Chapter NINE

Some Secrets of Well-known Women--The Charlady’s daughter
who is a Peeress--The Woman German Spy who has Married a
Peer--The Daughter of a Peer Marries a Gendarme at Monte
Carlo--A Blackguard who has been Knighted.

In the course of my cosmopolitan life I have met many notable men and women of to-day, both British and foreign, who have been--by one freak of fortune or another--in the public eye, and are therefore celebrities. They range from bishops to crooks, and from peeresses to adventuresses.

When I review my many friends, I hardly know where to begin, or what to say about them.

Perhaps it will interest the reader if I am indiscreet and tell secrets of some well-known people I have met.

Two young women well-known and highly popular in Society to-day, are uppermost in my mind as I write these lines. Both are pretty, and both welcomed everywhere. And both will, of course, hate me for disclosing their secrets.

The first young lady was the daughter of an estimable woman who acted as charlady at a furnished house I rented at Cromer in 1913. She was a pretty, blue-eyed, doll-like girl, who earned a few shillings a week by taking out on the sea-front perambulators containing children of visitors who wished to go golfing or on excursions. She went to London, met the son and heir of a well-known peer, and eventually married him.

At once a press agent got to work. She was photographed as one of England’s greatest beauties, her name was included in _Burke_, and she has been boomed constantly. Once a week her picture will meet your eye, depicting her riding to hounds, golfing, ski-running, walking in the Park, or chatting on the Terrace of Monte Carlo. And yet to the mother of this young lady with the soft complexion and appealing eyes I paid a daily wage of two shillings to do the scrubbing.

If you believe what you read about the pretty lady you will think she combines the facial beauties of Miss Gladys Cooper with the prowess of Diana, and is the last word in the sports of ski-ing in winter and lawn-tennis in summer.

One night last season I met her at a dance given at Claridge’s by my charming friend, the Marchioness Townshend, and we went into a corner and chatted together. The great company, gay indeed, included the French Ambassador and the Countess of Saint Aulaire, the Marquis and Marchioness of Carisbrooke, Princess Troubetskoy, Lord Leigh, and Mrs. George Pinckard. But I do not suppose anybody in the ballroom suspected that when I sat out with the slim little blue-eyed lady that I whispered a word of congratulation on her great social success.

Who among that gay crowd would have guessed the truth--that the pretty young married woman, radiant and beautiful, with a splendid diamond necklet, which her father-in-law had given her on her marriage, was the daughter of my rheumatic old charwoman!

We have kept our secret even to this day. Her husband and her husband’s parents do not know exactly who she is, though her name, as I have said, appears in _Burke_, and, after all, she is very happy.

The story of the other pretty lady, also a peeress, is far more remarkable, and again, for obvious reasons, I do not give her name. Suffice it to say that she is not of English birth, though everyone in her own smart social circle believes her to be.

She came beneath my notice in a curious way. While engaged in counter-espionage work on the Clyde during the war, I had my headquarters at the Central Station Hotel, in Glasgow. One evening a young Canadian officer asked to see me, and disclosed a very remarkable story, one so curious that I eventually induced him to write down and sign the particulars. They were afterwards duly investigated by the Intelligence Branch.

He told me how, two years before the declaration of war, he had left Quebec to make a tour of Europe, and had joined a pleasure cruise sailing from New York. Among the passengers was an extremely handsome young lady named Ethel Muirhead, who came from Buenos Ayres, and who was travelling alone. He confessed that he had fallen violently in love with her, and on arrival in London had taken her to see the sights of the metropolis. Later, in Paris, they were constantly together, though she was extremely reticent concerning her relatives. She had some German friends in Paris, to whom she introduced him, and some friends of hers in Rome were also German. Indeed, in Rome the secretary of the German Embassy apparently knew her well.

In due course, one night the liner put into Naples, whereupon the lady, who was walking the deck with her admirer after dinner, suddenly halted, and, looking into his face, said that she felt herself compelled to tell him something--namely, that in half-an-hour’s time she was going ashore, and leaving the ship.

“Why?” asked the young man, astounded at the sudden announcement.

“Because--well--to tell you the truth,” she said hesitatingly, “because I am meeting my fiancé here, and we are going to be married!”

The young man was staggered, for all along he had believed that she reciprocated his honest affection.

The girl bade him farewell, and he saw her go ashore in the tender. She would not allow him to accompany her, because her fiancé was awaiting her, but before they parted she gave him her photograph as a souvenir.

He showed it to me. That photograph went to London together with the young Canadian’s signed story, and by its means inquiries were made concerning the pretty Ethel Muirhead, as she had called herself.

