Mrs Albert Grundy—Observations in Philistia

“I spoke of the masculine attitude,” said Miss Wallaby, coldly. “Viewed intelligently, the gradations and classifications which we maintain among ourselves, at the cost of such infinite trouble and personal self-sacrifice, are the very foundation upon which rests the superstructure of British Society.”

“I admit that, too,” Uncle Dudley hastened to put in. “Really, we are getting on very nicely.”

Miss Wallaby ignored the interruption altogether. “The point is,” she went on, “that the male mind in England is coming – with characteristic slowness, no doubt, but still coming – to recognise the necessity of securing the very fullest and most complete participation of my sex in public affairs. As the diffusion of enlightenment progresses, men will more and more abandon the coarse and egoistic standards of their days of domination by brute force, and turn instead to the ideals of purity and sweetness which Woman in Politics typifies. It has been observed that one may pick out the future rulers of England in each coming generation by scanning the honour-lists of Oxford and Cambridge. How happy a day it will be for England, and civilisation, when this is said of Girton and Newnham as well!”

“I spent a summer in the State of Maine once, some years ago,” said Uncle Dudley. “That’s the State, you know, where they’ve had a Prohibition law now for nearly forty years. The excess of females over males is larger there, I believe, than it is anywhere else in the world – owing to the fact that all the young men who are worth their salt emigrate to some other State as soon as they’ve saved up enough for a railway-ticket. The men that you do see lounging around there, in the small villages, are all minding the baby, or sitting on the doorstep shelling peas, or out in the backyard, with their mouths full of clothes-pins, hanging up sheets and pillow-cases on the line to dry. The women there take a very active part in politics – and every census shows that Maine’s population has diminished. Shipbuilding has almost ceased, farms are being abandoned yearly, the State is mortgaged up to its eyebrows, and you get nothing but fried clams and huckleberry-pie for breakfast – but, of course, I suppose there is a good deal of purity and sweetness.”

Miss Wallaby rose and walked away from us; the black velvet riband around her neck, the glint of gas-light on her eyeglasses, the wearied haughtiness on her swarthy, high-nosed face, seemed to unite in saying to us that we were very poor creatures indeed.

“She’s been down to the Retired Licensed Victuallers’ Division of Surrey, you know,” exclaimed Uncle Dudley, “making speeches in favour of the sitting Member, old Sir Watkyn Hump.”

“Ah, that accounts for the milk in the cocoa-nut,” I remarked.

“Well, no,” my friend mused aloud, “I fancy young Hump accounts for that. See – she’s gone and cut him out from under the Timby-Hucks’s guns.”

It was at one of Mrs Albert Grundy’s evenings at home, and Uncle Dudley and I now had possession of a quiet corner to ourselves. From this pleasant vantage-ground we indolently surveyed the throng surrounding Mrs Albert at the piano end of the room, and stretching off through the open double doors into the adjoining chamber – a throng of dazzling arms and shoulders, of light-hued satins and fluffy stuffs, of waving feathers, and splendid piles of braided hair, and mostly comely faces wreathed in politic smiles. Here and there the mass of pinks and whites and creams was broken abruptly by a black coat with a hat under its sleeve. Dudley and I idly commented upon the fact that almost all these coats belonged to undersized elderly men, generally with spectacles and a grey beard, and we noted with placid interest that as they came in – announced in stentorian tones as Mr and Mrs So-and-so – their wives as a rule were several inches taller and many many years younger than themselves.

Then it was entertaining, too, to watch Mrs Albert shake hands with these newcomers. She knew just at what angle each preferred that ceremony, keeping her knuckles well down in welcoming the more sophisticated and up-to-date people from about Cromwell Road and the Park, but elevating them breast-high to greet those from around Brompton way, and hoisting them quite up to the chin-level with the guests from beyond Earl’s Court, who were still in the toils of last year’s fashions.

“Smart woman, that sister of mine!” said Uncle Dudley. “See the way she’s manoeuvred her shoulder around in front of the Timby-Hucks’s nose, so as to head her off from getting in and being introduced to the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn. And – hello! by George, she’s won! – there’s the Dowager Countess of Thames-Ditton coming in! You’ll never know the anguish, my boy, that was caused by the uncertainty whether she would come or not. Emily hasn’t been able to eat these past four days, expecting every moment the knock of the postman bringing her ladyship’s refusal to come. The only thing that enabled her to keep up, she said, was fixing her mind resolutely on the fact that the aristocracy are notoriously impolite about answering invitations. But now, happy woman – her cup is fairly running over. This is a great night for Fernbank. And – look! – hanged if that girl isn’t trying to edge her way in there, too! See how prettily Emily managed that? Oh, Timby-Hucks! Timby-Hucks! you’ve put your foot in it this time. You’ll never figure on the free-list for this show again.”

