Chapter V: Part 5

To-morrow I am going to begin on the first portrait. You will probably say that it is unnecessary to have any sittings at all, as with a grain of imagination it would be easy to paint a portrait that would fit any commercial gentleman. But I am beginning to know something about the species and to recognize differences between them, just as my particular one knows a difference between grains of corn. Of course, in many things there is a certain uniformity between him and others of his kind. His house, for instance, is like the houses of his friends, but that is partly because bad architecture is a sort of head-and-hand disease which breaks out in some architect’s office and spreads rapidly to others. A man gets a bad house in his head, and the design is carried from one town to another until people get used to living in bad houses just as they once got used to being marked with small-pox, and very few of them have the intelligence and the technical knowledge to invent a cure even if they have the time or the money. Naturally, good houses are built sometimes, but their architects are probably in a state of moral health that can only be transmitted by the slower process of breeding. It does not seem to be contagious. I wish that somebody would investigate the pathology of taste.

Neither are my sitter’s habits altogether peculiar to himself, because of the borrowing propensities of his womenkind. He has not the time nor the energy, when he gets home in the evening, to think out what he wants, therefore he exercises his personal taste at the office, and borrows comfortably, like the others, when he is at home. I hope you understand all this stuff about borrowing; I know that we have all got to live on other people, but while it seems suitable to borrow a neighbour’s fowl if we eat it up and it is made into blood and muscle and energy, yet it is merely disgusting to swallow it whole and then treat it as the whale treated Jonah. I have been living lately in drawing-rooms that are strewn with conversational Jonahs.

But there are bits of the man which are quite his own, and these bits he keeps in town. Every day at five o’clock he hangs up his individuality on a nail behind his office door, and when he comes home he slips on an easy suit of tastes provided for him by his wife. What a revolution there would be if he once brought home the creature whom he hangs up at the office! He knows good from bad there; he is not imposed upon by meaningless phrases; he can conceive a fine scheme, and is master of the technical details necessary to its perfection. I believe that his honesty and shrewdness would teach him discrimination in the things which he buys for his house, but the poor man is too tired to fight the battle of honesty both against thieves abroad and against his wife at home, so he gladly accepts any opinions upon unimportant subjects so long as they admit of comfortable arm-chairs and are not too expensive.

Now and then he indulges in one of his natural vices, as, for instance, when he allowed himself to enjoy the over-ripe melons and choir boys of my pictures, although he knew quite well that his wife would rather have commissioned some one equally bad but with a safer reputation. In this case he had enough support from Bessie and her friends to make it possible for him to indulge his taste without appearing absolutely eccentric. So now I think you know why I am here.

He met me himself at the station, with the small car, not the Rolls-Royce. It is about twenty minutes rattle out to Holly Park, where he lives. “Longmoor” is the name of the house. I noticed it on the fragile gatepost as we squeezed and scraped up to the front door, just missing the lobelias. A butler came out, looking exceedingly angry. I have seen inscrutable, wooden servants, and rough, loutish servants, and flighty, silly servants, but I never before saw permanently angry servants, such as they keep in Millport. The creatures are quite good-tempered when you get to know them; the anger is just a trade-mark to show that they are the genuine, old, tawny Millport, and would sooner give a month’s notice than put up with something--I have not yet discovered what! One imagines that a certain amount of abstract indignation is necessary to them in the same way as a parrot requires chillies in its food. It may be difficult to digest “the best families,” unless one is indignant with everybody who differs from them.

There was a tremendous barking when we arrived; a dog barking in just the same tone of voice as the butler looked. I could hear it shrieking: “What’s this? What’s it all about? Who said so? Who has come? What are they for? Don’t let them in! I shall have to hear something first before I can give an opinion!”

When the animal appeared, I thought him less like a dog than an imitation of one; he ought to have had green wheels and a flannel tongue. He is a priggish little thing, who knows when there are peas for dinner, and expects to be asked to beg at tea-time, instead of being ashamed of his tricks, like a decent dog. He is, actually, offended if no one asks him to make a fool of himself. I know he thinks that all ladies ought to like to see a little dog beg so nicely--it ought to make them laugh. I always smoke in his face when he does it, which I wouldn’t do to any other dog; but he maddens me. The merchant threw down his hat wearily, snapped his fingers at “Punch,” as the little beast is called, looked through the letters that were on the hall table, and then asked for his wife. She was in the garden, and there we found her sitting among the remains of tea, struggling with an acrostic in some magazine. The angry butler caught up the teapot, as if it had made a face at him, and bore it off to refill it, evidently against both its wish and his.

Mrs. Merchant has a great deal of a certain quality, definite enough, but for which I know of no name, which is in part natural goodness and, in part, only a queenlike unawareness. Whatever it is, it reacts on some submerged part of my character, and produces in me a sort of street arab whom I do not recognize. You know that I am not fast nor vicious nor dishonest, only an ordinary person enjoying life, yet with this woman I feel like Eve after the Fall. I rush helter-skelter from every topic of conversation, covering my harmless, natural thoughts with platitudes. Some serpent has told her that I have an “artistic temperament,” and I see her straining her mind, enough to rupture it, in efforts to appear “understanding.” I am supposed to know how many pictures Lord Leighton painted, and what are “the things to admire” in the Academy--“all the nice, out-of-the-way things,” she calls them. I told her once that I should like to draw the huffy butler, and she said it had never occurred to her that he was picturesque, but perhaps I was right, and what costume would I like to “do” him in.

