“And the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn?” I asked.
The fire came back into Mrs Albert’s eye. “That woman,” she said,
with bitter calmness, “was positively not ashamed to intrude her own
mercenary and self-seeking designs upon this loyal and purely patriotic
association. Why, she did it almost openly. She intrigued behind my back
with whole streetsful of people that one would hardly know on ordinary
occasions, paid them calls in a carriage got up for the occasion with
a bright new coat of arms, made friends with them, promised them heaven
only knows what, and actually secured nineteen votes to my three for the
purchase of a mouldy old piece of tapestry--something about Richard
III and Oliver Cromwell meeting on the battlefield, I think the subject
is--which belonged to her husband’s family. Of course, my lips are
sealed, but I have been _told_ that at Christie’s it would hardly have
fetched £100. I say nothing myself, but I can’t prevent people drawing
certain deductions, can I? And when I reflect also that her two
most active supporters in this nefarious business were Lady
Thames-Ditton--whose financial difficulties are notorious--and the
Countess of Wimps---- whose tradespeople--well, we won’t go into
_that_--it does force one to ask whether the fabric of British society
is not being undermined at its very top. In this very day’s paper I
read that the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn has hired a yacht, and will spend the
summer in Norwegian waters--while we--we----”
The door opened, and we made out through the half-light the comfortable
figure of Uncle Dudley. He was mopping his brow, and breathed heavily
from his long walk as he advanced.
“Well?” Mrs Albert asked, in a saddened and subdued tone, “Did you see
the place?”
“There are five bedrooms on the two upper floors,” he made answer, “but
there’s no bath-room, and the bus doesn’t come within four streets of
the house.”
_Introducing Scenes from a Foreign Country, and also conveying Welcome
Intelligence, together with some Instruction_
It was at a little village perched well up on one of the carriage-roads
ascending the Brocken, a fortnight or so ago, that I received a wire
from Uncle Dudley. It was kind of him to think of it--all the more as he
had good news to tell. “Family lighted square on their feet,” was what
the message said, and I was glad to gather from this that the Grundys
had weathered their misfortunes, and that Mrs Albert was herself again.
The thought was full of charm. It seemed as if I had never realised
before how fond I was of these good people. In sober fact; I dare say
that I had not dwelt much upon their woes during my holiday. But now,
with this affectionately thoughtful telegram addressing me as their
oldest friend, the one whom they wished to be the first to share the joy
of their rescued state, it was easy enough to make myself believe
that my whole vacation had been darkened with brooding over their
unhappiness.
It had not occurred to me before, but that was undoubtedly why I had
not liked the Harz so much this year as usual. Now that I thought of
it, walking down the birch-lined footpath towards the hamlet and the
telegraph office, the place seemed to have gone off a good deal. In
other seasons, before the spectre of cholera flooded its sylvan retreats
with an invading horde of Hamburgers, the Harzwald had been my favourite
resort. I had grown to love its fir-clad slopes, its shadowed glens, its
atmosphere of prehistoric myth and legend, as if I were part and product
of them all. Its people, too, had come much nearer to my breast than
any other Germans ever could. I had enjoyed being with them just because
they were what the local schoolmaster disdainfully declared them to
be--_Erdzertrümmerungsprozeszuribekanntevolk_--that is to say, people
entirely ignorant of the scientific theories about geological upheavals
and volcanic formations, and so able cheerfully to put their trust in
the goblins who reared these strange boulders in fantastic piles on
every hill top, and to hear with good faith the shouts of the witches as
they bounded over the Hexentanzplatz. Last year it had seemed even worth
the added discomfort of the swarming Hamburgers to be again in this
wholesome, sweet-aired primitive place. But this year--I saw now
clearly as I looked over Uncle Dudley’s message once more--it had not
been so pleasant. The hotel boy, Fritzchen, whom I had watched year
after year with the warmth of a fatherly well-wisher--smiling with
satisfaction at his jovial countenance, his bustling and competent ways,
and his comical attempts at English--had this season swollen up into
a burly and consequential lout, with a straw-coloured sprouting on his
upper-lip, and a military manner. They called him Fritz now, and he gave
me beer out of the old keg after I had heard the new one tapped.
