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CHAPTER III
I HAVE forced George’s hand, so I am told, and neither he nor mother take any notice of me.
But Aunt Gerty hugged me all over when she heard what I had done, and scolded Mother for not being nice to me.
“I don’t see why you need put that poor child in Coventry?” she said. “You had more need to be grateful to her than not. How much longer was it going to go on, I want to know? Hiding away his lawful wife like an old Bluebeard, and me Sister Anne boiling over and wanting to call it all from the house-tops!”
“Well, Gerty, you seem to have got it a bit mixed!” said Mother. “But, talking of Bluebeard, I always envied the first Mrs. B. the lots of cupboard room she must have had! I wonder if she was a hoarder, like me, who never have the heart to throw anything away? If I do happen to see the plans for the new house, I will speak up for lots of cupboards, and that is all I care about.”
“See the plans! Why, of course you will! Isn’t it your right? You must make a point of seeing them and putting your word in. Look after your own comfort in this world or you will jolly well find yourself out in the cold, and ‘specially with a husband like you’ve got!”
“Bother moving!” said Mother, in her dreary way that comes when she has been overdoing it, as she has lately. “It is an odious wrench; just like having all one’s teeth out at once.”
“Hadn’t need! Yours are just beautiful. One of your points, Lucy, and don’t you forget it.”
“The life here suited me well enough; I had got used to it, I suppose.”
“You can get used to something bad, can’t you, but that’s no reason you are not to welcome a change? Oh, you’ll like the new life that’s to be spent up-stairs in the daylight, above-board like, instead of this kind of ‘behind the scenes’ you have been doing for eighteen years. And a pretty woman still, for so you are. Cheer up! You are going to get new scenery, new dresses, new backcloth–”
“You see everything through the stage, Gerty. I must say it irritates one sometimes, especially now, when–”
“I know what you mean. No offence, my dear old sis. And you can depend on me not to be bringing the smell of the footlights, as they call it—it’s the only truly pleasant smell there is, to my idea!—into your fine new house. Pity but He can’t get a little whiff of it into his comedies, and some manager would see his way to putting them on, perhaps? No, beloved, me and George don’t cotton to each other, nor never shall. He isn’t my sort. I like a man that is a man, not a society baa-lamb! Baa! I’ve no patience with such–”
“Sh’, Gerty. You seem to forget his child sitting messing away with her paints in a corner so quietly there!”
That was me. Aunt Gerty stopped a minute, and then they went on just the same.
“We have never minded the child yet” (which was true), “and I don’t see why we should begin now. Tempe is getting quite a woman and able to hold her tongue when needful. And she knows her way about her precious father well enough. What you’ve to think of now, Lucy, is getting your hands white, and the marks of sewing and cooking off. Lemons and pumice! Cream’s good, too. You have been George Taylor’s upper servant too long—Gracious, who’s that at the front-door?”
Aunt Gerty nearly knocked me over in her rush to the window. We were all three sitting in the front bedroom, which is George’s, when he is at home, and Mother had been washing my hair. It was a dreadfully hot day—a dog-day, only we haven’t any dogs, but the kittens were tastefully arranged in the spare wash-basin all round the jug for coolness. They had put themselves there. We humans had got very little clothes on, partly for heat and also having got out of the habit of dressing in the afternoons, for no callers ever came to The Magnolias. But there were some now. There was a big, two-horsed thing at the door such as I have often seen driving out to Hampton Court, but never, never had I seen one stop at our gate before. It was most exciting. I hoped Jessie Hitchings and her mother saw.
There were two ladies inside, one of them old and frumpy, the other was Lady Scilly, whom I knew, though Mother didn’t. I haven’t got to her yet in my story. A footman was taking their orders, and Sarah was standing at the door holding on to her cap that she’d forgotten to put a pin in. Lucky she had a cap on at all! Mother doesn’t like her to leave her caps off to go to the door, even when George isn’t here, out of principle, and for once it told.
“For goodness sake get your head in, Gerty, you have got the shade a bit too strong to-day,” cried Mother, pulling my aunt in by her petticoats, and nearly upsetting the mirror on the dressing-table. Aunt Gerty came in with a cross grunt, and we all sat well inside till we heard the carriage drive away and Sarah mounting the stairs all of a hop, skip and a jump.
“Please m’m!” she cried almost before she got into the room, “there’s a carriage-and-pair just called–”
“Anything in it?” Mother said.
“Two ladies, m’m, and here’s their cards.”
I took one and Aunt Gerty the other.
“Dowager Countess of Fylingdales!” Aunt Gerty read, as if she was Lady Macbeth saying, “Out, dammed spot!”
The card I held was for Lady Scilly, and there was one for Lord Scilly, but it had got under the drawers.
“I said you wasn’t dressed, ma’am,” Sarah said, looking at Mother’s apron all over egg, and her rolled-up sleeves.
