ball which she is getting up for her favourite hospital. Wherever one
goes in this town, some one is doing something for his neighbour, or,
rather, for an organized section of his neighbours. There is any amount
of kindness to be had, but very little pleasure. There are parties--any
number of parties--for all classes of society (the kind creatures give
parties for the poor and for themselves), where the only practical
difference is in the quality of the refreshments; but I have seen very
little happiness since I came. People like everything very much, and it
is all most enjoyable, but I have not seen any one make any attempt to
jump over the moon. In fact, if a scheme were got up for hoisting the
public over the moon, a good many would take advantage of it. And then,
by and by, the lift would get crowded with the wrong sort of people,
who smell and make a noise, so the parties would be discontinued.
Probably by that time some bright spirit would have begun organizing
trips to hell, and it would be so interesting getting special asbestos
clothes to wear going down.
Last week I went with Mrs. Merchant to her hospital. It was her day for
visiting there, and we also met Mrs. Bushytail going her rounds. She
looked tremendously fat--fatter than usual--and was simply all over the
place as regarded management.
“Well, now, how are you getting on, Mrs. Tibby?” I heard her ask at one
bed-side.
Poor Mrs. Tibby looked at death’s door, but I believe she had a lurking
instinct that it would be as much as her place in bed was worth if she
were not found to be getting on nicely, so she made a weak profession
of well-being, and lay patiently awaiting what might come.
“That’s capital!” said Mrs. Bushytail. “Capital! Such a pleasant day,
isn’t it?”
Mrs. Tibby, who, by the way, had been taken to pieces like a clock only
a day or two before, would, I think, have privately described the day
as something a little short of pleasant; but you never know. I have
met before now Mrs. Tibbys who found pleasure in sermons, in strong tea
with sugar in it, in a visit from a lady, in a crochet petticoat, in
all sorts of queer things, in fact, so perhaps she found disintegration
pleasant.
[Illustration]
“We all have to be thankful if we have our health, ma’am,” she observed.
“Quite so,” agreed Mrs. Bushytail. “And you are going to have yours
now, Mrs. Tibby, and go back to your dear husband, and be able to take
up all your duties again as fresh as ever. I never feel half myself if
I can’t get about and attend to my house, and I’m sure you feel the
same.”
I had a private vision of Mr. Tibby as the forlorn husband trying to
decide whether the herring should be made into a soufflé, or served on
toast as a savoury in the evening, or, perhaps, remembering to speak to
the milkman, and write to the rent-collector. It would be a nice little
occupation for Mrs. Tibby to take over the household again. These
little tasks prevent us from dwelling on ourselves.
“And what are you going to do when you come out?” my fat friend asked a
young girl with a deformed body and a face like clay. “You must look on
the bright side, and not think of yourself, you know, or you will never
get well.”
The girl smiled a feeble smile and twiddled the bedclothes.
“There’s plenty of work to be got,” the excellent lady continued, “if
you apply in the right quarter. Everything is so splendidly managed
nowadays that nobody need be out of work if they don’t want to. And
it will be delightful--won’t it?--to think you are earning your own
living and putting by a little for a rainy day. The great thing is
to be thrifty and avoid spending money on things you don’t want. I am
sure you must be very grateful for all the care that has been taken of
you in this terrible illness. Yes, I am sure you are; that’s right.
Always be grateful and happy, and you will never want. Now I am going
to leave these flowers just where you can see them, and then I must
be off. There are so many poor things like you, you know, who have to
be cheered up. Good-bye--good-bye, Mrs. Tibby. Hope you will have a
splendid night and be about again directly.”
I was so entranced by Mrs. Bushytail’s vigour and excellence that
I forgot about Mrs. Merchant, who had in the meantime been quietly
rambling through the wards, timidly passing the time for the patients
one by one. She is not a vital person, and she is very shy, but they
watched her with the idle, restful pleasure which, when one is ill,
a cat performing its simple toilet may afford without raising one’s
temperature. I was left to my own resources, and felt most grateful
when a thin, wiry little woman addressed me from the end bed.
“Nice change in the weather, isn’t it, Miss?” she said.
We exchanged a few comments on the uncertain habits of the sun, and
then she said, with considerable feeling, “My! I’ll be glad to be about
again. I’ll be out next week if all’s well, and I’m just going to enjoy
meself a bit.”
“How?” I asked.
“I’ll be out a bit of an evening and get to one of the ’alls, perhaps.
Do you care for them places, Miss?”
