ABOUT A TOWN HOUSE.
I.
It was perhaps not inconsistent with the character of Lady Durwent
that, although she had striven to secure the guiding of Malcolm's
development, she should find herself totally devoid of any plan for the
training of a daughter.
Vaguely--and in this she mirrored thousands of other mothers--there was
a hope in her heart that Elise would grow up pretty, virtuous, amiable,
and would eventually marry well. It did not concern her that the girl
was permeated with individuality, that the temperament of an artist lay
behind the changing eyes in that restless, graceful figure. She could
not see that her daughter had a delicate, wilful personality, which
would rebel increasingly against the monotony of a social regime that
planned the careers of its sons before they were born, and offered its
daughters a mere incoherency of good intentions.
Full of the swift imaginativeness which makes the feminine contribution
to life so much a thing of charm and colour, Elise pursued the paths
which Youth has for its own--those wonderful streets of fantasy that
end with adolescence in Society's ugly fields of sign-posts.
Lacking the companionship of others of a similar age, she wove her own
conception of life, and dreamed of a world actuated by quick and
generous emotions. With every pulsing beat of the warm blood coursing
through her veins she demanded in her girl's mind that the world in
which her many-sided self had been placed should yield the wines to
satisfy the subtle shades of thirst produced by her insistent
individuality.
And the world offered her sign-posts. This must you do and thus must
you talk; hither shall you go and here remain: these are the Arts with
which you may enjoy a very slight acquaintance, but do not aspire to
genuine accomplishment--leave that to common people; be lady-like, be
calm and reserved; behold your brothers, how they swank!--but they are
men, and this is England; desire nought but the protected privileges of
your class, and in good season some youth of the same social stratum as
yourself will marry you, and, lo! in place of being a daughter in a
landed gentleman's house, you will be a wife.
Into this little world of a kind-hearted, chivalrous aristocracy (whose
greatest fault was their ignorance of the fact that the smallest
upheaval in humanitarianism, no matter what distance away, registers on
the seismograph of human destiny the world over) Elise Durwent found
her path laid. Increasingly resentful, she trod it until she was
fourteen years of age, when her mother, who had long been bored with
country life, made an important decision--and purchased a town house.
Having done this, Lady Durwent sent her daughter to a convent, a move
which enabled her to get rid of the governess discreetly, and left her
without family cares at all, as both boys were now at school.
Unencumbered, therefore, she said _au revoir_ to Roselawn, and set her
compass for No. 8 Chelmsford Gardens, London.
II.
Chelmsford Gardens is a row of dignified houses on Oxford Street--yet
not on Oxford Street. A miniature park, some forty feet in depth, acts
as a buffer-state between the street itself and the little group of
town houses. It is an oasis in the great plains of London's dingy
dwelling-places, a spot where the owners are rarely seen unless the
season is at its height, when gaily cloaked women and stiff-bosomed men
emerge at theatre-hour and are driven to the opera. Throughout the day
the Gardens (probably so styled on account of the complete absence of
horticultural embellishments) are as silent as the tomb; there is no
sign of life except in the mornings, when a solemn butler or a
uniformed parlour-maid appears for a moment at the door like some
creature of the sea coming up for air, then unobtrusively retires.
No. 8 was exactly like its neighbours, consisting of an exterior
boasting a huge oak door, with cold, stone steps leading up to it, and
an interior composed of rooms with very high ceilings, an insufficient
and uncomfortable supply of furniture, large pictures and small grates,
terrific beds and meagre chairs, and a general air of so much marble
and bare floor that one could almost imagine that house-cleaning could
be accomplished by turning on the hose.
After Lady Durwent had taken possession she sent for her husband, but
that gentleman reminded her that he was much happier at Roselawn,
though he would be glad if she would keep a room for him when business
at the 'House' or with his lawyers necessitated his presence in town.