Now, please do not remind me that a moment ago I was blaming these people for covering their instinctive thoughts of kindness, and that I spoke contemptuously of uniforms and tea-trays, while I now confess to covering my own thoughts with platitudes. The truth is that this is the most self-conscious household I ever was in, and when I see them all rushing for covert, of course I catch the panic without knowing what is the matter. Then, when all is calm, I get very angry at seeing myself and them tightly wrapped in moral shawls of one kind or another. The sight of the others’ shawls makes me conscious of my own, and I begin to tickle all over and fidget with annoyance.

We had such a good dinner! _Vol-au-vents_, and _mousses_, and _soufflés_, with ice inside them, and such horrid coffee! Mrs. Merchant lit a cigarette afterwards, spluttering when she got any smoke, and chewing the end to ribbons; not as a hospitable fiction, for she did not begin until after I had finished; but she says she likes an occasional cigarette. You do not smoke, I know, but you have fifteen love-affairs a week, so I can explain the absurdity of the occasional cigarette in terms that you will understand, by saying that it is as if some one told you she did so enjoy being made love to, now and then--about once a year--by a really nice old gentleman with a bald head, so long as he did not attempt to kiss her.

Some people came to dinner that evening. I had forgotten to tell you, being so busy about the food and tobacco. I shall call every one whom I meet here--including the Merchants--by the name of whatever they look like, because then you can tell that inquisitive Bessie, if she asks you, that you do not know whom I have met. She enjoys everything too much for it to be quite right to describe people by name to her. She stores things in her mind, and brings out plums for her guests in a way that is more hospitable than discreet.

I shall call the people who came Mr. and Mrs. Ritz-Trotter, Miss Darling, and Mr. Friseur. I am always puzzled as to how the Mr. Ritz-Trotters get wives. They are all right in an office, or on a board, or as butlers, or in any kind of man’s work (except soldiering, or sailoring, or diplomacy). But why does anyone want such a person in the house to keep? If one had dozens of husbands, it would be useful to have one Mr. Ritz-Trotter to manage the shares, and tell one where to sign things; but as we are limited to one, it seems such a waste of a unique opportunity to choose that sort. When Mr. Ritz-Trotter was young, he can, at best, only have been like Mr. Friseur, who looks to me altogether a bad egg so far as companionship is concerned.

I have called the young one Friseur, because he is like a hairdresser’s assistant, though that is, perhaps, scarcely fair on the hairdressing profession.

Personally, I do not like the chatty young man at Beau’s, who tells me that my hair is a very dressy colour, and that Blackpool is likely to be full this year; but at least he has a definite nervous system and vertebræ, so that he can jump about. I expect he will develop some day into a cheery old person, whereas Mr. Friseur, who is only in the first stage of becoming a Mr. Ritz-Trotter, will go on getting more and more depressing.

Women like Mrs. Ritz-Trotter are wonderfully adaptable. I think that if she were taken away now and given to a pirate, the natural fidelity and cheerfulness that keep her attached to her husband would turn her into a very attractive woman. But to acquire any decorative value these gems of character have to be cut by a life of more active horror than her present one. She was dressed last night in very expensive clothes, just enough like those of the _demi-monde_ to be thought up to date, but not sufficiently like them to scare her magnate, who is as conscious of the habits of such ladies as a jelly-fish is aware of the presence of titbits on the shore, even if they are not actually within his reach.

Mr. Friseur took me into dinner, and tired me so much that I was obliged to drink champagne, which is always bad for me. You know those dreadful things called Sparklets? You can shoot them into anything, and make it fizz--“aerate” is the proper word. If you can imagine aerated mutton--sparkling mutton--you will know what that young man’s conversation was like. I could see it, in my mind’s eye, advertised as “Friseur’s Frisky Food for Fascinating Females.” It got up my nose and stodged my spiritual digestion at the same time. When I let loose any pleasant fancy, he became sentimental; and when, just to restore his balance, I talked about bishops, and asked him to pass the mustard, his ideas frothed clumsily, and he said that he didn’t know artists went to church--and wasn’t mustard bad for the palette! I know he was trying to please me, poor thing, and that I was very ungrateful and nasty; but I felt all the time that he was really resorting to the device of the curlew, who utters shrill cries to divert the attention of a harmless traveller from its nest. He was trying to prevent me from remembering that he had had a respectable commercial home and upbringing. If young men in business had more outdoor pursuits, they would easily see in proper proportion such a trifle as their own origin. It is sitting on an office stool that makes people begin to wish that they were descended from a long line of Vikings. Miss Darling, I find, loves the silly thing, and intends to marry him. She is a simple person with a heart of velvet, and she will grow old with her hairdresser, taking him out to dinner three times a week, seeing the sparkle subside and the mutton grow tough. She will have, probably, about three sententious, knock-kneed little boys, and one anæmic, over-dressed little girl, and will end her days in a house three times as large as the one in which she began housekeeping. There ought to be a larger kind of men who prey upon and eat hairdressers.

