Chapter VI: Part 6

Each of the stalls was presided over by a peeress of some sort, and “with her,” as the bazaar notices said, were two or three of the fattest flowers of Millport. They were all as nervous as lambs at Easter. Even Mrs. County’s beautiful pale face was hot, and her dress looked tight, although it was one of the new, very sloppy kind. Her particular Marchioness had on a dress of just the same shape, and it looked as if she had been to bed in it for years and yet had managed to keep it quite fresh, because she was so self-possessed that none of her ever came through her skin. Mrs. County’s garment was equally loose, but it looked about as convincing as a Greek dress does on a school-mistress in three pairs of combinations and a lamb’s-wool bodice. Mrs. County never gets flurried like this except when she is masquerading--well--like the dickens.

Mrs. Bushytail’s stall belonged to a duchess who didn’t turn up; so although for some hours Mrs. Bushytail, like good dog Tray, grew very red, and would have growled and bit her till she bled, had she happened on the duchess just then, yet, when the first shock was over, she began, like a sensible woman, to count her blessings. She soon discovered several. One was that she would be able to run the stall as she liked, and bully every one else as the duchess might have bullied her. Another substantial blessing was that strangers coming round to the stall would probably mistake her for the duchess. It must have been after the discovery of this second blessing that I caught her pretending to be short-sighted and peering at people in a supercilious way. Her expression suddenly reminded me of a cook we once had who was not quite sober, and that finished it! I had to go back to my stall and hiccup in lonely pleasure, for I did not dare to show Mrs. Cambridge; she exaggerates sometimes.

We were one of thirteen stalls who were all selling what you might class together under the head of “mats.” Mats (by which I mean embroidery on things that are not of much use to anybody) are the special industry which the bazaar was laying itself out to promote. They are made by the natives of some island in the Archipelago where Mrs. County’s boss-marchioness’s husband has some land; she says that the natives are very poor, and that she is going to try and get our Government to do something for them. The bazaar was to help to make the industry known. One of the other three stalls sold native tobacco, one Home Produce (that is, all sorts of eatables and uneatables), and the third sold books about the Industry. The boss-marchioness got some one to go out to the islands and paint pictures of the country, and her husband is building a big hotel there, and is going to run it himself. It will be a sort of paying house-party, with golf and mixed bathing and gambling, and all sorts of games, and cost a good deal to go to. You can imagine the whole gang exploiting the ladies of Millport. If you had only seen Mrs. Bushytail sitting so happily in her trap, shelling out pounds and pounds for the privilege of looking short-sighted and _de haut en bas_! Her three daughters--really nice girls of eighteen to twenty-five--were there, taking it all as innocently as puppies take it when their mother does tricks for a piece of cake. Mrs. Merchant, as good as gold, had another stall of mats, and I helped between her and Mrs. Cambridge. Our marchioness (I forget who she was) didn’t turn up either; and Mrs. Merchant had Lady Lacey, who is a Quaker and wouldn’t hurt a fly, so none of us had to pretend to be tired, or deaf, or immoral, or any of the things that Mrs. County and the others were playing at.

I think that the natives would have been amused if they had seen who bought their things, and why. Of course the Millport ladies are very, very kind; you must never lose sight of that for a moment. They have all--or most of them, at any rate--“come through” a good lot themselves in the way of ordinary domestic care. They live nearer to the workings of their houses than one would suppose from their wealth. They keep comparatively few servants, and those they have stand in a very human relation to their masters. The angry butlers and huffy parlour-maids, who are so confident about what is “done in the best houses,” are often quite as devoted as any aged Highland retainer to be found in literature. This means that the Bushytails and Countys, if they would only leave off being so absurd, have lots of stuffing in them. It is the nonsense on the top of the stuffing that makes Mrs. Bushytail look so tight. I have wandered off from what I meant to say, which was that they have great sympathy with any form of work, and they were really much keener about the natives than were most of the marchionesses, who, on the whole, looked as if all they asked was to be taken “back to Dixie” and their illicit unions. Most likely they are all as virtuous as Penelope, and the loose-living, passionate doll expression that they all have is as much a pose with them as it is with Mrs. County when she imitates it. I have seen really good young girls do it right up to a tennis-net, until they became busy and forgot.