“I love them,” I assured her, feeling as if a great weight of care had
been lifted from my chest. “Bert Hoskyn is coming this week, I know,
and I wish I were going to see him.”
“Is he, indeed, Miss?” she said politely. “I don’t know his name
exactly, but there’s many of them that’s grand. I’ll take a good look
round next week, and maybe see the one you mention. You do get a bit
down-’earted lyin’ ’ere with nothing to think of all day, without it’s
the nurses or the food or your own inside. I’d show you the place, and
welcome, where they stitched me up, Miss, but maybe nurse wouldn’t like
it.”
“No,” I said, “I am sure she wouldn’t like you to disturb it; but you
must show me some other time, if I meet you again.”
“That I will, Miss,” she promised heartily. “Any time you’re passing.
Do you come far from ’ere?”
Mrs. Merchant took me home before our conversation got more
interesting, but I came away refreshed and with a feeling that pleasure
is not dead as I had suspected during the last few weeks. After all,
pleasure to be any good must be something that sprouts in one’s own
senses, and may be called to life by anything. The Millport idea of
it is something of which you buy from a purveyor as much as you can
afford, and then you pour it over yourself and other people. It rather
deadens the spontaneous kind.
Good-bye,
Yours ever,
GEORGINA.
_CHAPTER XX_
“LONGMOOR,” MILLPORT.
My dear Louise,--This day week will see me back. The portraits are
finished. I huddled them all on to one canvas at last--all, at least,
except papa. The children would not sit still without mamma, and mamma
had a sort of unemployed, forcible idleness look about her without the
children, so there they are. I won’t bore you by telling you any more
about the pictures. I have told you about the people themselves, and if
you don’t see their portraits in your mind’s eye it is owing to your
slowness in the uptake.
My last experience in Millport has amused me as much as any. I had a
whole day with Mrs. County, and I have not yet quite got back my power
of moving naturally. Mrs. Merchant had to go last week to the other end
of Cheddar to do some good work or other--sit on a Board or in a Chair,
or something--and suggested that I should go with her for the run.
Mrs. County, who, by the way, lives farther away than I thought, would
give me luncheon, and had asked me to stay until the car picked me up
again on its way home.
We motored miles and miles through something that certainly is not
country, though neither is it town, sea, desert, or icefloe. Perhaps it
is just arable land; I had not thought of that before. It looks like
acres of brown paper, slightly wrinkled, and marked into irregular
shapes by lines of the mixed rubbish that a bird makes its nest of. The
dusty road runs alongside of these lines of dusty twigs and straw and
rags, and every few minutes we passed a house built either of red brick
or of that white mud that has had gravel thrown at it. Exasperating
houses, planned often in imitation of a farmhouse with some cut about
it, only, unfortunately, the builders have copied all the details and
left out all the point. Any details they liked have been exaggerated,
such as sloping roofs, odd levels, inconvenient entrances. These houses
are the nurseries of Millport. Here the married sons and daughters
live after they have left papa’s luxurious nest on the outskirts of
his business, and before they have developed into full-blown county
specimens, with a hunting stable and the supreme terror of all forms of
discomfort, mental and physical.
In the eye of God I believe the last state of that man to be worse than
the first, and that the middle state partakes of the vices and virtues
of both. Papa is often self-made, but whether he has made himself
bad or good, still he has done it in the way he likes, and often in
fighting other people he develops a _flair_ for sincerity like that of
a pig for truffles. The young people in the nurseries, having papa’s
enthusiasm for progress without his gouty rigidity, are sometimes a
little priggish, but more often they are generous and amusing. They
have a great many babies, and work hard and keep young a long time.
Apollyon waits for them farther afield. If they escape his clutches
they may come out top among the angels, but he manages to catch quite
enough of them to keep him strong and active. When he catches them
he imbues them with an almighty terror of the word “it.” They become
“it’s” slave. Any trifle may involve them in the shame of not being
quite “it” (in my mother’s time people called it “the thing”), and
yet no one can tell them where “it” lurks; every one has to find out
for himself. “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou find ‘it,’” says
Apollyon, and they never know a moment’s peace after that.
I was left for a few minutes alone in the drawing-room before Mrs.
County came down. Her drawing-room is pretty, and smells delicious.
No human being could work, or, I should think, live, in a room like
that, but it is as pretty as a skilful conjuring trick. If one looked
carefully at any detail of it, its charm was gone. I could imagine
any number of cats feeling at home in it, because all its chairs are
luxurious, and, apart from bodily luxury, a cat’s whole creed is
negation and denial.
