The Celebrity at Home

So we took off our hats, at least I did—she wears a hat every time she can, except in bed—and went into the library where Lord Scilly was, and her cousin, a young man from the Foreign Office, Simon Hermyre, that I know.

Lord Scilly came up to her and said out loud, “You have got too much on!”

She softly dabbed her face with her handkerchief to please him, but so as not to disturb anything, and the young man from the Foreign Office laughed. He is a fifth cousin. Lady Scilly says her cousins grow like blackberries on every bush—one of the penalties of greatness.

“I’ve never really seen your face, Paquerette,” he said, “and I do believe it would justify my wildest expectations. Still, I think you are right not to make it too cheap. Who’s coming? Smart people, or one of your Bohemian crowds?”

“You’ll see,” she said. “Mrs. Ptomaine, for one.”

“Dear Tommy!” said he. “I love her.... Desist, O wasp!” he said to one that had come in by the window and was bothering him. “This is a precursor of Tommy.”

“Tommy’s all right, so long as she hasn’t got her knife into you. She favours you, Simon. You are to take her in, and distract her, and see that she doesn’t make eyes at my tame millionaire.”

“Oh, Mr. Pawky!” said Simon. “Is he coming? You should put me opposite, so that I could intercept the glances. And why mayn’t Tommy have a bit of him? She’s terribly thin!”

“Because he isn’t a very big millionaire—only half a one—and there’s only just enough for me. So you know what you have got to do. You may flirt wildly with Tommy, if nothing else will do. Let me see, who else is coming? Oh, Marston, the actor, a nice boy, gives me boxes, and mortally afraid of Lauderdale—and some odd fill-ups. Just think, I nearly went out to lunch with this child, and forgot you all. I should like to have seen all your faces!”

Then all these people came, and Lady Scilly put me on one side of the millionaire and herself on the other. He looked very mild and indigestible, and as if millionairing didn’t agree with him. He could only drink hot water and eat dry toast. He made a little “How-Are-You-My-Pretty-Dear” conversation with me, but he attended most to Lady Scilly, of course. She was telling him all about Miss Lauderdale, and Lady Ildegonde and the dresses, and discussing Society, as it is now.

“Titles! Why, my dear man, no one cares a fig for birth now-a-days. No, the only thing we care for is culture, and the only thing we can’t forgive is for people to bore us!”

I wondered where the poor millionaire came in, for he can’t culture, while he certainly does bore, but I suppose Lady Scilly wouldn’t waste her time for nothing, and perhaps there is some other attraction Society takes count of that she didn’t mention?

“I’ll go anywhere and everywhere to be amused,” she went on. “I’d go to Gatti’s Music Hall under the Arches—only music halls are a bit stale now! I’d go to a prize-fight in a sewer—anything to get some colour into my life!”

“Paint the town red, wouldn’t you!” muttered Lord Scilly.

“That is the way we all are,” Lady Scilly went on. “Look at Kitty London! She is going to marry a perfect darling of an acrobat, who can play billiards on his own back!”

“Cheap culture that!” said Lord Scilly, and I don’t know what he meant, but I knew he meant to be nasty; but the millionaire went on sipping his hot water, and enjoyed having a countess talk like that to him, and stood her any amount of dinners at the Paxton for it, I dare say. They say he runs it?

He was well protected, but still I could not help thinking that Mrs. Ptomaine on the other side of the table, not even opposite, seemed to have her eye on him, one of them at any rate, Simon couldn’t manage to distract both. I didn’t like her. She came to our ball in a mask, and flirted with Mr. Frederick Cook. I quite saw why Simon Hermyre compared her to a wasp. She looked as if she sat up too late and drank too much tea, and I was sure that though they were very smart, her petticoats were all muddy at the bottom. She called Lady Scilly “Darling!” across the table every now and then to show how intimate she was. Lady Scilly never cares or notices. It is one of her charms. The actor was on her other side. I saw Lord Scilly stare at his eighteen rings and his nice painted face, as if he were a new arrival. But there is some excuse for him, he was just up—he said so—and I dare say he was too tired to wash the paint off when he got home this morning. Besides that, he is acting Juliet to Miss Lauderdale’s Romeo—that is the way they do it now. I wish I had seen Shakespeare when men acted men’s parts and women did women, but I was born too late for that.

When we got up from lunch, Mrs. Ptomaine cleverly caught her dress in a leg of her chair, and she wouldn’t let the actor disengage it, but waited till the millionaire came past her seat and had a feeble try at it. She smiled at him very gratefully for tearing a large bit of the flounce off in getting it out, but after all, it made an introduction, and she can have a new piece of common lace put in. Afterwards in the drawing-room she had quite a nice chat with him, before Lady Scilly sent somebody to break it up, as she did, after five minutes.