We all did a roaring trade. Mrs. Cambridge made up for her lack of a marchioness by her own talent for making people do what she wants. You know the sort of old wretches who haunt bazaars? I do not know whether the number of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised, or whether they are more nuisance than they are financially worth. It is certain that they don’t spend much individually. But then a horde of locusts lay a field bare very quickly; so, owing to their numbers, they may be valuable, though I have grave doubts. Anyhow, you know them, don’t you? With long lines down the sides of their mouths, and snuffy green coats and skirts, and hats like one’s morning tea-tray, with one cup, a little jug, and some bread-and-butter on it. Mrs. Cambridge catches them with her eye, and then begins to arrange the most offensive things on her stall. The prey she intends to catch always loves any appliances for discomfort: cosies to make the good tea strong and bitter and horrible; or useless objects with a picture of a detestable cock making noises to wake every one up; or garments--but we can’t go into that. These old ladies make me shiver and feel grey, like an eclipse of the sun does; and I remember all sorts of depressing things, such as hair in brushes. They seem to bring these suggestions with them, and to be searching for horrors. They are the scavengers of every bazaar, and are really a very morbid class, I believe.

Myself I can do nothing with them, but Mrs. Cambridge is as impervious to sentiment as they are, and equally obstinate; and having her mental powers in more efficient order than theirs, she generally gets rid of more than they intended to buy--and they have to be nice about it, too, or they don’t get the things.

I enjoyed seeing Lady Claneustrigge, at the next stall, in the grip of one of these scavengers. The wretch had been to us for toast-warmers (I think she called them), and we had not got any.

“Toast-warmers?” said Lady Claneustrigge helplessly, looking about her. “Have we any toast-warmers, Mrs. Trotter?”

Mrs. Ritz-Trotter hurried up, all smiles, and took possession of Mrs. Cambridge’s lost prey.

“No, I am afraid not,” she said; “I don’t think that the natives, you see, _use_ so much toast as we do. They live on a peculiar sort of bread which they carry next the skin, in these bags--aren’t they quaint? Two-and-six. Not at _all_ dear, are they?”

The prey waved her aside without ceremony, and ran her experienced, mauve eyes up and down Lady Claneustrigge in silence--the sort of silence there is at whist.

“Have you any handkerchief-shams?” she asked at last.

Lady Claneustrigge backed nervously down the stall, and then lost her head altogether. “This is it, isn’t it?” she stammered, shaking out a yellow table-centre embroidered in shells. “They work beautifully, don’t they?” she added, with a smile of obvious fear and mistrust. “It is quite worth helping them, isn’t it, to make such lovely things? It is such a splendid industry.”

“I said handkerchief-shams,” said the prey in her flat, patient tone, “that’s a table-centre; my table wouldn’t hold that.”

“It wouldn’t do for a wedding present for Lizzie, would it, auntie?” whispered a kindly girl who came with her.

“Wouldn’t stand wear,” said the prey tersely.

“I am afraid we have none of those things just _now_,” Mrs. Ritz-Trotter said, throwing a protecting arm across Lady Claneustrigge, who looked on the verge of tears under this inexplicable form of torture. “You see, in those hot countries the natives take such _light_ breakfasts of fruit, and so on, that they hardly understand our home comforts. But I expect they could easily be taught to make them, couldn’t they, Lady Claneustrigge?”

A grateful nod and incoherent assurances. You must remember that the mauve eyes had never ceased their travelling, up and down, up and down, taking in every detail; sucking it in, absorbing every knot, every jewel, as though it were some harmful, irresistible drug.

“I’ll take one of those,” she said at last, pointing to a small purse of shells marked one-and-ninepence. I know, as surely as a mother knows what a baby will do with a pot of jam, that the woman took the purse home and put it on the dressing-table of her spare room, and that her frost-bitten guests put hair in it on every day of their critical, ungrateful visits.

“Very tahrsome, isn’t it, explaining to those sort of people?” was apparently the last word that Mrs. County would ever have the energy to pronounce, as she passed our stall with the preoccupation of a woman of ten thousand worlds.

I wonder how I shall paint Mrs. Merchant to-morrow. She wants me to do a thing in a white satin evening dress, sitting on a sofa, or standing up near a doorway, or just looking intelligent and ladylike on canvas, with a dark background and a light forehead. I can’t paint her as I should like at the head of a breakfast table, feeding all the little Merchants with Force out of a packet with the label on, or in a nightgown and a fur coat, with her hair down, and flames all over the back of the picture.

