplicable form of
torture. “You see, in those hot countries the natives take such _light_
breakfasts of fruit, and so on, that they hardly understand our home
comforts. But I expect they could easily be taught to make them,
couldn’t they, Lady Claneustrigge?”
A grateful nod and incoherent assurances. You must remember that the
mauve eyes had never ceased their travelling, up and down, up and
down, taking in every detail; sucking it in, absorbing every knot,
every jewel, as though it were some harmful, irresistible drug.
“I’ll take one of those,” she said at last, pointing to a small purse
of shells marked one-and-ninepence. I know, as surely as a mother knows
what a baby will do with a pot of jam, that the woman took the purse
home and put it on the dressing-table of her spare room, and that her
frost-bitten guests put hair in it on every day of their critical,
ungrateful visits.
“Very tahrsome, isn’t it, explaining to those sort of people?” was
apparently the last word that Mrs. County would ever have the energy to
pronounce, as she passed our stall with the preoccupation of a woman of
ten thousand worlds.
I wonder how I shall paint Mrs. Merchant to-morrow. She wants me to
do a thing in a white satin evening dress, sitting on a sofa, or
standing up near a doorway, or just looking intelligent and ladylike
on canvas, with a dark background and a light forehead. I can’t paint
her as I should like at the head of a breakfast table, feeding all the
little Merchants with Force out of a packet with the label on, or in a
nightgown and a fur coat, with her hair down, and flames all over the
back of the picture.
[Illustration]
She has a beautiful character, and if only they had not frightened her
as a little girl, no one could have been more charming. They began by
telling her how easily shocked the angels were, and that there could be
no moments of indulgence in moral carpet slippers and dressing-gown,
because the angels never went down (or up) for meals, or even to fetch
a handkerchief. They were “there all the while,” like the gentleman at
the famous siege, and they were shocked if children did practically
anything that their elders do. Later in life the bogy held over her
head was what “people” would say. The angels apparently don’t concern
themselves with any one over half-fare age. When she turned twelve
they dropped off, and that vague creature “people” took on the job. You
can imagine “people” buttoning on his uniform and taking over the name,
age, and previous record of the young sufferer. Do you remember how
you exploded the idea of “people” when we were at school? You walked
down a whole street with your tongue out, and I ate peas with my knife
at a restaurant, and no one said anything. You went home and told your
mother that if “people” were ever going to say anything, now was the
time to do it, and you didn’t believe that there were any “people” at
all. Mrs. Merchant still “goes by what people say” a good deal, and I
sometimes find it difficult to talk to her on this account. There is a
“people” deposit left on her mind, which has to be scraped off before
one can see what she is like. She and her husband came to supper at the
Cambridges’ last Sunday, and after supper, when the men were downstairs
smoking, we got on the subject of religion.
In that respect Mrs. Merchant does not altogether “go by what people
say.” She goes by it for a time, and gets over a good many difficult
bits with its assistance, but when it comes to plain ethics she does as
she likes.
“I don’t think that bazaars are very nice, do you?” she asked Mrs.
Cambridge. “People seem to like them very much, but I think it would
be nicer if we all sent the money to the Archipelago if they really
want it there, or if the natives’ work were introduced at some shop we
could buy it if we wanted to. People did stare so at the stall holders,
didn’t they?”
This gave me an idea. Suppose that “people,” who say all the horrible
things that frighten us, are the ghoulish ladies who buy receptacles
for hair! Suppose that they go about dressed like that because they are
detectives (if you come to think of it they never look as if they had
any legitimate business of their own to mind), and that after a visit
from one of them this or that information “gets about,” “people are
saying it,” etc. If I had thought for a moment when I was at the bazaar
that I had run down my lifelong enemy, I should have taken a revolver
and sacrificed myself for the good of humanity by shooting the lot of
them dead and taking the consequences.
Then those two got on ethics in general. Mrs. Cambridge never goes by
what people say, but she seems to incorporate their remarks with her
own experience, and out of the two together makes a very serviceable
guide which takes her down paths pleasant to herself and agreeable to
her neighbours.
“Oh, I think most likely the Old Testament is true,” I heard Mrs.
Merchant saying when next I caught them up. “At least people say that
it is all quite possible if you think what conjurers do--and the East
and all that: and even part of the New as well, it is possible--” but
that was getting a little uncomfortable, and her voice died away in
a self-reproving silence. “But I think,” she went on with apparent
irrelevance, “that the clergy might be more strict in how they teach us
to behave; they are a little vague, don’t you think?” “I don’t think
they know themselves what they want,” was Mrs. Cambridge’s opinion.
