Mrs Albert Grundy—Observations in Philistia

“Why not?” demanded Mrs Albert, with shining eyes. “Because the story had been told just to trap her into laughing – because – because the speaker upon whom that unhappy vegetable marrow exploded was —Eustace Hump!”

Containing Thoughts upon the Great Unknown, to which are added Speculations upon her Hereafter

It is not often that I find the time to take part in Mrs Albert Grundy’s Thursdays – the third and fifth Thursdays of each month, from 4 to 6.30 P.M. – but on a certain afternoon pleasant weather and the sense of long-accrued responsibility drew me to Fernbank.

It was really very nice, after one got there. Perhaps it would have been less satisfactory had escape from the drawing-room been a more difficult matter. Inside that formal chamber, with its blinds down-drawn to shield the carpet from the sun, the respectable air hung somewhat heavily about the assembled matronhood of Brompton and the Kensingtons. The units in this gathering changed from time to time – for Mrs Albert’s circle is a large and growing one – but the effect of the sum remained much the same. The elderly ladies talked about the amiability and kindliness of the Duchess of Teck; and argued the Continental relationships of the Duchesses of Connaught and Albany, first into an apparently hopeless tangle of burgs and hausens and zollerns and sweigs, then triumphantly out again into the bright daylight of well-ordered and pellucid genealogy. The younger wives spoke in subdued voices of more juvenile Princesses on the lower steps of the throne, with occasional short-winged flights across the North Sea in imaginative search of a suitable bride for the then unwedded Duke of York, if an importation should be found to be necessary – about which opinions might in all loyalty differ. The few young girls who sat dutifully here beside their mammas or married sisters talked of nothing at all, but smiled confusedly and looked away whenever another’s glance, caught theirs – and, I daresay, thought with decent humility upon Marchionesses.

But outside, on the garden-lawn at the rear of the house, the Almanach de Gotha threw no shadow, and the pungent scent of jasmine and lilies drove the leathery odour of Debrett from the soft summer air. The gentle London haze made Whistlers and Maitlands of the walls and roof-lines and chimney-pots beyond. The pretty girls of Fernbank held court here on the velvet grass, with groups of attendant maidens from sympathetic Myrtle Lodges and Cedarcrofts and Chestnut Villas – selected homesteads stretching all the way to remote West Kensington. They said there was no one left in London. Why, as I sat apart in the shade of the ivy overhanging the garden path, and watched this out-door panorama of the Grundys’ friendships, it seemed as if I had never comprehended before how many girls there really were in the world.

And how sweet it was to look upon these damsels, with their dainty sailor’s hats of straw, their cheeks of Devon cream and damask, their tall and shapely forms, their profiles of faultless classical delicacy! What if, in time, they too must sit inside, by preference, and babble of royalties and the peerage, and politely uncover those two aggressive incisors of genteel maturity when they were asked to have a third cup of tea? That stage, praise heaven, should be many years removed. We will have no memento mori bones or tusks out here in the sunlit garden – but only tennis balls, and the inspiring chalk-bands on the sward, and the noble grace of English girlhood, erect and joyous in the open air. # Much as I delighted in this spectacle, it forced upon me as well a certain vague sense of depression. These lofty and lovely creatures were strangers to me. I do not mean that their names were unknown to me, or that I had not exchanged civil words with many of them, or that I might not be presented to, and affably received by, them all. The feeling was, rather, that if it were possible for me to marry them all, we still to the end of our days would remain strangers. I should never know what to say to them; still less should I ever be able to guess what they were thinking.

The tallest and most impressive of all the bevy – the handsome girl in the pale brown frock with the shirt-front and jacketed blouse, who stands leaning with folded hands upon her racket like an indolent Diana – why, I punted her about the whole reach from Sunbury to Walton during the better part of a week, only last summer, not to mention sitting beside her at dinner every evening on the houseboat. We were so much together, in truth, that my friends round about, as I came to know afterwards, canvassed among themselves the prospect of our arranging never to separate. Yet I feel that I do not know this girl. We are friends, yes; but we are not acquainted with each other.

More than once – perhaps a dozen times – in driving through the busier of London streets, my fancy has been caught by this thing: a hansom whirling smartly by, the dark hood of which frames a woman’s face – young, wistful, ivory-hued. It is like the flash exposure of a kodak – this bald instant of time in which I see this face, and comprehend that its gaze has met mine, and has burned into my memory a lightning picture of something I should not recognise if I saw it again, and cannot at all reproduce to myself, and probably would not like if I could, yet which leaves me with the feeling that I am richer than I was before. In that fractional throb of space there has been snatched an unrehearsed and unprejudiced contact of human souls – projected from one void momentarily to be swept forward into another; and though not the Judgment Day itself shall bring these two together again, they know each other.

Now that I look again at the goddess in the pale-brown gown, these unlabelled faces of the flitting hansoms seem by comparison those of familiar companions and intimates.

