The Celebrity at Home

CHAPTER XX

MY mother is changed—not horrid, but quite changed. She goes out nearly every morning at ten, with Aunt Gerty, whose manners are worse than ever, and who has a little chuckling, cheerful way of going about that simply irritates me to death! There is a secret, evidently, and George and I are out of it. It brings us together. He is not happy, no more than I am, no more than Mother is. She is excited, not happy. She has taken to wearing her mouth shut lately; once we used to tease her because she kept it open, and looked always just as if she were going to speak, or had done speaking. But Mother is a good woman. Although she gads about so much, she doesn’t neglect her household duties. She sees after George’s comfort as much as ever, and keeps all onions out of the house as usual. The more she fusses over him, the less he likes it. He shook his head once, when Mother had tidied his writing-table for him—it took her two hours—and then he said half-laughing, “A bad sign, Tempe! Read your Balzac.”

I don’t read Balzac, and I don’t know what George means. I don’t try, and I find that is the best sort of sympathy one can give. At any rate, he likes it, and he is always having me in his study, and teaching me to type-write, and saying little things, like that I have put down, under his breath. He mutters a good deal to himself, not to me, and wants not so much some one to talk to, as some one to talk at.

We hear no more of Lady Scilly. She has not been here since Ariadne was married. Ariadne was an excuse. Mother never gave her an excuse to come to see her, she had never accepted her, or been rude to her either. She simply ignored her. So Lady Scilly not having Ariadne to come and fetch, had no particular reason for coming to us, unless she came to see George, and she could have seen him more easily at “The Hutch” or her town-house, till quite recently. She used to come here about her novel, but most uncomfortably, for Christina was a sad dragon, and looked down her nose at her. Christina could curl her nostril really, which very few women can do. It is a horrid thing to have done at you, and withers you soonest of anything. Now the novel is finished, and the type-written copy, tied up like Christmas meat, is going the social round of all the literary men who have been asked to her dinner-parties with a view to their favourable opinion. I know that Mr. Frederick Cook has had it, and written her a polite letter about it, though that won’t prevent him slating it in The Bittern if he wants to. So Mrs. Ptomaine says.

I know that what Aunt Gerty said in spite, and to give Mother a stick to hit George back with when he came and found us doing dressmaking in his sacred study, was true. Lord Scilly had told George not to go to his house any more. Perhaps Lady Scilly had said he might? Having no more use for George, she may have given Lord Scilly a free hand with him, and perhaps a free foot, who knows? I think she is not nice. I am on George’s side now, as far as outside politics go, though I shall never approve of the way he treats my brother Benvenuto.

Lady Scilly came to Cinque Cento House at last, and George didn’t “look that pleased to see her,” as Elizabeth Cawthorne said afterwards. Elizabeth Cawthorne has no opinion of her, nor of the way she goes on with that German fellow. She means the man who was so rude to Ariadne at the Islingtons’, at least he was far too kind for politeness. He was a Count then, but he is also Lady Scilly’s chauffeur. He was waiting outside on her motor at this very moment, quite the servant. She took him to her aunt’s ball for the fun of it, I suppose, and it was easy to pretend he was somebody, for he looks quite military and distinguished.

Elizabeth showed her into the study, saying gruffly, “A female to see you, sir.”

“Paquerette!” said George, in real amazement, as she floated in, and when the door had closed on Elizabeth Cawthorne, went a little down on one knee and looked up into George’s face, saying, as I have heard the French do to their professors of painting or music,—“Cher maître!”

George had taught her to do this in the days when he was really her professor, and she wanted to do everything as Bohemians do in the Quartier Latin, but only the way she looked at him as she said it I could tell that she had no further use for him.