She has a beautiful character, and if only they had not frightened her as a little girl, no one could have been more charming. They began by telling her how easily shocked the angels were, and that there could be no moments of indulgence in moral carpet slippers and dressing-gown, because the angels never went down (or up) for meals, or even to fetch a handkerchief. They were “there all the while,” like the gentleman at the famous siege, and they were shocked if children did practically anything that their elders do. Later in life the bogy held over her head was what “people” would say. The angels apparently don’t concern themselves with any one over half-fare age. When she turned twelve they dropped off, and that vague creature “people” took on the job. You can imagine “people” buttoning on his uniform and taking over the name, age, and previous record of the young sufferer. Do you remember how you exploded the idea of “people” when we were at school? You walked down a whole street with your tongue out, and I ate peas with my knife at a restaurant, and no one said anything. You went home and told your mother that if “people” were ever going to say anything, now was the time to do it, and you didn’t believe that there were any “people” at all. Mrs. Merchant still “goes by what people say” a good deal, and I sometimes find it difficult to talk to her on this account. There is a “people” deposit left on her mind, which has to be scraped off before one can see what she is like. She and her husband came to supper at the Cambridges’ last Sunday, and after supper, when the men were downstairs smoking, we got on the subject of religion.

In that respect Mrs. Merchant does not altogether “go by what people say.” She goes by it for a time, and gets over a good many difficult bits with its assistance, but when it comes to plain ethics she does as she likes.

“I don’t think that bazaars are very nice, do you?” she asked Mrs. Cambridge. “People seem to like them very much, but I think it would be nicer if we all sent the money to the Archipelago if they really want it there, or if the natives’ work were introduced at some shop we could buy it if we wanted to. People did stare so at the stall holders, didn’t they?”

This gave me an idea. Suppose that “people,” who say all the horrible things that frighten us, are the ghoulish ladies who buy receptacles for hair! Suppose that they go about dressed like that because they are detectives (if you come to think of it they never look as if they had any legitimate business of their own to mind), and that after a visit from one of them this or that information “gets about,” “people are saying it,” etc. If I had thought for a moment when I was at the bazaar that I had run down my lifelong enemy, I should have taken a revolver and sacrificed myself for the good of humanity by shooting the lot of them dead and taking the consequences.

Then those two got on ethics in general. Mrs. Cambridge never goes by what people say, but she seems to incorporate their remarks with her own experience, and out of the two together makes a very serviceable guide which takes her down paths pleasant to herself and agreeable to her neighbours.

“Oh, I think most likely the Old Testament is true,” I heard Mrs. Merchant saying when next I caught them up. “At least people say that it is all quite possible if you think what conjurers do--and the East and all that: and even part of the New as well, it is possible--” but that was getting a little uncomfortable, and her voice died away in a self-reproving silence. “But I think,” she went on with apparent irrelevance, “that the clergy might be more strict in how they teach us to behave; they are a little vague, don’t you think?” “I don’t think they know themselves what they want,” was Mrs. Cambridge’s opinion.

“Oh, don’t you? Perhaps that is it,” said my dear innocent. “I am quite sure that if instead of taking the text we had to-day, ‘And Israel set liers in wait round about Gibeah,’ and just telling us that we ought to take a strong line against slackness in the education of our children--if, instead, they had said to us, ‘You mustn’t be hypocrites with your children and pretend that God makes one law for you and another for them----’”

“That we have the entrée to heaven, in fact, while they have to go round by the front and take the risk of being turned back,” suggested Mrs. Cambridge.

“And if they had said, ‘You must stop that everlasting talk about what other people ought to do, either as regards your children or your friends, and you must forget yourself when you want to be nice to people, and remember yourself when you want to be nasty to them----’”

This was too much for Mrs. Cambridge; it made her laugh, and Mrs. Merchant began to drink her coffee, which was quite cold, and the men came upstairs. Mrs. Cambridge, who is devoted to Mrs. Merchant, gave their husbands an outline of what had been going on. They took it up, but we had to stop them almost at once, because they left the nice personal line and began philosophizing and generalizing. It made us all yawn and get tired about the eyes. If they had really let themselves go and had told us what frauds public men are, and what their platform tears amount to in private, or if they had given us practical instances, in strict confidence (we were all among friends), it would have been so pleasant. But you never can bring men down to facts. Their conversation is a perpetual vague laying down of the law for everybody, and never following it by anybody year in and year out. I like getting at people individually, and then offering myself for a jab in return, don’t you?

Yours ever,
GEORGINA.

_CHAPTER XIX_

“LONGMOOR,” MILLPORT.

MY DEAR LOUISE,--We have just come back from a wedding; the wedding of Miss Darling and Mr. Friseur. You remember, he is the young man I told you about at the first dinner-party. It seems such a long time ago since I first came here portrait-painting. I am getting so fond of them all that I believe I shall think you rather drunk and disorderly when I come back. The extraordinary innocence of every one amazes me. Most of them are as good as gold (nice refined gold with enough alloy in it to stand hard wear, and really quite good enough for all one wants). Perhaps they are innocent because they live within a short distance of the country, which makes them healthy and not morbidly civilized, and on the other hand, rumours of the Court and fashion filter through to them quite rapidly, which prevents them from relapsing easily into bucolic vices.

