CHAPTER XX
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
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.