I HOPE,” said Mrs Albert, “that I am as free to admit my errors in judgment as another. Evidently there has been a mistake in this matter, and it is equally obvious that I am the one who must have made it. I did not need to have this pointed out to me, Dudley. What I looked to you for was advice, counsel, sympathy. You seem not to realise at all how important this is to me. A false step now may ruin everything—and you simply sit there and grin!”
“My dear sister,” replied Uncle Dudley, smoothing his face, “the smile was involuntary. It shall not recur. I was only thinking of Albert’s enthusiasm for the——”
“Yes, I know!” put in Mrs Albert; “for that girl with the zouave jacket——”
“And the scarlet petticoat,” prompted Uncle Dudley.
“And the crinoline,” said the lady.
“O, he did not insist upon that. I recall his exact words. ‘Whether this under-garment,’ he said, ‘be made of some stiff material like horsehair, or by means of steel hoops, is a mere question of detail.’ No, Albert expressly kept an open mind on that point.”
“I agree with you,” remarked Mrs Albert coldly, “to the extent that he certainly does keep his mind on it. He has now reverted to the subject, I should think, at least twenty times. I am not so blind as you may imagine. I notice that that Mr Labouchere also keeps on referring, every week, to another girl in her zouave jacket, whom he remembers with equal fondness, apparently.”
“Yes,” put in Uncle Dudley, “those words about the ‘stiff material like horsehair’ were in Truth. I daresay Albert simply read them there, and just unconsciously repeated them. We often do inadvertent, unthinking things of that sort.”
Mrs Albert shook her head. “It is nothing to me, of course,” she said, “but I cannot help feeling that the middle-aged father of a family might concentrate his thoughts upon something nobler, something higher, than the recollection of the charms of a red petticoat, thirty years ago. That is so characteristic of men. They cannot discuss a question broadly——”
“Think not?” queried Uncle Dudley, with interest. “You should listen at the keyhole sometime, after you have led the ladies out from dinner.”
“I mean personally, in a general way. They always particularise. Albert, for example, allows all his views on this very important question to be coloured by the fact that when he was a young man he admired some girl in a short red Balmoral petticoat. Whenever conversation touches upon any phase of the whole subject of costume, out he comes with his tiresome adulation of that particular garment. Of course, I ask no questions—I should prefer not to be informed—I try not even to draw inferences—but I notice that Ermyntrude is beginning to observe the persistency with which her father——”
“My good Emily,” urged Uncle Dudley, consolingly, “far back in the Sixties we all liked that girl; we couldn’t help ourselves—she was the only girl there was. And we think of her fondly still—we old fellows—because for us she was also the last there was! When she went out, lo and behold! we too had gone out, not to come back any more. When Albert and I babble about a scarlet petticoat, it is only as a symbol of our own far-away youth. O delicious vision!—the bright, bright red, the skirt that came drooping down over it, not hiding too much that pretty little foot and ankle, the dear zouave jacket moulding itself so delicately to the persuasive encircling arm——”
“Dudley! I really must recall you to yourself,” said Mrs Albert. “We were speaking of quite another matter. I am in a very serious dilemma. First of all, as I explained to you, to please the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn I became one of the Vice-Presidents of the Friendly Divided Skirt Association. You know how useful she can be, in helping to bring Ermyntrude out successfully. And of course everybody knew that, even if we did have them made, we should never wear them. That was quite out of the question.”
“And then?” asked Uncle Dudley.
“Well, then, let me see—yes, next came the Neo-Dress-Improver League. I never understood what the object was, precisely; it was a kind of secession from the other, led by the Countess of Wimps, and I needn’t tell you that she is of the utmost importance to us, and there was simply nothing for me to do but to become a Lady Patroness of that. You were in extremely nice company—there were seven or eight ladies of title among the Patronesses, our names all printed together in beautiful little gilt letters—and you really weren’t committed to anything that I could make out. No—that was all right. I should do the same thing again, under the circumstances. No, the trouble came with the Amalgamated Anti-Crinoline Confederacy. That was where I was too hasty, I think.”
“That’s the thing with the protesting post-cards, isn’t it?” inquired Uncle Dudley.
“That very feature of it alone ought to have warned me,” Mrs Albert answered with despondency. “My own better sense should have told me that post-cards were incompatible with selectness. But you see, the invitations were sent out by the authoress of The Street-Sprinkler’s Secret, and that gave me the impression that it was to be literary—to represent Culture and the Arts, you know; and that appealed to me, of course, very strongly.”
“I have always feared that your literary impulses would run away with you,” Uncle Dudley declared gravely.
“It is my weak side; I don’t deny it,” replied his sister. “Where letters and authorship, and that sort of thing, you know, are concerned, it is my nature to be sympathetic. And besides, the Dowager Lady Thames-Ditton was very pronounced in favour of the movement, and I couldn’t fly in the face of that, could I? I must say, though, that I had my misgivings almost from the first. Miss Wallaby told the Rev. Mr Grayt-Scott that a lady she knew had looked over quite a peck or more of the post-cards which came in one day, and they were nine-tenths of them from Earl’s Court.”
