CHAPTER XVIII
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.
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?