shoulders and pinched at the knees; then it was the other way about.
Finally I was educated--literature helped the delusion--to think that to
be acceptable one had to be a tiny thing stopping just where "his" manly
heart throbbed. I have seen shopworn feminine articles left over from
that bygone season, and how ridiculous they do look!
I am sorry these days for a short girl, for the man with the throbbing
heart is always on the look-out for a young giantess, into whose lovely
eyes he can only gaze by standing on a step-ladder.
Yes, I really want to look just like that enchanting creature who gazes
at me from the book Mr. Whiteley, in his subtle study of my weak mind,
sent me yesterday. Who is the divine original? Apart from wearing such
beautiful clothes, what has she done to be so perfectly lovely? She
cannot be less than seven feet tall, and crowned by a dream of a hat.
Her eyes are so big and brown and trustful, and her mouth is the
traditional rosebud, while her nose--a feature to which in real life
nature is usually most unkind--is so small that fashions for
pocket-handkerchiefs must soon go out. Her shoulders are so broad, and
yet her waist is so attenuated, that I wonder if--well--if she has any
organs, or does she rise superior to organs? I ask in the spirit of
serious inquiry, for I should not like to be misunderstood. And then
when it comes to that which society, in its exquisite propriety, blushes
to mention, I do believe that under those frilly petticoats, Nature,
ever considerate and bountiful to her, has provided her with telescopic
stilts, and not the other thing. At least that is the only explanation I
have ever found for her divine length! So what wonder if one sits at
one's dressmaker's day in and day out, while that patient woman produces
volume after volume representing perfect beauty combined with perfect
taste, that the average woman is crushed at the impossibility of
reaching such a standard of perfection?
If I were a man, my only aim in life would be to find the original of
that superb creature, and lay at her feet my heart, my life and my
purse. The last is very necessary, for she needs all those innumerable
and fascinating things with which Mr. Whiteley, Mr. Harrod, Mr. Barker,
and all the rest of those well-meaning but cruel tempters fill up the
pages of their catalogues. These catalogues are really a biography in
pictures, in which the beautiful She is shown to the world from the most
intimate undress up, and in every phase she is lovely and dignified. Her
perfect propriety in "combinations"--for which occasion she evidently
discards stilts!--her _svelte_ and sinuous grace in corsets, while in
petticoats one hardly knows which to admire most, her frills or her
bland unconsciousness, and as for her dresses, from the one in which she
is thrillingly pictured as pouring out a slow cup of coffee, she cannot
fail to arouse in each the jealousy of the most generous of her sex.
Her characteristics are always dignity, vacancy, and a smile not always
appropriate to the occasion, I am free to confess, for I have seen her
smile, by mistake of course, in the heaviest of widow's weeds. But
perhaps that was because her head is always supremely unconscious of
what the rest of her is doing. It is the unconsciousness of a great
artist who is attending strictly to business; for she has not even a
touch of vulgar feminine coquetry.
If she fascinates the weak-minded man who idly turns the leaves of the
fashion-book, it is in spite of herself. When she stands confessed in,
say, corsets--an attitude which must be trying in the cold eye of the
public--she does not look embarrassed, she only looks dignified. She is,
in fact, the direct modern descendant of the Vestal Virgins who
sacrificed their beauty to religion, only she sacrifices her beauty to
business. The comfort for a tired man to come home to her placid,
well-dressed society! That she never loses her temper her exquisitely
dressed head amply proves, for you can't lose your temper and preserve
the serenity of your back hair! The rapture of a man and a father to
come home to his perfectly dressed, silent infant which smiles sweetly
from the latest thing in lace cribs, while She bends over him in a
toilette which expresses as nothing else can maternal solicitude
combined with perfect taste.
Then to see her play tennis, unflushed, unruffled, with her adorable
hair still intact; skipping with such ladylike activity, and always
smiling. What rapture for a loving man! The delight of golfing with her
and her numerous sisters--such a family resemblance!--unexcited,
ladylike, the linen collar about her swan like throat never wilted, but
a monument to some celestial laundress, and delivering her strokes into
the landscape with that inconsequential feebleness which men love, say
what they will.