“Yes,” remarked Uncle Dudley, “I think I have heard that the post-card reaches its most luxuriant state of literary usefulness in that locality. It was from that point that they tried to rush the Laureateship, you know.”
“Well, you can imagine how I felt when I heard it. It is all well enough to be literary—nobody realises that more than I do—and it is all very well to be loyal—of course! But one draws the line at Earl’s Court—at least, that part of it. I say frankly that it serves me right. I should have known better. One thing I cannot be too thankful for—Ermyntrude did not send a post-card. Some blessed instinct prompted me to tell her there was no hurry about it—that I did not like to see young girls too forward in such matters. And now—why—who knows—Dudley! I have an idea! Ermie shall join the Crinoline Defence League!”
“I see—the family will hedge on the crinoline issue. Capital!”
“You know, after all, we may have to wear them. It’s quite as likely as not. The old Duchess of West Ham is President of the League, and she is very influential in the highest quarters. Her Grace, I understand, is somewhat bandy, but she has always maintained the strictest Christian respectability, and her action in this matter will count for a great deal. Just think, if she should happen to take a fancy to Ermyntrude! That Miss Wallaby has thrust herself forward till she is actually a member of the Council, and she is going to deliver an address on ‘The Effect of Modesty on National Morals.’ She told our curate that at one of the meetings of the Council she came within an ace of being introduced to the Duchess herself. Now surely, if she can accomplish all this, Ermie ought to be able to do still more. Tell me, Dudley, what do you think?”
“I think,” replied Uncle Dudley musingly, “I think that the scarlet petticoat, with the zouave jack——”
Mrs Albert interrupted him with sternness. “Don’t you see,” she demanded, “that if it does come, the dear girl will share in the credit of bringing it in, and if it doesn’t come, I shall have the advantage of having helped to stave it off. Whichever side wins, there we are.”
Uncle Dudley rose, and looked thoughtfully out upon the fog, and stroked his large white moustache in slow meditation. “Yes—undoubtedly,” he said at last, “there we are.”
There was once a woman—obviously a thoughtful woman—who remarked that she had noticed that if she managed to live till Friday, she invariably survived the rest of the week. I did not myself know this philosopher, who is preserved to history in one of Roscoe Conkling’s speeches, but her discovery always recurs to me about this time of year, when February begins to disclose those first freshening glimpses of sunlight and blue skies to bleared, fog-smudged and shivering London. Aha! if we have won thus far, if we have contrived to get to February, then we shall surely see the Spring. At least the one has heretofore involved the other—and there is confident promise in the smile of a noon-day once more able to cast a shadow, albeit the teeth of the east wind gleam close behind that smile.
It was a day for a walk—no set and joyous rural tramp, indeed, with pipe and wallet, and a helpful spring underfoot in the clean hard roadway, and an honest, well-balanced stick for the bell-ringing gentry who shall come at you on wheels from behind—but just an orderly, contemplative urban ramble, brisk enough for warmth, but with no hurry, and above all no destination. And it was a day, moreover, for letting one’s fellow-creatures pass along with scant notice—a winter-ridden, shuffling, mud-stained company these, conscious of being not at all worth examination—and for giving eye instead to the house-fronts in the sunshine, and radiant chimneypots and tiles above them, and the signs of blessed, unaccustomed blue still further up. There was, it is true, an undeniable disproportion between the inner look of these things, and this gladness of the heart because of them. Glancing more closely, one could see that they were not taking the sun seriously, and, for their own part, were expecting more fogs next week. And farther westward, when stucco, brick, and stone gave way to park-land, it was apparent at sight that the trees were flatly incredulous.
They say that in Ireland, where the mildness of climate has in the past prompted many experiments with exotic growths, the trees not really indigenous to the island never learn sense, but year after year are gulled by this February fraud into gushing expansively forth with sap and tender shoots, only to be gripped and shrivelled by the icy after-hand of March. The native tree, however, knows this trick of old, and greets the sham Spring with a distinctive, though well-buttoned-up wink. In Kensington Park region one couldn’t be sure that the trees really saw the joke. It is not, on the whole, a humourous neighbourhood. But at all events they were not to be fooled into premature buds and sprouts and kindred signs of silliness. Every stiffly exclusive drab trunk rising before you, every section of the brown lacework of twigs up above, seemed to offer a warning advertisement: “No connection with the sunshine over the way!”
Happily the flower-beds exhibited more sympathy. Up through the mould brave little snowdrops had pushed their pretty heads, and the crocuses, though with their veined outer cloaks of sulphur, mauve, and other tints still wrapped tight about them, wore almost a swaggering air to show how wholly they felt at home. Emboldened by this bravado, less confident fellows were peeping forth, though in such faltering fashion that one could scarcely tell which was squill, which narcissus or loitering jonquil. Still, it was good to see them. They too were glad that they had lived till February, because after that comes the Spring.
And it was better still, as I turned to stroll on, to behold coming toward me down the path, with little swinging step, and shapely head well up in air, none other than our Ermyntrude.