I was sitting at the type-writer, in the corner of the room, as if I were in my castle, and I stayed there. It was getting dark and they didn’t think of turning on the electric light. Besides, George had at first made me a little sign which I understood, because of the entente cordiale we had had for some time, to stay where I was, and I like doing what people seem to want, especially when it goes with what I want myself. Then he forgot me altogether. Lady Scilly, I believe, never saw me at all, for she never said how-do-you-do, or looked my way, and yet we had not quarrelled. George put on his “pretty woman” manner, and raised her, and made her sit in a nice high-backed chair that suited her.

“How nice of you to come! My wife is out. By the way, I may as well tell you, she is leaving me.”

I nearly fell off my chair. Lady Scilly looked upset; for she hadn’t come to see Mother, and hadn’t thought of asking whether she was out or not. She collected herself, and said to George with some dignity—

“You put it crudely.”

“I do. I never mince my words, except in books. It is as I say. I shall not oppose it. I hope that my unhappy partner may one day come to know the bourgeois happiness I have been unable to give her. Unlucky fellow that I am—cœur de célibat, you know; an Alastor of Fitz John’s Avenue, the Villon of Maresfield Gardens–”

“No woman’s such a fool as to leave a place like this–”

“What does Shelley say? Love first leaves the well-built nest–”

“You certainly are a most extraordinary man!” she mumbled. George puzzled her by changing about so.

“Yes,” he answered her, smiling. “Come, take off your furs and make yourself at home. Compromise yourself merrily. I suppose now, by all the rights and wrongs of it, I ought to invite you to bolt with me, but I am weak, I shall not.”

“Are you quite sure you won’t be stronger by the end of this interview?”

“Oh, is this an interview? Ah, why be formal and boring? Why stable the steed after the horse—I mean the novel is out? It will be a huge success, so your enemies predict. Frederick Cook of The Bittern writes me that this, the latest output of a militant aristocracy, seeking to beat us with our own weapons, is chockful of cleverness and primitive woman. What more do you want?”

“D. the novel! I want you!” she said, stamping her foot.

“Oh, throw away the fugitive husk and the rind outworn—the creed forgotten—the deed forborne—how does it go? Give a poor author a chance, now that you have sucked his commonplace book dry, and torn the heart out of his theories, butchered him to make a literary agent’s holiday.”

“You are unkind.”

“Don’t say that. It is unworthy of you. Stale! like the plot of the new novel you propose we should work out together.”

“I am prepared to go all lengths to assert–”

“Your powers of imagination. I don’t doubt it. But I have been thinking it over, and I find it a ghastly, an impossible plot. No, it would never do, not even if we made a motor-motif of it. It won’t go on all fours. It would not even begin to sell. It has none of the elements of popularity. To begin and end with, there’s not an atom of passion about it, not even so much as would lie on twenty thousand pounds of radium, and you know how much that is!”

“Don’t imply that I am incapable of passion in that insulting way!” she said quite angrily. “It shall never be said–”

“It will never be said, unless we run away and apply the test of Boulogne and social ostracism. Believe me, Paquerette, things are best as they are—going to be. There’s true evolution in it. When the feast is over, you put out the fluttering candles, tear down the wreaths, open the windows. When the novel is done–”

“I hate you to talk like this!” said she, making a cross face.

“Women hate realism.”

“Women hate lukewarmness. Pull yourself together, George, and let us lay our heads together to make Scilly—look silly. He’s mad just now, but it will pass off, he will get over it, and you will come down to us at ‘The Hutch’ as usual and more so. Dear old Scilly will be the first to climb down–”

George shook his head.

“No, no, non bis in idem. Not twice in the same place.” (I wasn’t sure if he was alluding to the kick Lord Scilly had given him or not.) “Go now, you sweet woman. I want to be alone. You are staid for.”

“Yes, yes, I must go. You remind me. The Count will be so deliciously irritated. Thanks so much, so very, very much, for all your help and timely assistance, your–”

“Has the play been worth the scandal?” George asked her, while he was kissing her hand to hide how much he loathed her, and was glad she was going. He knew, as well as I knew, that she was the kind of woman who kicks away the ladder she has just got up by with a toss of her fairy foot, and that he would never be asked to “The Hutch” again. Mr. Aix would, more probably, because he may chance to review what George has helped her to write. And it seemed to me that she has been massaged so much or so long or something, that her cheeks are like flabby oysters, and her figure brought out in all the wrong places. She was too pretty to last kittenish and fluffy as she was when I saw her come out of the public-house that first day.