I will write next week, and continue the story of what a journalist would call “A lady artist’s plucky attempt to disarm Provincials.”

Yours ever,
GEORGINA.

_CHAPTER XVI_

“LONGMOOR,” MILLPORT.

My dear Louise,--I have nearly finished Mr. Merchant’s portrait. I showed it to him yesterday for the first time, and it apparently “proves satisfactory,” so I shall very likely be here for weeks. He gives me two hours sitting every day, which, I am beginning to realize, is a remarkable thing for a business man to do. It is almost the first time in his life, except during the inevitable August, that he has not left his house at a quarter to nine every morning. But he has been ill, and I think that he intends, sooner or later, to retire from business and live away from town, as this is what they all aspire to. In the meantime he is only allowed to work for a few hours at a time, so he has taken the opportunity to have his portrait painted and so fill up the leisure which might otherwise hang heavy on his hands.

He went off this morning at eleven, and I worked on without him until luncheon. Then I was shown some more of the social machinery of Millport; that part of it which decides in what mood the fighting apparatus shall begin its day’s work--a very important matter, if you come to think of it. Mrs. Merchant had a party of women representing different sections of society, and, so far as I could judge, they did not seem to be working quite in unison. The only one whom I knew was Miss Darling, who is a great friend of Mrs. Merchant’s and comes to everything. There was also a fat, elderly thing, in a satin coat and skirt, plumed hat and boa, besides a prettier edition of Mrs. Merchant, dressed in tweeds, which are the uniform of the more distant suburbs and indicate the magic word “county”; and last of all, like a French squirrel in a hurry, murmuring some domestic apology, the wife of a professor at the University.

You know how, in any town which is given up to a University, even the bald-faced old women with hair like charwomen’s, who stamp through their social duties with the corsetless aplomb of the born moralizer, are recognized as forming a sort of aristocracy in keeping with the spirit of the place. But here all the academic flowers, good and bad alike, are looked upon as interlopers. I have heard many of the _vieillesse dorée_ of Millport lump them together indiscriminately as “peculiar” and “too clever for us.” If I had my way I would make it criminal libel to apply the word “clever” to any persons but those who have been found guilty of attempted intelligence. The Romans are spoken of in history books as having brought the blessing of education to the untutored savages of ancient Britain. But I can imagine the snuffy look on the faces of the female aristocracy in woad when the high-browed matrons of Rome landed among them, armed with copy-books. You may see the same look spread over a party of Millport Druids and their wives when the University is mentioned.

I don’t think that everybody by nature likes being educated. Improvement is forced on some by others who have an inherent morbid craving for it, and when the victims have been compelled to accept it, they behave as the fox who was accidentally deprived of his tail behaved to his friends who had escaped the misfortune. The foxes of Millport are, one by one, losing their tails. The old-fashioned appendages of fat and fur no longer command general respect among the neighbours; yet the fashion dies hard. All the same, how pleasant a few little feathery tails, sewn with sequins, would be in Oxford or Cambridge, would they not? It is so tiresome when people insist on all trying to be one particular thing.

But to go on with the luncheon-party. The fat elderly fox was invited to lead the way to the dining-room, and she gave the impression that if she had not been asked to lead the way she would have led it of her own accord. She has such an expressive back; it seems to be waiting impatiently for other people to do right, yet almost hoping they won’t, so that she may have the pleasure of correcting them. Mrs. County followed next, with the good-natured politeness of a Prime Minister sent in to dinner behind a knight; the French squirrel smiled at us and went after them, and Miss Darling and I scuffled amiably in the doorway over Mrs. Merchant’s toes.

The hostess’s task was a difficult one, but she showed wonderful tact. She was conscious of having at her table two persons who represented the established authority of commerce and landed property (even if it is only a couple of fields and a carriage sweep for flies to drive up). Opposed to these were two others, one of whom (myself) belonged to a community whose wildness and eccentricity, it was rumoured, knew no bounds, while the other (from the University) was associated with certain unintelligible heathens who were said to “poke fun” at the idols of Mrs. Bushytail, Mrs. County and herself. Miss Darling, she knew, could be relied upon to interpose her soft form as a cushion if anybody took to throwing anything: still it was anxious work.

“The trees are quite losing their leaves, are they not?” began Miss Darling, unfolding her napkin. It was like the tuning up of the violins before the rise of the curtain. I tried to tune up too, but no words would come. Do you remember how Dick told us that he sometimes could think of nothing to say but, “Do you wear drawers in autumn?” The trees reminded me of it.

“Yes, aren’t they, dreadfully?” said Mrs. Merchant. “It is quite sad.” We had some more tuning up, Mrs. Bushytail (I still refuse to give you their real names because you and Bessie are too unreliable) taking the part of the drum.