I say “our” because—it is really absurd to think of it—it seems only a few months ago since she was a sprawling tom-boy sort of a little girl, who sat on my knee and listened with her mouth open to my reminiscences of personal encounters with unicorns and the behemoth of Holy Writ. She must be now—by George! she is—not a minute under two-and-twenty. And that means—hélas! it undoubtedly means—that I am getting to be an old boy indeed. At Christmas-tide—I recall it now—Mrs Albert spoke of me as the oldest friend of the family. It sounded kindly at the time, and I had a special pleasure in the smile Ermyntrude wore as she, with the others, lifted her glass towards me. I won’t say what vagrant thoughts and ambitions that smile did not raise in my mind—and, lo! they were toasting me as an amiable elderly friend of the Fernbank household. No wonder I am glad to have lived till February!
Ermyntrude had a roll of music in her hands. There was a charming glow on her cheeks, and a healthy, happy, sparkle in her eyes. She stopped short before me, with a little exclamation of not displeased surprise!
“Why, how nice to run upon you like this,” she said, in high spirits. “We thought you must have gone off to the Riviera, or Algiers, or somewhere—for your cold, you know. Mamma was speaking of you only yesterday—hoping that you were taking care of yourself.”
“Had I a cold?” I asked absently. The air had grown chillier. We walked along together, and she let me carry the music.
“O—you haven’t heard,” she exclaimed suddenly, “such news as I have for you! You couldn’t ever guess!”
“Is it something about crinoline?” I queried. “Your mother was telling
“Rubbish!” said Ermyntrude gaily. “I’m engaged!”
The wind had really got round into the East, and I, fastened my coat at the collar. “I am sure”—I remarked at last—“I’m sure I congratulate—the happy young man. Do I know him?”
“I hardly think so,” she replied. “You see, it’s—it’s what you might call rather sudden. We haven’t known him ourselves very long—that is, intimately. You may have heard his name—the Honourable Knobbeleigh Jones. It’s a very old family though the title is somewhat new. His father is Lord Skillyduff, you know.”
“The shipping man?” I said, wearily.
“Yes. He and papa are together on some board or other. That is how we came to know them. Papa says he never saw such business ability and sterling worth combined in one man before—I’m speaking of the father, you know. He began life in quite a small way, with just a few ships that he rented, or something like that. Then there was a war on some coast in Africa or Australia—it begins with an A, I know—oh, is there a place called Ashantee?—yes, that’s it—and he got the contract to take out four shiploads of hay to our troops—it would be for their horses, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes: the asses connected with the military branch are needed at home—or at least are kept there.”
“Well, after he started, he got orders to stop at some place and wait for other orders. He did so, and he waited four years and eight months. Those orders never came. The hay all rotted, of course: the ships almost moulded away: I daresay some of the crew died of old age—But Mr Jones never stirred from his post. Finally, some English official came on him by accident—quite! and so he was recalled. Papa says very few men would have shown such tenacity of purpose and grasp of the situation. Mamma says his fidelity to duty was magnificent.”
“Magnificent—yes,” I commented; “but it wasn’t war.”
“Oh, bless you! there was no war then,” explained Ermyntrude. “The war had been ended for years. And all that while the pay for shipping that hay had been going on, so that the Government owed him—I think it was £45,000. Of course he got more contracts, and then he was made a baronet, and could build his own ships; and now he is a lord, and papa says the War Office would be quite helpless without him.”
“And the son,” I asked; “what does he do?”
“Why, nothing, of course!” said Ermyntrude, lifting her pretty brows a little in surprise. “He is the eldest son.”
“I didn’t know but he might have gone in for the Army, or Parliament, or something,” I explained weakly: “just to occupy his mind.”
She smiled to herself—somewhat grimly, I thought. “No,” she said, assuming a serious face, “he says doing things is all rot, if you aren’t obliged to do them. Of course, he goes in for hunting and shooting and all that, and he has a houseboat and a yacht, and one year he was in the All-Slumpshire eleven, but that was too much bother. He hates bother.”
We had come out upon the street now, and walked for a little in silence.
“Ermie,” I said at last, “you mustn’t be annoyed with me—this is one of my sentimental days, and you know as an old friend of the family I’ve a certain right of free speech—but this doesn’t seem to me quite good enough. A girl like you—beautiful and clever and accomplished, knowing your way about among books, and with tastes above the ruck—there ought to be a better outlook for you than this! I know that type of young man, and he isn’t in your street at all. Come now!” I went on, gathering courage, “look me in the face if you can, and tell me that you honestly love this young man, or that you really respect his father, or that you candidly expect to be happy. I defy you to do it!”
I was wrong. Ermyntrude did look me in the face, squarely and without hesitation. She halted for the moment to do so, and her gaze, though not unkindly, was full of serious frankness.
“There is one thing I do expect,” she said, calmly. “I expect to get away from Fernbank.”
You will find Dudley up in what he calls his library,” said Mrs Albert in the hallway. “I’m so sorry I must go out—but he’ll be glad to see you. And—let me entreat you, don’t give him any encouragement!”
“What!” I cried, “encourage Uncle Dudley? Oh—never, never!”