“No more I am,” said Mother, laughing. “Don’t look so disappointed, Gerty. I couldn’t have seen them.”
“But you shouldn’t have said your mistress wasn’t dressed, Sarah,” said Aunt Gerty. “It isn’t done like that in good houses. You should have said, ‘My mistress is gone out in the carriage.’”
“But that would have been a lie!” argued Sarah, “and I’m sure I don’t want to go to hell even for a carriage-and-pair.”
“Oh, where have you been before, Sarah,” Aunt Gerty sighed, “not to know that a society lie can’t let any one in for hell fire? Well, it is too late now; they have gone. And it was rather a shabby turnout for aristocratic swells like that, after all.”
“They didn’t really want to see me,” said Mother. “They only called on me to please George. He sent them probably. I have heard him speak of Lady Fylingdales. He stays there. She is one of his oldest friends. She is lame and nearly blind. Lady Scilly I shall never like from what I have heard of her. Tempe, run in the garden in the sun and dry your hair. Off you go!”
“And get a sunstroke,” thought I. “Just because she wants to talk to Aunt Gerty about the grand callers!”
So I stayed, and they have got so in the habit of not minding me that they went on as if I really had been out broiling in the sun.
Mother began to talk very fast about the new house, and getting visiting-cards printed, and taking her place in Society. These ladies coming had given her thoughts a fresh jog. She nearly cried over the bother of it all, and what George would now go expecting of her, and she with no education and no ambition to be a smart woman, as Aunt Gerty was continually egging her on to be, saying it was quite easy if you only had a nice slight figure, like she has.
“Bead chains and pince-nezs won’t do it as you seem to think,” Mother said. “And even if I get to be smart, I shall never get to be happy!”
“Happy!” screamed my Aunt Gertrude. “Who talked of being happy? You don’t go expecting to be happy, unless it makes you happy, as it ought, to put your foot down on those stuck-up cats who have been leading your husband astray all these years, and giving them a good what-for. It would me, that’s all I can say. Happiness indeed! It is something higher than mere happiness. What you have got to do, my dear Lucy, is just to take your call and go on—not before you’ve had a trip to Paris for your clothes, though—and show them all what a pretty woman George Taylor’s despised wife is. There’s an object to live for! That’s your ticket, and you’ve got it. He married you for your looks, now, didn’t he?”
“Nothing else,” said Mother sadly.
“Nonsense! Weren’t you—aren’t you as good as he? You are the daughter of a respectable Irish clergyman. Whose daughter—I mean son—is he? A French tailor’s, I expect. You married him eighteen years ago in Putney Parish Church by special licence, when he was nothing and nobody cared whom or what he married. Little flighty, undersized foreign-looking creature! You have been a good wife to him, borne his children, nursed him when he was ill, and kept a house going for him to come back to when he was tired of the others, and if it’s been done on the sly, it hasn’t been through any will of yours! And now that the matter has been taken out of his hands, and a good thing too, and he’s obliged to leave off his dirty little tricks and own you, and send his grand friends to call on you, and build a nice house to put you in, you want to back out and hide yourself—lose your chance once for all and for ever! You are good-looking, your children are sweet—you’ll soon catch them all up, and then you can be as haughty and stuck-up as the rest of them. If it is me you are thinking of, I shan’t trouble you—I have my work and I mean to stick to it!”
“I shall never disown you, Gerty.”
“No, I dare say not, but I shan’t put myself in the way of a snub. I’ve got one thing that’s been very useful to me in this life—that’s tact. I shan’t make a nasty row or a talk, but you’ll not see more of me than you want to. I’m a lady—I’ll never let anybody deny that—but I’ve knocked about the world a bit, and it’s a rough place, and that soft dainty manner people admire so, rubs off pretty soon fighting one’s own battles. The aristocracy can afford to keep it on. Clothes does it, largely. Where you’re wearing chiffon, I’ll be wearing linen, that’s the diff. Now I’m off—‘on’ first act and share a dresser with three other cats, where there isn’t room to swing one. Ta-ta! I’m not as vulgar as you think!”
She put on her picture-hat carefully with sixteen pins in it, and went away. Mother asked me why I hadn’t been drying my hair in the garden all this time? Because I wanted to hear what Aunt Gerty had to say, I answered, and Mother accepted the explanation. But now I went and found a cool place and meditated on my sins.
I am not what is called a strictly naughty child. I am too busy. Satan never need bother about me or find mischief for me to do, for my hands are never idle, and I can generally find it for myself.
On the eventful morning that decided our fate three weeks before this incident, I was in the drawing-room, where we hardly ever sit, making devils with George’s name with the ink out of the best inkstand. I spilt it. Why do these things happen? It is the fault of fatality.