The evening gatherings of the villagers in the hotel, too, were
not amusing as they once had been. The huge lion-maned and grossly
over-bearded _Kantor_, or music-master, who came regularly at nightfall
to thump on the table with his bludgeon-like walking stick, to roar
forth impassioned monologues on religion and politics, and to bellow
ceaselessly at Fritzchen for more beer, had formerly delighted me. This
time he seemed only a noisy nuisance, and the half-circle of grave old
retired foresters and middle-aged _Jàger_ officers who sat watching
him over their pipes, striving vainly now and again to get in a word
edgewise about the auctions of felled trees in the woods, or the
mutinous tendencies of the charcoal-burners, presented themselves in the
light of tiresome prigs. If they had been worth their salt, I felt, they
would long ago have brained the Kantor with their stoneware mugs. Even
as I walked I began to be conscious that a three weeks’ stay in the Harz
was a good deal of time, and that the remaining third would certainly
hang on my hands.
By the time I reached the telegraph station I had my answer to Uncle
Dudley ready in my mind. He liked the forcible imagery of Australia and
the Far West; and I would speak to him at this joyful juncture after
his own heart. It seemed that I could best do this by giving him to
understand that I was celebrating his news--that I was, in one of his
own phrases, “painting the town red.” It required some ingenuity to work
this idea out right, but I finally wrote what appeared to answer the
purpose:--“_Brocken und Umgebung sind roth gemalen_”--and handed it in
to the man at the window.
He was a young man with close-cropped yellow hair and spectacles,
holding his chin and neck very stiff in the high collar of his uniform.
He glanced over my despatch, at first with careless dignity. Then he
read it again attentively. Then he laid it on the table, and bent
his tight-buttoned form over it as well as might be in a severe and
prolonged scrutiny. At last he raised himself, turned a petrifying gaze
on through his glasses at me, and shook his head.
“It is not true,” he said. “Some one has you deceived.”
“But,” I tried to explain to him, with the little German that I knew
scattering itself in all directions in the face of this crisis, “it is a
figure of speech, a joke, a----”
The telegraph man stared coldly at my luckless despatch, and then at me.
“You would wish to state to your friend, perhaps,” he suggested, “that
they seem as if they had been coloured with red, owing to the change in
the leaves.”
“No, no,” I put in. “It must be that they _have_ been painted, _are_
painted, or he will not me understand.”
“But, my good sir,” retorted the operator with emphasis, “they are _not_
painted! From the door gaze you forth! What make you with this nonsense,
that Brocken and vicinity are red painted?”
“Well, then,” I said wearily, oppressed by the magnitude of the task,
“I don’t know how to word it myself, but you can fix it for me. Just say
that I am _going_ to paint them red--that will do just as well.
“But you shall not! It is forbidden!” exclaimed the official, holding
himself like a poker, and glaring vehemence through his glasses. “It
is strongly forbidden! When you one brush-mark shall make, quick to
the prison go you. In Germany have we for natural beauty respect--also
laws.”
Reluctantly, but of necessity, I abandoned metaphor, and in a humble
spirit telegraphed in English to Uncle Dudley at his club that I was
very glad. Even as my pen clung in irresolution on the paper over
this word “glad,” the impulse rose in me to add: “_Tired of Harz. Am
returning immediately_.”
“When the same here is,” remarked the operator, moodily studying the
unknown words, “in Brunswick stopped it will be.”
I translated it for him, and added, “I go from here home, to be where
officials their own business mind.”
He nodded, not unamiably, and replied as he handed me out my change:
“Yes, I know: England. So well their own business there officials mind,
that Balfour to Argentina easily comes.”
Walking up the hillside again, already quite captive to the fascination
of the morrow’s homeward flight, I met at the turn of the path a family
party--father, mother, and two girls in the younger teens--seated along
the rocky siding, and gazing with a common air of dejection upon a
portentous row of bags and portmanteaus at their feet. The notion that
they were Hamburgers died still-born. Nothing more obviously un-German
than these wayfarers was ever seen.
“I hope, sir,” the man spoke up as I approached, “that I am right in
presuming that you speak English!”