“Good-bye—then—George!” she said, with something between a sneer and a sob. “We meet again—in society, not under the clock at Charing Cross.”

What should take George and her there I cannot imagine, but George bowed, and led her out, and I followed them. There was her chauffeur in the car as large as life—and as a German. Though indeed he is very good-looking.

“I can see that he is cross in every line of his back,” Lady Scilly whispered to George as she left him on the steps, and tripped down them, and got in beside her crabstick Count. He received her most coldly, and it was easy to see he was her master more than her servant.

George grunted as he fastened the door. There was an east wind blowing, and he was afraid of catching cold after standing there bareheaded.

“She will probably bolt with him before the year is out,” he said, as we went back to the study shivering. He played cat’s-cradle with me till dinner-time. It was all he was good for, he said, and as the game appeared to amuse him, I didn’t mind making a fool of myself for once.

About Mother’s going away that he spoke of to Lady Scilly! I believe it really is with Mr. Aix, as George is so very civil to him. I don’t see who else it could be, for we see more of him than of any one else. He is George’s greatest friend, as well as Mother’s, and people don’t run away with perfect strangers, as a rule.

Mother was certainly up to something, for her eyes were as bright as glass, and she had hysterics two days running. Aunt Gerty used to say while these were going on, slapping Mother’s palms and vinaigretting her—“It is natural, you know—the excitement.” The excitement of running away, I suppose. She used to make her lie down a great deal, and “nurse her energy,” for she “would want it all!” Mother was by far the most important person in the whole house in these days, and instead of George being out late, and needing his latch-key, it was Mother who was always on the go, and dining with the Press every other night of her life. At least, I suppose Mrs. Ptomaine and Mr. Freddy Cook are the Press, they are certainly nothing else of importance. Mother joined a club, and stayed there one night when there was a fog.

George never asks her any questions. He is too proud, and of course he knows that she is too. She wouldn’t stand having her movements questioned, any more than he would. But he began to look ragged and grey, and to have indigestion. He lived chiefly in his study. He fenced a good deal, with Mr. Aix. He asked Mr. Aix to leave the button off his foil, but Mr. Aix would not. George’s other distraction is Father Mack, who comes to see him a good deal, and when George goes out now, which he seldom does, it is to see Father Mack. Father Mack is not oppressively stiff. Once George came back from confession and set us all to try and translate “The Survival of the Fittest” into French, a problem Father Mack had asked him. Father Mack also gave Mother the address of a very good little dressmaker. He lent George the Life of Saint Catherine Emmerich, a lovely book. She was one of those women who can think so hard of something that it comes out all over their bodies, in spots. People came from far and wide to look at her and admire her, and her family allowed it, instead of getting a trained nurse at five-and-twenty shillings a week, and giving her a free hand till Catherine was cured. It is my belief that she did not want to be cured, she liked being praised for having so many spots that you could fancy it was all in the shape of a crown of thorns. Still it is a nice romantic story, and the poor woman meant well.

Aunt Gerty says George is going to be a ’vert, and that I shall have to be baptized over again, and not buried in consecrated ground when I die. She said I need not bother to go on with preparing for my confirmation, as all that would be stopped. I was hemming my veil and I went on, for I believed she was teasing. And as for Father Mack, he is quite a nice man, and George doesn’t swear half so badly since he came under his influence.

One of these nights, when Mother had gone off to dine at some restaurant or other, with a merry party, Aunt Gerty said, I had a talk with Ben. George, as usual now, dined in his study alone. Ben told me some things Mother had been saying to him, about better times coming, and darkest before dawn, and so on. He wanted me to explain her, but I couldn’t, for the only fact I knew, viz. her going to Boulogne with Mr. Aix, would not do Ben any good that I could see? It is really no use trying to find out what grown-up people mean, sometimes, it is like trying to imagine eternity; one has nothing to go on.