Miss Darling’s wedding was about as flat and comfortable and sensible a proceeding as you could well imagine. No passion in it to lead to possible disappointment and disaster; no marrying for money or position, as they are both already comfortably seated on the top branch of their social tree, and both have about the same amount of money, enough for perfect ease and to cover sudden emergencies, but not enough to lead to riotous living. Miss Darling loves everybody, so it is not likely that she will leave out her husband. Mr. Friseur loves himself chiefly, therefore, having chosen a wife, there is nothing to tempt him to ask for any other lady. If you like gooseberry-fool better than any other dish and are already eating gooseberry-fool, you don’t bother about the relative value of the other dishes on the table. You may need a biscuit of some sort to bring out the flavour of your choice, and Mr. Friseur has chosen Miss Darling to be his biscuit, so that he may enjoy himself more. But the other women may leave the world so far as he is concerned; his interest in the meal is at an end.

We had an early lunch, and got off afterwards in a great hurry. The coffee was late and too hot to drink. Our hair did not go so well as it did the last time we wore the same hat, and our gloves were a little tight, which made us flushed. It is only at a wedding that these _contretemps_ happen; one can get to any other sort of party quite calmly. It is all such a self-conscious ceremony from beginning to end. The crowd by the awning leading to the church seems to have one gigantic eye fixed on the first leg one puts to the ground in getting out of the motor. When it is a motor I can just bear the ordeal, as the step is broad and low, but when I have to shuffle out of a cab, and hit just the right spot on which to plant my toe, the eye of the crowd slays my ease for the rest of the day. “Eh, look! h’m”--says the eye, and off I go up the red carpet, thoroughly flushed, and with my dress up to the knees on one side and a tail of chiffon dragging in the mud at the other. I find this out when I get home, and the mark always shows afterwards. The church, again, is all eyes. Every one has been there for hours, in a state of acute observation. The young gentlemen with shiny hair and buttonholes don’t mind this much. Boys are more or less uncomfortable anywhere in society, and have to be brave about it, so this is not worse than any ordinary party. Besides, it takes them all their time to remember the things they have been told to do; to see that the right people get seats beyond the cord, and so on. We were just short of the cord and in a perfect nest of acquaintances. I saw Mrs. Bushytail and Mrs. County, and Mrs. Cambridge was tucked away comfortably under the lee of the mammoth, who sat down upon me that afternoon I told you about. The brazen serpent was also there, looking about her through a lorgnette. She is very religious, and therefore behaves in a church as if she were very much at home, and could sit in all the pews at once if she liked. She reminds me of a person one always meets on a sea voyage, who wears a yachting cap and examines the wheel and the barometer, and counts the knots at breakfast. I once met one who was seasick, and I was so pleased. I should love it if an angel came into the church and didn’t recognize the brazen serpent, and she had to explain who she was. She was taking charge of the whole wedding. I wish I had been sitting next to her! I should have tried to put on a face like G. P. Huntley’s, and drawled, “Oh, that’s the bride, is it? What’ll they do with her, now? Oh, do they? Very nice, yes. Who’s the old fellow dressed up in calico, what? Vicar--Ah, quite so, yes, very nice. Cuts the cake and finds a ring and a sixpence in it, doesn’t he? Yaas, thanks--what a lot you know about it!”

Miss Darling is, as I have told you, a velvet-hearted creature, and no doubt the life she is to lead will give her more opportunity of cultivating her good qualities than if she were marrying any one with intelligence enough to be a connoisseur in velvet. Mr. Friseur will know how to keep himself warm with the velvet, but that is all; he cares nothing for quality or light and shade.

Bridesmaids always look their worst, don’t they? whereas brides just look queer. Very often brides are persons rarely visited by emotion. But on that day they have an idea that emotion is not only natural, but necessary; it would be an opportunity missed if they did not have some then. So they either fish a little out of the pockets of their own consciousness, or they borrow some from friends and relations, who are all ready to contribute for the occasion. “It is quite right that dear Emily should be upset,” they say; so dear Emily manages somehow to get a little upset, and looks it, and the guests revel in her indisposition. Her red nose and trembling hand have the same luscious, nutritive quality for the wedding-guests as the implements of a murder or other work of the emotions have for the unemployed. People who are themselves sensitive to the varying weather of the passions are usually eager to keep those whom they love as warm and sheltered as may be when a storm threatens, but those who habitually lead the sheltered life like nothing better than to stare out of the windows at their friends who are being buffeted about in the gale.