Presently the door opened and a lovely creature came in. The butler
looked round the room and said: “Mrs. County will be down directly,
ma’am.” She was just like Mrs. County, except that all her features
turned a little down instead of a little up. Even her eyelids were
nearly closed, whereas Mrs. County’s are nearly always turned up, with
an appealing expression, as though she were about to join the angels
but was too tired to make the first move.
I find it so difficult to observe by-laws, such as ignoring people
unless one knows them. I should have chatted to this weary Wilhelmina
if I had thought that there was a chance of her answering, but I had an
instinct that she would partially raise one eyelid at me and pretend to
be either a dying empress or a virtuous barmaid accosted in Piccadilly
under a misapprehension. I therefore looked down my nose too, and said
nothing.
Mrs. County, of course, introduced us when she came down. The other
one’s name was really Mrs. Smith, and that in itself is disguise
enough, so I need not invent one for her. She had a deep, rich voice,
full of good food and the health which comes from taking plenty of
exercise, and letting every one else do everything except what every
one wants to do. That you make haste to do yourself, with carefully
concealed greed.
[Illustration]
They were very entertaining. First they licked one another all
over--“Darling, such a lovely hat! m’m--m’m. You do always manage to
get hold of such wonderful things!” Then one or other got a little
playful pat on the ear--“_Yours_, darling; he never was mine; nothing
to do with me. I’m absolutely out of it.” Then a swift retreat--“Lola
ought to be more careful, shouldn’t she? I mean, it’s too pitiful
running after any one like that!”
We went in to lunch, and they purred together over the good food. Now
and then they left for a moment their absorbing occupation of the
preliminaries of battle while they took a detour round me. They had to
do this for the sake of politeness, but they were both quite pleased to
prolong their delights by a little diversion in between. Mrs. County
brought Mrs. Merchant’s name in her mouth, and laid it before us as a
morsel to worry. Being, more or less, in charge of it for the moment,
I was able to slip it into my pocket and substitute a mixed variety
of their Millport acquaintances. All of these they pretended to know
in the slightest possible degree, they having now crossed the Rubicon
between Millport and the County, and burned their sauce-boats (you
know, don’t you, that this is the great ketchup country? You pass whole
fields of it when you come through by train).
“Funny little place, Millport, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Smith. “I never
could stand it when I was there. We’re having a party of natives next
week; will you come, Rita, and help? I shan’t know what to do with
them.”
“What sort of natives?” asked Mrs. County.
“Oh, you know the freaks Sam collects in Millport. He says we should
not have any money if we weren’t civil to them.”
“It gives one such an insight into what the King and Queen must feel at
Drawing-rooms, doesn’t it?” I suggested.
“I don’t quite see what you mean,” Mrs. Smith said, screwing up her
eyes at me with elaborate attention. I explained that my cook’s sister
was lady’s maid to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and that
she used to describe the fun that was often made, behind the scenes,
of some of us middle-class people who go to the Drawing-rooms. Of
course, they never suggested that the King and Queen made fun of their
subjects--for, naturally, they wouldn’t; but some of those quite near
the Throne did sometimes.
[Illustration]
“You get all the best of the fun here,” I added, “because you see it
from both points of view. Of course, the class below ours get it when
they snub the tradespeople and then get snubbed by us; but the top dogs
can only get one side of it all the time, until, perhaps, they go to
heaven. Do you think that the Beasts who are described in the Book of
Revelation will snub the ladies-in-waiting then?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Smith coldly.
Mrs. County giggled, and, I thought, looked gratefully at me, as if I
had been trying to score a point for her, which really hadn’t entered
my mind. I was pursuing my own thoughts entirely. A great many people
came over for tennis in the afternoon. Such a lot of cackling went on,
but very languid cackling, like sick hens. At first it all seemed to
consist of, “Now then, Hartley! Here, Lola! Where’s Bob? Teddy, have
you got the balls? Will you take Emma? All right, take Lola then; it
doesn’t matter which. Now then, Bob! Where’s Hartley? Lola, have you
got the balls? Here, Teddy!” And then the same all mixed up again in
a different way. But by and by, when they began to play, I became
conscious again of the awful, cold shadow of fear that seems always
upon them. Fear of losing some man’s allegiance. Fear of a husband
discovering that a man’s allegiance is coveted. Fear of all their
friends not knowing that there is any man’s allegiance for the husband
to be prevented from discovering. Fear that there may be allegiance
of greater social value which is being offered to some one else.