“Oh, don’t you? Perhaps that is it,” said my dear innocent. “I am quite
sure that if instead of taking the text we had to-day, ‘And Israel
set liers in wait round about Gibeah,’ and just telling us that we
ought to take a strong line against slackness in the education of our
children--if, instead, they had said to us, ‘You mustn’t be hypocrites
with your children and pretend that God makes one law for you and
another for them----’”
“That we have the entrée to heaven, in fact, while they have to go
round by the front and take the risk of being turned back,” suggested
Mrs. Cambridge.
“And if they had said, ‘You must stop that everlasting talk about what
other people ought to do, either as regards your children or your
friends, and you must forget yourself when you want to be nice to
people, and remember yourself when you want to be nasty to them----’”
This was too much for Mrs. Cambridge; it made her laugh, and Mrs.
Merchant began to drink her coffee, which was quite cold, and the men
came upstairs. Mrs. Cambridge, who is devoted to Mrs. Merchant, gave
their husbands an outline of what had been going on. They took it up,
but we had to stop them almost at once, because they left the nice
personal line and began philosophizing and generalizing. It made us all
yawn and get tired about the eyes. If they had really let themselves
go and had told us what frauds public men are, and what their
platform tears amount to in private, or if they had given us practical
instances, in strict confidence (we were all among friends), it would
have been so pleasant. But you never can bring men down to facts. Their
conversation is a perpetual vague laying down of the law for everybody,
and never following it by anybody year in and year out. I like getting
at people individually, and then offering myself for a jab in return,
don’t you?
Yours ever,
GEORGINA.
_CHAPTER XIX_
“LONGMOOR,” MILLPORT.
MY DEAR LOUISE,--We have just come back from a wedding; the wedding
of Miss Darling and Mr. Friseur. You remember, he is the young man I
told you about at the first dinner-party. It seems such a long time ago
since I first came here portrait-painting. I am getting so fond of them
all that I believe I shall think you rather drunk and disorderly when
I come back. The extraordinary innocence of every one amazes me. Most
of them are as good as gold (nice refined gold with enough alloy in it
to stand hard wear, and really quite good enough for all one wants).
Perhaps they are innocent because they live within a short distance of
the country, which makes them healthy and not morbidly civilized, and
on the other hand, rumours of the Court and fashion filter through to
them quite rapidly, which prevents them from relapsing easily into
bucolic vices.
Miss Darling’s wedding was about as flat and comfortable and sensible
a proceeding as you could well imagine. No passion in it to lead
to possible disappointment and disaster; no marrying for money or
position, as they are both already comfortably seated on the top branch
of their social tree, and both have about the same amount of money,
enough for perfect ease and to cover sudden emergencies, but not enough
to lead to riotous living. Miss Darling loves everybody, so it is not
likely that she will leave out her husband. Mr. Friseur loves himself
chiefly, therefore, having chosen a wife, there is nothing to tempt him
to ask for any other lady. If you like gooseberry-fool better than any
other dish and are already eating gooseberry-fool, you don’t bother
about the relative value of the other dishes on the table. You may need
a biscuit of some sort to bring out the flavour of your choice, and
Mr. Friseur has chosen Miss Darling to be his biscuit, so that he may
enjoy himself more. But the other women may leave the world so far as
he is concerned; his interest in the meal is at an end.
We had an early lunch, and got off afterwards in a great hurry. The
coffee was late and too hot to drink. Our hair did not go so well
as it did the last time we wore the same hat, and our gloves were a
little tight, which made us flushed. It is only at a wedding that these
_contretemps_ happen; one can get to any other sort of party quite
calmly. It is all such a self-conscious ceremony from beginning to
end. The crowd by the awning leading to the church seems to have one
gigantic eye fixed on the first leg one puts to the ground in getting
out of the motor. When it is a motor I can just bear the ordeal, as the
step is broad and low, but when I have to shuffle out of a cab, and
hit just the right spot on which to plant my toe, the eye of the crowd
slays my ease for the rest of the day. “Eh, look! h’m”--says the eye,
and off I go up the red carpet, thoroughly flushed, and with my dress
up to the knees on one side and a tail of chiffon dragging in the mud
at the other. I find this out when I get home, and the mark always
shows afterwards. The church, again, is all eyes. Every one has been
there for hours, in a state of acute observation. The young gentlemen
with shiny hair and buttonholes don’t mind this much. Boys are more
or less uncomfortable anywhere in society, and have to be brave about
it, so this is not worse than any ordinary party. Besides, it takes
them all their time to remember the things they have been told to do;
to see that the right people get seats beyond the cord, and so on. We
were just short of the cord and in a perfect nest of acquaintances. I
saw Mrs. Bushytail and Mrs. County, and Mrs. Cambridge was tucked away
comfortably under the lee of the mammoth, who sat down upon me that
afternoon I told you about. The brazen serpent was also there, looking
about her through a lorgnette. She is very religious, and therefore
behaves in a church as if she were very much at home, and could sit
in all the pews at once if she liked. She reminds me of a person one
always meets on a sea voyage, who wears a yachting cap and examines the
wheel and the barometer, and counts the knots at breakfast. I once met
one who was seasick, and I was so pleased. I should love it if an angel
came into the church and didn’t recognize the brazen serpent, and she
had to explain who she was. She was taking charge of the whole wedding.