“Ahem! B-r-r-r-r-r-um!” she coughed. “It is quite impossible to count on the seasons at all in these days. They are all at sixes and sevens. Such warm weather at this time of year cannot be healthy.”

Mrs. County gave us a few languid runs on the French horn, foreshadowing her _leit motif_, the West Cheddar pack, with whom she hunts now and then. She said that frosts were of no value to anyone except plumbers, and that now everybody found Christmas such a bore, it seemed hardly worth while having snow and all that sort of thing, except that it made an occupation for the poor wretches in town to shovel it away. It kept them in the fresh air instead of stewing at home all day.

Perhaps Mrs. Merchant thought that the tuning up was getting too discordant, for she collected us with her eye and gave out the hymn of Literature. You see, literature is such a good subject, because it can never get hackneyed (with so many books coming out each year), and everybody is sure to have read something. Sooner or later Mrs. Bushytail’s voice makes itself heard above any babel. She had the upper hand of us in a moment, and discussion lay dead beside her plate. One would suppose that the _raison d’être_ of human speech was to further exchanges of opinion, but Mrs. Bushytail pursues this intention with relentless ferocity as if were moral vermin.

“No interesting books are written nowadays,” she said, giving a final throttle to our already extinct debate. “They seem all nonsense about heredity and character, and things of that sort. That doesn’t make evil any better. If people had larger families there would be bound to be some good children among the lot, and the others would soon find their level.”

Miss Darling interposed her velvet heart between further severity and us.

“You ought to read some of George Birmingham’s books,” she said bravely. “They are so amusing, and not a bit morbid.”

“I have read one,” flourished the old lady, “and I never met with greater nonsense in my life. Most impossible rubbish. I know numbers of Irish people, and they are indolent and dreamy, with an immense respect for England. I never heard of any of them poking fun at our Members of Parliament, and that sort of thing, and they were all far too idle to think of going on ridiculous adventures. What do you think, Mrs. Cambridge? Your husband is an authority on literature I am told.” This was no more an invitation to discussion than is the spider’s lure the bidding of a genial host, but Mrs. Cambridge is far from ingenuous.

“We both liked some of them,” she said quietly, “but then my husband is Irish, you know, so you must excuse him.”

Mrs. Bushytail scowled at her and remarked, “Humph! I suppose there are different grades of society in Ireland, just as there are here. Are any of you going to the Mayor’s reception?”

“I suppose I ought to go,” said Mrs. County wearily, “but I declined; they are such dreadful people!”

Mrs. Merchant said that she was going, and asked me if I would like to go with her. She added, poor dear, that she was “afraid I should not find it very lively--not like my Bohemian parties with all the great Academicians, and clever people....”

Dear Louise, why does not a merciful Providence, whose will it is to fashion us in such humorous variety, put directions for use on our backs, or send a bottle of medium with us by which we could communicate with one another? Ought I to have replied, “Dear Mrs. Merchant, I will make the best of your friends, and when you come to stay with me I will try to collect some people with double chins and dictatorial manners who know all about boiling soap and making beef-juice”? I should take it for granted that she would like my friends, or, at all events, that she would find something interesting in them, and perhaps enjoy a change from her own species. So why is it to be supposed that I cannot live without my own form of shop?

“Who is the present Mayor?” asked Mrs. Cambridge. “He came to the University the other day, and I thought he looked rather a strange person to have at the head of a big city like this.”

“Not a gentleman, _of course_,” pronounced our Dictator, helping herself to another lot of Pêches Melba (the vigorous old creature had cherry-brandy with it too), “but a very capable man. He is on our hospital committee and he puts his foot down on the younger men in a very admirable way; never wastes too much time on discussion. A splendid financier; doesn’t allow improvements to be carried beyond a reasonable distance.”

“He has dreadful manners, though,” sighed Mrs. County, who eats nothing but vegetables, and refuses sweets because she says they spoil her form at badminton. “The Duchess presided at the annual meeting of our Waifs and Strays at the Town Hall the other day, and she said that the Mayor made his speech with his foot on her muff.”

“Then she shouldn’t have left her muff on the floor,” replied Mrs. Bushytail. “The Duchess was an old friend of mine when you were in the schoolroom, my dear, and I shall tell her that she ought to take better care of her things.”

“Lady Seelby said the Town Hall smelt very strong of onions,” Mrs. County ventured again with her eyes half shut.

I was pleased at things going like this--maliciously pleased. Instead of the two suspected firebrands setting up a conflagration in the camp, there were the two representatives of law and order (the town and the county) sparring together over the personal habits of the chief magistrate; while the heathen and the anarchist sat with milk and honey on their lips, ready to pour balm on the wounds of the combatants!

All the same, I think that Mrs. Cambridge and I would have let them lose a little more blood before we actually interfered; but Miss Darling flew to the rescue and stopped a second round by saying that the dear Mayoress had been so sweet with the children on Empire Day, and that no one knew what a powerful force the Mayor was among the inebriates of the city. She hoped it was not going to rain: it was looking rather threatening. But what a lovely colour the leaves were at this time of year. It seemed so sad that they must all come off.