Miss Darling, however, was not out in any storm. She walked to the altar as to a new plateau in an altogether agreeable country, where her Friseur figures as a picturesque object for the devotion which she lavishes on every human creature within her reach. He will need to beat her very hard indeed before she takes a dislike to him. But to go back to the bridesmaids. They were not queer, like the bride; they were just sticky, and they were suffering as we had suffered about our hair. I don’t know which of them were the worst--those who had done their own hair with trembling fingers, or those who had got in a man and had it waved. They were as solemn and self-conscious as a stuffed owl that tries to look natural with its foot on a real egg which has, unfortunately, been blown previously. Miss Darling’s awful father (as they described him in the hymn, with unnecessary rudeness, I thought) looked really detestable in a white waistcoat and spats, and a pink skin head. Men, when they get to that age, look so much better if they have been exposed to the weather a good deal. I should think that Mr. Darling had been kept too warm, and given too soft food. All the slyness and cupidity and harshness, which may be quite dignified when they form a horny skin over a heart full of natural fire, are in his case just spongy and unpleasant indications of general rottenness. I don’t think that Miss Darling has a mother, but the bridegroom’s was there--a bad woman, I should think, from the look of her: thick-skinned, over-dressed, and with short legs, which are always a sign of doubtful virtue. I don’t think that her son drinks; in fact, I am sure he does not; but she is the type of woman who schemes indefatigably to find a good young girl to marry her drunken blackguard of a son in the hope of keeping him straight. The bridegroom looked like the man who takes the leading part in that wearisome type of play where the old men are fossils, the young men are nonentities, the elder women are saints, and all are marshalled into a ritual of self-revelation by a girl of eighteen, who has sown some fairly commonplace wild oats. Well, that is all over, and they have gone off to the Riviera to listen to the Voice that breathed o’er Eden.

I spent the evening helping Mrs. Merchant with the accounts of a ball which she is getting up for her favourite hospital. Wherever one goes in this town, some one is doing something for his neighbour, or, rather, for an organized section of his neighbours. There is any amount of kindness to be had, but very little pleasure. There are parties--any number of parties--for all classes of society (the kind creatures give parties for the poor and for themselves), where the only practical difference is in the quality of the refreshments; but I have seen very little happiness since I came. People like everything very much, and it is all most enjoyable, but I have not seen any one make any attempt to jump over the moon. In fact, if a scheme were got up for hoisting the public over the moon, a good many would take advantage of it. And then, by and by, the lift would get crowded with the wrong sort of people, who smell and make a noise, so the parties would be discontinued. Probably by that time some bright spirit would have begun organizing trips to hell, and it would be so interesting getting special asbestos clothes to wear going down.

Last week I went with Mrs. Merchant to her hospital. It was her day for visiting there, and we also met Mrs. Bushytail going her rounds. She looked tremendously fat--fatter than usual--and was simply all over the place as regarded management.

“Well, now, how are you getting on, Mrs. Tibby?” I heard her ask at one bed-side.

Poor Mrs. Tibby looked at death’s door, but I believe she had a lurking instinct that it would be as much as her place in bed was worth if she were not found to be getting on nicely, so she made a weak profession of well-being, and lay patiently awaiting what might come.

“That’s capital!” said Mrs. Bushytail. “Capital! Such a pleasant day, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Tibby, who, by the way, had been taken to pieces like a clock only a day or two before, would, I think, have privately described the day as something a little short of pleasant; but you never know. I have met before now Mrs. Tibbys who found pleasure in sermons, in strong tea with sugar in it, in a visit from a lady, in a crochet petticoat, in all sorts of queer things, in fact, so perhaps she found disintegration pleasant.

“We all have to be thankful if we have our health, ma’am,” she observed.

“Quite so,” agreed Mrs. Bushytail. “And you are going to have yours now, Mrs. Tibby, and go back to your dear husband, and be able to take up all your duties again as fresh as ever. I never feel half myself if I can’t get about and attend to my house, and I’m sure you feel the same.”

I had a private vision of Mr. Tibby as the forlorn husband trying to decide whether the herring should be made into a soufflé, or served on toast as a savoury in the evening, or, perhaps, remembering to speak to the milkman, and write to the rent-collector. It would be a nice little occupation for Mrs. Tibby to take over the household again. These little tasks prevent us from dwelling on ourselves.

“And what are you going to do when you come out?” my fat friend asked a young girl with a deformed body and a face like clay. “You must look on the bright side, and not think of yourself, you know, or you will never get well.”

The girl smiled a feeble smile and twiddled the bedclothes.