Then, too, to see her listening, in full dress, to the touching strains
of the pianola, as performed by a soul-inspired being in the last thing
in party frocks and a flower-crowned _coiffure_, is a study of
controlled emotion. She _is_ moved, but too much emotion might ruffle
what the poetry of commerce has so sweetly named her "transformation."
So she controls her feelings, and looks with calm and thoughtful eyes at
the back of the "artiste's" marvellous toilette, and possibly wonders,
to the strains of the "Largo" of Händel, how she got into her
"creation." But that is a dead and awful secret only known to Mr. Harrod
or possibly to Messrs. Derry and Toms.
How many a time have I watched her in a paper-garden-party mingling with
other lovely beings of her own sex, for her sense of propriety never
allows her to mingle with those gallant gentlemen in frock-coats and
evening dress we admire in the tailors' windows. The landscape is--if I
may say so--of a most ladylike nature. Mud is absent, for the fair
beings meander about in a landscape which nature has apparently cleaned
with a tooth-brush. I suppose their need for amusement is amply
satisfied with staring at their lovely sisters or offering them fans or
bouquets--for I have rarely seen them do anything else, though once the
artist who portrayed them became dramatic, and introduced two young
things of their kind playing at battledore and shuttlecock in the
background.
The greatest innovation was when She was pictured as pouring tea in a
baronial hall. The exquisite grace with which she "poured" was a lesson,
though I had a terrible doubt as to whether there was anything in that
perfect teapot. She wore a tea-gown which was the last "cry" in
fluffiness, and the friends about her were gorgeous, in attitudes which
did more justice to their toilettes than their manners, for the way they
turned their flat backs on each other might, in other society, have
given offence. Another innovation in the picture was a perfect footman,
a perfect page-boy, and a perfect butler, a noble being like an
Archbishop, but much more serious. It was well that no other mere man
was present even on paper, for the combination of loveliness was
overpowering.
Ah, yes, indeed, if the usual run of mothers and wives were like these,
then would there need to be no outcry against the selfish bachelor who
refuses to marry. Instead, the bachelor in his five hundred horse-power
motor, defying speed limit, palpitating with eagerness, would fly to lay
himself at her exquisitely shod feet. For what does man care for beauty
unadorned! As for intellect, well, intellect has never been in it!
I am quite sure that neither Mr. Whiteley, nor Mr. Harrod, nor the rest
of the public-spirited gentlemen, whose only object in life is to make
us beautiful, know what harm they are doing; or why do they portray a
race of women to whose perfections mortal women must ever vainly aspire.
Your lovely syrens with their divine legs--there, the awful word is
out!--never go shopping through the mud in the early morning! When they
wear a dress it is called a "creation," and it is certainly not the year
before last's best in reduced circumstances. When they lift their
elegant robes, and show their sumptuous frills, it proves that they know
nothing of the depravity of "model" laundries. Nor do I for a moment
believe that their smiling babies--the smile inherited from their
mother, sweet, but slightly vacant--know the agonies of teeth,
nettle-rash or colic.
In fact, I refuse to believe that such perfect loveliness can exist. It
is a poet's dream, evolved by those worthy gentlemen who only make life
a greater trial for us by sending us quarterly reminders of what we
ought to be, but what most of us are not. It is a crime to introduce
into the bosom of contented families such presentments of too lovely
women. Man _is_ weak, and when the wife of his heart comes home from
shopping with her hat on one side, by accident, not coquetry, her
ostrich plume limp and lank from a battle with the rain, a rent for the
convenience of her nose, her _chaussures_ caked with mud to match her
petticoats, and on her face an expression which is not bland as she
hears shrieks proclaiming colic, how can he help but make sorrowful
comparisons with a vision in his mind of a silent infant in a
lace-smothered crib that smiles at him from Messrs. Dickins and Jones's
alluring book?
Then is the harm done; the weak father falls a victim to his ideal, and
his heart turns from his distracted, bedraggled wife to that lovely
vision who entered a happy home through the innocent letter-box to the
eternal destruction of its domestic peace. Thus "home," once the bulwark
of the British nation, is rapidly becoming a mere mockery.