I think I cannot do better than copy the report of the searching investigation made in a number of quarters. It runs as follows:

“Alice Ann Morrison, _alias_ Ethel Muirhead, Mary Greenlees,
known as ‘Slim Betty.’ Born in Buenos Ayres in 1893, her
father being a shipping clerk and her mother Italian. Was
employed in a shop in Buenos Ayres. Went to New York and
thence to Berlin. Knows Spanish and Italian well, and has been
identified by S---- S---- as a well-known German secret agent,
who lived in Paris, 124 Rue des Petits Champs, in 1912, being
on friendly terms with B----, who was then a high official
at the French Admiralty. Two years prior to this the girl
in question acted as decoy to the dangerous Creswell gang
of card-sharpers working the transatlantic liners, and was
then known as Betty Bates, and to her associates as ‘Saucy’
Greenlees. Is an adventuress of the worst type and a very
clever secret agent. Married in 19-- ----”

and following is the name of a well-known English peer!

The reader would be very surprised to know the present name of this ex-German spy, who is to-day a pretty and much-photographed peeress, whose smiling face frequently peers out at you from the pages of the illustrated papers. Very few people except myself know the real truth concerning her.

I meet her sometimes, and she is always gracious to me. But will she be so kind and affable when she has read these lines, and learns, for the first time, that I know her secret?

Truly this is a strange world, and the phantasmagoria of life is full of interest. Would that I dare reveal her identity.

But what a shock her husband would sustain.

It is a secret that is better undivulged.

* * * * *

I was walking across Grosvenor Square one day with the Marquis Imperiale, the Italian Ambassador in London, who was for several years so popular in society.

We passed a rather angular lady of uncertain age, evidently a war-widow, who was wearing extremely smart shoes and very expensive silk stockings.

“Ah! Signor Le Queux,” remarked His Excellency, “the goods are well displayed in the window, are they not?”

I afterwards met the same lady a few nights later in a certain drawing-room in Curzon Street, and two months later her photograph appeared in the _Evening News_ as the chief figure in a certain _cause célèbre_.

As a novelist I have naturally ever been in search of real romance. The romances of real life are around us every day, as any reader of these pages well knows. But it was a particularly curious romance of real life in which I participated while I rented a flat that had been vacated by Madame Marconi (mother of Senatore Marconi), facing the Mediterranean at Leghorn.

The British chaplain one day hinted to me that among the small English colony in the sun-blanched Italian town there was a half-starved teacher of English, a certain Signora Baccelli.

I managed to meet the lady, and discovered a very curious romance. It was, to tell it briefly, that she, the eldest daughter of a certain well-known English earl, had, while on their annual winter sojourn on the Riviera, met and fallen in love, with Enrico Baccelli, a tall and particularly handsome gendarme in the service of the Principality of Monaco. Her parents were aghast. Every effort was made on the part of the father and mother to keep their daughter from the good-looking guardian of the peace, who, in his smart uniform, used to do daily duty in patrolling the Place du Casino. They appealed to the Prince of Monaco, and the too-handsome young fellow was, on some pretence, sent to Austria.

But the pretty young lady managed to escape from her father’s seat in Hampshire and join him in Prague, where they were married. Then her parents cut her off, and allowed the newly-married pair to drift.

Poor little lady! Though her name is one of the most historic in Britain, and you will also find her in _Burke_, she was in very homely circumstances when I met her. She cared not a jot for the action of her parents. “They had to do it,” she remarked to me in English, while her tall, handsome husband stood by, not understanding what we were saying. “I do not blame them. One day they will recognize that I love Enrico. I would rather marry the man I love, though he be a gendarme, than make a loveless alliance, such as is made each season in Mayfair. After all, we women ought to be mistresses of our own hearts.”

I agreed. We all three became friends, and for a couple of years they often came and lunched with me. At last the earl forgave his daughter, and to-day they both live in London and are highly popular. Baccelli is not the gendarme’s real name, but it is an Italian one, and you often see a reference to their doings in the _Morning Post_.

Such is real romance--romance that, when the novelist like myself deals with it, resembles mere fiction. But it is to be found everywhere.

* * * * *

“Jean” Palmer, as she was known to her intimate friends, lived in a beautiful corner house in Grosvenor Square, in what Society contemptuously nicknamed “The Biscuit Box.” She was the wife of Sir Walter Palmer, of the firm of Huntley & Palmer, of Reading, and was for many years my friend. We had literary and artistic tastes in common. Oscar Wilde and Coulson Kernahan were of our little set. The wife of a very wealthy man, she delighted in being a Bohemian, and was at heart a great lover of good music.

Her “Wednesdays,” when she decorated her house in Grosvenor Square with flowers, which, by the way, often cost her three hundred pounds, will long be remembered. The gorgeous rooms, with their priceless paintings, the concerts that cost her fabulous sums in fees to the greatest artists of the day, and those wonderful suppers with the most cultured and artistic set in London around the tables, are still fresh in the memory of many besides myself.