I get no sense of human communion from that serene and regular countenance, with its exquisite nose, its short upper-lip and glint of pearls along the bowed line of the mouth, its correctly arched brows and wide-open, impassive blue eyes. I can see it with prophetic admiration out-queening all the others at Henley, or at Goodwood, or on the great staircase of Buckingham Palace. I can imagine it at Monte Carlo, flushed a little at the sight of retreating gold; or at the head of a great noble’s table, coldly poised above satin throat and shoulders, and stirring no muscle under the free whisperings of His Excellency to the right. I can conceive it in the Divorce Court, bearing with metallic equanimity the rude scrutiny of a thousand unlicensed eyes. But my fancy wavers and fails at the task of picturing that face at my own fireside, with the light of the home-hearth painting the fulness of her rounded chin, and reflecting back from her glance, as we talk of men and books and things, the frank gladness of real comradeship.

But – tchut! – I have no fireside, and the comrades I like best are playing halfcrown whist at the club; and these are all nice girls – hearty, healthful, handsome girls, who can walk, run, dance, swim, scull, skate, ride as no others have known or dared to do since the glacial wave of Christianity depopulated the glades and dells of Olympus. They will mate after their kind, and in its own good time along will come a new generation of straight, strong-limbed, thin-lipped, pink-and-white girls, and of tow-headed, deep-chested lads, their brothers – boys who will bully their way through Rugby and Harrow, misspell and misapprehend their way into the Army, the Navy, and the Civil Service, and spread themselves over the habitable globe, to rule, through sheer inability to understand, such Baboos and Matabele and mere Irishry as Imperial destiny delivers over to them.

The vision is not wholly joyous, as it with diffidence projects itself beyond, into that further space where new strange other generations walk – the girls still taller and more coldly tubbed, the boys astride a yet more temerarious saddle of dull dominion. Reluctant prophecy discerns beneath their considerable feet the bruised fragments of many antique trifles – the bric-à-brac of an extinct sentimental fraction that had a sense of humour and could spell – and, to please mamma, the fig-leaves have quite overspread and hidden the statues in their garden. But power is there, and empire; they still more serenely loom above the little foreign folks who cook, and sing to harps and fiddles, and paint for their amusement; such as it is under their shaping, they possess the earth.

So, as the sun goes down in the Hammersmith heavens, I take off my hat, and salute the potential mothers of the New Rome.

Glancing at some Modern Aspects of Master John Gutenberg’s ingenious but Over-rated Invention

It was very pleasant thus to meet Uncle Dudley in the Strand. Only here and there is one who can bear that test. Whole legions of our friends, decent and deeply reputable people, fall altogether out of the picture, so to speak, on this ancient yet robust thoroughfare. They do very well indeed in Chelsea or Highgate or the Pembridge country, where they are at home: there the surroundings fit them to a nicety; there they produce upon one only amiable, or at the least, natural, impressions. But to encounter them in the Strand is to be shocked by the blank incongruity of things. It is not alone that they give the effect of being lost – of wandering helplessly in unfamiliar places. They offend your perceptions by revealing limitations and shortcomings which might otherwise have been hidden to the end of time. You see suddenly that they are not such good fellows, after all. Their spiritual complexions are made up for the dim light which pervades the outskirts of the four-mile radius – and go to pieces in the jocund radiance of the Strand. It is flat presumption on their part to be ambling about where the ghosts of Goldsmith and Johnson walk, where Prior and Fielding and our Dick Steele have passed. Instinctively you go by, looking the other way.

It was quite different with Uncle Dudley. You saw at once that he belonged to the Strand, as wholly as any of our scorned and scornful sisters on its comers, competing with true insular doggedness against German cheeks and raddled accents; as fully as any of its indigenous loafers, hereditary in their riverside haunts from Tudor times, with their sophisticated joy in drink and dirt, their large self-confidence grinning through rags and sooty grime. It seemed as if I had always associated Uncle Dudley with the Strand.

He was standing in contemplation before a brave window, wherein American cheese, Danish butter, Norwegian fish, Belgian eggs, German sausages, Hungarian bacon, French vegetables, Australian apples, and Algerian fruits celebrate the catholicity of the modern British diet. He turned when I touched his shoulder, and drew my arm through his.

“Sir,” said Uncle Dudley, “let us take a walk along the Strand to the Law Courts, where I conceive that the tide of human existence gets the worst of it with unequalled regularity and dispatch.”

On his way he told me that his gout had quite vanished, owing to his foresight in collecting a large store of the best medical advice, and then thoughtfully and with pains disregarding it all. He demonstrated to me at two halting places that his convalescence was compatible with rich and strong drinks. He disclosed to me, as we sauntered eastward, his purpose in straying thus far afield.

“You know Mrs Albert is really a kindly soul,” he said. “It isn’t in her to keep angry. You remember how sternly she swore that she and Fernbank had seen the last of Miss Timby-Hucks. It only lasted five weeks – and now, bless me if the girl isn’t more at home on our backs than ever. She’s shunted herself off, now, into a new branch of journalism – it seems that there are a good many branches in these days.”

