The Real Thing and Other Tales

“Mrs. Bray’s having some big thing next week; come with me there and I’ll show you what I mane,” Mrs. Donovan pleaded.

“I see what you mane,” Rose answered, brushing away her temptation and getting up.  “I’m much obliged to you.”

“You know you’re wrong, my dear,” said her interlocutress, with angry little eyes.

“I’m not going to Mrs. Bray’s.”

“I’ll get you a kyard; it’ll only cost me a penny stamp.”

“I’ve got one,” said the girl, smiling.

“Do you mean a penny stamp?”  Mrs. Donovan, especially at departure, always observed all the forms of amity.  “You can’t do it alone, my darling,” she declared.

“Shall they call you a cab?” Rose asked.

“I’ll pick one up.  I choose my horse.  You know you require your start,” her visitor went on.

“Excuse my mother,” was Rose’s only reply.

“Don’t mention it.  Come to me when you need me.  You’ll find me in the Red Book.”

“It’s awfully kind of you.”

Mrs. Donovan lingered a moment on the threshold.  “Who will you have now, my child?” she appealed.

“I won’t have any one!”  Rose turned away, blushing for her.  “She came on speculation,” she said afterwards to Mrs. Tramore.

Her mother looked at her a moment in silence.  “You can do it if you like, you know.”

Rose made no direct answer to this observation; she remarked instead: “See what our quiet life allows us to escape.”

“We don’t escape it.  She has been here an hour.”

“Once in twenty years!  We might meet her three times a day.”

“Oh, I’d take her with the rest!” sighed Mrs. Tramore; while her daughter recognised that what her companion wanted to do was just what Mrs. Donovan was doing.  Mrs. Donovan’s life was her ideal.

On a Sunday, ten days later, Rose went to see one of her old governesses, of whom she had lost sight for some time and who had written to her that she was in London, unoccupied and ill.  This was just the sort of relation into which she could throw herself now with inordinate zeal; the idea of it, however, not preventing a foretaste of the queer expression in the excellent lady’s face when she should mention with whom she was living.  While she smiled at this picture she threw in another joke, asking herself if Miss Hack could be held in any degree to constitute the nucleus of a circle.  She would come to see her, in any event—come the more the further she was dragged down.  Sunday was always a difficult day with the two ladies—the afternoons made it so apparent that they were not frequented.  Her mother, it is true, was comprised in the habits of two or three old gentlemen—she had for a long time avoided male friends of less than seventy—who disliked each other enough to make the room, when they were there at once, crack with pressure.  Rose sat for a long time with Miss Hack, doing conscientious justice to the conception that there could be troubles in the world worse than her own; and when she came back her mother was alone, but with a story to tell of a long visit from Mr. Guy Mangler, who had waited and waited for her return.  “He’s in love with you; he’s coming again on Tuesday,” Mrs. Tramore announced.

“Did he say so?”

“That he’s coming back on Tuesday?”

“No, that he’s in love with me.”

“He didn’t need, when he stayed two hours.”

“With you?  It’s you he’s in love with, mamma!”

“That will do as well,” laughed Mrs. Tramore.  “For all the use we shall make of him!” she added in a moment.

“We shall make great use of him.  His mother sent him.”

“Oh, she’ll never come!”

“Then he sha’n’t,” said Rose.  Yet he was admitted on the Tuesday, and after she had given him his tea Mrs. Tramore left the young people alone.  Rose wished she hadn’t—she herself had another view.  At any rate she disliked her mother’s view, which she had easily guessed.  Mr. Mangler did nothing but say how charming he thought his hostess of the Sunday, and what a tremendously jolly visit he had had.  He didn’t remark in so many words “I had no idea your mother was such a good sort”; but this was the spirit of his simple discourse.  Rose liked it at first—a little of it gratified her; then she thought there was too much of it for good taste.  She had to reflect that one does what one can and that Mr. Mangler probably thought he was delicate.  He wished to convey that he desired to make up to her for the injustice of society.  Why shouldn’t her mother receive gracefully, she asked (not audibly) and who had ever said she didn’t?  Mr. Mangler had a great deal to say about the disappointment of his own parent over Miss Tramore’s not having come to dine with them the night of his aunt’s ball.

“Lady Maresfield knows why I didn’t come,” Rose answered at last.

