Part 11

I said that I didn’t, because I dislike anything that sits still and looks heavy while I am working. “That’s right, that’s right,” she said, patting my hand. “Now do you see that woman over there? Dirty creature! I believe she has come out again without washing her neck. She gave an exhibition of her work the other day; it seemed to me most deplorable. There was one picture in particular which really vexed me. A glass of water (a very ugly glass too--a common bedroom tumbler), a book (shamefully dog-eared), half a melon, and a boot that a scavenger might have been ashamed to wear, unlaced, and with a great bulging hole in the toe. I more than half suspect that she got it out of her husband’s dressing-room, because that is the sort of woman she is. I was quite frank about it. ‘No, my dear,’ I said, ‘I don’t like it, and I’m not going to flatter you. Art is meant to ennoble us, and there is nothing ennobling about untidiness and sloth. If ever you see things of that sort about in your house, don’t immortalize them--burn them. We don’t want to recall such things. Don’t even give them to the poor!’”

I longed for her to go on, but a disagreeable, boasting woman came up and laid a bold hand upon my mammoth. Such a woman has no excuse for braving danger, because, whichever place she goes to, she is bound to be unpleasantly situated when she dies. But to my great surprise, nothing happened; she was not trampled upon as I expected. In fact, any fool may tamper with these immense creatures, who very rarely exercise their strength. Their real anxiety is not to break anything, and the desire of their hearts is to inspire confidence.

I have seen the other woman--a brazen serpent in my opinion--at every house to which I have been lately. She seems to be an object of superstitious veneration in the town. Whether she ever did any good or cured people who had been bitten by adversity I do not know, but now she is nothing more than a fetish. Sometimes she shows a more active vulgarity, and mixes among us as an ordinary moral bounder, a sort of “’Arry” of the Christian religion. I have seen religious “Algernons,” too, more effete and less noisy, but this woman, when she is at her worst, clothes herself in virtue as though it were a loud check suit, and wears her blameless life like a buttonhole of dahlias.

Unfortunately she happened to catch sight of my mammoth, who was swaying in a leisurely manner above the heads of the crowd, and, thrusting aside her worshippers, she plunged across the room. She was full of some pompous, trivial rubbish about a churchwarden and a stained-glass window. “Of _course_, the dear Bishop would never find anything objectionable in it. They were all _Protestant_ saints that we chose. John has been _most_ particular on that point.”

The wretched woman contrived to make a mess of the whole tea-party in about five minutes. Her brawling attracted other loiterers to the spot by the well-known dodge of the Park preacher. If you get on a chair in the Park, and in a high-pitched voice address the baby and perambulator that are nearest to you, and if you then rope in an errand boy, and two maiden ladies, and a tramp, you will soon have an audience that a prophet might be proud of. I don’t think that she stood on a chair, but I know that she began with one harmless, deaf old lady whom she caught on the hearth-rug. When she was removed by an indulgent and busy husband, she left behind her the absurd impression that we had all been edified and improved. I meet her constantly, wherever we go, and her behaviour always reminds me of a temperance lecturer explaining limelight views of a drunkard’s liver to an assembly of school children. She assumes that every one in the audience is either drunk or likely to become drunk very soon if she is not there to interfere.

The mammoth stayed to dinner that evening, and I felt that for the moment chaos was over and the earth resting. She swept us all into our places with a gentle overpoweringness, and we knew at once just where we were. The large animals nibbled their food, the small ones frisked about unharmed. If any of us wandered for a moment from the broad path of reason, the mammoth drove the offender back again into his place with irresistible common sense and kindness. Mr. Cambridge teased her because she goes to lectures.

“My dear professor,” she said, “I like to improve my mind. I was never educated as a girl, and I like to know what is going on. You young people know so much that I have never heard of. I should be sorry to go into another world having missed so much of what is to be seen in this one. The clergy are all very well: they mean excellently--I am a Churchwoman myself--but it seems to me that they spend too much time in laying plans for what can only be a visionary future, before they have mastered the wonders of our actual past and present. How can they fit their immortal souls for what is to come when they know so little of what has gone before? Their ignorance is lamentable, if you consider that their object in life is to adapt us for association with beings of the highest intelligence.”

I said at dinner how much I disliked the woman whom I had met that afternoon, and when they understood from my description who she was, they all had so much to say that I disentangled the facts with great difficulty. I now understand that she has declared herself a sort of Queen of Morality in the town, and that her following consists of those who will believe anything that any one says so long as it is said loud enough and often enough.