I bowed assent, and even as I did so, recognised him. “I hope _I_ am
right,” I answered, “in thinking that I have met you before--at Mr
Albert Grundy’s in London--you are the American gentleman with the Oboid
Oil Engine, are you not?”
“Well, by George!” he cried, rising and offering his hand with frank
delight, and introducing me in a single comprehensive wave to his wife
and daughters. “Yes, sir,” he went on, “and I wish I had an Oboid here
right now--up in the basement of that stone boarding-house on the knoll
there--just for the sake of heating up, and shutting down the valves,
and blowing the whole damned thing sky-high. That would suit me, sir,
right down to the ground.”
“Were strangers here, sir,” he explained in answer to my question: “we’d
seen a good deal of the Dutch at home--I mean _our_ home--and we thought
we’d like to take a look at ‘em in the place they come from. Well, sir,
we’ve had our look, and we’re satisfied. We don’t want any more on our
plate, thank you. One helping is an elegant sufficiency. Do you know the
trick they played on us? Why, I took a team of horses yesterday from a
place they called Ibsenburg or Ilsenburg, or some such name, and had
it explained to my driver that he was to take us up to the top of the
Brocken, there, and stop all night, and fetch us back this morning. When
we got up as far as Shierke, there, it was getting pretty dark, and the
women-folks were nervous, and so we laid up for the night. There didn’t
seem anything for the driver to do but set around in the kitchen and
drink beer, and he needed money for that, and so I gave him some loose
silver, and told him to make himself at home. We got the words out of a
dictionary for that--_machen sie selbst zu Heim_ we figured ‘em out to
be--and I spoke them at him slowly and distinctly, so that he had no
earthly excuse for not understanding. But, would you believe it, sir,
the miserable cuss just up and skipped out, horses, rig and all, while
we were getting supper! And here we were this morning, landed high and
dry. No conveyance, nobody to comprehend a word of English, no nothing.
We haven’t seen the top of their darned mountain even.”
“What I’m more concerned about, I tell Wilbur,” put in the lady, “is
seeing the bottom of it. If they had only sense enough to make valises
and bonnet-boxes ball-shaped, we could have rolled ‘em down hill.”
“There’ll be no trouble about all that,” I assured them, and we talked
for a little about the simple enough process of getting their luggage
carried down to the village, and of finding a vehicle there. I, indeed,
agreed to make one of their party on quitting the Harz, that very
afternoon.
“And now tell me about the Grundys,” I urged, when these more pressing
matters were out of the way. “I got a wire to-day saying--hinting that
they are in luck’s way again.”
“Is that so?” exclaimed the American, at once surprised and pleased.
“I’m glad to hear it. I can’t guess what it might be in. Grundy’s got
so many irons in the fire--some white hot, some lukewarm, some frosted
straight through--you never can tell. The funny thing is--he can’t tell
himself. Why, sir, those men of yours in the City of London, they don’t
know any more about business than a babe unborn. If they were in New
York they’d have their eyeteeth skinned out of their heads in the shake
of a lamb’s tail. Why, we’ve been milking them dry for a dozen years
back. And yet, you know, somehow----”
“Somehow--?” I echoed, encouragingly.
“Well, sir, somehow--that’s the odd thing about it--they don’t stay
milked.”
_Disclosing the Educational Influence exerted by the Essex Coast, and
other Matters, including Reasons for Joy_
Sit down here by the fire--no, in the easy chair,” said Ermyntrude,
with a note of solicitude in her kindly voice. “Mamma won’t be home for
half an hour yet, and I want a nice, quiet, serious talk with you. Oh,
it’s going to be extremely serious, and you must begin by playing that
you are at least one hundred and fifty years old.”
“That won’t be so difficult,” I replied, not without the implication of
injury. “It will only be adding a few decades to the venerableness that
I seem always to possess in your eyes.”
“Oh!” said Ermie, and looked at me inquiringly for a moment. Then she
seated herself, and gazed with much steadiness into the fire. I waited
for the nice, serious talk to begin--and waited a long time.