“Ah, now, but I don’t, you know; can’t you tell me?” asked the young man.

“It doesn’t matter, if your mother’s clear about it.”

“Oh, but why make such an awful mystery of it, when I’m dying to know?”

He talked about this, he chaffed her about it for the rest of his visit: he had at last found a topic after his own heart.  If her mother considered that he might be the emblem of their redemption he was an engine of the most primitive construction.  He stayed and stayed; he struck Rose as on the point of bringing out something for which he had not quite, as he would have said, the cheek.  Sometimes she thought he was going to begin: “By the way, my mother told me to propose to you.”  At other moments he seemed charged with the admission: “I say, of course I really know what you’re trying to do for her,” nodding at the door: “therefore hadn’t we better speak of it frankly, so that I can help you with my mother, and more particularly with my sister Gwendolen, who’s the difficult one?  The fact is, you see, they won’t do anything for nothing.  If you’ll accept me they’ll call, but they won’t call without something ‘down.’”  Mr. Mangler departed without their speaking frankly, and Rose Tramore had a hot hour during which she almost entertained, vindictively, the project of “accepting” the limpid youth until after she should have got her mother into circulation.  The cream of the vision was that she might break with him later.  She could read that this was what her mother would have liked, but the next time he came the door was closed to him, and the next and the next.

In August there was nothing to do but to go abroad, with the sense on Rose’s part that the battle was still all to fight; for a round of country visits was not in prospect, and English watering-places constituted one of the few subjects on which the girl had heard her mother express herself with disgust.  Continental autumns had been indeed for years, one of the various forms of Mrs. Tramore’s atonement, but Rose could only infer that such fruit as they had borne was bitter.  The stony stare of Belgravia could be practised at Homburg; and somehow it was inveterately only gentlemen who sat next to her at the table d’hôte at Cadenabbia.  Gentlemen had never been of any use to Mrs. Tramore for getting back into society; they had only helped her effectually to get out of it.  She once dropped, to her daughter, in a moralising mood, the remark that it was astonishing how many of them one could know without its doing one any good.  Fifty of them—even very clever ones—represented a value inferior to that of one stupid woman.  Rose wondered at the offhand way in which her mother could talk of fifty clever men; it seemed to her that the whole world couldn’t contain such a number.  She had a sombre sense that mankind must be dull and mean.  These cogitations took place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain, and they had a flat echo in the transalpine valleys, as the lonely ladies went vaguely down to the Italian lakes and cities.  Rose guided their course, at moments, with a kind of aimless ferocity; she moved abruptly, feeling vulgar and hating their life, though destitute of any definite vision of another life that would have been open to her.  She had set herself a task and she clung to it; but she appeared to herself despicably idle.  She had succeeded in not going to Homburg waters, where London was trying to wash away some of its stains; that would be too staring an advertisement of their situation.  The main difference in situations to her now was the difference of being more or less pitied, at the best an intolerable danger; so that the places she preferred were the unsuspicious ones.  She wanted to triumph with contempt, not with submission.

One morning in September, coming with her mother out of the marble church at Milan, she perceived that a gentleman who had just passed her on his way into the cathedral and whose face she had not noticed, had quickly raised his hat, with a suppressed ejaculation.  She involuntarily glanced back; the gentleman had paused, again uncovering, and Captain Jay stood saluting her in the Italian sunshine.  “Oh, good-morning!” she said, and walked on, pursuing her course; her mother was a little in front.  She overtook her in a moment, with an unreasonable sense, like a gust of cold air, that men were worse than ever, for Captain Jay had apparently moved into the church.  Her mother turned as they met, and suddenly, as she looked back, an expression of peculiar sweetness came into this lady’s eyes.  It made Rose’s take the same direction and rest a second time on Captain Jay, who was planted just where he had stood a minute before.  He immediately came forward, asking Rose with great gravity if he might speak to her a moment, while Mrs. Tramore went her way again.  He had the expression of a man who wished to say something very important; yet his next words were simple enough and consisted of the remark that he had not seen her for a year.

“Is it really so much as that?” asked Rose.

“Very nearly.  I would have looked you up, but in the first place I have been very little in London, and in the second I believed it wouldn’t have done any good.”