There is nothing I hate more than the sickening smell of spilt ink, or rather, the soapy rags they chose to rub it up with, so I went up to my room quietly intending to get my hat and go out till it had blown over, or rather soaked in. Sarah was there, tidying or something, and she said immediately, “Now whatever have you been up to?” I told her that the word “ever” was quite surplus in that sentence, and that George objected to it strongly. Thus I got away from her, wishing I had a less expressive face.
I found myself in the street without an object. I have got beyond the age of runaway rings, thank goodness, but they did use to amuse me, till one day an old gentleman got hold of me and went on about the length of kitchen stairs generally, and the shortness of cooks’ legs, and the cruel risk of things boiling over. He changed my heart. So this day I just walked along to a motor-car, that I saw at the end of the next street but one, standing in front of the “Milliner’s Arms,” with nobody in it. I expected the man was having a drink, for it was piping hot. I got into the car and sat down, and just put my hand on the twirly-twirly thing in front, considering if I should set the car going. It was the very first time I had ever been in a motor in my life, and I simply hadn’t the heart to miss the chance.
A lady came out of the Public. I never saw anything so pretty, and her dress was all billowy, like the little fluffy clouds we call Peter’s sheep in a blue sky, and the hem of it was covered with sawdust off the public-house floor. Yet I can’t say she looked at all tipsy.
“I wanted a pick-me-up so badly, I just had to go in and get it.” She said this in an apologizing sort of way, while I was just wondering how I should explain my presence in her car. She settled that for me, by saying with a little sweet smile, “Well, you pretty child, how do you like my motor-car?”
“It is the first time I–”
“Oh, of course! Would you like to be in one while it is on the move?”
I confessed I should, and she jumped in beside me, saying, “Sit still, then, child!” and moved the crissy-cross starfish thing in front, and we were off.
Mercy, what a rate! Policemen seemed to hold up their hands in amazement at us, and she looked pleased and flattered. We drove on and on, past the Hounslow turning, through miles of nursery gardens and then miles of slums, till at last the houses got smarter and bigger, and I guessed this was the part of London where George lives, only I did not ask questions. I hardly ever do. I did see a clock once, and I saw it was nearly our lunch time. I realized that I had missed rice-pudding for once, and was glad. She talked all the way along, and I listened. I find that is what people like, for she kept telling me that I was a nice child, and that she thought she should run away with me.
“You are running away with me,” I said.
“And you don’t care a bit, you very imperturbable atom! I think I shall take you home with me to luncheon. You amuse me.”
She amused me. She was a darling—so gay, so light, as if she didn’t care about anything, and had never had a stomach-ache in her whole life. If George’s high-up friends are like this, I don’t wonder he prefers them to Aunt Gerty. Mother can be as amusing as anybody,—I am not going to try to take Mother down—but even she can’t pretend she is happy as this woman seemed to be. She was like champagne,—the very dry kind George opens a bottle of when he is down, and gives Mother and me a whole glassful between us.
We were quite in a town now, and on a soft pavement made of wood, like my bedroom floor. The streets, oddly enough, grew grander and narrower. She told me about the houses as we went along.
“That is where my uncle, the Duke of Frocester, lives,” she said, and pointed to a kind of grey tomb, with a paved courtyard in a very tiny street. I knew that name—the name of the man George stays and shoots with—but of course I didn’t say anything. Then we passed a funny little house in a smaller street called after a chapel, and there was a fanlight over the door, and a great extinguisher thing on the railings.
“You have no idea what a lovely place that is inside,” she told me. “A great friend of mine lives there, and pulled it about. He took out all the inside of the house, and made false walls to the rooms. One of them has just the naked bricks and mortar showing, but then the mortar is all gilt. He always has quantities of flowers, great arum lilies shining in the gloom, and oleanders in pots, and stunted Japanese trees. He gives heavenly tea-parties and little suppers after the play. He writes plays, but somehow they have never been acted that I know of? Bachelors always do you so well. I declare, if I wasn’t going to see him this very afternoon at my club, I would go in and surprise him, now that I have got you with me, you little elf! You have certainly got the widest open eyes I ever saw. He is probably in there now, working at his little table in the window, getting up the notes for his lecture, so we should put him out abominably. I will take you to the lecture instead. And remind me to lend you one of his books,—that is, if your mother allows you to read novels.”
I explained to her that I was a little off novels, as my father kept us on them.
“Oh, does he? How interesting! I love authors! You must introduce him to me some day. Bring him to one of my literary teas. I always make a point of raising an author or so for the afternoon. It pleases my crowd so, far better than music and recitations, and played-out amusements of that kind; and then one doesn’t have to pay them. They are only too glad to come and get paid in kind looks that cost nothing. The queerer they are, the more people believe in them. I used to have Socialists, but really they were too dirty! Some authors now are quite smart, and wear their hair no longer than Lord Scilly, or so very little longer. Now, there is Morrell Aix, the man who wrote The Laundress. I took him up, but he had been obliged, he said, to live in the slums for two years to get up his facts, and you could have grown mustard and cress on the creases of his collar. And I do think, considering the advertisement he gave them, the laundresses might have taken more trouble with the poor man’s shirts!”