“There’s plenty of work to be got,” the excellent lady continued, “if you apply in the right quarter. Everything is so splendidly managed nowadays that nobody need be out of work if they don’t want to. And it will be delightful--won’t it?--to think you are earning your own living and putting by a little for a rainy day. The great thing is to be thrifty and avoid spending money on things you don’t want. I am sure you must be very grateful for all the care that has been taken of you in this terrible illness. Yes, I am sure you are; that’s right. Always be grateful and happy, and you will never want. Now I am going to leave these flowers just where you can see them, and then I must be off. There are so many poor things like you, you know, who have to be cheered up. Good-bye--good-bye, Mrs. Tibby. Hope you will have a splendid night and be about again directly.”

I was so entranced by Mrs. Bushytail’s vigour and excellence that I forgot about Mrs. Merchant, who had in the meantime been quietly rambling through the wards, timidly passing the time for the patients one by one. She is not a vital person, and she is very shy, but they watched her with the idle, restful pleasure which, when one is ill, a cat performing its simple toilet may afford without raising one’s temperature. I was left to my own resources, and felt most grateful when a thin, wiry little woman addressed me from the end bed.

“Nice change in the weather, isn’t it, Miss?” she said.

We exchanged a few comments on the uncertain habits of the sun, and then she said, with considerable feeling, “My! I’ll be glad to be about again. I’ll be out next week if all’s well, and I’m just going to enjoy meself a bit.”

“How?” I asked.

“I’ll be out a bit of an evening and get to one of the ’alls, perhaps. Do you care for them places, Miss?”

“I love them,” I assured her, feeling as if a great weight of care had been lifted from my chest. “Bert Hoskyn is coming this week, I know, and I wish I were going to see him.”

“Is he, indeed, Miss?” she said politely. “I don’t know his name exactly, but there’s many of them that’s grand. I’ll take a good look round next week, and maybe see the one you mention. You do get a bit down-’earted lyin’ ’ere with nothing to think of all day, without it’s the nurses or the food or your own inside. I’d show you the place, and welcome, where they stitched me up, Miss, but maybe nurse wouldn’t like it.”

“No,” I said, “I am sure she wouldn’t like you to disturb it; but you must show me some other time, if I meet you again.”

“That I will, Miss,” she promised heartily. “Any time you’re passing. Do you come far from ’ere?”

Mrs. Merchant took me home before our conversation got more interesting, but I came away refreshed and with a feeling that pleasure is not dead as I had suspected during the last few weeks. After all, pleasure to be any good must be something that sprouts in one’s own senses, and may be called to life by anything. The Millport idea of it is something of which you buy from a purveyor as much as you can afford, and then you pour it over yourself and other people. It rather deadens the spontaneous kind.

Good-bye,
Yours ever,
GEORGINA.

_CHAPTER XX_

“LONGMOOR,” MILLPORT.

My dear Louise,--This day week will see me back. The portraits are finished. I huddled them all on to one canvas at last--all, at least, except papa. The children would not sit still without mamma, and mamma had a sort of unemployed, forcible idleness look about her without the children, so there they are. I won’t bore you by telling you any more about the pictures. I have told you about the people themselves, and if you don’t see their portraits in your mind’s eye it is owing to your slowness in the uptake.

My last experience in Millport has amused me as much as any. I had a whole day with Mrs. County, and I have not yet quite got back my power of moving naturally. Mrs. Merchant had to go last week to the other end of Cheddar to do some good work or other--sit on a Board or in a Chair, or something--and suggested that I should go with her for the run. Mrs. County, who, by the way, lives farther away than I thought, would give me luncheon, and had asked me to stay until the car picked me up again on its way home.

We motored miles and miles through something that certainly is not country, though neither is it town, sea, desert, or icefloe. Perhaps it is just arable land; I had not thought of that before. It looks like acres of brown paper, slightly wrinkled, and marked into irregular shapes by lines of the mixed rubbish that a bird makes its nest of. The dusty road runs alongside of these lines of dusty twigs and straw and rags, and every few minutes we passed a house built either of red brick or of that white mud that has had gravel thrown at it. Exasperating houses, planned often in imitation of a farmhouse with some cut about it, only, unfortunately, the builders have copied all the details and left out all the point. Any details they liked have been exaggerated, such as sloping roofs, odd levels, inconvenient entrances. These houses are the nurseries of Millport. Here the married sons and daughters live after they have left papa’s luxurious nest on the outskirts of his business, and before they have developed into full-blown county specimens, with a hunting stable and the supreme terror of all forms of discomfort, mental and physical.