“You should have put that first,” said the girl.  “It wouldn’t have done any good.”

He was silent over this a moment, in his customary deciphering way; but the view he took of it did not prevent him from inquiring, as she slowly followed her mother, if he mightn’t walk with her now.  She answered with a laugh that it wouldn’t do any good but that he might do as he liked.  He replied without the slightest manifestation of levity that it would do more good than if he didn’t, and they strolled together, with Mrs. Tramore well before them, across the big, amusing piazza, where the front of the cathedral makes a sort of builded light.  He asked a question or two and he explained his own presence: having a month’s holiday, the first clear time for several years, he had just popped over the Alps.  He inquired if Rose had recent news of the old lady in Hill Street, and it was the only tortuous thing she had ever heard him say.

“I have had no communication of any kind from her since I parted with you under her roof.  Hasn’t she mentioned that?” said Rose.

“I haven’t seen her.”

“I thought you were such great friends.”

Bertram Jay hesitated a moment.  “Well, not so much now.”

“What has she done to you?” Rose demanded.

He fidgeted a little, as if he were thinking of something that made him unconscious of her question; then, with mild violence, he brought out the inquiry: “Miss Tramore, are you happy?”

She was startled by the words, for she on her side had been reflecting—reflecting that he had broken with her grandmother and that this pointed to a reason.  It suggested at least that he wouldn’t now be so much like a mouthpiece for that cold ancestral tone.  She turned off his question—said it never was a fair one, as you gave yourself away however you answered it.  When he repeated “You give yourself away?” as if he didn’t understand, she remembered that he had not read the funny American books.  This brought them to a silence, for she had enlightened him only by another laugh, and he was evidently preparing another question, which he wished carefully to disconnect from the former.  Presently, just as they were coming near Mrs. Tramore, it arrived in the words “Is this lady your mother?”  On Rose’s assenting, with the addition that she was travelling with her, he said: “Will you be so kind as to introduce me to her?”  They were so close to Mrs. Tramore that she probably heard, but she floated away with a single stroke of her paddle and an inattentive poise of her head.  It was a striking exhibition of the famous tact, for Rose delayed to answer, which was exactly what might have made her mother wish to turn; and indeed when at last the girl spoke she only said to her companion: “Why do you ask me that?”

“Because I desire the pleasure of making her acquaintance.”

Rose had stopped, and in the middle of the square they stood looking at each other.  “Do you remember what you said to me the last time I saw you?”

“Oh, don’t speak of that!”

“It’s better to speak of it now than to speak of it later.”

Bertram Jay looked round him, as if to see whether any one would hear; but the bright foreignness gave him a sense of safety, and he unexpectedly exclaimed: “Miss Tramore, I love you more than ever!”

“Then you ought to have come to see us,” declared the girl, quickly walking on.

“You treated me the last time as if I were positively offensive to you.”

“So I did, but you know my reason.”

“Because I protested against the course you were taking?  I did, I did!” the young man rang out, as if he still, a little, stuck to that.

His tone made Rose say gaily: “Perhaps you do so yet?”

“I can’t tell till I’ve seen more of your circumstances,” he replied with eminent honesty.

The girl stared; her light laugh filled the air.  “And it’s in order to see more of them and judge that you wish to make my mother’s acquaintance?”

He coloured at this and he evaded; then he broke out with a confused “Miss Tramore, let me stay with you a little!” which made her stop again.

“Your company will do us great honour, but there must be a rigid condition attached to our acceptance of it.”

“Kindly mention it,” said Captain Jay, staring at the façade of the cathedral.

“You don’t take us on trial.”

“On trial?”

“You don’t make an observation to me—not a single one, ever, ever!—on the matter that, in Hill Street, we had our last words about.”

Captain Jay appeared to be counting the thousand pinnacles of the church.  “I think you really must be right,” he remarked at last.

“There you are!” cried Rose Tramore, and walked rapidly away.

He caught up with her, he laid his hand upon her arm to stay her.  “If you’re going to Venice, let me go to Venice with you!”

“You don’t even understand my condition.”

“I’m sure you’re right, then: you must be right about everything.”

“That’s not in the least true, and I don’t care a fig whether you’re sure or not.  Please let me go.”

He had barred her way, he kept her longer.  “I’ll go and speak to your mother myself!”

