Mrs Albert Grundy—Observations in Philistia

“Great heavens!” I exclaimed at last. “Why, man alive, what on earth possessed you to – ”

“Come now!” broke in Uncle Dudley, with peremptory sternness. “Chuck it!”

“Yes – I know” – I stammered haltingly along – “I promised I wouldn’t ask you – but – ”

“But the original simian instincts triumph over your resolutions, eh?” said my friend, crustily. “Yes, I know. I’ve had pretty nearly a week of it now. That question has been asked me, I estimate, somewhere about six hundred and seventy-eight times since last Thursday. It’s only fair to you to tell you that I have registered a vow to hit the next man who asks me that fool of a question – ‘What did you do it for?’ – straight under his left ear. I probably saved your life by interrupting you.”

Though the words were fierce, there was a marked return of geniality in the tone. I took the liberty of putting a hand over Uncle Dudley’s shoulder, and marching him across to the window.

“Let’s have a good look at you,” I said.

“I did it myself; I did it with my little hatchet; I did it because I wanted to; I had a right to do it; I should do it again if the fit struck me – ” Thus, with mock gravity, Uncle Dudley ran on as I scrutinised his countenance in the strong light. “And furthermore,” he added, “I don’t care one single hurrah in Hades whether you like it or not.”

“I think on the whole,” I mused aloud – “yes, I think I rather do like it – now that I accustom myself to it.”

Uncle Dudley’s face brightened on the instant. “Do you really?” he exclaimed, and beamed upon me. In spite of his professed indifference to my opinion, it was obvious that I had pleased him.

“Sit down,” he said – “there are the matches behind you – hope these aren’t too green for you. Yes, my boy, I created quite a flutter in the hen-yard, I can tell you. Did my sister tell you? – she nearly fainted, and little Amy burst out boo-hooing as if she’d lost her last friend. When you come to think of it, old man, it’s really too ridiculous, you know.”

“It certainly has its grotesque aspects,” I admitted.

Uncle Dudley looked up sharply, as if suspecting some ironical meaning in my words. “You really do think it’s an improvement?” he asked, with a doubtful note in his voice.

“Of course, it makes a tremendous change,” I said, diplomatically, “and the novelty tends perhaps to confuse judgment: but I must confess the result is – is, well, very interesting.”

My friend did not look wholly satisfied. “It shows what stupid people we are,” he went on in a dogmatic way. “Why, the way they’ve gone on, you’d think I had no property rights in the thing at all – that I was merely a trustee for it – bound to give an account to every Tom-Dick-and-Harry who came along and had nothing better to occupy his mind with. And then that eternal, vacuous, woollen-brained ‘What did you do it for?’ Oh, that’s got to be too sickening for words! And the confounded familiarity of the whole thing! Why, hang me, if even the little Jew cigar dealer down on the corner didn’t feel entitled to pass what he took to be some friendly remarks on the subject. ‘Vy,’ he said, ‘if I could say vidout vlattery, vot a haddsobe jeddlebad you ver, and vy did you do dot by yourself?’ It gets on a man’s nerves, you know, things like that.”

“But hasn’t anyone liked the change?” I asked.

Uncle Dudley sighed. “That’s the worst of it,” he said, dubiously. “Only two men have said they liked it – and it happens that they are both persons of conspicuously weak intellect. That’s rather up against me, isn’t it? But on the other hand, you know, people who are silliest about everything else always get credit for knowing the most about art and beauty and all that. Perhaps in such a case as this, I daresay their judgment might be better than all the others. And after all, what do I care? That’s the point I make: that it’s my business and nobody else’s. If a man hasn’t got a copyright in his own personal appearance, why there is no such thing as property. But instead of recognising this, any fellow feels free to come up and say: ‘You look like an unfrocked priest,’ or ‘Hullo! another burglar out of work,’ and he’s quite surprised if you fail to show that you’re pleased with the genial brilliancy of his remarks. I don’t suppose there is any other single thing which the human race lapses into such rude and insolent meddlesomeness over as it does over this.”

“It is pathetic,” I admitted – “but – but it’ll soon grow again.”

Uncle Dudley laughed a bitter laugh. “By Jove,” he cried, “I’ve more than half a mind not to let it. It would serve ‘em right if I didn’t. Why, do you know – you’d hardly believe it! My sister had a dinner party on here for Saturday night, and after I’d – I’d done it – she cancelled the invitations – some excuse about a family loss – a bereavement, my boy. Well, you know, treatment of that sort puts a man on his mettle. I’m entitled to resent it. And besides – you know – of course it does make a great change – but somehow I fancy that when you get used to it – come now – the straight griffin, as they say – what do you think?”

“I’m on oath not to encourage you,” I made answer.