“We will drive you to the reception, dear,” said Mrs. Merchant gratefully; and then we all rose, and I escaped into the garden to have a cigarette behind the lobelias.

When Mrs. Bushytail had driven off in a robust brougham, her two obese horses guided by an apoplectic old man, and Mrs. County had departed on foot to whatever cross-bred residence her husband’s particular brand of ketchup provides for her, Miss Darling, Mrs. Cambridge (who was also going to the reception), Mrs. Merchant and I spread ourselves comfortably in the Rolls-Royce, and were driven to the Town Hall.

Numbers of people were in the great hall, waiting to meet their friends. There was a large sprinkling of Bushytails and Countys, but most of the crowd were of another type, which I have not met before. I took them to be honest tradesmen of the oblong and erratic shapes which seem inseparable from commerce. But several of them turned out to belong to the best society, and the dumpiest one of all, dressed in the most creased and stained frock-coat and the worst trousers, was Mrs. Cambridge’s husband. I have sometimes wondered why both commercial and professional men are often so incurably slovenly, and I begin to think it must be owing to some instinct of self-preservation which leads them to shun the sort of women who would look after their clothes by force. To make a busy man look tidy when he does not want to, it must be necessary to worry him all day, and no doubt women who have the firmness and pertinacity for the task are recognized by naturally baggy men in the same way as the presence of a cat is scented from afar by even the most absent-minded mouse.

At the top of a wide staircase decorated with palms we found the Mayor and Mayoress. Bessie would have called them “fairies,” but you know how inappropriate her descriptions are. Anything from a round of beef to a rainbow may be a fairy if it excites her imagination. But, indeed, they were wonderful! Have you ever seen a mayor? If not, take a stockbroker and stuff him quite tight until he creaks. Dress half of him for a wedding--not forgetting spats--and the other half for “standing at the plate” outside a Scotch kirk (he wears a white tie and a frock-coat). Dab bits of fur on his eyebrows, but not on his head--you leave that quite bare--and then hang a heavy locket and chain round his neck. For a mayoress, take a gentle, timid old lady out of a woolshop. Dress her regardless of expense, and frighten her to death. Then hang another locket and chain round her neck, and there you are!

They were both shaking hands with the rapidity of an experienced cook shelling peas. Each of us was emptied out of our identity and cast into the room beyond, pressed on by the growing mass of those who had fulfilled the object for which they came. By and by we reached the edge of the heap and looked about us. Mrs. Bushytail and Mrs. County, each the centre of a group, were dispensing the milk of their several words with reckless liberality. Presently Mrs. Merchant drew me to a small table covered with plates of bread-and-butter, mixed biscuits, and wedding cake. Then she artfully picked two or three of her friends out of the different groups, and formed them into a small private tea-party. A maid-servant brought us tea--so strong that it tasted like beef-juice and tobacco mixed--and while we were drinking it I saw for the first time that a really nice girl was making herself frightfully hot by singing at the top of her voice. None of us had realized what was happening, only it seemed to me that it was becoming more and more difficult to make oneself heard.

Mrs. Bushytail came to our table, and there were also a German and his wife, both of whom I liked very much. It was he who first noticed the poor girl singing.

“_Ach, was!_” he said, “der is music, and we knew not. Let us listen.” We all listened hard, but all I could hear was, “blows--part--rose--heart--” and Mrs. Merchant said, “That lovely thing! I always like it so much.”

“She has a goot voice,” said the German lady, “but not str-r-r-ong.”

“Absurd!” Mrs. Bushytail informed us. “They should have had a man to do it.”

The noise was fearful. You know what a party is always like--a yapping and drumming that never stops, and every one stuffing something down holes in their faces--you don’t notice this effect unless everybody is eating at once--and the room began to smell like an oven full of mice.

Mrs. Merchant asked whether I had noticed the portraits hung round the room. She added that they were considered very good.

“They are all Mayors, _hein_?” said the German, peering through his spectacles.

“Kings,” Mrs. Bushytail explained angrily, “all kings. We don’t keep the Mayors here; they are in the Council Chamber.”

“So we keep our Kaisers,” said the German’s kind wife. “You are patriotic too? That is good. They look very nice standing so.” She puffed out her chest, and thrust a gloved hand into the front of her mantle.

“Were the pictures presented to the Town Hall?” Mrs. Cambridge inquired.

“No,” said Mrs. Bushytail, with reasonable pride, “the city paid for them; immense sums. They are a great deal larger than any at the Guildhall. What do you think of them?” she asked me. “You ought to be a judge of art.”

“I think they are beautiful,” I said. “They make me feel, for the first time in my life, that I should like to be married to a king. I love splash and rolls of parchment and thunderstorms. I quite see what you like about them.”

I do not know whether I meant to tease her or not. The pictures are just what I said, but I think that if I had liked her better I might have said the same thing in a different way. Anyhow, it did not do at all. My German made it worse by saying critically, “Yes, that is so, you have it quite. Now in Germany we care for the skill, for the worthiness of the picture. We make, perhaps, too much of it. And you, you care more for the sentiment--the ‘splash’ you call it? What the common people shall understand. Very good. You are quaite r-raight.”