_Trilby_ had been produced, and Jean Palmer had nicknamed me “Little Billee,” a name which stuck to me for years.

One day, during the winter season in Florence, I met her in Gilli’s in the Via Tornabuoni, at the fashionable hour of eleven, when everyone goes and eats a cake and drinks a glass of vermouth.

“Hulloa, Little Billee!” she cried. “Look here! Come to a concert with me this afternoon. There’s a new fiddler going to play in a schoolroom out at the Porta Romana.”

I pointed out that the day was warm, and I was not keen about sitting to hear a fiddler in a schoolroom that afternoon.

“Gladys is going with me. Won’t you take mother and daughter?” she urged.

So I reluctantly consented.

After luncheon we drove to a small schoolroom somewhere near the gate of the old road to Rome, where we found about forty people had assembled. On the platform there presently appeared a thin, cadaverous, shabbily-dressed youth, with black, piercing eyes and long hair and rather sallow complexion.

“Oh! So that’s the new genius!” I whispered to Jean.

“Yes. He looks the part, doesn’t he?”

We waited. He played on his violin so magnificently that some of the audience declared him to be the new Paganini.

“Funny name!” remarked Jean, who had never before even looked at her programme. “Kubelik. Hungarian, eh?”

That moment marked the young violinist’s rise to success. After the performance she sought him out and invited him to dinner. We all three dined together. Next day she invited him to drive up to Fiesole and take lunch there. In the carriage Lady Palmer had her pet Pekinese.

Kubelik, shy yet charmingly boy-like, remarked in French:

“Oh, what a pretty dog! Those are very expensive, are they not?”

“I gave a thousand francs for him,” replied his hostess.

Whereupon he sighed and said:

“Ah! that is just double what my violin cost!”

Within two months Jean Palmer had presented him with that magnificent Stradivarius which she acquired from the Finch Hatton family, and had launched him in London on the road to fame.

He was tied up to some Hungarian agents in Budapest, but in order to free him she paid them out a very big sum. She presented him to King Edward, who gave him the magnificent ring that he showed me on the night he received it, and she paid him a fee of five hundred pounds each time he performed at her “Wednesdays.”

Therefore by the kind-heartedness of Jean Palmer did Kubelik rise to the pinnacle of fame as the greatest violinist of his time.

* * * * *

On a January afternoon in 1914 I was standing on the carpeted steps of the Casino at Monte Carlo, having just left an American friend, when suddenly I met a smartly-groomed man whom I knew in London--a man-about-town reported to be wealthy, and a member of at least two good clubs.

“Look here, Le Queux,” he exclaimed in a low voice, “I know you are interested in little Lady X, as everyone is. What do you think of this?” And he took from his pocket-book a letter in the handwriting of a much-photographed young peeress, whose beauty was notable and whose marriage had been one of the smartest in the previous season.

It was, I must admit, a most compromising letter, with a date that showed it to have been written since her marriage.

“Well,” he asked, “what do you think of that, eh?” and he grinned.

“You ought to burn it--not show it round.” I declared in annoyance. “Where did you get it?”

“That’s my affair, my dear fellow,” he laughed, putting it back into his wallet. “I mean it to be of considerable use to me,” he said in a voice of triumph.

Then I recollected that I had once heard a faint whisper that my well-dressed friend lived by his wits, and now I realized that he was a blackmailer.

In secret, I watched during the months that followed, and it became plain that the scoundrel squeezed money time after time out of the pretty young wife. I happen to know that he compelled her to pawn her jewels, and when he could get no more out of her, the blackguard gave her husband the incriminating letter, and it formed the basis of divorce proceedings. Poor little Lady X died last year.

But to-day that despicable blackguard is actually a knight! He married a rich woman older than himself, and you will constantly read of their doings in the “Society gossip.” Is it any wonder when I read of them I am nauseated? Yet is it any worse to grant honours to war-profiteers or aliens from nowhere?

The King cannot be blamed for the graft that has been accepted for honours in the past. Indeed, it is hoped that the new system, with its array of penalties, may prevent it in future. The King naturally believes in those whom he trusts with the government of his country, and not even the most violent tub-thumper in Hyde Park can possibly blame him.

The case I have referred to is, I fear, but one of many where honours have been bought by men in order to whitewash themselves--bought in the open market, as they would buy a bundle of pink tape. But I have hope that such cases will never again be repeated. We must not allow “celebrities” to manufacture themselves by means of a fat cheque to “the proper quarter,” and thus demand a niche in the already overcrowded pages of “_Who’s Who_.”