Their life is like that fatiguing game called Demon Patience, where
everybody tries to be the first to put the next card on six different
heaps at once. I felt that Mrs. County and Mrs. Smith, and all the rest
of them, were watching with the most practised rapidity of glance to
see where a rival was going to plant a new _dernier cri_, whether in
clothes, tricks of speech, paramours, or accomplishments of any kind. I
longed to become a Yogi: to turn in my tongue, and sit motionless under
a tree for a thousand hours and observe the slow processes of Nature.
When Mrs. Merchant came to fetch me I could have thrown myself into her
arms. She is as simple as the day, and as dull as ditch-water (a clean
ditch with clear water in it and rare ferns growing on the banks), and
as pretty as a picture (a chromolithograph of an amiable and beautiful
lady), and as wise as an owl which knows that the tree it lives in is
hollow and prefers it that way, and as harmless as a dove whom I have
been brutally making into pigeon-pie for your delight, but really that
you may the better appreciate her full use and beauty. I should like to
explain this to her if there were any chance of her ever coming across
these letters; to tell her that we love
_First when we see them roasted, biras we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see._
We left Hartley and Emma and Lola and all of them hard at work,
evaporating--metabolizing--rather than playing or doing anything
else. Their existence seems to be continued by a succession of little
explosions, when they leave off one habit and begin another. Some one,
I suppose Mrs. County, had been rash enough to tell them that I belong
to the professional classes. That set them off exploding like little
bombs all round. “By Jove!” “You don’t say so!” “Dear me!” “Artists
and those queer kind of beggars!” “Ever meet So-and-so? He painted my
missis and we had the time of our lives,” etc.
[Illustration]
Have you ever, in a big hotel where an orchestra played after dinner,
noticed the faces listening to the music? Sometimes in those orchestras
there are men who can play. I have seen some of our brothers saying
in their inner consciousness, and almost unknown to the part of their
minds which they are using at the moment, “Queer beggars, by Jove!
makin’ chunes and fiddlin’ away there. Curious sort of life it must be
workin’ a stick up and down on a string made out of some por brute’s
inside! wonderful how they manage to keep it up--La da, da de da,
pretty little thing that. Tomkins is a deuced shrewd feller the way he
handled that contract--” and their thoughts go wandering off again.
So I have wandered off myself; but this pigeon-holing of people is a
habit I have learned here for the first time. I never knew before how
much you and I pigeon-holed merchants and their kind as miserly and
uneducated persons, just as they pigeon-hole us as queer beggars with
eccentric hair and polygamous habits. When we got home I explained all
this to Mr. Merchant, and we spent an evening of vigorous discussion.
He rolled me over, so to speak (I have got into the way of explaining
all forms of hyperbole), and trampled on me.
“What you long-haired chaps don’t see--” he began.
“Now, if I am to stop calling you and your friends fat you must stop
calling mine long-haired,” I interrupted.
“Very well,” he agreed, “but what you and your friends don’t see is
that there must be different kinds of people to keep things going. You
can’t have every one alike.”
“God forbid!” I said, “no one ever suggested it.”
“Now suppose one of your long-haired friends came into my office--”
“Yes,” I said, “or suppose one of your fat friends came into my
studio--”
“Just so,” he replied. “Well, they’d both be fish out of water,
wouldn’t they?”
“In a state of chaos,” I explained, “animals, birds, fishes and so on
lived together, and such as could not agree ate each other in silence.
Later in history they became civilized and masqueraded in one another’s
skins, and we are led to hope that, by and by, the lion will lie down
with the lamb, and the merchant and the cockatrice----”
The angry butler came in just then and Mrs. Merchant gave a slight
cough and frowned at me, so we never finished our discussion. I shall
be sorry to leave them.
Good-bye,
Yours ever,
GEORGINA.
PRINTED AT
THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
LONDON
A LIST OF THE LIBRARIES
AND SERIES OF COPYRIGHT
BOOKS PUBLISHED BY
Duckworth & CO.
[Illustration]
3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
LONDON, W.C.
THE LIBRARY OF ART
Embracing Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, etc. Edited by Mrs S.
Arthur Strong, LL.D. _Extra cloth_, with lettering and design in
gold. _Large cr. 8vo_ (7-3/4 in. by 5-3/4 in.), _gilt top, headband.
5s. net a volume. Inland postage, 5d._
LIST OF VOLUMES
DONATELLO. By Lord Balcarres, M.P. With 58 plates.
GREAT MASTERS OF DUTCH AND FLEMISH PAINTING. By Dr W. Bode. With 48
plates.
REMBRANDT. By G. Baldwin Brown, of the University of Edinburgh. With
45 plates.