“Well, my dear child,” I broke in upon the silence at last, “I hoped to
have been the very first to come and tell your mother how deeply glad I
was to see you all back again in Fernbank. But that wretched rheumatism
of mine--_at my age_, you know------”
I was watching narrowly for even the faintest sign of deprecation. She
did not stir an eyelash.
“Yes,” she suddenly began, still intently gazing into the fire; “papa
has got his money all back, and more. That is, it isn’t the same money,
but somebody else’s--I’m sure I don’t know whose. Sometimes I feel sorry
for those other people, whoever they are, who have had to give it up
to us. Then, other times, I am so glad simply to be in again where it’s
warm that I don’t care.”
“The firelight suits your face, Ermie,” I said, noting with the pleasure
appropriate to my position as the oldest friend of the family, how
sweetly the soft radiance played upward upon the fair young rounded
throat and chin, and tipped the little nostrils with rosy light.
“Fortunately,” she went on, as if I had not spoken, “some Americans took
the house furnished in September for three months--I think, poor souls,
that they believed it was the London season--and so we never had to
break up, and we were able to get back again in time for Uncle Dudley to
plant all his bulbs. They seem to have been very quiet people. Mamma
had a kind of notion that they would practise with bucking horses on
the tennis-lawn, and shoot at bottles and clay pigeons here in the
drawing-room. The only thing we could find that they did was to paste
thick paper over the ventilator in the dining-room. And yet a policeman
told our man that they slept with their bedroom windows open all night.
Curious, isn’t it?”
“I like to have one of these ‘nice, quiet, serious talks’ with you,
Ermie,” I said.
Even at this she did not lift her eyes from the grate. “Oh, don’t be
impatient--it will be serious enough,” she warned me. “They say, you
know, that drowning people see, in a single instant of time, whole years
of events, whole books full of things. Well, I’ve been under water for
six months, and--and--I’ve noticed a good deal.”
“Ah! is there a submarine observation station at Clacton-on-Sea? Now you
speak of it, I _have_ heard of queer fish being studied there.”
“None queerer than we, my dear friend, you may be sure. Mamma was right
in choosing the place. We never once saw a soul we knew. Of course, it
is the dullest and commonest thing on earth--but it exactly fitted us
during that awful period. We were going at first to Cromer, but
mamma learned that that was the chosen resort of dissolute theatrical
people--it seems there has been a poem written in which it is called
‘Poppy land,’ which mamma saw at once must be a cover for opium-eating
and all sorts of dissipation. So we went to Clacton instead. But what
I was going to say is this--I did a great deal of thinking all through
those six months. I don’t say that I am any wiser than I was, because,
for that matter, I am very much less sure about things than I was
before. But I was simply a blank contented fool then. Now it’s different
to the extent that I’ve stirred up all sorts of questions and problems
buzzing and barking about me, and I don’t know the answers to them, and
I can’t get clear of them, and they’re driving me out of my head--and
there you are. That’s what I wanted to talk with you about.”
I shifted my feet on the fender, and nodded with as sensible an
expression as I could muster.
“That’s why I said you must pretend to yourself that you are
very old--quite a fatherly person, capable of giving a girl
advice--sympathetic advice. In the first place--of course you know that
the engagement with that Hon. Knobbeleigh Jones has been off for ages.
Don’t interrupt me! It isn’t worth speaking of except for one point.
His father, Lord Skillyduff, was the principal rogue in the combination
which plundered papa of his money. Having got the Grundy money they had
no use for the Grundy girl. Now, he justified his rascality by pleading
that he had to make provision for _his_ daughters, and everybody said
he was a good father. Papa goes in again through some other opening, and
after a long fight brings out a fresh fortune, which he has taken away
from somebody else--and I heard him tell mamma that he was doing it for
the sake of _his_ daughters. People will say _he_ is a good father--I
know _I_ do.”
“None better in this world,” I assented cordially.
“Well, don’t you see,” Ermyntrude went on, “that puts daughters in the
light of a doubtful blessing. Papa’s whole worry and struggle was for
us--for _me_. I was the load on his back. I don’t like to be a
load. While we were prosperous, there was only one way for me to get
down--that is by marriage. When we became poor, there was another
way--that I should earn my own living. But this papa wouldn’t listen to.