I wish I had been sitting next to her! I should have tried to put on a
face like G. P. Huntley’s, and drawled, “Oh, that’s the bride, is it?
What’ll they do with her, now? Oh, do they? Very nice, yes. Who’s the
old fellow dressed up in calico, what? Vicar--Ah, quite so, yes, very
nice. Cuts the cake and finds a ring and a sixpence in it, doesn’t he?
Yaas, thanks--what a lot you know about it!”
Miss Darling is, as I have told you, a velvet-hearted creature, and
no doubt the life she is to lead will give her more opportunity of
cultivating her good qualities than if she were marrying any one with
intelligence enough to be a connoisseur in velvet. Mr. Friseur will
know how to keep himself warm with the velvet, but that is all; he
cares nothing for quality or light and shade.
Bridesmaids always look their worst, don’t they? whereas brides just
look queer. Very often brides are persons rarely visited by emotion.
But on that day they have an idea that emotion is not only natural,
but necessary; it would be an opportunity missed if they did not have
some then. So they either fish a little out of the pockets of their
own consciousness, or they borrow some from friends and relations, who
are all ready to contribute for the occasion. “It is quite right that
dear Emily should be upset,” they say; so dear Emily manages somehow
to get a little upset, and looks it, and the guests revel in her
indisposition. Her red nose and trembling hand have the same luscious,
nutritive quality for the wedding-guests as the implements of a murder
or other work of the emotions have for the unemployed. People who are
themselves sensitive to the varying weather of the passions are usually
eager to keep those whom they love as warm and sheltered as may be when
a storm threatens, but those who habitually lead the sheltered life
like nothing better than to stare out of the windows at their friends
who are being buffeted about in the gale.
[Illustration]
Miss Darling, however, was not out in any storm. She walked to the
altar as to a new plateau in an altogether agreeable country, where
her Friseur figures as a picturesque object for the devotion which
she lavishes on every human creature within her reach. He will need
to beat her very hard indeed before she takes a dislike to him. But
to go back to the bridesmaids. They were not queer, like the bride;
they were just sticky, and they were suffering as we had suffered
about our hair. I don’t know which of them were the worst--those who
had done their own hair with trembling fingers, or those who had got
in a man and had it waved. They were as solemn and self-conscious as
a stuffed owl that tries to look natural with its foot on a real egg
which has, unfortunately, been blown previously. Miss Darling’s awful
father (as they described him in the hymn, with unnecessary rudeness,
I thought) looked really detestable in a white waistcoat and spats,
and a pink skin head. Men, when they get to that age, look so much
better if they have been exposed to the weather a good deal. I should
think that Mr. Darling had been kept too warm, and given too soft
food. All the slyness and cupidity and harshness, which may be quite
dignified when they form a horny skin over a heart full of natural
fire, are in his case just spongy and unpleasant indications of
general rottenness. I don’t think that Miss Darling has a mother, but
the bridegroom’s was there--a bad woman, I should think, from the look
of her: thick-skinned, over-dressed, and with short legs, which are
always a sign of doubtful virtue. I don’t think that her son drinks;
in fact, I am sure he does not; but she is the type of woman who
schemes indefatigably to find a good young girl to marry her drunken
blackguard of a son in the hope of keeping him straight. The bridegroom
looked like the man who takes the leading part in that wearisome type
of play where the old men are fossils, the young men are nonentities,
the elder women are saints, and all are marshalled into a ritual
of self-revelation by a girl of eighteen, who has sown some fairly
commonplace wild oats. Well, that is all over, and they have gone off
to the Riviera to listen to the Voice that breathed o’er Eden.