“No, just be firm with him,” Mrs Albert went on. “Say that it mustn’t be thought of for a moment. And Oh—by the way—it’s as well to warn you: don’t ask him what he did it for! It seems that every one asks him that—and he gets quite enraged about it now, when that particular question is put. As like as not he’d throw something at you.” She spoke earnestly, in low, impressive tones.
“Wild horses should not drag it from me,” I pledged myself. “I will not encourage him: I will not enrage him; I swear not to ask him what he did it for. But—if you don’t mind—could I, so to speak, bear the shock of learning what it is that he has done?”
“You haven’t heard?” Mrs Albert asked, glancing up at me, with an astonished face, as I stood on the stairs. When I shook my head, she put out her hand to the latch, and opened the door, as if to heighten the dramatic suspense. Then she turned and looked me in the eye with solemn intentness. “What has he done?” she echoed in a hollow voice: “You go upstairs and see!”
The door closed behind her, and I made my way noiselessly, two steps at a time, to the floor above. Some vague sense of disaster seemed to brood over the silent, half-lighted stairway and the deserted landing. I knocked at Uncle Dudley’s door—almost prepared to find my signal unanswered. But no, his voice came back, cheerily enough, and I entered the room.
“Oh, it’s you!” said my friend, rising from his chair. “Glad to see you,”—and we shook hands. Standing thus, I found myself staring into his face with a rude and prolonged fixity of gaze, under which he first smiled—a strange, unwholesome sort of smile—then flushed a little, then scowled and averted his glance.
“Great heavens!” I exclaimed at last. “Why, man alive, what on earth possessed you to—”
“Come now!” broke in Uncle Dudley, with peremptory sternness. “Chuck it!”
“Yes—I know”—I stammered haltingly along—“I promised I wouldn’t ask you—but—”
“But the original simian instincts triumph over your resolutions, eh?” said my friend, crustily. “Yes, I know. I’ve had pretty nearly a week of it now. That question has been asked me, I estimate, somewhere about six hundred and seventy-eight times since last Thursday. It’s only fair to you to tell you that I have registered a vow to hit the next man who asks me that fool of a question—‘What did you do it for?’—straight under his left ear. I probably saved your life by interrupting you.”
Though the words were fierce, there was a marked return of geniality in the tone. I took the liberty of putting a hand over Uncle Dudley’s shoulder, and marching him across to the window.
“Let’s have a good look at you,” I said.
“I did it myself; I did it with my little hatchet; I did it because I wanted to; I had a right to do it; I should do it again if the fit struck me——” Thus, with mock gravity, Uncle Dudley ran on as I scrutinised his countenance in the strong light. “And furthermore,” he added, “I don’t care one single hurrah in Hades whether you like it or not.”
“I think on the whole,” I mused aloud—“yes, I think I rather do like it—now that I accustom myself to it.”
Uncle Dudley’s face brightened on the instant. “Do you really?” he exclaimed, and beamed upon me. In spite of his professed indifference to my opinion, it was obvious that I had pleased him.
“Sit down,” he said—“there are the matches behind you—hope these aren’t too green for you. Yes, my boy, I created quite a flutter in the hen-yard, I can tell you. Did my sister tell you?—she nearly fainted, and little Amy burst out boo-hooing as if she’d lost her last friend. When you come to think of it, old man, it’s really too ridiculous, you know.”
“It certainly has its grotesque aspects,” I admitted.
Uncle Dudley looked up sharply, as if suspecting some ironical meaning in my words. “You really do think it’s an improvement?” he asked, with a doubtful note in his voice.
“Of course, it makes a tremendous change,” I said, diplomatically, “and the novelty tends perhaps to confuse judgment: but I must confess the result is—is, well, very interesting.”
My friend did not look wholly satisfied. “It shows what stupid people we are,” he went on in a dogmatic way. “Why, the way they’ve gone on, you’d think I had no property rights in the thing at all—that I was merely a trustee for it—bound to give an account to every Tom-Dick-and-Harry who came along and had nothing better to occupy his mind with. And then that eternal, vacuous, woollen-brained ‘What did you do it for?’ Oh, that’s got to be too sickening for words! And the confounded familiarity of the whole thing! Why, hang me, if even the little Jew cigar dealer down on the corner didn’t feel entitled to pass what he took to be some friendly remarks on the subject. ‘Vy,’ he said, ‘if I could say vidout vlattery, vot a haddsobe jeddlebad you ver, and vy did you do dot by yourself?’ It gets on a man’s nerves, you know, things like that.”
“But hasn’t anyone liked the change?” I asked.
Uncle Dudley sighed. “That’s the worst of it,” he said, dubiously. “Only two men have said they liked it—and it happens that they are both persons of conspicuously weak intellect. That’s rather up against me, isn’t it? But on the other hand, you know, people who are silliest about everything else always get credit for knowing the most about art and beauty and all that. Perhaps in such a case as this, I daresay their judgment might be better than all the others. And after all, what do I care? That’s the point I make: that it’s my business and nobody else’s. If a man hasn’t got a copyright in his own personal appearance, why there is no such thing as property. But instead of recognising this, any fellow feels free to come up and say: ‘You look like an unfrocked priest,’ or ‘Hullo! another burglar out of work,’ and he’s quite surprised if you fail to show that you’re pleased with the genial brilliancy of his remarks. I don’t suppose there is any other single thing which the human race lapses into such rude and insolent meddlesomeness over as it does over this.”