Misfortune indeed claimed Miss Timby-Hucks for its very own. Mrs Albert had twice adroitly interposed her well-rounded shoulders between that enterprising young woman and social eminence – the second time with quite obvious determination of purpose. And there, too, behind the door, young Mr Hump bent his sloping shoulders and cliff-like collar humbly over Miss Wallaby’s chair, listening with all his considerable ears to her selected monologues. Ah, the vanity of human aspirations!

Casting an heroic glance over the field of defeat, Miss Timby-Hucks’s eye lighted upon our corner, and on the instant her two upper front teeth gleamed in a smile of relief. At all events, we were left – and she came towards us with a decisive step.

“I’ve hardly seen you since the Academy,” she said in her sprightly way to me, after we had all shaken hands, and she had seated herself between us on the sofa.

“And how did your article come out?” I asked politely.

“Oh, it never came out at all,” she replied. “It seems it got left over too long. The editor said it was owing to the pressure of interesting monkey-language matter upon his columns; but I believe it was just because I’m a lady journalist, and so does the cousin of Mrs Umpelbaum, the proprietor’s wife. It must have been that – because, long after the editor gave this excuse, there were the daily papers still printing their criticisms, ‘Eleventh Notice of the Royal Academy,’ ‘The Spring Exhibitions – Fourteenth Article,’ and so on. I taxed him with it – told him I heard they had some still left, that they were going to begin printing again after the elections were over – but he said it was different with dailies. All they needed were advertisements and market reports, and police news, and telegrams about the Macedonian frontier, and they could print art criticisms and book reviews whole years after they should have appeared, because nobody ever read them when they were printed – but weeklies had to be absolutely up to date.”

“Evil luck does pursue you!” I said, compassionately. “So you haven’t got into print at all?”

“O I’m not a bit cast down,” replied Miss Timby-Hucks, with jaunty confidence. “There’s no such word as fail in my book. The way to succeed is just to keep pegging away. I know of one lady-journalist who went every day for nine weeks to interview the Countess of Wimps about her second son’s having been warned off Newmarket Heath. Every day she was refused admittance – once she got into the hall and was put out by a brutal footman – but it never unnerved her. Each morning she went again. And she would have succeeded by this time, probably – only the Countess suddenly left England to spend the summer in Egypt.”

“Yes, Wady Halfa has its advantages, even in July,” said Uncle Dudley. “It is warm, and there are insects, but one is allowed by law to kill them – in Egypt.”

Illustrating the operation of Vegetables and Feminine Duplicity upon the Concepts of Maternal Responsibility

I FELT that I was on sufficiently intimate terms with Mrs Albert Grundy to tell her that she was not looking well. She gave a weary little sigh and said she knew it.

Indeed, poor lady, it was apparent enough. She has taken of late to wearing her hair drawn up from her forehead over a roll – the effect of mouse-tints at which Nature is beginning to hint, being frankly helped out by powder. Everybody about Fernbank recognises that in some way this reform has altered the whole state of affairs. The very servant who comes to the door, or who brings in the tea-things, seems to carry herself in a different manner since the change has been made. Of course, it is by no means a new fashion, but it was not until the Dowager Countess of Thames-Ditton brought it in person to Fernbank that Mrs Albert could be quite sure of its entire suitability. Up to that time it had seemed to her a style rather adapted to lady lecturers and the wives of men who write: and though Mrs Albert has the very highest regard for literature – quite dotes on it, as she says – she is somewhat inclined to sniff at its wives.

We all feel that the change adds character to Mrs Albert’s face – or rather exhibits now that true managing and resourceful temper, which was formerly obscured and weakened by a fringe. But the new arrangement has the defects of its qualities. It does not lend itself to tricks. The countenance beneath it does not easily dissemble anxiety or mask fatigue. And both were written broadly over Mrs Albert’s fine face. “Yes,” she said, “I know it.”

The consoling suggestion that soon the necessity of giving home-dinners to the directors in her husband’s companies would have ended, and that then a few weeks out of London, away somewhere in the air of the mountains or the sea, would bring back all her wonted strength and spirits, did no good. She shook her head and sighed again.

“No,” she said, “it isn’t physical. That is to say, it is physical, but the cause is mental. It is over-worry.”

“Of all people on earth —you!” I replied reproachfully. “Why think of it – a husband who is the dream of docile propriety, a competency broadening each year into a fortune, a home like this, such servants, such appointments, such a circle of admiring friends – and then your daughters! Why, to be the mother of such a girl as Ermyntrude – ”

“Precisely,” interrupted Mrs Albert. “To be the mother of such a girl, as you say. Little you know what it really means! But, no – I know what you were going to say —please don’t! it is too sad a subject.”