He quite swore about it--vowed he would rather work his fingers to the
bone; rather do anything, no matter what it was, or what people thought
of him for doing it, than that a daughter of his should take care
of herself. He would look upon himself as disgraced, he said. Those
lodgings of ours at Clacton weren’t specially conducive to good temper,
I’m afraid; for I told him that the real disgrace would be to keep me in
idleness to sell to some other Knobbeleigh Jones, or to palm me off on
some better sort of young man who would bind himself to work for me all
his life, and then find that I would have been dear at the price of
a fortnight’s labour--and then mamma cried.--and papa, he swore
more--and--and--”
I stirred the fire here, and then blushed to rediscover that it was
asbestos I was knocking about. “How stupid of me!” I exclaimed, and
murmured something about having been a stranger to Fernbank so long.
Ermyntrude took no notice. “I made a pretence of going up to London on
a visit,” she continued, “and I spent five days looking about, making
inquiries, trying to get some notion of how girls who supported
themselves made a beginning. I talked a little with such few girls that
I knew as were in town, and I cared to see--guardedly, of course. They
had no idea--save in the way of the governess or music teacher. I’d cut
my throat before I’d be either of those--forced to dress like ladies on
the wages of a seamstress, and to smile under the insults of tradesmen’s
wives and their louts of children. An actress I might be, after I had
starved a long time in learning my business--but before that mamma would
have died of shame. Then there are typewriters, and lady journalists
and telegraph clerks--I am surly enough sometimes to do that last to
perfection--but they all have to have special talents or knowledge. As
for saleswomen in the shops--there are a dozen poor genteel wretches
standing outside ready to claw each other’s eyes out for every vacancy.
I went over Euston Road way at noon, and I watched the work-girls come
out of the factories and workshops, and they had such sharp, knowing,
bullying faces that I knew I should be a helpless fool among them. And
watching them--and watching the other girls on the street... in the
Strand and Piccadilly--I told you I was going to talk seriously, my dear
friend--it all came to seem to me like a nightmare. It frightened me.
These were the girls whose fathers had failed to provide for them--that
was absolutely all the difference between them and me. I had looked
lazily down at marriage as a chance of escaping being bored here at
Fernbank. They were all looking fiercely up at marriage as the one only
chance of rescue from weary toil, starvation wages, general poverty and
misery. In both cases the idea was the same--to find some man, no matter
what kind of a man, if only he will take it upon himself to provide
something different. You see what poor, dependent things we really are!
Why should it be so? That’s what I want to know.”
“Oh, that’s all you want to know, is it?” I remarked, after a little
pause. “Well, I think--I think you had better give me notice of the
question.”
“I have tried to read what thinkers say about it,” she added; “but they
only confuse one the more. There is a Dr Wallace whom the papers speak
of as an authority, and he has been writing a long article this very
week--or else it is an interview--and he says that everything will be
all right, that all the nice women will marry all the good men, and that
the other kinds will die off immediately, and everybody will be oh, so
happy--in a ‘regenerated society.’ That is another thing I wanted to
ask you about. He speaks--they all speak--so confidently about this
‘regenerated society.’ Do you happen to know when it is to be?”
“The date has not been fixed, I believe,” I replied.
The early winter twilight had darkened the room, and the light from the
grate glowed ruddily upon the girl’s face as she bent forward, her chin
upon her clasped hands, looking into the fire.
“There is another date which remains undetermined,”’ I added, faltering
not a little at heart, but keeping my tongue under fair control. “I
should like to speak to you about it, if I may take off my lamb’s-wool
wig and Santa Claus beard, and appear before you once more as a
contemporary citizen. It is this, Ermie. I am not so very old, after
all. There is only a shade over a dozen years between us--say a baker’s
dozen. My habits--my personal qualities, tolerable and otherwise,
are more or less known to you. I am prosperous enough, so far as this
world’s goods go. But I am tired of living----”
I stopped short, and stared in turn blankly at the mock coals. A
freezing thought had just thrust itself into the marrow of my brain. She
would think that I was saying all this because her father had regained
and augmented his fortune. I strove in a numb, puzzled way to retrace
what I had just uttered--to see if the words offered any chance of
getting away upon other ground--and could not remember at all.