“It is pathetic,” I admitted—“but—but it’ll soon grow again.”
Uncle Dudley laughed a bitter laugh. “By Jove,” he cried, “I’ve more than half a mind not to let it. It would serve ‘em right if I didn’t. Why, do you know—you’d hardly believe it! My sister had a dinner party on here for Saturday night, and after I’d—I’d done it—she cancelled the invitations—some excuse about a family loss—a bereavement, my boy. Well, you know, treatment of that sort puts a man on his mettle. I’m entitled to resent it. And besides—you know—of course it does make a great change—but somehow I fancy that when you get used to it—come now—the straight griffin, as they say—what do you think?”
“I’m on oath not to encourage you,” I made answer.
“There you have it!” cried Uncle Dudley: “the old tyrannical conspiracy against the unusual, the individual, the true! Let nobody dare to be himself! Let us have uniformity, if all else perishes. The frames must be alike in the Royal Academy, that’s the great thing; the pictures don’t matter so much. You see our women-folk now, this very month, getting ready to case themselves in ugly hoops which they hate, at the bidding of they know not whom, because, if they did not, the hideous possibility of one woman being different from another woman would darken the land. A man is not to be permitted the pitiful privilege of seeing his own mouth, not even once in fifteen years, simply because it temporarily inconveniences the multitude in their notions as to how he is in the habit of looking! What rubbish it is!”
“It is rubbish,” I assented—“and you are talking it. Your sister who fainted, your niece who wept, your friends who averted their gaze in anguish, the hordes of casual jackasses who asked why you did it, the kindly little Jew cigar man who broke forth in lamentations—these are the world’s jury. They have convicted you—sorrowfully but firmly. You yourself, for all your bravado, realise the heinousness of your crime. You are secretly ashamed, remorseful, penitent. I answer for you—you will never do it again.”
“And yet it isn’t such a bad mouth, either,” mused Uncle Dudley, with a lingering glance at the mirror over the mantel. “There is humour, delicacy of perception, affection, gentleness—ever so many nice qualities about it which were all hidden up before. The world ought to welcome the revelation—and it throws stones instead. Ah well!—pass the matches—let us yield gracefully to the inevitable! It shall grow again.”
“Mrs Albert will be so glad,” I remarked.
If his name was Jabez, why weren’t we told so, I’d like to know?” demanded Mrs Albert of me, with a momentary flash in her weary glance. “What right had the papers to go on calling him J. Spencer, year after year, while he was deluding the innocent, and fattening upon the bodies of his dupes? To be sure, now that the mask is off, and he has fled, they speak of him always as Jabez. Why didn’t they do it before, while honest people might still have been warned? But no—they never did—and now it’s too late—too late!”
The poor lady’s voice broke pathetically upon this reiterated plaint. She bowed her head, and as I looked with pained sympathy upon the drooping angle of her proud face, I could see the shadows about her lips quiver.
A sad tale indeed it was, to which I had been listening—here in a lonesome corner of the cloistral, dim-lit solitude of the big drawing-room at Fernbank. It was not a new story. Kensington has known it by heart for a generation. Bloomsbury learned it earlier, and before that it was familiar in Soho—away off in the old days when the ruffling gentry of Golden Square fought for the chance of buying ingenious John Law’s South Sea scrip. And even then, the experience was an ancient and half-forgotten memory of Bishopsgate and the Minories. It was the old, old tragedy of broken fortunes.
Mrs Albert was clear that it began with the Liberator troubles. I had my own notion that Mr Albert Grundy was skating on thin ice before the collapse of the building societies came. However that may be, there was no doubt whatever that the cumulative Australian disasters had finished the business. There were melancholy details in her recital which I lack the courage to dwell upon. The horse and brougham were gone; the lease of Fernbank itself was offered for sale, with possession before Michaelmas, if desired; Ermyntrude’s engagement was as good as off.
“It won’t be a bankruptcy,” said Mrs Albert, lifting her face and resolutely winking the moisture from her lashes. “We shall escape that—but for the moment at least I must abandon my position in society. Dudley is over to-day looking at a small place in Highgate, although Albert thinks he would prefer Sydenham. My own feeling is that some locality from which you could arrive by King’s Cross or St Paneras would be best. One never meets anybody one knows there. Then, when matters adjust themselves again, as of course they will, we could return here—to this neighbourhood, at least—and just mention casually having been out at our country place—on the children’s account, of course. And Floribel is delicate, you know.”
“Oh well, then,” I said, trying to put buoyance into my tone, “it isn’t so had after all. And you feel—Albert feels—quite hopeful about things coming right again?”