“There you have it!” cried Uncle Dudley: “the old tyrannical conspiracy against the unusual, the individual, the true! Let nobody dare to be himself! Let us have uniformity, if all else perishes. The frames must be alike in the Royal Academy, that’s the great thing; the pictures don’t matter so much. You see our women-folk now, this very month, getting ready to case themselves in ugly hoops which they hate, at the bidding of they know not whom, because, if they did not, the hideous possibility of one woman being different from another woman would darken the land. A man is not to be permitted the pitiful privilege of seeing his own mouth, not even once in fifteen years, simply because it temporarily inconveniences the multitude in their notions as to how he is in the habit of looking! What rubbish it is!”

“It is rubbish,” I assented – “and you are talking it. Your sister who fainted, your niece who wept, your friends who averted their gaze in anguish, the hordes of casual jackasses who asked why you did it, the kindly little Jew cigar man who broke forth in lamentations – these are the world’s jury. They have convicted you – sorrowfully but firmly. You yourself, for all your bravado, realise the heinousness of your crime. You are secretly ashamed, remorseful, penitent. I answer for you – you will never do it again.”

“And yet it isn’t such a bad mouth, either,” mused Uncle Dudley, with a lingering glance at the mirror over the mantel. “There is humour, delicacy of perception, affection, gentleness – ever so many nice qualities about it which were all hidden up before. The world ought to welcome the revelation – and it throws stones instead. Ah well! – pass the matches – let us yield gracefully to the inevitable! It shall grow again.”

“Mrs Albert will be so glad,” I remarked.

Narrating the Failure of a Loyal Attempt to Circumvent Adversity by means of Modern Appliances

If his name was Jabez, why weren’t we told so, I’d like to know?” demanded Mrs Albert of me, with a momentary flash in her weary glance. “What right had the papers to go on calling him J. Spencer, year after year, while he was deluding the innocent, and fattening upon the bodies of his dupes? To be sure, now that the mask is off, and he has fled, they speak of him always as Jabez. Why didn’t they do it before, while honest people might still have been warned? But no – they never did – and now it’s too late – too late!”

The poor lady’s voice broke pathetically upon this reiterated plaint. She bowed her head, and as I looked with pained sympathy upon the drooping angle of her proud face, I could see the shadows about her lips quiver.

A sad tale indeed it was, to which I had been listening – here in a lonesome corner of the cloistral, dim-lit solitude of the big drawing-room at Fernbank. It was not a new story. Kensington has known it by heart for a generation. Bloomsbury learned it earlier, and before that it was familiar in Soho – away off in the old days when the ruffling gentry of Golden Square fought for the chance of buying ingenious John Law’s South Sea scrip. And even then, the experience was an ancient and half-forgotten memory of Bishopsgate and the Minories. It was the old, old tragedy of broken fortunes.

Mrs Albert was clear that it began with the Liberator troubles. I had my own notion that Mr Albert Grundy was skating on thin ice before the collapse of the building societies came. However that may be, there was no doubt whatever that the cumulative Australian disasters had finished the business. There were melancholy details in her recital which I lack the courage to dwell upon. The horse and brougham were gone; the lease of Fernbank itself was offered for sale, with possession before Michaelmas, if desired; Ermyntrude’s engagement was as good as off.

“It won’t be a bankruptcy,” said Mrs Albert, lifting her face and resolutely winking the moisture from her lashes. “We shall escape that – but for the moment at least I must abandon my position in society. Dudley is over to-day looking at a small place in Highgate, although Albert thinks he would prefer Sydenham. My own feeling is that some locality from which you could arrive by King’s Cross or St Paneras would be best. One never meets anybody one knows there. Then, when matters adjust themselves again, as of course they will, we could return here – to this neighbourhood, at least – and just mention casually having been out at our country place – on the children’s account, of course. And Floribel is delicate, you know.”

“Oh well, then,” I said, trying to put buoyance into my tone, “it isn’t so had after all. And you feel – Albert feels – quite hopeful about things coming right again?”

My friend’s answering nod of affirmation had a certain qualifying dubiety about it. “Yes, we’re hopeful,” she said. “But a fortnight ago, I felt positively sanguine. Nobody ever worked harder than I did to deserve success, any way. I only failed through gross treachery – and that, too, at the hands of the very people of whom I could never, never have believed it. When you find the aristocracy openly actuated by mercenary motives, as I have done this past month, it almost makes you ask what the British nation is coming to!”

“Dear me!” I exclaimed, “is it as bad as that?”

“You shall judge for yourself,” said Mrs Albert gravely. “You know that I organised – quite early in the Spring – the Loyal Ladies’ Namesake Committee of Kensington. I do not boast in saying that I really organised it, quite from its beginnings. The idea was mine; practically all the labour was mine. But when one is toiling to realise a great ideal like that, one frequently loses sight of small details. I ought to have known better – but I took a serpent to my bosom. I was weak enough to associate with me in the enterprise that monument of duplicity and interested motives – the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn. Why, she hadn’t so much as an initial letter to entitle her to belong – ”

“I am not sure that I follow you,” I put in. “Ladies’ Namesake Committee – initial letter – I don’t seem to grasp the idea.”