I ask, in the interest of society, why cannot the lovely beings in the
fashion-papers and fashion-books be made less lovely? Whatever you are,
and I commend this sentiment to all, as well as to distinguished
haberdashers, be truthful. Be truthful! Chop off at least one foot and
eight inches from those lovely ones who imperil our peace. Be realists
at least occasionally; portray them with a rip, or a skirt which is
short where it should be long; let their hair be out of curl, and
buttons off their boots--anything, only to prove that they also are
human.
The postman has just brought another big, square, flat familiar parcel.
I shall destroy it; it is too entrancing. It portrays Her in a golden
_coiffure_ crowned by a hat that breathes of spring. Clad in a perfect
and appropriate "creation" she has climbed into an apple-tree, to which
she clings with white gloved hands. Playfully and yet with perfect
propriety she peeps through the clustering pink blossoms. It is the same
smile, the same irreproachable nose, the same wave to her golden hair,
the same great eyes. Now to put this vision of beauty and grace high up
in a tree unflushed, unscratched, unruffled, untorn, is really too much
to bear--besides, it is false to nature! The head of the house shall not
look at her and make cruel comparisons, and decide in his ignorant
masculine mind that all women can look so after they have climbed a
tree. Then grow discontented when one tries to explain to him that they
cannot. So then, before it is too late, here goes--into the fire! One
domestic peace at least is saved.
Now I ask Mr. Whiteley, Mr. Harrod, Mr. Robinson, and all the rest of
the gentlemen who stand for all that is best in the way of hats and
clothes and things, and to whose benevolent guidance we women trust
ourselves, be merciful as well as truthful, we beg, and do not make
those beautiful creatures quite so beautiful!
It is the new invasion, compared to which the possible arrival of hordes
of worthy yellow men is as nothing. The invasion, think, of too
beautiful ideals into hitherto contented homes! Mr. Whiteley, you who
have always provided everything, start a new branch,--give us peace!
Head a great movement which shall have as object to portray the fashions
by less bewildering beauty. Earn what has probably no commercial value,
and that is our gratitude! Remember that we are not only women but
customers.
Now supposing all your customers should revolt? What then?
_A Study of Frivolity_
After studying the veracious and thrilling works of our modern
dramatists, one comes to the conclusion that the lady with a past,
though she may suffer from nothing else, does suffer tortures from tight
boots. Whatever situation they put her in, however harrowing, pathetic
or revolting, when boots would seem to be the last consideration of a
tortured conscience, yet hers have that exquisite, brand-new perfection
which proves that, when she is not planning wickedness nor torn by
remorse, she spends the rest of her time buying boots, and we all know
that new boots hurt rather more than a bad conscience.
It is also the happy destiny of this lady to wear the most superlatively
beautiful clothes, and when, in moments of guilty emotion, she swishes
her train about, we have a vision of petticoats which only she,
indifferent to the voice of conscience and laundry charges, dares to
wear; and still more damning witness than her petticoats to her evil
conscience is the elegance of her feet. Your real hardened adventuress
on the stage always wears the most delicious slippers, no matter how
inappropriate to the occasion, but she wears them prophetically as it
were, for she alone knows that she is destined to die in the fifth act,
with her feet to the footlights.
To the social philosopher there is no more interesting sight than the
window of a fashionable shoemaker's, there to make mental notes of the
destiny of all those charming little shoes and slippers that confront
one in all the coquetry of commerce. The only thing needed is a band to
make them frisk about in all their gold, white, scarlet and bronze
frivolity. The sophisticated curve of the satin heel and the tiny
pointed satin toe are still innocent of worldly knowledge. Care, even in
the shape of the daintiest foot, has not touched them yet, they have not
been danced in, nor kicked off, nor made love to; in fact, they have not
been born.
There is, however, a destiny for slippers as well as other things, and
there is a certain slipper, long and slender, with arched instep and
Louis XV heel which, so instinct tells us, is inevitably destined to
belong to a lady with a past. Virtue never wears anything so subtle nor
so pretty, for, indeed, it is only conscious rectitude that dares to
dispense with coquetry, and wears her boots boldly down at the heel.