We went to bed early, but I couldn’t sleep; after what Ben had said I felt I must see Mother again that night. I kept awake with great difficulty till I heard the swish of her dress on the stairs, and then I slipped out of bed and faced her. She was too tired to scold, she had trodden twice in the hem of her dress going up-stairs. When we got into her own room, she let her cloak slide off on to the floor, and came out of it like a flower, and looked awfully nice in her low neck and bare arms.

“Oh, my pretty little Mother,” I said. “I do love you.”

“You are just like every one else,” she answered me pettishly.

“I’m not,” I said, but of course there is no doubt about it, one does love people more in evening dress and less in a nightgown.

“Did George ever see you like this?” I asked.

“Often. Is he gone to bed?”

“Yes, with a headache.”

She took a candle and we went on tiptoe to his room, Mother first taking off her high-heeled shoes, for they would tap on the parquet and make a noise. George was asleep. He had eaten one of his bananas, and the other was still by the side of his bed.

“Hold the candle, Tempe!” Mother said quickly. It was that she might go down on her knees beside George. She then buried her head in the quilt and cried.

“Oh, George, I am doing it for the best—I am, I am! For my poor neglected boy—my poor Ben.”

She upset and puzzled me so by alluding to Ben, after my conversation with him that very evening, that I dropped a blob of candle-grease on the sheet near George’s arm, and I was so afraid I had awakened him, that I at once shut the stable-door—I mean blew out the candle and made a horrible smell. Mother jumped off her knees as frightened as I was—Father Mack hasn’t cured George quite of swearing!—and we made a clean bolt of it back to her room, where she re-lit the candle and began to get out of her dress as quickly as she could, while I sat in a honeypot on the floor, and kept my nightgown well round my legs not to catch cold, and talked to her nicely, so as not to startle her.

“Of course, Mother dear, you are doing it for the best, even if it is to run away.”

“Run away! Who says I am going to run away?”

“George.”

“He told you?”

“He told Lady Scilly.”

“Did he, then? He deserves that I should make it true.” She laughed, a laugh I did not like at all. It wasn’t her laugh, but I have said she was quite changed.

“Oh, Mother, don’t laugh like that!”

“You are like the good little girl in the play, who preaches down a wicked mother’s heart! Well, my dear, I’ll promise you one thing. I will never run away without you. Will that be all right?”

“That will be all right,” I answered, much relieved. For although I am so much more “pally” with George and sorry for him, I don’t want to be left with him. Perhaps I shall be allowed to run over in the Marguerite from Boulogne sometimes on a visit? Then I could darn and mend for him, as Mr. Aix would not be able to spare Mother from doing for him. I did not mention Mr. Aix to her. I thought she would rather tell me all in her own time.

I often wonder if we three will be happy in Boulogne, or wherever it is social ostracism takes you to? I fancy the inconvenience of running away is chiefly the want of society.

That is the only want Mother will not feel after all those years buried away in Isleworth. Ariadne is now happily married, so it won’t affect her, though I suppose that if this had happened a year ago, a mother-in-law spending her days in social ostracism would not have suited Simon’s stiff relations. It might have prevented him from proposing. I see it all; Mother unselfishly waited.

One thing really troubles me. Why does not Mother do some packing? I hope that she is not going to run away in that uncomfortable style when you only throw two or three things into a bag? A couple of bottles of eau-de-cologne, and some hair-pins, like Laura in To Leeward? I, at any rate, have some personal property, and I shall do very badly without it in a dull, dead-alive place like Boulogne. But I will be patient. Whatever Mother does is sure to be right, even running away, which gets so dreadfully condemned in novels.