Even in the midst of another emotion she was amused at the air of audacity accompanying this declaration.  Poor Captain Jay might have been on the point of marching up to a battery.  She looked at him a moment; then she said: “You’ll be disappointed!”

“Disappointed?”

“She’s much more proper than grandmamma, because she’s much more amiable.”

“Dear Miss Tramore—dear Miss Tramore!” the young man murmured helplessly.

“You’ll see for yourself.  Only there’s another condition,” Rose went on.

“Another?” he cried, with discouragement and alarm.

“You must understand thoroughly, before you throw in your lot with us even for a few days, what our position really is.”

“Is it very bad?” asked Bertram Jay artlessly.

“No one has anything to do with us, no one speaks to us, no one looks at us.”

“Really?” stared the young man.

“We’ve no social existence, we’re utterly despised.”

“Oh, Miss Tramore!” Captain Jay interposed.  He added quickly, vaguely, and with a want of presence of mind of which he as quickly felt ashamed: “Do none of your family—?”  The question collapsed; the brilliant girl was looking at him.

“We’re extraordinarily happy,” she threw out.

“Now that’s all I wanted to know!” he exclaimed, with a kind of exaggerated cheery reproach, walking on with her briskly to overtake her mother.

He was not dining at their inn, but he insisted on coming that evening to their table d’hôte.  He sat next Mrs. Tramore, and in the evening he accompanied them gallantly to the opera, at a third-rate theatre where they were almost the only ladies in the boxes.  The next day they went together by rail to the Charterhouse of Pavia, and while he strolled with the girl, as they waited for the homeward train, he said to her candidly: “Your mother’s remarkably pretty.”  She remembered the words and the feeling they gave her: they were the first note of new era.  The feeling was somewhat that of an anxious, gratified matron who has “presented” her child and is thinking of the matrimonial market.  Men might be of no use, as Mrs. Tramore said, yet it was from this moment Rose dated the rosy dawn of her confidence that her protégée would go off; and when later, in crowded assemblies, the phrase, or something like it behind a hat or a fan, fell repeatedly on her anxious ear, “Your mother is in beauty!” or “I’ve never seen her look better!” she had a faint vision of the yellow sunshine and the afternoon shadows on the dusty Italian platform.

Mrs. Tramore’s behaviour at this period was a revelation of her native understanding of delicate situations.  She needed no account of this one from her daughter—it was one of the things for which she had a scent; and there was a kind of loyalty to the rules of a game in the silent sweetness with which she smoothed the path of Bertram Jay.  It was clear that she was in her element in fostering the exercise of the affections, and if she ever spoke without thinking twice it is probable that she would have exclaimed, with some gaiety, “Oh, I know all about love!”  Rose could see that she thought their companion would be a help, in spite of his being no dispenser of patronage.  The key to the gates of fashion had not been placed in his hand, and no one had ever heard of the ladies of his family, who lived in some vague hollow of the Yorkshire moors; but none the less he might administer a muscular push.  Yes indeed, men in general were broken reeds, but Captain Jay was peculiarly representative.  Respectability was the woman’s maximum, as honour was the man’s, but this distinguished young soldier inspired more than one kind of confidence.  Rose had a great deal of attention for the use to which his respectability was put; and there mingled with this attention some amusement and much compassion.  She saw that after a couple of days he decidedly liked her mother, and that he was yet not in the least aware of it.  He took for granted that he believed in her but little; notwithstanding which he would have trusted her with anything except Rose herself.  His trusting her with Rose would come very soon.  He never spoke to her daughter about her qualities of character, but two or three of them (and indeed these were all the poor lady had, and they made the best show) were what he had in mind in praising her appearance.  When he remarked: “What attention Mrs. Tramore seems to attract everywhere!” he meant: “What a beautifully simple nature it is!” and when he said: “There’s something extraordinarily harmonious in the colours she wears,” it signified: “Upon my word, I never saw such a sweet temper in my life!”  She lost one of her boxes at Verona, and made the prettiest joke of it to Captain Jay.  When Rose saw this she said to herself, “Next season we shall have only to choose.”  Rose knew what was in the box.