My friend’s answering nod of affirmation had a certain qualifying dubiety about it. “Yes, we’re hopeful,” she said. “But a fortnight ago, I felt positively sanguine. Nobody ever worked harder than I did to deserve success, any way. I only failed through gross treachery—and that, too, at the hands of the very people of whom I could never, never have believed it. When you find the aristocracy openly actuated by mercenary motives, as I have done this past month, it almost makes you ask what the British nation is coming to!”
“Dear me!” I exclaimed, “is it as bad as that?”
“You shall judge for yourself,” said Mrs Albert gravely. “You know that I organised—quite early in the Spring—the Loyal Ladies’ Namesake Committee of Kensington. I do not boast in saying that I really organised it, quite from its beginnings. The idea was mine; practically all the labour was mine. But when one is toiling to realise a great ideal like that, one frequently loses sight of small details. I ought to have known better—but I took a serpent to my bosom. I was weak enough to associate with me in the enterprise that monument of duplicity and interested motives—the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn. Why, she hadn’t so much as an initial letter to entitle her to belong——”
“I am not sure that I follow you,” I put in. “Ladies’ Namesake Committee—initial letter—I don’t seem to grasp the idea.”
“It’s perfectly simple,” explained Mrs Albert. “The idea was that all the ladies—our set, you know—whose name was ‘May’ should combine in subscribing for a present.”
“But your name is Emily,” I urged, thoughtlessly.
“Oh, we weren’t exactly literal about it,” said Mrs Albert; “we couldn’t be, you know. It would have shut out some of our very best people. But I came very near the standard, indeed. My second name is Madge. You take the first two letters of that, and the ‘y’ from Emily, and there you have it. Oh, I assure you, very few came even as near it as that—and as I said to Dudley at the time, if you think of it, even her name isn’t really May. It’s only a popular contraction. But that Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn, she had no actual right whatever to belong. Her names are Hester Winifred Edith. She hasn’t even one letter right!”
“Ah, that was indeed treachery!” I ejaculated.
“Oh, no, that, was not what I referred to,” Mrs Albert set me right. “Of course, I was aware of her names. I had seen them in the ‘Peerage’ for years. It was what she did after her entrance that covers her with infamy. But I will narrate the events in their order. First, we collected £1100. Of course, our own contribution was not large, but Ermyntrude and I hunted the various church registers—we don’t speak of it, but even the Nonconformist ones we went through—and we got a tremendous number of Christian names more or less what was desired, and our circulars were sent to every one, far and near. As I said, we raised quite £1100. Then there came the question of the gift.”
Mrs Albert uttered this last sentence with such deliberate solemnity that I bowed to show my consciousness of its importance.
“Yes,” she went on, “the selection of the gift. Now I had in mind a most appropriate and useful present. Have you heard of the Oboid Oil Engine? No? Well, it is an American invention, and has been brought over here by an American, who has bought the European rights from the inventor. He is in the next building to Albert, in the City, and they meet almost every day at luncheon, and have struck up quite a friendship. He has connections which might be of the utmost importance to Albert, and if Albert could only have been of service to him in introducing this engine, there is literally no telling what might not have come of it. Albert does not say that a partnership would have resulted, but I can read it in his face.”
“But would an oil engine have been—under the circumstances—you know what I mean——” I began.
“Oh, most suitable!” responded Mrs Albert with conviction. “It is really, it seems, a very surprising piece of machinery. After it’s once bought, the cheapness of running it is simply absurd. It does all sorts of things at no expense worth mentioning—anything you want it to do. It appears that if it had been invented at that time, the pyramids in Egypt could have been built by it for something like 130 per cent, less than their cost is estimated to have been—or something like that. Oh, it is quite extraordinary, I assure you. Albert says he could stand and watch it working for hours—especially if he had an interest in the company.”
“But I hadn’t heard that there were any new pyramid plans on just now—although, when I think of it, Shaw-Lefevre did have some Westminster Abbey project which——”
“No, no!” interrupted Mrs Albert. “One of the engine’s greatest uses is in agriculture. It does everything—threshes, garners, mows, milks—or no, not that, but almost everything. No self-respecting farmer, they say, dreams of being without one—that is, of course, if he knows about it. You can see what it would have meant, if one had been thus publicly introduced on the princely farm at Sandringham. All England would have rung with demands for the Oboid—and Albert feels sure that the American man would have been grateful—and—and—then perhaps we need never have left Fernbank at all.”
My poor friend shook her head mournfully at the thought
“And the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn?” I asked.
The fire came back into Mrs Albert’s eye. “That woman,” she said, with bitter calmness, “was positively not ashamed to intrude her own mercenary and self-seeking designs upon this loyal and purely patriotic association. Why, she did it almost openly. She intrigued behind my back with whole streetsful of people that one would hardly know on ordinary occasions, paid them calls in a carriage got up for the occasion with a bright new coat of arms, made friends with them, promised them heaven only knows what, and actually secured nineteen votes to my three for the purchase of a mouldy old piece of tapestry—something about Richard III and Oliver Cromwell meeting on the battlefield, I think the subject is—which belonged to her husband’s family. Of course, my lips are sealed, but I have been told that at Christie’s it would hardly have fetched £100. I say nothing myself, but I can’t prevent people drawing certain deductions, can I? And when I reflect also that her two most active supporters in this nefarious business were Lady Thames-Ditton—whose financial difficulties are notorious—and the Countess of Wimps—— whose tradespeople—well, we won’t go into that—it does force one to ask whether the fabric of British society is not being undermined at its very top. In this very day’s paper I read that the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn has hired a yacht, and will spend the summer in Norwegian waters—while we—we——”
The door opened, and we made out through the half-light the comfortable figure of Uncle Dudley. He was mopping his brow, and breathed heavily from his long walk as he advanced.