I could do nothing but feebly strive to look my surprise. To think of sadness connected with tall, handsome, good-hearted Ermie, was impossible.

“You think I am exaggerating, I know,” Mrs Albert went on. “Ah, you do not know!”

“Nothing could be more evident,” I replied, “than that I don’t know. I can’t even imagine what on earth you are driving at.”

Mrs Albert paused for a moment, and pushed the toe of her wee slipper meditatively back and forth on the figure of the carpet.

“Yes, I will tell you,” she said at last. “You are such an old friend of the family that you are almost one of us. And besides, you are always sympathetic – so different from Dudley. Well, the point is this. You know the young man – Sir Watkyn’s son – Mr Eustace Hump.”

“I have met him here,” I assented.

“Well, I doubt if you will meet him here any more,” Mrs Albert said, impressively.

“The deprivation shall not drive me to despair or drink,” I assured her. “I will watch over myself.”

“I dare say you did not care much for him,” said Mrs Albert. “I know Dudley didn’t. But, all the same, he was eligible. He is an only son, and his father is a Baronet – an hereditary title – and they are rolling in wealth. And Eustace himself, when you get to know him, has some very admirable qualities. You know he writes!”

“I have heard him say so,” I responded, perhaps not over graciously.

“O, regularly, for a number of weekly papers. It is understood that quite frequently he gets paid – not of course that that matters to him – but his associations are distinctly literary. I have always felt that with his tastes and connections his wife – granting of course that she was the right kind of woman – might at last set up a real literary salon in London. We have wanted one so long, you know.”

“Have we?” I murmured listlessly, striving all the while to guess what relation all this bore to the question of Ermyntrude. I built up in my mind a hostile picture of the odious Hump, with his shoulders sloping off like a German wine-bottle, his lean neck battlemented in high starched walls of linen, and his foolish conceited face – and leaped hopefully to the conclusion that Ermyntrude had rejected him. I could not keep the notion to myself.

“Well – has she sent him about his business?” I asked, making ready to beam with delight.

“No,” said Mrs Albert, ruefully. “It never got to that, so far as I can gather – but at all events it is all over. I expect every morning now to read the announcement in the Morning Post that a marriage has been arranged between him and – and – Miss Wallaby!”

I sat upright, and felt myself smiling. “What! – the girl with the black ribbon round her neck?” I asked comfortably.

“It would be more appropriate round her heart,” remarked Mrs Albert, with bitterness in her tone. “Why, do you know? her mother, for all that she’s Lady Wallaby, hasn’t an ‘h’ in her whole composition.”

“Well, neither has old Sir Watkyn Hump,” I rejoined pleasantly. “So it’s a fair exchange.”

“Ah, but he can afford it,” put in Mrs Albert. “But the Wallabys – well, I can only say that I had a right to look for different treatment at their hands. How, do you suppose, they would ever have been asked to the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn’s garden-party, or met Lady Thames-Ditton, or been put in society generally, if I had not taken an interest in them? Why, that girl’s father, old Sir Willoughby Wallaby, was never anything but chief of police, or something like that, out in some Australian convict settlement. I have heard he was knighted by mistake, but of course my lips are sealed.”

“I suppose they really have behaved badly,” I said, half interrogatively.

“Badly!” echoed the wrathful mother. “I will leave you to judge. It was done here, quite under my own roof. You know Miss Wallaby volunteered her services, and went down into the Retired Licensed Victuallers’ Division of Surrey to electioneer for Sir Watkyn. Do you know, I never suspected anything. And then Miss Timby-Hucks, she went down also, but they rather cold-shouldered her, and she came back, and she told me things, and still I wouldn’t believe it. Well then – three weeks ago – my Evening At Home – you were here – the Wallabys came as large as life, and that scheming young person manoeuvred about until she got herself alone with Eustace and my Ermyntrude, and then she told her a scene she had witnessed during her recent election experiences. There was a meeting for Sir Watkyn at some place, I can’t recall the name, and there were a good many of the other side there, and they hooted and shouted, and raised disturbance, until at last there was one speaker they would not hear at all. All this that girl told Ermyntrude seriously, and as if she were overflowing with indignation. And then she came to the part where the speaker stood his ground and tried to make himself heard, and the crowd yelled louder than ever, and still he doggedly persisted – and then someone threw a large vegetable marrow, soft and very ripe, and it hit that speaker just under the ear, and burst all over him!”

“Ha-ha-ha!” I ejaculated. “The vegetable marrow in politics is new – full of delightful possibilities and seeds – wonder it has never been thought of before.”

“Yes,” said Mrs Albert, with a sigh. “Ermyntrude also thought it was funny. She has a very keen sense of humour – quite too keen. She laughed, too!”

“And why not?” I asked.