“Tired of living,” I heard Ermyntrude echo. I saw her nod her head
comprehendingly in the firelight. She sighed.
“Yes, except upon conditions,” I burst forth. “I weary of living alone.
There hasn’t been a time for years when I didn’t long to tell you
this--and most of all at Clacton, if I had known you were at Clacton.
You have admitted yourself that _nobody_ knew you were there.” The words
came more easily now. “But always before I shrank from speaking. There
was something about you too childlike, too innocent, too--too----”
“Too silly,” suggested Ermie, with an affable effect of helping me out.
Then she unlocked her fingers, and, still looking into the fire,
stretched out a hand backward to me. “All the same,” she murmured, after
a little, “it isn’t an answer to my question, you know.”
“But it is to mine!” I made glad response, “and in my question all the
others are enwrapped--always have been, always will be. And, oh, darling
one----”
“That is mamma in the hall,” said Ermyntrude.
_Describing Impressions of a Momentous Interview, loosely gathered by
One who, although present, was not quite In it_
Mrs Albert has smiled upon my suit to be her son-in-law.
The smile did not, however, gush forth spontaneously at the outset. When
the opportunity for imparting our great news came, we three were in the
drawing-room, and Mrs Albert, who had just entered, had been allowed to
discover me holding Ermyntrude’s passive hand in mine. She cast a swift
little glance over us both, and seemed not to like what she saw. I
was conscious of the impression on the instant that Ermyntrude did not
particularly like it either. An effect of profound isolation, absurd
enough, but depressingly real, suddenly encompassed me. I began talking
something--the words coming out and scattering quite on their own
incoherent account--and the gist of what they made me say sounded in my
ears as if it were a determined enemy who was saying it Why should I be
speaking of my age, and the fact that I had held Ermie on my knee as a
child, and even of my rheumatism? And did I actually allude to them?
or only hear the clamorous echoes of conscience in my guilty soul, the
while my tongue was uttering other matters? I don’t know, and the fear
that Ermie would admit that she really hadn’t been paying attention has
restrained me from asking her since.
But Mrs Albert was paying attention. She held me with a cool and
unblinking eye during my clumsy monologue, and she continued this steady
gaze for a time after I had finished. She stirred the small and shapely
headgear of black velvet and bird’s-wing which she had worn in from
the street, just by the fraction of a forward inch, to show that she
understood what I had been saying--and also very much which I had left
unsaid.
“Hm--m!” the good lady remarked, at length. “I see!”
“Well, mamma, having seen,” Ermyntrude turned languidly in her chair to
observe, lifting the hand which still rested within mine into full and
patent view, and then withdrawing it abruptly--“having seen, and been
seen, there’s really nothing more to do, is there?”
“She is very young,” said the mother, in a tentative musing manner which
suggested the thought that I, on the other hand, was very much the other
way.
Ermyntrude sniffed audibly, and rose to her feet. “I am
three-and-twenty,” she said, “and that is enough, thank you.” There was
something in it all which I did not understand. The sensation of being
out of place, as in the trying-on room of a dressmaker’s, oppressed me.
The sex were effecting sundry manouvres and countermarchings peculiar to
themselves--so much I could see by the way in which the two were talking
with their eyes--hut what it was all about was beyond me. The mother
finally inclined her head to one side, and pursed together her lips.
Ermyntrude drew herself to her full stature, threw up her chin for a
moment like one of Albert Moore’s superb full-throated goddesses, and
then relaxed with that half-cheerful sigh which we express in types
with “heigho!” It was at once apparent to me that the situation had
lightened--but how or why I cannot profess to guess. Uncle Dudley, to
whom I subsequently narrated what I had observed, abounded in theories,
but upon reflection they do not impress, much less convince, me. Here
is in substance one of the several hypothetical conversations which
he sketched out as having passed in that moment of pre-occupied and
surcharged silence:
Mother [_lowering brows_]. You may be sure that at the very best it will
be Bayswater.
Daughter [_with quiver of nostrils_]. Better that than hanging on for a
Belgravia which never comes.
Mother [_disclosing the tips of two teeth_]. It is a chance of a title
going for ever.