ANTONIO POLLAIUOLO. By Maud Cruttwell. With 50 plates.
VERROCCHIO. By Maud Cruttwell. With 48 plates.
THE LIVES OF THE BRITISH ARCHITECTS. By E. Beresford Chancellor. With
45 plates.
THE SCHOOL OF MADRID. By A. de Beruete y Moret. With 48 plates.
WILLIAM BLAKE. By Basil de Selincourt. With 40 plates.
GIOTTO. By Basil de Selincourt. With 44 plates.
FRENCH PAINTING IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. By L. Dimier. With 50 plates.
THE SCHOOL OF FERRARA. By Edmund G. Gardner. With 50 plates.
SIX GREEK SCULPTORS. (Myron, Pheidias, Polykleitos, Skopas,
Praxiteles, and Lysippos.) By Ernest Gardner. With 81 plates.
TITIAN. By Dr Georg Gronau. With 54 plates.
CONSTABLE. By M. Sturge Henderson. With 48 plates.
PISANELLO. By G. F. Hill. With 50 plates.
MICHAEL ANGELO. By Sir Charles Holroyd. With 52 plates.
MEDIÆVAL ART. By W. R. Lethaby. With 66 plates and 120 drawings in the
text.
THE SCOTTISH SCHOOL OF PAINTING. By William D. McKay, R.S.A. With 46
plates.
CHRISTOPHER WREN. By Lena Milman. With upwards of 60 plates.
CORREGGIO. By T. Sturge Moore. With 55 plates.
ALBERT DÜRER. By T. Sturge Moore. With 4 copperplates and 50 half-tone
engravings.
SIR WILLIAM BEECHEY, R.A. By W. Roberts. With 49 plates.
THE SCHOOL OF SEVILLE. By N. Sentenach. With 50 plates.
ROMAN SCULPTURE FROM AUGUSTUS TO CONSTANTINE. By Mrs S. Arthur Strong,
LL.D., Editor of the Series. 2 vols. With 130 plates.
THE POPULAR LIBRARY OF ART
Pocket volumes of biographical and critical value on the great
painters, with very many reproductions of the artists’ works. Each
volume averages 200 pages, 16mo, with from 40 to 50 illustrations.
To be had in different styles of binding: _Boards gilt, 1s. net;
green canvas, or red cloth, gilt, 2s. net; limp lambskin, red and
green, 2s. 6d. net._ Several titles can also be had in the popular
Persian yapp binding, in box, _2s. 6d. net each_.
LIST OF VOLUMES
BOTTICELLI. By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). Also in Persian yapp
binding.
RAPHAEL. By Julia Cartwright (Mrs Ady). Also in Persian yapp binding.
FREDERICK WALKER. By Clementina Black.
REMBRANDT. By Auguste Bréal.
VELAZQUEZ. By Auguste Bréal. Also in Persian yapp binding.
GAINSBOROUGH. By Arthur B. Chamberlain. Also in Persian yapp binding.
CRUIKSHANK. By W. H. Chesson.
BLAKE. By G. K. Chesterton.
G. F. WATTS. By G. K. Chesterton. Also in Persian yapp binding.
ALBRECHT DÜRER. By Lina Eckenstein.
THE ENGLISH WATER-COLOUR PAINTERS. By A. J. Finberg. Also in Persian
yapp binding.
HOGARTH. By Edward Garnett.
LEONARDO DA VINCI. By Dr Georg Gronau. Also in Persian yapp binding.
HOLBEIN. By Ford Madox Hueffer.
ROSSETTI. By Ford Madox Hueffer. Also in Persian yapp binding.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD. By Ford Madox Hueffer. Also in Persian
yapp binding.
PERUGINO. By Edward Hutton.
MILLET. By Romain Rolland. Also in Persian yapp binding.
WATTEAU. By Camilla Mauclair.
THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS. By Camille Mauclair. Also in Persian yapp
binding.
WHISTLER. By Bernhard Sickert. Also in Persian yapp binding.
MASTERS OF PAINTING
_With many illustrations in photogravure._
A series which gives in each volume a large number of examples
reproduced in _photogravure_ of the works of its subject. The first
series of books on art issued at a popular price to use this beautiful
method of reproduction.
The letterpress is the same as the volumes in the Popular Library of
Art, but it is reset, the size of the volumes being 8-3/4 ins. by 5-3/4
ins. There are no less than 32 plates in each volume. Bound in cloth
with gold on side, gold lettering on back: gilt top, picture wrapper,
3_s._ 6_d._ _net_ a volume, postage 4_d._