In the eye of God I believe the last state of that man to be worse than the first, and that the middle state partakes of the vices and virtues of both. Papa is often self-made, but whether he has made himself bad or good, still he has done it in the way he likes, and often in fighting other people he develops a _flair_ for sincerity like that of a pig for truffles. The young people in the nurseries, having papa’s enthusiasm for progress without his gouty rigidity, are sometimes a little priggish, but more often they are generous and amusing. They have a great many babies, and work hard and keep young a long time. Apollyon waits for them farther afield. If they escape his clutches they may come out top among the angels, but he manages to catch quite enough of them to keep him strong and active. When he catches them he imbues them with an almighty terror of the word “it.” They become “it’s” slave. Any trifle may involve them in the shame of not being quite “it” (in my mother’s time people called it “the thing”), and yet no one can tell them where “it” lurks; every one has to find out for himself. “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou find ‘it,’” says Apollyon, and they never know a moment’s peace after that.

I was left for a few minutes alone in the drawing-room before Mrs. County came down. Her drawing-room is pretty, and smells delicious. No human being could work, or, I should think, live, in a room like that, but it is as pretty as a skilful conjuring trick. If one looked carefully at any detail of it, its charm was gone. I could imagine any number of cats feeling at home in it, because all its chairs are luxurious, and, apart from bodily luxury, a cat’s whole creed is negation and denial.

Presently the door opened and a lovely creature came in. The butler looked round the room and said: “Mrs. County will be down directly, ma’am.” She was just like Mrs. County, except that all her features turned a little down instead of a little up. Even her eyelids were nearly closed, whereas Mrs. County’s are nearly always turned up, with an appealing expression, as though she were about to join the angels but was too tired to make the first move.

I find it so difficult to observe by-laws, such as ignoring people unless one knows them. I should have chatted to this weary Wilhelmina if I had thought that there was a chance of her answering, but I had an instinct that she would partially raise one eyelid at me and pretend to be either a dying empress or a virtuous barmaid accosted in Piccadilly under a misapprehension. I therefore looked down my nose too, and said nothing.

Mrs. County, of course, introduced us when she came down. The other one’s name was really Mrs. Smith, and that in itself is disguise enough, so I need not invent one for her. She had a deep, rich voice, full of good food and the health which comes from taking plenty of exercise, and letting every one else do everything except what every one wants to do. That you make haste to do yourself, with carefully concealed greed.

They were very entertaining. First they licked one another all over--“Darling, such a lovely hat! m’m--m’m. You do always manage to get hold of such wonderful things!” Then one or other got a little playful pat on the ear--“_Yours_, darling; he never was mine; nothing to do with me. I’m absolutely out of it.” Then a swift retreat--“Lola ought to be more careful, shouldn’t she? I mean, it’s too pitiful running after any one like that!”

We went in to lunch, and they purred together over the good food. Now and then they left for a moment their absorbing occupation of the preliminaries of battle while they took a detour round me. They had to do this for the sake of politeness, but they were both quite pleased to prolong their delights by a little diversion in between. Mrs. County brought Mrs. Merchant’s name in her mouth, and laid it before us as a morsel to worry. Being, more or less, in charge of it for the moment, I was able to slip it into my pocket and substitute a mixed variety of their Millport acquaintances. All of these they pretended to know in the slightest possible degree, they having now crossed the Rubicon between Millport and the County, and burned their sauce-boats (you know, don’t you, that this is the great ketchup country? You pass whole fields of it when you come through by train).

“Funny little place, Millport, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Smith. “I never could stand it when I was there. We’re having a party of natives next week; will you come, Rita, and help? I shan’t know what to do with them.”

“What sort of natives?” asked Mrs. County.

“Oh, you know the freaks Sam collects in Millport. He says we should not have any money if we weren’t civil to them.”

“It gives one such an insight into what the King and Queen must feel at Drawing-rooms, doesn’t it?” I suggested.

“I don’t quite see what you mean,” Mrs. Smith said, screwing up her eyes at me with elaborate attention. I explained that my cook’s sister was lady’s maid to one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and that she used to describe the fun that was often made, behind the scenes, of some of us middle-class people who go to the Drawing-rooms. Of course, they never suggested that the King and Queen made fun of their subjects--for, naturally, they wouldn’t; but some of those quite near the Throne did sometimes.

“You get all the best of the fun here,” I added, “because you see it from both points of view. Of course, the class below ours get it when they snub the tradespeople and then get snubbed by us; but the top dogs can only get one side of it all the time, until, perhaps, they go to heaven. Do you think that the Beasts who are described in the Book of Revelation will snub the ladies-in-waiting then?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Smith coldly.