Mercifully the fact that he had not been introduced to Mrs. Bushytail prevented her from using other weapons of destruction than a look, which glanced off his spectacles as harmlessly as summer lightning. But Mrs. Merchant was clearly uneasy, scenting trouble, but uncertain in which direction it lay. She therefore slipped away, taking me with her. Heavens! the dressing gong! and I was just going to tell you something more amusing about the Cambridges. I will write again.

Yours ever,
GEORGINA.

CHAPTER XVII

UNITY SQUARE, MILLPORT.

My dear Louise,--I am sorry that you are getting out of breath with my experiences; but just think what it must be for me to have to go through them! If I had not a better-balanced mind and a more stable temperament than yours, I should probably have been returned dead on your hands a week ago, and you would have found that far more disturbing than reading my letters.

I am writing from the University, because the Merchants’ eldest child has got measles. The higher powers are so ingenious in devising these little bits of action to brighten up the plot of one’s life! Measles is not the sort of thing I should ever have thought of for myself, but it has varied my days here to an extent that I should have supposed to be quite out of the range of a few spots.

I have had measles myself, and was therefore quite prepared to go on with my work. I was even looking forward to brightening the monotonous pallor of the children’s complexions by painting in a pink rash, but I was not allowed to. Mrs. Merchant has a warm heart, and said that it would not be safe to trifle with illness. This means that instead of everything going on as usual, as it might quite well do, every one in the house has to run up and down stairs all day--except the hospital nurse, who stands just inside the child’s door and heads the runners downstairs again.

It was suggested at first that I should go home for three weeks and then come back here, but instead of that I am staying with Mrs. Cambridge. I have forgotten why she asked me to come to her, or why I accepted. The last week has been like a dream, where one begins by salmon-fishing, and then suddenly finds oneself in a motor accident on the top of the Alps. The connecting links have faded.

Most of the Dons, or whatever their local equivalent is, live in a square round the University, which is a big building like a cross between an office and a church. I have told you that the Merchants’ house is a mixed-looking erection; the whole town is like that. The offices are half hotels, the churches suggest schools or offices, the private houses have borrowed a feature or two from dovecots, mausoleums, and even castles on the Rhine. The Town Hall has a compromising resemblance to the Stock Exchange, which, in its turn, is tricked out in what looks like pink gingham trimmings from the seaside lodging-houses. The Cambridges’ house is designed for the greatest comfort of the few, and the greatest inconvenience of the many, the many being a large staff of maid-servants. All the rooms are beautifully large and airy, the stairs narrow and steep, the bedrooms infinitely removed from the apparatus by which they are kept clean. The kitchens are so remotely buried in the bowels of the earth that, even if the smell of boiled cabbage travelled as quickly as a ray of light, it would take, probably, some weeks to reach the noses of those fortunates engaged at meals in the dining-room.

I have already described the Cambridges to you. I should like to add that I am beginning to be very fond of the beetle-like Mr. Cambridge. As for her, it is a delight to see her handle the town. I never in my life saw such skill. Her “at-home” day makes me think of one of the days of creation--about the middle of the week--when huge lizards, giant toads, and queer-faced monstrosities of all sorts were being delivered by the million at the front door of Eden, and there was no one to show them what to do next. Mr. Cambridge would have made a bad Adam. He would have looked at them through his spectacles and said: “No, really, I can’t think of a name for that fellow. Let’s try this fat old girl. Let me see--h’m, ha!”--(he gives his little old--maidish cough)--“er--Pobblyomniba Jessica perhaps----”

“May I introduce Mrs. Blot?” Mrs. Cambridge would then have said in her quiet voice, and the matter would have been settled for all time, or until the Blots died out or were replaced by a more agile species, the Trots.

On her last Thursday I pinned myself into a corner behind the heaviest mammoth of the lot--a massive woman with a hairy face, and arms like a prize-fighter’s legs. I have never recovered from my first alarm sufficiently to ask her name, but I have since gathered that she lives alone with a widowed nephew, and is at once the terror and delight of the junior staff of the University. People of strong character are not afraid of her, but the younger and less definite individuals cower before her, although her mighty hands shower sugar-plums, excellent dinner-parties, and the kindest advice upon them.

I was resting for a moment on an ottoman near the window when she sat down upon me, and looked about her through a pair of lorgnettes. Then she began to fan herself, and the motion which this gave to her body caused me such acute agony in my knees that I gave a faint scream, and, I think, moved a little. She looked round. I can’t think how she did it--but, in fact, her face came quite close to the top of my head. I could feel her breath distinctly.

“God bless me!” she exclaimed. “It’s a child! A young person! I beg your pardon most heartily, my dear child. I hope I have not injured you.”

“No, indeed, I don’t think so,” I answered when I could speak. “I shall be quite all right in a minute.”