This is a queer, self-conscious place. The people who inhabit it are neither living in a state of natural warfare, nor is there any domestic harmony between the species. They walk in the glaring publicity of a small community, and each says to the other, “I am I. Who are you? Well, that won’t do at all; you must be somebody quite different, or I shan’t like you.” Mrs. Cambridge has something of the contemptuous nonchalance of a Persian cat, which is always sufficient unto itself, and would rather, almost, that the common herd were not cats, because their inclusion in her tribe would lower its exclusiveness. But my dear mammoth can never look on while a bird flies, or a mole burrows, or a squirrel leaps from bough to bough, but she must exclaim, “Bless my soul! What a splendid idea! I must learn to step more lightly, and to know more of the wonders of the underworld.”

The city wives and the wives of the University may not see eye to eye, but they both have their value, and people like the mammoth (for there are others like her) provide a medium of common sense in which these two very different elements may combine for the benefit of what my chemist calls the “pill-swallowing public.”

“Then, my dear, you ought to,” says the mammoth (so Mrs. Cambridge tells me), when some satin-coated Ichthyosaurus, spangled with diamonds, boasts that she has not made the acquaintance of a certain little spoon-backed mouse with spectacles and a family. “She would do you a world of good. If you had to educate your own dear children as she has, you would have no idea how to set about it. And as for myself, I should be quite helpless without my _chef_. I could never learn to prepare a dinner equal to the one that she and her little maid cooked for me last week. Quite admirable, I assure you, and I am a greedy woman.”

But last night she spoke with equal frankness on the other side. “You mustn’t misunderstand dear Sarah Plummins,” I heard her say to Mrs. Cambridge; “her kindness is beyond all description. She would give the clothes off her back--yes, I know what you are going to say, and it is very witty, and you shall not say it--she would give the clothes off her back to help a friend or an enemy, and say nothing about it. Her abrupt manner is just shyness. You see, I am shy myself, and I know how awkward it is to be thrown among people with ideas to which we are not used. But I don’t mind your chaff, and I tell Sarah that she is to come and see your lovely collections, and take Mr. Cambridge out in her motor. It will do them both good.”

I went to tea with Mrs. Merchant yesterday, just to see how the child was, and I asked her whether she knew the mammoth. She said that she had always been a little afraid of her. “Tom likes her,” she said, speaking of her husband, “but she overpowers me sometimes.” I said that she was like an oak among shrubs, and the literal creature reminded me that a moment ago I had called her a mammoth. Which did I mean? Mammoths were not a bit like oaks. I was cross, and replied, “Yes, they were, because they both had trunks,” and she went shrieking off to “Tom” in his smoking-room, and said that I had made such a good joke, fit for _Punch_. I came back here before they had reached the inevitable sequel of a mammoth in a tight boot being like an oak because it is sure to have a-corn. By the way, I also mentioned the brazen serpent to Mrs. Merchant, who rose at once to my bait.

“Oh, I am so glad you have come across her,” she exclaimed, “she is such a delightful woman!”

“Whom does she delight?” I asked, determined to get at the bottom of this legend. “Not the police, I’ll be bound, for she takes the bread out of their mouths.”

“Oh, what nonsense,” said Mrs. Merchant. “Has she been scolding you? I expect you deserved it.”

“Who first started the idea that she was anything in particular?” I asked. “Did she tell you she was in the confidence of the angels?--and, if so, can she produce any evidence of such favouritism?”

I could get nothing more definite than the same vague rumours of her merit repeated again and again. It is evidently just as I thought. The idea has got about that she does a lot of good. I am inclined to put an advertisement in the local papers:

SUSPECTED DISCOVERY OF A GIGANTIC SOCIAL HOAX

£5 reward to any man, woman or child, who will give satisfactory proof of having received moral, spiritual, or financial benefit at any time from the well-known society leader, Mrs. Evangelette de Rougemont (or whatever her name is).

I believe that the mammoth would provide funds for a commission to investigate the whole matter, if she were persuaded that it were for the good of the town. Most probably, though, she would do nothing of the sort. She would say that we all stand in need of improvement, and that a borrowed twopenny dip strapped to the back of a blind weasel may be tiresome and even dangerous in society, but it all helps to keep up the idea that there is a good fire burning somewhere. I can imagine her saying it with perfect conviction.

Yours ever, GEORGINA.

_CHAPTER XVIII_

UNIVERSITY SQUARE, MILLPORT.

My dear Louise,--I am still hard at it and shall probably be here for ages. No more of the Merchants’ children got measles, and he is so pleased with his portrait that I am to begin on his wife’s when I go back to Longmoor to-morrow. I have so enjoyed being with the Cambridges, and shall miss the peace of being able to Be or not to Be, as I like, without complications. I once read a medical book called, “My System of Elimination,” and it seemed to me the simplest possible cure for all evils. If any one would eliminate from the recollections of the Millport belles everything that they have seen without seeing and heard without understanding they would be so nice; really nice dears. But it makes them so fussy and nervous to masquerade as delicately bred, and intuitive, and things of that sort, when they are bound to be found out by even the most weevily specimens of the real article.