Given a woman's shoe, and one can easily evolve out of it her entire
emotional history, just as a naturalist reconstructs from a bone the
entire animal to which it once belonged. Not long ago I saw a famous
German actress as Beata in Sudermann's play "The Joy of Living." It is a
fine melodramatic part. She has a lover and a husband--familiar
combination--but the sin is in the past, and they have all three reached
that comfortable middle age when people are supposed to know better.
Unfortunately at the eleventh hour the husband discovers the secret of
his wife's old faithlessness and his best friend's treachery. At a
dinner in the last act Beata drinks a toast to "The Joy of Living," and
promptly solves the riddle of existence by staggering into the next room
and poisoning herself. It was as she staggered away that the German
actress deprived me of all my illusions for, as she lifted her dress
rather high in her anguish, she exhibited a pair of broad, flat boots,
with patent leather tips, and the kind of heels only virtue wears, broad
and flat and low. I thought I saw side elastics, but that may have been
the effect of a perturbed vision.
However, from that moment I lost all belief in Beata's trials. A woman
with such boots never takes her own life, never has a lover, never has a
past, but she has a good sensible husband who falls asleep after dinner,
and while he snores she knits him golf stockings. The audience was under
the impression that Beata had killed herself in the next room, but I
knew better. No, those feet were not made for tragedy, even Sudermann's
art could not convince me, and so a pair of German boots spoiled my
illusions.
It is not often that we poor philistines have the privilege of studying
at close range the lady who may be truly described as the pet of the
stage, and when we do so we owe it entirely to our kind dramatists; and
find however much she and her sisters may differ in the details of their
interesting careers, they have in common the transcendent charms of
their toilettes and the fascination of their slippers.
When one sees how uninteresting the play would be without her, how often
virtue is rather fatiguing and not nearly so well dressed, and how the
dramatist gives his favourite the most interesting talk and the most
dramatic situations, one realises her importance, and that she is quite
indispensable to the stage, whatever she is in real life. One only
regrets, when society is a little fatiguing, that she is not
occasionally permitted to pass through in her gorgeous toilette and her
immoral slippers, and that bewitching side glance which one only sees on
the stage, just to make society, like the stage, a little more
thrilling.
Now in the days of the older dramatists when much was left to what in
this material age is fast dying out, that is the imagination, if the
dungeon of Lord de Smyth was wanted, the scene-painter nailed up a
sign-post with the simple notice, "This is the Dungeon of Lord de
Smyth," and the audience were as much thrilled as if they could hear
the clanking of the fetters.
In these days we refuse to take our dungeons so absolutely on faith,
and, still, if we see a too beautiful creature in red hair (fascinating
crime always has red hair), gorgeous clothes, and slippers with Louis XV
heels--that estimable monarch was responsible for so much sinfulness
combined with singular good taste--and an opera cloak all lace and
allurement, the kind for which virtue has neither the money nor the
taste, then we can settle down to a good three hours' thrill, for those
perfect garments are as much an indication of the dramatist's intentions
as in less sophisticated days the sign-post which announced the dungeon
of the de Smyths.
We have learnt by experience that certain kinds of clothes always come
to a bad end, though never until the fifth act; while virtue, without
any nice clothes to comfort her, has a very bad time for at least four
acts and a half. One could wish the dramatists would give virtue a
better chance!
A very charming woman regretfully confessed to me that the old proverb,
that virtue is its own reward, is distinctly discouraging. She felt,
with a perfectly blameless existence behind her, that she had a right to
demand of fate jewels more precious than imitation pearls, and a mode of
transit more patrician than a 'bus or the "tube," or a four-wheeler on
state occasions. Her bitterness was enhanced by a picture in the
"tube-lift" of a lovely creature ablaze with diamonds, who advertises a
firm of philanthropists from whom one can get one's Koh-i-noors on the
instalment plan.
If ever a young person looks as if she had had a chequered past, it is
this young person, so radiant, so self-satisfied, and so prosperous. She
is a painful satire on virtue in a mackintosh with a dripping umbrella,
who has no earthly hope of diamonds, no matter how she may long for
them, and who stares drearily at the lovely being until she is bounced
out upon terra firma, and then pushed into the rain by other virtues
with umbrellas and very sharp elbows. The charming woman further
declared that virtue should be offered a more substantial reward than
imitation pearls these days when the shoemakers, dressmakers and
dramatists form a "combine" for the exclusive glorification of the lady
in question.