I knew Mr. Aix, of course, and I have often seen Mother take the clothes-brush to him, but I said nothing, for I like to show I can hold my tongue. Knowledge is power, if it’s ever so unimportant. We didn’t go far from the house with walls like stopped teeth, before she pulled up at another rather smart little door in a street called Curzon.
“Here we are at my place, and there’s Simmy Hermyre on the doorstep waiting to be asked to lunch.”
It was a nice clean house with green shutters and lovely lace curtains at the windows, that Ariadne would have been glad of for a dress, all gathered and tucked and made to fit the sash as if it had been a person. The young man standing at the front door had a coat with a waist, and a nice clean face, and a collar that wouldn’t let him turn his head quickly. He helped us out, and she laughed at him as if he was hers.
“Are you under the impression that I have asked you to lunch? Why, I don’t suppose there is any!”
Imagine her saying that when she had brought me all the way from Isleworth to have it! I didn’t, of course, say anything, and she made me go in, and the young man followed us, quite calm, although she had said there wasn’t anything for him to eat.
“I would introduce you to this person” (I thought it so nice of her not to stick on the offensive words little or young!) “only it strikes me I don’t know her name.” She didn’t ask it, but went on, “It’s a most original little creature, and amused me more in an hour than you have in a year, my dear boy!”
Now, had I said anything particularly amusing? I hadn’t tried, and I do think you should leave off calling children “it” after the first six months. Mothers hate it. Still, though I didn’t think her quite polite, I told her my name—Tempe Vero-Taylor—in a low voice so that she could introduce me to her great friend, as we were going to lunch at the same table. I thought there wouldn’t be a children’s table, as she didn’t speak of children, and I was glad, for children eat like pigs and have no conversation.
Her eyebrows went up and her mouth went down, but she soon buttoned up her lips again, though they stayed open at the corners, and didn’t introduce me to Mr. Hermyre at all. I didn’t suppose I should ever meet him again, so it didn’t matter.
We went in and had lunch, and it was quite a grand lunch, hot, and as much again cold on a side-table. But I was actually offered rice-pudding! I wouldn’t have believed it, in a house like this. I refused rather curtly, but she ate it, and very little else. I generally take water at home, but I did not see why I shouldn’t taste champagne when I had the chance, and I took a great deal, quite a full glass full, and when I had taken it, I felt as if I could fight a lion. George often says when he comes back from London that he has been fighting with wild beasts at Ephesus. I wondered if I might not meet some this afternoon at the lecture at the Go-ahead Club? Lady Scilly (that’s her name) said she must take me, and I knew I should be bored, but I couldn’t very well say no.
“You may come too, Simmy,” she said to the young man; “it will be exciting, I can promise you!”
“Not if I know it,” he said. Then he tried to be kind and said, “What is the lecture about?”
“The Uses of Fiction.”
“None, that I can see, except to provide some poor devil with an income.”
“That’s a man’s view.”
“It is,” he said, “a man, and not a monkey’s. You don’t call your literary crowd men, do you?”
I was just wondering what he did call them, when Lady Scilly shut him up, and I thought she looked at me. Presently he went on—
“You’re quite spoiling your set, you know, Paquerette. I used to enjoy your receptions.”
“I don’t see why you should permit yourself to abuse my set because you’re a fifth cousin. That’s the worst of being well connected, so many people think they have the right to lecture one!”
“All the better for you, my dear! Do you suppose now, that if you were not niece to a duke and cousin to a marquis, that Society would allow you to fill your house with people like Morrell Aix and Mrs. Ptomaine and Ve–”
Lady Scilly jumped up and said she must go and dress, and if he wouldn’t come to the lecture he must go, and pushed me out of the room in front of her and on up-stairs.
“Good-bye!” she called to him over the bannisters. “Let yourself out, and don’t steal the spoons.”
That was a funny thing to say to a friend, not to say a relation! We went up into her bedroom, and her old nurse—I suppose it was her nurse, for she wore no cap and bullied her like anything—came forward.
“Put me into another gown, Miller!” she said, flopping into a chair. Miller did, putting the skirt over her head as if she had been a child, and even pulling her stockings up for her. Then she had a try at tidying me.
“Don’t bother. The child’s all right. She’s so pretty she can wear anything.”
I think personal remarks rude even if she does think me pretty, but I said nothing. She looked at herself very hard in the glass, and we went down-stairs and got into the motor again. Lady Scilly sat with her hand in mine, and a funny little spot of red on the top of the bone of her cheek that I hadn’t noticed there before. It was real.