“It has been noticed,” I assented.

“She doesn’t write any more,” he explained, “that is, for the papers. She goes instead to the Museum or somewhere, and reads carefully every daily and weekly journal, I believe, in England. Her business is to pick out possible libels in them – and to furnish her employers, a certain firm of solicitors, with a daily list of these. They communicate with the aggrieved people, notifying them that they are aggrieved, which they very likely would not otherwise have known, and the result is, of course, a very fine and spirited crop of litigation.”

“Then that accounts for all the recent – ”

“Perhaps not quite all,” put in Uncle Dudley. “But the Timby-Hucks is both energetic and vigilant, and she tells me she is doing splendidly. She is very enthusiastic about it, naturally. She says that while the money is, of course, an object, her real satisfaction is in the humanitarian aspects of her work.”

“I am not sure that I follow,” I said doubtingly.

“No, I didn’t altogether myself at the start,” said Uncle Dudley, “but as she explains it, it is very simple. You see business is in a bad way in London – worse, they say, than usual. The number of unemployed is something dreadful to think of, so I am told by those who have thought of it. There are many thousands of people with no food, no fire, no clothes to speak of. Most people are discouraged about this. They can’t see how the thing can be improved. But Miss Timby-Hucks has a very ingenious idea. Why, she asks, do not all the Unemployed sue all the newspapers for libel? Do you catch the notion?”

“By George!” I exclaimed, “that is a bold, comprehensive thought!”

“Yes, isn’t it?” cried Uncle Dudley. “I am immensely attracted by it. For one thing, it is so secure, so certain! Broadly speaking, there are no risks at all. I suppose there has never yet been a case, no matter what its so-called merits, in which the English newspaper hasn’t been cast in damages of some sort Nobody is too humble or too shady to get a verdict against an editor or newspaper proprietor. Miss Timby-Hucks relates several most touching instances where the wolf was actually at the door, the children shoeless and hungry, the mother prostrated by drink, rain coming through the roof and so on – and everything has been changed to peace and contentment by the happy thought of bringing a libel suit. The father now wears a smile and a white waistcoat; the drains have been repaired; the little children, nicely washed and combed, kick each other’s shins with brand new boots, and sing cheerfully beneath a worsted-work motto of ‘God bless our Home!’ I find myself much affected by the thought.”

“You had always a tender heart,” I responded. “I suppose there would be no trouble about the Judges?”

“Not the least in the world,” said Uncle Dudley, with confidence. “Of course the Bench would have to be greatly enlarged, but there need be no fear on that score. There is a mysterious but beneficent rule, my boy, which you can always count upon in this making of judges – no matter how hail-fellow-well-met an eminent lawyer may be, no matter how intimate his connection with newspapers, how large his indebtedness to them for his career – the moment he gets on the Bench he catches the full, fine, old-crusted judicial spirit toward the Press. The scales fall with a bang from his eyes, and he sees the editor and newspaper proprietor as they really are – designing criminals, mercenary reprobates, social pests – to be lectured and bullied and put down. O, you may rely on the Judges! They are as safe as a new Liberal peer is to vote Tory.”

“But the ‘power of the Press’?” I urged. “If the newspapers combine in protest, and – ”

“You talk at random!” said Uncle Dudley almost austerely. “I should say the most certain, the most absolutely reliable, element in the whole case is the fact that newspapers do not combine. Whenever one editor gets hit, all the others grin. One journal is mulcted in heavy damages: the rest have all a difficulty in dissembling their delight. You read in natural history that kites are given to falling upon one of their kind which gets wounded or decrepit, and picking out its eyes. Well, kites are also made of newspapers.”

“And juries?” I began to ask.

“Here we are,” remarked Uncle Dudley, turning in toward the guarded portals of the great hall.

“I have a friend among the attendants here, a thoughtful and discerning man. I will learn from him where we may look for the spiciest case. He takes a lively interest in the flaying of editors. I believe he was once a printer. He will tell us where the axe gleams most savagely to-day: where; we shall get the most journalistic blood for our money. You were speaking of juries. Just take a look at one of them – if you are not afraid of spoiling your luncheon – and you will see that they speak for themselves. They regard all newspapers as public enemies – particularly when the betting tips have been more misleading than usual. They stand by their kind. They ‘give the poor man a chance’ without hesitation, without fail. They are here to avenge the discovery of movable types, and they do it. Come with me, and witness the disembowelling of a daily, the hamstringing of a sub-editor – a publisher felled by the hand of the Law like a bullock. Since the bear-pits of Bankside were closed there has been no such sport.”

Unhappily, it turned out that none of the Judges had come down to the Courts that day. There was a threat of east wind in the air. “You see, if they don’t live, to a certain age they get no pensions, and their heirs turn a key in the lock on the old gentlemen in weather like this,” explained Uncle Dudley, turning disappointedly away.

Detailing certain Prudential Measures taken during the Panic incident to a Late Threatened Invasion

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.”