I gave her my seat, and was beginning to feel my legs again, when she said suddenly: “Do you live here? I see you are not wearing your hat.” I explained all that I have told you, and she became very much interested. She said one especially amusing thing.

“I hope, my dear, that you don’t paint still-life?”

I said that I didn’t, because I dislike anything that sits still and looks heavy while I am working. “That’s right, that’s right,” she said, patting my hand. “Now do you see that woman over there? Dirty creature! I believe she has come out again without washing her neck. She gave an exhibition of her work the other day; it seemed to me most deplorable. There was one picture in particular which really vexed me. A glass of water (a very ugly glass too--a common bedroom tumbler), a book (shamefully dog-eared), half a melon, and a boot that a scavenger might have been ashamed to wear, unlaced, and with a great bulging hole in the toe. I more than half suspect that she got it out of her husband’s dressing-room, because that is the sort of woman she is. I was quite frank about it. ‘No, my dear,’ I said, ‘I don’t like it, and I’m not going to flatter you. Art is meant to ennoble us, and there is nothing ennobling about untidiness and sloth. If ever you see things of that sort about in your house, don’t immortalize them--burn them. We don’t want to recall such things. Don’t even give them to the poor!’”

I longed for her to go on, but a disagreeable, boasting woman came up and laid a bold hand upon my mammoth. Such a woman has no excuse for braving danger, because, whichever place she goes to, she is bound to be unpleasantly situated when she dies. But to my great surprise, nothing happened; she was not trampled upon as I expected. In fact, any fool may tamper with these immense creatures, who very rarely exercise their strength. Their real anxiety is not to break anything, and the desire of their hearts is to inspire confidence.

I have seen the other woman--a brazen serpent in my opinion--at every house to which I have been lately. She seems to be an object of superstitious veneration in the town. Whether she ever did any good or cured people who had been bitten by adversity I do not know, but now she is nothing more than a fetish. Sometimes she shows a more active vulgarity, and mixes among us as an ordinary moral bounder, a sort of “’Arry” of the Christian religion. I have seen religious “Algernons,” too, more effete and less noisy, but this woman, when she is at her worst, clothes herself in virtue as though it were a loud check suit, and wears her blameless life like a buttonhole of dahlias.

Unfortunately she happened to catch sight of my mammoth, who was swaying in a leisurely manner above the heads of the crowd, and, thrusting aside her worshippers, she plunged across the room. She was full of some pompous, trivial rubbish about a churchwarden and a stained-glass window. “Of _course_, the dear Bishop would never find anything objectionable in it. They were all _Protestant_ saints that we chose. John has been _most_ particular on that point.”

The wretched woman contrived to make a mess of the whole tea-party in about five minutes. Her brawling attracted other loiterers to the spot by the well-known dodge of the Park preacher. If you get on a chair in the Park, and in a high-pitched voice address the baby and perambulator that are nearest to you, and if you then rope in an errand boy, and two maiden ladies, and a tramp, you will soon have an audience that a prophet might be proud of. I don’t think that she stood on a chair, but I know that she began with one harmless, deaf old lady whom she caught on the hearth-rug. When she was removed by an indulgent and busy husband, she left behind her the absurd impression that we had all been edified and improved. I meet her constantly, wherever we go, and her behaviour always reminds me of a temperance lecturer explaining limelight views of a drunkard’s liver to an assembly of school children. She assumes that every one in the audience is either drunk or likely to become drunk very soon if she is not there to interfere.

The mammoth stayed to dinner that evening, and I felt that for the moment chaos was over and the earth resting. She swept us all into our places with a gentle overpoweringness, and we knew at once just where we were. The large animals nibbled their food, the small ones frisked about unharmed. If any of us wandered for a moment from the broad path of reason, the mammoth drove the offender back again into his place with irresistible common sense and kindness. Mr. Cambridge teased her because she goes to lectures.

“My dear professor,” she said, “I like to improve my mind. I was never educated as a girl, and I like to know what is going on. You young people know so much that I have never heard of. I should be sorry to go into another world having missed so much of what is to be seen in this one. The clergy are all very well: they mean excellently--I am a Churchwoman myself--but it seems to me that they spend too much time in laying plans for what can only be a visionary future, before they have mastered the wonders of our actual past and present. How can they fit their immortal souls for what is to come when they know so little of what has gone before? Their ignorance is lamentable, if you consider that their object in life is to adapt us for association with beings of the highest intelligence.”

I said at dinner how much I disliked the woman whom I had met that afternoon, and when they understood from my description who she was, they all had so much to say that I disentangled the facts with great difficulty. I now understand that she has declared herself a sort of Queen of Morality in the town, and that her following consists of those who will believe anything that any one says so long as it is said loud enough and often enough.

This is a queer, self-conscious place. The people who inhabit it are neither living in a state of natural warfare, nor is there any domestic harmony between the species. They walk in the glaring publicity of a small community, and each says to the other, “I am I. Who are you? Well, that won’t do at all; you must be somebody quite different, or I shan’t like you.” Mrs. Cambridge has something of the contemptuous nonchalance of a Persian cat, which is always sufficient unto itself, and would rather, almost, that the common herd were not cats, because their inclusion in her tribe would lower its exclusiveness. But my dear mammoth can never look on while a bird flies, or a mole burrows, or a squirrel leaps from bough to bough, but she must exclaim, “Bless my soul! What a splendid idea! I must learn to step more lightly, and to know more of the wonders of the underworld.”