“Well?” Mrs Albert asked, in a saddened and subdued tone, “Did you see the place?”
“There are five bedrooms on the two upper floors,” he made answer, “but there’s no bath-room, and the bus doesn’t come within four streets of the house.”
It was at a little village perched well up on one of the carriage-roads ascending the Brocken, a fortnight or so ago, that I received a wire from Uncle Dudley. It was kind of him to think of it—all the more as he had good news to tell. “Family lighted square on their feet,” was what the message said, and I was glad to gather from this that the Grundys had weathered their misfortunes, and that Mrs Albert was herself again.
The thought was full of charm. It seemed as if I had never realised before how fond I was of these good people. In sober fact; I dare say that I had not dwelt much upon their woes during my holiday. But now, with this affectionately thoughtful telegram addressing me as their oldest friend, the one whom they wished to be the first to share the joy of their rescued state, it was easy enough to make myself believe that my whole vacation had been darkened with brooding over their unhappiness.
It had not occurred to me before, but that was undoubtedly why I had not liked the Harz so much this year as usual. Now that I thought of it, walking down the birch-lined footpath towards the hamlet and the telegraph office, the place seemed to have gone off a good deal. In other seasons, before the spectre of cholera flooded its sylvan retreats with an invading horde of Hamburgers, the Harzwald had been my favourite resort. I had grown to love its fir-clad slopes, its shadowed glens, its atmosphere of prehistoric myth and legend, as if I were part and product of them all. Its people, too, had come much nearer to my breast than any other Germans ever could. I had enjoyed being with them just because they were what the local schoolmaster disdainfully declared them to be—Erdzertrümmerungsprozeszuribekanntevolk—that is to say, people entirely ignorant of the scientific theories about geological upheavals and volcanic formations, and so able cheerfully to put their trust in the goblins who reared these strange boulders in fantastic piles on every hill top, and to hear with good faith the shouts of the witches as they bounded over the Hexentanzplatz. Last year it had seemed even worth the added discomfort of the swarming Hamburgers to be again in this wholesome, sweet-aired primitive place. But this year—I saw now clearly as I looked over Uncle Dudley’s message once more—it had not been so pleasant. The hotel boy, Fritzchen, whom I had watched year after year with the warmth of a fatherly well-wisher—smiling with satisfaction at his jovial countenance, his bustling and competent ways, and his comical attempts at English—had this season swollen up into a burly and consequential lout, with a straw-coloured sprouting on his upper-lip, and a military manner. They called him Fritz now, and he gave me beer out of the old keg after I had heard the new one tapped.
The evening gatherings of the villagers in the hotel, too, were not amusing as they once had been. The huge lion-maned and grossly over-bearded Kantor, or music-master, who came regularly at nightfall to thump on the table with his bludgeon-like walking stick, to roar forth impassioned monologues on religion and politics, and to bellow ceaselessly at Fritzchen for more beer, had formerly delighted me. This time he seemed only a noisy nuisance, and the half-circle of grave old retired foresters and middle-aged Jàger officers who sat watching him over their pipes, striving vainly now and again to get in a word edgewise about the auctions of felled trees in the woods, or the mutinous tendencies of the charcoal-burners, presented themselves in the light of tiresome prigs. If they had been worth their salt, I felt, they would long ago have brained the Kantor with their stoneware mugs. Even as I walked I began to be conscious that a three weeks’ stay in the Harz was a good deal of time, and that the remaining third would certainly hang on my hands.
By the time I reached the telegraph station I had my answer to Uncle Dudley ready in my mind. He liked the forcible imagery of Australia and the Far West; and I would speak to him at this joyful juncture after his own heart. It seemed that I could best do this by giving him to understand that I was celebrating his news—that I was, in one of his own phrases, “painting the town red.” It required some ingenuity to work this idea out right, but I finally wrote what appeared to answer the purpose:—“Brocken und Umgebung sind roth gemalen”—and handed it in to the man at the window.
He was a young man with close-cropped yellow hair and spectacles, holding his chin and neck very stiff in the high collar of his uniform. He glanced over my despatch, at first with careless dignity. Then he read it again attentively. Then he laid it on the table, and bent his tight-buttoned form over it as well as might be in a severe and prolonged scrutiny. At last he raised himself, turned a petrifying gaze on through his glasses at me, and shook his head.
“It is not true,” he said. “Some one has you deceived.”