But it is not only the eloquence of slippers, but the eloquence of
petticoats! Are not our shop windows the Frenchiest of French novels,
divided not into chapters, but into petticoats? Do they not form
flamboyant rainbows behind those glittering plate-glass fronts? That
there is no one inside of them takes nothing away from their charm. To
see them out-spread against a window--a bewildering chaos of colours,
frilly, fluffy and fantastic, is the outward and visible sign of an
inarticulate poet who lives sonnets in silk without putting them on
paper. How much more satisfactory to live poems than merely to write
them!
So every shop window proclaims that this is the age of petticoats. Who
buys them, who wears them? Why are they never seen again? Yet well may
we ask what sylph can worthily wear those coquettish fantasies? It must
be conceded, though it will hurt out national pride, that only the women
of one nation have that sovereign right.
It is the Frenchwoman alone who can lift her skirts with that supreme
elegance which turns even the worst mud puddle into an instrument for
the display of her exquisite grace. She is the artist of the
petticoat--and if she lifts her skirts rather high, it is because she
does not feel it her duty to help the County Council to sweep the
streets with the tail of a draggled gown.
Now when an English woman lifts her skirt, she does it as one on
business bent; coquetry is not in it. She makes a frantic clutch at the
back of her skirt, grabs a solid handful, and drags it uncompromisingly
forward until she outlines herself with simple, cruel distinctness. Her
silhouette is a curious study in angles.
Though she has no coquetry about her feet or her petticoats, the
fatality of fate ordains that she should always wear high-heeled
slippers and cobweb stockings in that downpour which Divine Providence
reserves exclusively for the English nation. This opportunity she also
takes to wear those lace petticoats which, having survived the terrors
of the British laundry, succumb to British mud. Heaven, in its
inscrutable wisdom, has denied to the Anglo-Saxons and Teutons that
subtle turn of the wrist which makes the lifting of a skirt a fine art.
Even the American woman, conqueror though she be of dukes and lesser
things, has never yet conquered that Latin grace.
Now who buys those silken rainbows in the shops? Get the sphinx to
answer that riddle if you can. Do they vanish into space, or are they
bought by those radiant beings who flit about in electric landaulettes,
and whom we never meet, because we flit about in 'buses?
If the rainbow ever touches earth it is on exceptional occasions which
only prove the rule. And it is always when virtue, always elderly and
stout, with big, flat feet in cloth boots, lifts her skirt and exhibits
to the eye of the public a yellow or scarlet silk confection which hangs
limp and dejected. Its melancholy flop and want of rustle plainly show
its consciousness of being misunderstood and in a false position. The
irreproachable petticoat, sacred to the eminently respectable, is
usually black and of a material of the nature of horsehair. No shop
boasts of it, and it is always pulled out of an ignoble pile when
required, and is quite Spartan in its unadorned simplicity.
That virtue is best adorned by itself we concede; still virtue is a
little handicapped. I put it to the dramatists: Why not give her better
clothes and let her for once triumph in the second act? The dramatists,
inspired photographers of manners though they are, have a great deal to
answer for! At best they give her a white dress, a blue sash, ankle-ties
and no conversation. One asks how is she to compete with a stately
creature with dramatic red hair and that sinuous and glittering costume
fraught with tragic situations? What a fatal contrast when studied by
the youth of our land who have been taught to regard the stage as an
educator!
The stage is conceded to be a great educational and moral force, and yet
I beg of those excellent gentlemen who provide the lessons that the
stage so eloquently recites not to lavish on the lady in question that
bewildering wardrobe which must give her a sense of peace and calm
security that even a good conscience cannot bestow. For once put her
into a bargain coat and skirt left over from a sale at Tooting, adorn
her with a tam o'shanter, the kind with a quill that sticks out in
front, and put on her feet the boots of a perfect propriety, always
short and broad, then see if the pit will adore her!