Mrs. County giggled, and, I thought, looked gratefully at me, as if I had been trying to score a point for her, which really hadn’t entered my mind. I was pursuing my own thoughts entirely. A great many people came over for tennis in the afternoon. Such a lot of cackling went on, but very languid cackling, like sick hens. At first it all seemed to consist of, “Now then, Hartley! Here, Lola! Where’s Bob? Teddy, have you got the balls? Will you take Emma? All right, take Lola then; it doesn’t matter which. Now then, Bob! Where’s Hartley? Lola, have you got the balls? Here, Teddy!” And then the same all mixed up again in a different way. But by and by, when they began to play, I became conscious again of the awful, cold shadow of fear that seems always upon them. Fear of losing some man’s allegiance. Fear of a husband discovering that a man’s allegiance is coveted. Fear of all their friends not knowing that there is any man’s allegiance for the husband to be prevented from discovering. Fear that there may be allegiance of greater social value which is being offered to some one else. Their life is like that fatiguing game called Demon Patience, where everybody tries to be the first to put the next card on six different heaps at once. I felt that Mrs. County and Mrs. Smith, and all the rest of them, were watching with the most practised rapidity of glance to see where a rival was going to plant a new _dernier cri_, whether in clothes, tricks of speech, paramours, or accomplishments of any kind. I longed to become a Yogi: to turn in my tongue, and sit motionless under a tree for a thousand hours and observe the slow processes of Nature.

When Mrs. Merchant came to fetch me I could have thrown myself into her arms. She is as simple as the day, and as dull as ditch-water (a clean ditch with clear water in it and rare ferns growing on the banks), and as pretty as a picture (a chromolithograph of an amiable and beautiful lady), and as wise as an owl which knows that the tree it lives in is hollow and prefers it that way, and as harmless as a dove whom I have been brutally making into pigeon-pie for your delight, but really that you may the better appreciate her full use and beauty. I should like to explain this to her if there were any chance of her ever coming across these letters; to tell her that we love

_First when we see them roasted, biras we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see._

We left Hartley and Emma and Lola and all of them hard at work, evaporating--metabolizing--rather than playing or doing anything else. Their existence seems to be continued by a succession of little explosions, when they leave off one habit and begin another. Some one, I suppose Mrs. County, had been rash enough to tell them that I belong to the professional classes. That set them off exploding like little bombs all round. “By Jove!” “You don’t say so!” “Dear me!” “Artists and those queer kind of beggars!” “Ever meet So-and-so? He painted my missis and we had the time of our lives,” etc.

Have you ever, in a big hotel where an orchestra played after dinner, noticed the faces listening to the music? Sometimes in those orchestras there are men who can play. I have seen some of our brothers saying in their inner consciousness, and almost unknown to the part of their minds which they are using at the moment, “Queer beggars, by Jove! makin’ chunes and fiddlin’ away there. Curious sort of life it must be workin’ a stick up and down on a string made out of some por brute’s inside! wonderful how they manage to keep it up--La da, da de da, pretty little thing that. Tomkins is a deuced shrewd feller the way he handled that contract--” and their thoughts go wandering off again. So I have wandered off myself; but this pigeon-holing of people is a habit I have learned here for the first time. I never knew before how much you and I pigeon-holed merchants and their kind as miserly and uneducated persons, just as they pigeon-hole us as queer beggars with eccentric hair and polygamous habits. When we got home I explained all this to Mr. Merchant, and we spent an evening of vigorous discussion. He rolled me over, so to speak (I have got into the way of explaining all forms of hyperbole), and trampled on me.

“What you long-haired chaps don’t see--” he began.

“Now, if I am to stop calling you and your friends fat you must stop calling mine long-haired,” I interrupted.

“Very well,” he agreed, “but what you and your friends don’t see is that there must be different kinds of people to keep things going. You can’t have every one alike.”

“God forbid!” I said, “no one ever suggested it.”

“Now suppose one of your long-haired friends came into my office--”

“Yes,” I said, “or suppose one of your fat friends came into my studio--”

“Just so,” he replied. “Well, they’d both be fish out of water, wouldn’t they?”

“In a state of chaos,” I explained, “animals, birds, fishes and so on lived together, and such as could not agree ate each other in silence. Later in history they became civilized and masqueraded in one another’s skins, and we are led to hope that, by and by, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the merchant and the cockatrice----”

The angry butler came in just then and Mrs. Merchant gave a slight cough and frowned at me, so we never finished our discussion. I shall be sorry to leave them.

Good-bye,
Yours ever,
GEORGINA.

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