“It’s perfectly simple,” explained Mrs Albert. “The idea was that all the ladies – our set, you know – whose name was ‘May’ should combine in subscribing for a present.”

“But your name is Emily,” I urged, thoughtlessly.

“Oh, we weren’t exactly literal about it,” said Mrs Albert; “we couldn’t be, you know. It would have shut out some of our very best people. But I came very near the standard, indeed. My second name is Madge. You take the first two letters of that, and the ‘y’ from Emily, and there you have it. Oh, I assure you, very few came even as near it as that – and as I said to Dudley at the time, if you think of it, even her name isn’t really May. It’s only a popular contraction. But that Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn, she had no actual right whatever to belong. Her names are Hester Winifred Edith. She hasn’t even one letter right!”

“Ah, that was indeed treachery!” I ejaculated.

“Oh, no, that, was not what I referred to,” Mrs Albert set me right. “Of course, I was aware of her names. I had seen them in the ‘Peerage’ for years. It was what she did after her entrance that covers her with infamy. But I will narrate the events in their order. First, we collected £1100. Of course, our own contribution was not large, but Ermyntrude and I hunted the various church registers – we don’t speak of it, but even the Nonconformist ones we went through – and we got a tremendous number of Christian names more or less what was desired, and our circulars were sent to every one, far and near. As I said, we raised quite £1100. Then there came the question of the gift.”

Mrs Albert uttered this last sentence with such deliberate solemnity that I bowed to show my consciousness of its importance.

“Yes,” she went on, “the selection of the gift. Now I had in mind a most appropriate and useful present. Have you heard of the Oboid Oil Engine? No? Well, it is an American invention, and has been brought over here by an American, who has bought the European rights from the inventor. He is in the next building to Albert, in the City, and they meet almost every day at luncheon, and have struck up quite a friendship. He has connections which might be of the utmost importance to Albert, and if Albert could only have been of service to him in introducing this engine, there is literally no telling what might not have come of it. Albert does not say that a partnership would have resulted, but I can read it in his face.”

“But would an oil engine have been – under the circumstances – you know what I mean – ” I began.

“Oh, most suitable!” responded Mrs Albert with conviction. “It is really, it seems, a very surprising piece of machinery. After it’s once bought, the cheapness of running it is simply absurd. It does all sorts of things at no expense worth mentioning – anything you want it to do. It appears that if it had been invented at that time, the pyramids in Egypt could have been built by it for something like 130 per cent, less than their cost is estimated to have been – or something like that. Oh, it is quite extraordinary, I assure you. Albert says he could stand and watch it working for hours – especially if he had an interest in the company.”

“But I hadn’t heard that there were any new pyramid plans on just now – although, when I think of it, Shaw-Lefevre did have some Westminster Abbey project which – ”

“No, no!” interrupted Mrs Albert. “One of the engine’s greatest uses is in agriculture. It does everything– threshes, garners, mows, milks – or no, not that, but almost everything. No self-respecting farmer, they say, dreams of being without one – that is, of course, if he knows about it. You can see what it would have meant, if one had been thus publicly introduced on the princely farm at Sandringham. All England would have rung with demands for the Oboid – and Albert feels sure that the American man would have been grateful – and – and – then perhaps we need never have left Fernbank at all.”

My poor friend shook her head mournfully at the thought

“And the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn?” I asked.

The fire came back into Mrs Albert’s eye. “That woman,” she said, with bitter calmness, “was positively not ashamed to intrude her own mercenary and self-seeking designs upon this loyal and purely patriotic association. Why, she did it almost openly. She intrigued behind my back with whole streetsful of people that one would hardly know on ordinary occasions, paid them calls in a carriage got up for the occasion with a bright new coat of arms, made friends with them, promised them heaven only knows what, and actually secured nineteen votes to my three for the purchase of a mouldy old piece of tapestry – something about Richard III and Oliver Cromwell meeting on the battlefield, I think the subject is – which belonged to her husband’s family. Of course, my lips are sealed, but I have been told that at Christie’s it would hardly have fetched £100. I say nothing myself, but I can’t prevent people drawing certain deductions, can I? And when I reflect also that her two most active supporters in this nefarious business were Lady Thames-Ditton – whose financial difficulties are notorious – and the Countess of Wimps – whose tradespeople – well, we won’t go into that– it does force one to ask whether the fabric of British society is not being undermined at its very top. In this very day’s paper I read that the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn has hired a yacht, and will spend the summer in Norwegian waters – while we – we – ”

The door opened, and we made out through the half-light the comfortable figure of Uncle Dudley. He was mopping his brow, and breathed heavily from his long walk as he advanced.

“Well?” Mrs Albert asked, in a saddened and subdued tone, “Did you see the place?”