The city wives and the wives of the University may not see eye to eye, but they both have their value, and people like the mammoth (for there are others like her) provide a medium of common sense in which these two very different elements may combine for the benefit of what my chemist calls the “pill-swallowing public.”

“Then, my dear, you ought to,” says the mammoth (so Mrs. Cambridge tells me), when some satin-coated Ichthyosaurus, spangled with diamonds, boasts that she has not made the acquaintance of a certain little spoon-backed mouse with spectacles and a family. “She would do you a world of good. If you had to educate your own dear children as she has, you would have no idea how to set about it. And as for myself, I should be quite helpless without my _chef_. I could never learn to prepare a dinner equal to the one that she and her little maid cooked for me last week. Quite admirable, I assure you, and I am a greedy woman.”

But last night she spoke with equal frankness on the other side. “You mustn’t misunderstand dear Sarah Plummins,” I heard her say to Mrs. Cambridge; “her kindness is beyond all description. She would give the clothes off her back--yes, I know what you are going to say, and it is very witty, and you shall not say it--she would give the clothes off her back to help a friend or an enemy, and say nothing about it. Her abrupt manner is just shyness. You see, I am shy myself, and I know how awkward it is to be thrown among people with ideas to which we are not used. But I don’t mind your chaff, and I tell Sarah that she is to come and see your lovely collections, and take Mr. Cambridge out in her motor. It will do them both good.”

I went to tea with Mrs. Merchant yesterday, just to see how the child was, and I asked her whether she knew the mammoth. She said that she had always been a little afraid of her. “Tom likes her,” she said, speaking of her husband, “but she overpowers me sometimes.” I said that she was like an oak among shrubs, and the literal creature reminded me that a moment ago I had called her a mammoth. Which did I mean? Mammoths were not a bit like oaks. I was cross, and replied, “Yes, they were, because they both had trunks,” and she went shrieking off to “Tom” in his smoking-room, and said that I had made such a good joke, fit for _Punch_. I came back here before they had reached the inevitable sequel of a mammoth in a tight boot being like an oak because it is sure to have a-corn. By the way, I also mentioned the brazen serpent to Mrs. Merchant, who rose at once to my bait.

“Oh, I am so glad you have come across her,” she exclaimed, “she is such a delightful woman!”

“Whom does she delight?” I asked, determined to get at the bottom of this legend. “Not the police, I’ll be bound, for she takes the bread out of their mouths.”

“Oh, what nonsense,” said Mrs. Merchant. “Has she been scolding you? I expect you deserved it.”

“Who first started the idea that she was anything in particular?” I asked. “Did she tell you she was in the confidence of the angels?--and, if so, can she produce any evidence of such favouritism?”

I could get nothing more definite than the same vague rumours of her merit repeated again and again. It is evidently just as I thought. The idea has got about that she does a lot of good. I am inclined to put an advertisement in the local papers:

SUSPECTED DISCOVERY OF A GIGANTIC SOCIAL HOAX

£5 reward to any man, woman or child, who will give satisfactory proof of having received moral, spiritual, or financial benefit at any time from the well-known society leader, Mrs. Evangelette de Rougemont (or whatever her name is).

I believe that the mammoth would provide funds for a commission to investigate the whole matter, if she were persuaded that it were for the good of the town. Most probably, though, she would do nothing of the sort. She would say that we all stand in need of improvement, and that a borrowed twopenny dip strapped to the back of a blind weasel may be tiresome and even dangerous in society, but it all helps to keep up the idea that there is a good fire burning somewhere. I can imagine her saying it with perfect conviction.

Yours ever,
GEORGINA.

_CHAPTER XVIII_

UNIVERSITY SQUARE, MILLPORT.

My dear Louise,--I am still hard at it and shall probably be here for ages. No more of the Merchants’ children got measles, and he is so pleased with his portrait that I am to begin on his wife’s when I go back to Longmoor to-morrow. I have so enjoyed being with the Cambridges, and shall miss the peace of being able to Be or not to Be, as I like, without complications. I once read a medical book called, “My System of Elimination,” and it seemed to me the simplest possible cure for all evils. If any one would eliminate from the recollections of the Millport belles everything that they have seen without seeing and heard without understanding they would be so nice; really nice dears. But it makes them so fussy and nervous to masquerade as delicately bred, and intuitive, and things of that sort, when they are bound to be found out by even the most weevily specimens of the real article.

I have been helping Mrs. Cambridge to sell at a bazaar, where the special form of masquerade practised was “smart setting.” I do wish you could have seen Mrs. Bushytail being a duchess; the kind of duchess that you get in newspaper feuilletons and cheap Sunday stories--stout, short-sighted, crisp, impertinent, and great friends with the well-bred young girl who is not afraid of her.