By the time they reached Venice (they had stopped at half a dozen little old romantic cities in the most frolicsome æsthetic way) she liked their companion better than she had ever liked him before.  She did him the justice to recognise that if he was not quite honest with himself he was at least wholly honest with her.  She reckoned up everything he had been since he joined them, and put upon it all an interpretation so favourable to his devotion that, catching herself in the act of glossing over one or two episodes that had not struck her at the time as disinterested she exclaimed, beneath her breath, “Look out—you’re falling in love!”  But if he liked correctness wasn’t he quite right?  Could any one possibly like it more than she did?  And if he had protested against her throwing in her lot with her mother, this was not because of the benefit conferred but because of the injury received.  He exaggerated that injury, but this was the privilege of a lover perfectly willing to be selfish on behalf of his mistress.  He might have wanted her grandmother’s money for her, but if he had given her up on first discovering that she was throwing away her chance of it (oh, this was her doing too!) he had given up her grandmother as much: not keeping well with the old woman, as some men would have done; not waiting to see how the perverse experiment would turn out and appeasing her, if it should promise tolerably, with a view to future operations.  He had had a simple-minded, evangelical, lurid view of what the girl he loved would find herself in for.  She could see this now—she could see it from his present bewilderment and mystification, and she liked him and pitied him, with the kindest smile, for the original naïveté as well as for the actual meekness.  No wonder he hadn’t known what she was in for, since he now didn’t even know what he was in for himself.  Were there not moments when he thought his companions almost unnaturally good, almost suspiciously safe?  He had lost all power to verify that sketch of their isolation and déclassement to which she had treated him on the great square at Milan.  The last thing he noticed was that they were neglected, and he had never, for himself, had such an impression of society.

It could scarcely be enhanced even by the apparition of a large, fair, hot, red-haired young man, carrying a lady’s fan in his hand, who suddenly stood before their little party as, on the third evening after their arrival in Venice, it partook of ices at one of the tables before the celebrated Café Florian.  The lamplit Venetian dusk appeared to have revealed them to this gentleman as he sat with other friends at a neighbouring table, and he had sprung up, with unsophisticated glee, to shake hands with Mrs. Tramore and her daughter.  Rose recalled him to her mother, who looked at first as though she didn’t remember him but presently bestowed a sufficiently gracious smile on Mr. Guy Mangler.  He gave with youthful candour the history of his movements and indicated the whereabouts of his family: he was with his mother and sisters; they had met the Bob Veseys, who had taken Lord Whiteroy’s yacht and were going to Constantinople.  His mother and the girls, poor things, were at the Grand Hotel, but he was on the yacht with the Veseys, where they had Lord Whiteroy’s cook.  Wasn’t the food in Venice filthy, and wouldn’t they come and look at the yacht?  She wasn’t very fast, but she was awfully jolly.  His mother might have come if she would, but she wouldn’t at first, and now, when she wanted to, there were other people, who naturally wouldn’t turn out for her.  Mr. Mangler sat down; he alluded with artless resentment to the way, in July, the door of his friends had been closed to him.  He was going to Constantinople, but he didn’t care—if they were going anywhere; meanwhile his mother hoped awfully they would look her up.

Lady Maresfield, if she had given her son any such message, which Rose disbelieved, entertained her hope in a manner compatible with her sitting for half an hour, surrounded by her little retinue, without glancing in the direction of Mrs. Tramore.  The girl, however, was aware that this was not a good enough instance of their humiliation; inasmuch as it was rather she who, on the occasion of their last contact, had held off from Lady Maresfield.  She was a little ashamed now of not having answered the note in which this affable personage ignored her mother.  She couldn’t help perceiving indeed a dim movement on the part of some of the other members of the group; she made out an attitude of observation in the high-plumed head of Mrs. Vaughan-Vesey.  Mrs. Vesey, perhaps, might have been looking at Captain Jay, for as this gentleman walked back to the hotel with our young lady (they were at the “Britannia,” and young Mangler, who clung to them, went in front with Mrs. Tramore) he revealed to Rose that he had some acquaintance with Lady Maresfield’s eldest daughter, though he didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to know, her ladyship.  He expressed himself with more acerbity than she had ever heard him use (Christian charity so generally governed his speech) about the young donkey who had been prattling to them.  They separated at the door of the hotel.  Mrs. Tramore had got rid of Mr. Mangler, and Bertram Jay was in other quarters.