George’s new secretary is quite utilitarian and devoted to him, she is not so farouche as Christina, Mr. Aix says, or so charming. George keeps her hard at work typing his autobiography, and doesn’t go to see Father Mack any more. I asked him why he was “off” dear Father Mack, and he says last time he went to see him it was the Father’s supper-time, and he saw a horrid sight. He could not think, he says, of entrusting his salvation to a man whom he had seen supping with the utmost relish off a plateful of bullock’s eyes. Just like George to be put off his salvation by a little thing like that! Though I always felt myself as if Father Mack was not quite ascetic enough for a real right-down sinner like George.

Tickets have come to George for the first night of Mr. Aix’s play. George calls it Ingomar, which vexes Aix, because Ingomar is a certain old-fashioned kind of play that only needs a pretty woman who can’t act, as “lead.”

“Who’s your Parthenia?” he asked him.

Mr. Aix answered, “Oh, a little woman I unearthed for myself from the suburban drama—the usual way.”

“Any good?” asked George casually.

“I am telling her exactly what I want her to do, and she looks upon me as Shakespeare and the Angel Gabriel in one,” said Mr. Aix, glancing across at Mother, who pursed up her lips and laughed.

“I will take Tempe to your first night,” said George suddenly.

“A play of Jim Aix’s for the child’s first play!” cried Mother in a fright. “I shouldn’t think of it.”

“Children never see impropriety, or ought not to,” George said. “But if you don’t wish it, I will take Lady Scilly and the Fylingdales instead. It will do the play good.”

“It’s a fond delusion,” said Aix, “that the aristocracy can even damn a play.”

Of course I understood the impropriety blind. Mother wanted me to be free to go away with her, and the twenty-sixth was to be the night, after all. I thought of the crossing by the nine o’clock mail that we should have to do, and that I only know of from hearsay, and wondered why they must choose such an awkward time? Perhaps we should not after all cross that night, for surely Mr. Aix would want to come before the curtain if called, and that wouldn’t possibly be till about ten o’clock, too late for the train?

Perhaps we should stay the night at an hotel? I should simply love that.

CHAPTER XXI

“SHALL I type your Good-bye to George?” I asked Mother. She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “The one you will leave pinned to your pincushion in the usual place?”

She laughed, and I again thought her most fearfully casual. There was no packing done, although one would have thought she would have liked her clothes nice and fresh and lots of them, so that she shouldn’t feel shabby at Boulogne, and let Mr. Aix and herself down. As for my clothes—I really only had one—one dress I mean—and it was hanging loose where it shouldn’t, and with a large ink-spot in front nobody had troubled to take out with salts of lemon or anything.

But I began to think some things had been sent on beforehand, as advance luggage or so forth, for Mr. Aix came in one evening, and when Aunt Gerty raised her eyebrows at him, he said “A 1!” That I fancied was the ticket number for the luggage, so I felt more at ease.

One eventful evening, after Mother had been lying down all day, I was told to put on my sun-ray pleated, and to mend it if it wanted it. I did mend it and I put a toothbrush in the pocket of it, and I kissed all the cats until they hated me. Cats don’t like kissing, but then I didn’t know when I should see them again? I supposed some time, for running away never is a permanent thing. People always come back and take up housekeeping again, in the long run.

The funny thing was, they had chosen the day of Mr. Aix’s first night to run away on. I suppose it was in case he was boo-ed. Then the manager could come on and say, “The author is not in the house, having gone to Boulogne with a lady and little girl, by the nine o’clock mail!” That, of course, was the train we were to catch. I looked it out, I am good at trains.

George took Lady Scilly to dine at the Paxton that night, and on to the theatre where some others were to meet them. I have never been to a theatre myself, only music halls. At six o’clock George went off, all grin and gardenia. The grin was as forced as the gardenia. I observed that.

Aunt Gerty badly wanted to go with Mr. Aix and hold his hand, as he was as nervous as a cat. But he wouldn’t have her with him, and I don’t wonder. It would have been impossible to shake her off by nine o’clock, and he would have missed the boat-train, and Mother and me.