Unhampered, therefore, by a husband, Lady Durwent prepared to invade
London Society, only to receive a shock at the very opening of the
campaign.
The Ironmonger had preceded her!
It is one of the tragedies of the _élite_ that even peers are not
equal. The law of class distinction, that amazing doctrine of
timidity, penetrated even the oak door of 8 Chelmsford Gardens. The
Ironmonger's daughter found that being the daughter of a man who had
made an honest living rendered her socially the unequal of the
daughters of men who, acting on a free translation of 'The earth is the
Lord's,' had done nothing but inherit unearned substance.
Then there was her cheerfulness, and the menacing voice!
Turning from the aloofness of the exclusive, Lady Durwent thought of
taking in famous performing Lions and feeding them. Unfortunately the
market was too brisk, and the only Lion she could get was an Italian
tenor from Covent Garden, who refused to roar, but left a poignant
memory of garlic.
It was then that a brilliant idea entered her brain. Lady Durwent
decided to cultivate _unusual_ people.
No longer would she batter at oak doors that refused to open; no more
would she dangle morsels of food in front of overfed Lions. She would
create a little Kingdom of remarkable people--not those acclaimed great
by the mealy mob, but those whose genius was of so rare and subtle a
growth that ordinary eyes could not detect it at all. Her only fear
was that she might be unable to discover a sufficient number to create
a really satisfactory _clientèle_.
But she reckoned without her London.
For every composer in the Metropolis who is trying to translate the
music of the spheres, there are a dozen who can only voice the
discordant jumble of their minds or ask the world to listen to the
hollow echo of their creative vacuum. For every artist striving to
catch some beauty of nature that he may revisualise it on canvas, there
are a score whose eyes can only cling to the malformation of existence.
For every writer toiling in the quiet hours to touch some poor, dumb
heart-strings, or to open unseeing eyes to the joy of life, there are
many whose gaze is never lifted from the gutter, so that, when they
write, it is of the slime and the filth that they have smelt, crying to
the world that the blue of the skies and the beauty of a rose are
things engendered of sentimental minds unable to see the real, the
vital things of life.
To this community of _poseurs_ Lady Durwent jingled her town house and
her title--and the response was instantaneous. She became the hostess
of a series of dinner-parties which gradually made her the subject of
paragraphs in the chatty columns of the press, and of whole chapters in
the gossip of London's refined circles.
Her natural cheerfulness expanded like a sunflower, and when her son
Malcolm secured a commission in the --th Hussars, her triumph was
complete. Even the staggering news that Dick had been taken away from
Eton to avoid expulsion for drunkenness proved only a momentary cloud
on the broad horizon of her contentment.
When she was nineteen years of age Elise came to live with her mother,
and as the fiery beauty of the child had mellowed into a sort of
smouldering charm that owed something to the mystic atmosphere of
convent life, Lady Durwent felt that an ally of importance had entered
the arena.
Thus four years passed, and in 1913 (had peeresses been in the habit of
taking inventories) Lady Durwent could have issued a statement somewhat
as follows:
ASSETS.
1 Husband; a Peer.
1 Son; aged twenty-five; decently popular with his regiment.
1 Daughter; marriageable; aged twenty-three.
1 Town House.
1 Country Estate.
The goodwill of numerous _unusual_ people, and the envy of a
lot of minor Peeresses.
LIABILITIES.
1 Son; aged twenty; at Cambridge; in perpetual trouble,
and would have been rusticated ere now had he not been the
son of a lord.
1 Ironmonger.
* * * * * *
'My dear,' said Lady Durwent, glancing at her daughter, who was reading
a novel, 'hadn't you better go and dress?'
'Is there a dinner-party to-night?' asked the girl without looking up.
'Of course, Elise. Have you forgotten that Mr. Selwyn of New York will
be here?'
'Is he as tedious as Stackton Dunckley?'
Lady Durwent frowned with vexation. 'My dear,' she said, 'you are very
trying.'