I have been helping Mrs. Cambridge to sell at a bazaar, where the special form of masquerade practised was “smart setting.” I do wish you could have seen Mrs. Bushytail being a duchess; the kind of duchess that you get in newspaper feuilletons and cheap Sunday stories--stout, short-sighted, crisp, impertinent, and great friends with the well-bred young girl who is not afraid of her.

Each of the stalls was presided over by a peeress of some sort, and “with her,” as the bazaar notices said, were two or three of the fattest flowers of Millport. They were all as nervous as lambs at Easter. Even Mrs. County’s beautiful pale face was hot, and her dress looked tight, although it was one of the new, very sloppy kind. Her particular Marchioness had on a dress of just the same shape, and it looked as if she had been to bed in it for years and yet had managed to keep it quite fresh, because she was so self-possessed that none of her ever came through her skin. Mrs. County’s garment was equally loose, but it looked about as convincing as a Greek dress does on a school-mistress in three pairs of combinations and a lamb’s-wool bodice. Mrs. County never gets flurried like this except when she is masquerading--well--like the dickens.

Mrs. Bushytail’s stall belonged to a duchess who didn’t turn up; so although for some hours Mrs. Bushytail, like good dog Tray, grew very red, and would have growled and bit her till she bled, had she happened on the duchess just then, yet, when the first shock was over, she began, like a sensible woman, to count her blessings. She soon discovered several. One was that she would be able to run the stall as she liked, and bully every one else as the duchess might have bullied her. Another substantial blessing was that strangers coming round to the stall would probably mistake her for the duchess. It must have been after the discovery of this second blessing that I caught her pretending to be short-sighted and peering at people in a supercilious way. Her expression suddenly reminded me of a cook we once had who was not quite sober, and that finished it! I had to go back to my stall and hiccup in lonely pleasure, for I did not dare to show Mrs. Cambridge; she exaggerates sometimes.

We were one of thirteen stalls who were all selling what you might class together under the head of “mats.” Mats (by which I mean embroidery on things that are not of much use to anybody) are the special industry which the bazaar was laying itself out to promote. They are made by the natives of some island in the Archipelago where Mrs. County’s boss-marchioness’s husband has some land; she says that the natives are very poor, and that she is going to try and get our Government to do something for them. The bazaar was to help to make the industry known. One of the other three stalls sold native tobacco, one Home Produce (that is, all sorts of eatables and uneatables), and the third sold books about the Industry. The boss-marchioness got some one to go out to the islands and paint pictures of the country, and her husband is building a big hotel there, and is going to run it himself. It will be a sort of paying house-party, with golf and mixed bathing and gambling, and all sorts of games, and cost a good deal to go to. You can imagine the whole gang exploiting the ladies of Millport. If you had only seen Mrs. Bushytail sitting so happily in her trap, shelling out pounds and pounds for the privilege of looking short-sighted and _de haut en bas_! Her three daughters--really nice girls of eighteen to twenty-five--were there, taking it all as innocently as puppies take it when their mother does tricks for a piece of cake. Mrs. Merchant, as good as gold, had another stall of mats, and I helped between her and Mrs. Cambridge. Our marchioness (I forget who she was) didn’t turn up either; and Mrs. Merchant had Lady Lacey, who is a Quaker and wouldn’t hurt a fly, so none of us had to pretend to be tired, or deaf, or immoral, or any of the things that Mrs. County and the others were playing at.

I think that the natives would have been amused if they had seen who bought their things, and why. Of course the Millport ladies are very, very kind; you must never lose sight of that for a moment. They have all--or most of them, at any rate--“come through” a good lot themselves in the way of ordinary domestic care. They live nearer to the workings of their houses than one would suppose from their wealth. They keep comparatively few servants, and those they have stand in a very human relation to their masters. The angry butlers and huffy parlour-maids, who are so confident about what is “done in the best houses,” are often quite as devoted as any aged Highland retainer to be found in literature. This means that the Bushytails and Countys, if they would only leave off being so absurd, have lots of stuffing in them. It is the nonsense on the top of the stuffing that makes Mrs. Bushytail look so tight. I have wandered off from what I meant to say, which was that they have great sympathy with any form of work, and they were really much keener about the natives than were most of the marchionesses, who, on the whole, looked as if all they asked was to be taken “back to Dixie” and their illicit unions. Most likely they are all as virtuous as Penelope, and the loose-living, passionate doll expression that they all have is as much a pose with them as it is with Mrs. County when she imitates it. I have seen really good young girls do it right up to a tennis-net, until they became busy and forgot.