“But,” I tried to explain to him, with the little German that I knew scattering itself in all directions in the face of this crisis, “it is a figure of speech, a joke, a——”
The telegraph man stared coldly at my luckless despatch, and then at me. “You would wish to state to your friend, perhaps,” he suggested, “that they seem as if they had been coloured with red, owing to the change in the leaves.”
“No, no,” I put in. “It must be that they have been painted, are painted, or he will not me understand.”
“But, my good sir,” retorted the operator with emphasis, “they are not painted! From the door gaze you forth! What make you with this nonsense, that Brocken and vicinity are red painted?”
“Well, then,” I said wearily, oppressed by the magnitude of the task, “I don’t know how to word it myself, but you can fix it for me. Just say that I am going to paint them red—that will do just as well.
“But you shall not! It is forbidden!” exclaimed the official, holding himself like a poker, and glaring vehemence through his glasses. “It is strongly forbidden! When you one brush-mark shall make, quick to the prison go you. In Germany have we for natural beauty respect—also laws.”
Reluctantly, but of necessity, I abandoned metaphor, and in a humble spirit telegraphed in English to Uncle Dudley at his club that I was very glad. Even as my pen clung in irresolution on the paper over this word “glad,” the impulse rose in me to add: “Tired of Harz. Am returning immediately.”
“When the same here is,” remarked the operator, moodily studying the unknown words, “in Brunswick stopped it will be.”
I translated it for him, and added, “I go from here home, to be where officials their own business mind.”
He nodded, not unamiably, and replied as he handed me out my change: “Yes, I know: England. So well their own business there officials mind, that Balfour to Argentina easily comes.”
Walking up the hillside again, already quite captive to the fascination of the morrow’s homeward flight, I met at the turn of the path a family party—father, mother, and two girls in the younger teens—seated along the rocky siding, and gazing with a common air of dejection upon a portentous row of bags and portmanteaus at their feet. The notion that they were Hamburgers died still-born. Nothing more obviously un-German than these wayfarers was ever seen.
“I hope, sir,” the man spoke up as I approached, “that I am right in presuming that you speak English!”
I bowed assent, and even as I did so, recognised him. “I hope I am right,” I answered, “in thinking that I have met you before—at Mr Albert Grundy’s in London—you are the American gentleman with the Oboid Oil Engine, are you not?”
“Well, by George!” he cried, rising and offering his hand with frank delight, and introducing me in a single comprehensive wave to his wife and daughters. “Yes, sir,” he went on, “and I wish I had an Oboid here right now—up in the basement of that stone boarding-house on the knoll there—just for the sake of heating up, and shutting down the valves, and blowing the whole damned thing sky-high. That would suit me, sir, right down to the ground.”
“Were strangers here, sir,” he explained in answer to my question: “we’d seen a good deal of the Dutch at home—I mean our home—and we thought we’d like to take a look at ‘em in the place they come from. Well, sir, we’ve had our look, and we’re satisfied. We don’t want any more on our plate, thank you. One helping is an elegant sufficiency. Do you know the trick they played on us? Why, I took a team of horses yesterday from a place they called Ibsenburg or Ilsenburg, or some such name, and had it explained to my driver that he was to take us up to the top of the Brocken, there, and stop all night, and fetch us back this morning. When we got up as far as Shierke, there, it was getting pretty dark, and the women-folks were nervous, and so we laid up for the night. There didn’t seem anything for the driver to do but set around in the kitchen and drink beer, and he needed money for that, and so I gave him some loose silver, and told him to make himself at home. We got the words out of a dictionary for that—machen sie selbst zu Heim we figured ‘em out to be—and I spoke them at him slowly and distinctly, so that he had no earthly excuse for not understanding. But, would you believe it, sir, the miserable cuss just up and skipped out, horses, rig and all, while we were getting supper! And here we were this morning, landed high and dry. No conveyance, nobody to comprehend a word of English, no nothing. We haven’t seen the top of their darned mountain even.”
“What I’m more concerned about, I tell Wilbur,” put in the lady, “is seeing the bottom of it. If they had only sense enough to make valises and bonnet-boxes ball-shaped, we could have rolled ‘em down hill.”
“There’ll be no trouble about all that,” I assured them, and we talked for a little about the simple enough process of getting their luggage carried down to the village, and of finding a vehicle there. I, indeed, agreed to make one of their party on quitting the Harz, that very afternoon.
“And now tell me about the Grundys,” I urged, when these more pressing matters were out of the way. “I got a wire to-day saying—hinting that they are in luck’s way again.”
“Is that so?” exclaimed the American, at once surprised and pleased. “I’m glad to hear it. I can’t guess what it might be in. Grundy’s got so many irons in the fire—some white hot, some lukewarm, some frosted straight through—you never can tell. The funny thing is—he can’t tell himself. Why, sir, those men of yours in the City of London, they don’t know any more about business than a babe unborn. If they were in New York they’d have their eyeteeth skinned out of their heads in the shake of a lamb’s tail. Why, we’ve been milking them dry for a dozen years back. And yet, you know, somehow——”
“Somehow—?” I echoed, encouragingly.
“Well, sir, somehow—that’s the odd thing about it—they don’t stay milked.”