We all did a roaring trade. Mrs. Cambridge made up for her lack of a marchioness by her own talent for making people do what she wants. You know the sort of old wretches who haunt bazaars? I do not know whether the number of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised, or whether they are more nuisance than they are financially worth. It is certain that they don’t spend much individually. But then a horde of locusts lay a field bare very quickly; so, owing to their numbers, they may be valuable, though I have grave doubts. Anyhow, you know them, don’t you? With long lines down the sides of their mouths, and snuffy green coats and skirts, and hats like one’s morning tea-tray, with one cup, a little jug, and some bread-and-butter on it. Mrs. Cambridge catches them with her eye, and then begins to arrange the most offensive things on her stall. The prey she intends to catch always loves any appliances for discomfort: cosies to make the good tea strong and bitter and horrible; or useless objects with a picture of a detestable cock making noises to wake every one up; or garments--but we can’t go into that. These old ladies make me shiver and feel grey, like an eclipse of the sun does; and I remember all sorts of depressing things, such as hair in brushes. They seem to bring these suggestions with them, and to be searching for horrors. They are the scavengers of every bazaar, and are really a very morbid class, I believe.

Myself I can do nothing with them, but Mrs. Cambridge is as impervious to sentiment as they are, and equally obstinate; and having her mental powers in more efficient order than theirs, she generally gets rid of more than they intended to buy--and they have to be nice about it, too, or they don’t get the things.

I enjoyed seeing Lady Claneustrigge, at the next stall, in the grip of one of these scavengers. The wretch had been to us for toast-warmers (I think she called them), and we had not got any.

“Toast-warmers?” said Lady Claneustrigge helplessly, looking about her. “Have we any toast-warmers, Mrs. Trotter?”

Mrs. Ritz-Trotter hurried up, all smiles, and took possession of Mrs. Cambridge’s lost prey.

“No, I am afraid not,” she said; “I don’t think that the natives, you see, _use_ so much toast as we do. They live on a peculiar sort of bread which they carry next the skin, in these bags--aren’t they quaint? Two-and-six. Not at _all_ dear, are they?”

The prey waved her aside without ceremony, and ran her experienced, mauve eyes up and down Lady Claneustrigge in silence--the sort of silence there is at whist.

“Have you any handkerchief-shams?” she asked at last.

Lady Claneustrigge backed nervously down the stall, and then lost her head altogether. “This is it, isn’t it?” she stammered, shaking out a yellow table-centre embroidered in shells. “They work beautifully, don’t they?” she added, with a smile of obvious fear and mistrust. “It is quite worth helping them, isn’t it, to make such lovely things? It is such a splendid industry.”

“I said handkerchief-shams,” said the prey in her flat, patient tone, “that’s a table-centre; my table wouldn’t hold that.”

“It wouldn’t do for a wedding present for Lizzie, would it, auntie?” whispered a kindly girl who came with her.

“Wouldn’t stand wear,” said the prey tersely.

“I am afraid we have none of those things just _now_,” Mrs. Ritz-Trotter said, throwing a protecting arm across Lady Claneustrigge, who looked on the verge of tears under this inexplicable form of torture. “You see, in those hot countries the natives take such _light_ breakfasts of fruit, and so on, that they hardly understand our home comforts. But I expect they could easily be taught to make them, couldn’t they, Lady Claneustrigge?”

A grateful nod and incoherent assurances. You must remember that the mauve eyes had never ceased their travelling, up and down, up and down, taking in every detail; sucking it in, absorbing every knot, every jewel, as though it were some harmful, irresistible drug.

“I’ll take one of those,” she said at last, pointing to a small purse of shells marked one-and-ninepence. I know, as surely as a mother knows what a baby will do with a pot of jam, that the woman took the purse home and put it on the dressing-table of her spare room, and that her frost-bitten guests put hair in it on every day of their critical, ungrateful visits.

“Very tahrsome, isn’t it, explaining to those sort of people?” was apparently the last word that Mrs. County would ever have the energy to pronounce, as she passed our stall with the preoccupation of a woman of ten thousand worlds.

I wonder how I shall paint Mrs. Merchant to-morrow. She wants me to do a thing in a white satin evening dress, sitting on a sofa, or standing up near a doorway, or just looking intelligent and ladylike on canvas, with a dark background and a light forehead. I can’t paint her as I should like at the head of a breakfast table, feeding all the little Merchants with Force out of a packet with the label on, or in a nightgown and a fur coat, with her hair down, and flames all over the back of the picture.