At four o’clock they all went and we took our drive after all. Lady Scilly never pays calls—only the bourgeois do—but we went to see Mrs. Ptomaine.

“I hadn’t a word with Tommy to-day,” Lady Scilly said, “and I had several little things to arrange with her. I can’t sleep till I have put a spoke in Lauderdale’s wheel. Poor Tommy! What a fright she looked to-day! But she is not a bad sort, is Tommy, and devoted to me!”

“What does she do?” I asked.

“Oh, she works the press for me. She has command of half-a-dozen papers. Goodness knows how, for I am sure no editor would ever care for her to make love to him! She is useful, you see, she describes my dresses free. I don’t care for that myself, naturally, but the dressmakers do, if their names are given, and then they don’t worry so with their bills. And she interviewed me once, and I gave Kitty London such a lesson—things I wanted conveyed to her, you know, and could not quite say myself! It is rather a good idea to conduct one’s quarrels through the press, isn’t it? Here we are at Tommy’s flat! Up at the very, very top! The vulture in its eyrie—is it the vulture that has an eyrie? I know it has a ragged neck with cheap fur round it! Up we go! No lift! One oughtn’t to visit with flats without a lift! You ring!”

I rang, and Mrs. Ptomaine herself opened the door.

“So soon, darling! Delightful!” she said. She didn’t look very pleased to see us, I thought, but she was “in to tea,” I could see, for there were three kinds of little tea-cakes and a yellow cake made with egg-powder.

“I wanted to prime you about your critique of Lady Ildegonde, you know. Now, Tommy, it is understood, Lauderdale is to be snubbed and punished for her impertinence in daring to act me, in Camille’s dresses.”

“Darling, quite so! Of course. I had it nearly written. Dearest, you don’t trust your Tommy.”

“Not so much darling dear, now, if you don’t mind,” said Lady Scilly. “We are alone, and this child doesn’t need impressing. It fidgets me.”

“All right, sweetheart—I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Ptomaine, quite obligingly; but talk of fidgeting, she herself was in a terrible state. “Is it too early for tea?”

“Too late you mean, Tommy. What is the matter with you? Have you got a headache?”

“Three distinct headaches,” said poor Tommy. “Did three first nights last night, and got a separate headache for each.”

“How interesting!” said Lady Scilly. “I mean I am very sorry. Is there nothing I can do?”

“No, no, nothing. I have experience of these. Nothing but complete rest will do any good. If I could just lie down and darken the room and think of nothing for an hour.”

Lady Scilly got up to go after such a plain hint as that, and we were just opening the door when it opened itself and let in the millionaire!

Mrs. Ptomaine made the best of it. She got up to receive him with a very pained smile on the side of her face next Lady Scilly, and said to her in an undertone, “No chance for me, you see! This man will want his tea. Must you go?”

Lady Scilly hadn’t even said she must go, but she did go, and p.d.q. as my brother Ben says. What was more, she said “Good-bye, Mrs. Ptomaine,” in a tone that must have peeled the skin off poor Tommy’s nose. No more “dears” and “darlings”! To the millionaire she said, “So we meet again?” and from the way she said that polite thing, I should say he would have serious doubts as to whether he would ever be invited to drink toast-and-water in her house any more.

“There are as good millionaires in South Africa as ever came out of it,” she said to me, going down-stairs. “Poor old Pawky! One woman after another exploits the dear old thing. They are kind to him, pour le bon motif! He did say to me in a first introduction, ‘Hev’ you any bills?’ But I put it down to his South African manners and his idea of breaking the ice and making conversation. Tommy will fleece him. I hope she’ll get him to give her a new carpet!”

I know that Mr. Pawky gave Lady Scilly her box at the Opera, but then it was on consideration of her allowing him to sit in it with her now and then. Thus she gives a quid pro quo, which poor Tommy can’t do, having nothing marketable about her, not even a title.

If he values Lady Scilly’s kindness he is a fool to run after Tommy so obviously. But that is what I have noticed about these rich people; they seem to lose their heads, let themselves go cheap every now and then. Tommy is so ugly—she never looked nice in her life except when she was Mrs. Sulphuretta Hydrogen, at our party, and wore a mask and flirted with Mr. Frederick Cook—that he must be demented, or jealous of Frederick Cook, perhaps?

She has an organ, I mean a paper she’s on, and I suppose she can write Mr. Pawky up. Still I think he has made a bad exchange, for Mrs. Ptomaine won’t last. They change the staffs of those papers in the night, and any morning Mr. Frederick Cook may walk down to the office and find a new man sitting at his desk, and the same with Mrs. Ptomaine,—where there’s a way (of making a little) there’s a minx to take it! so she often says. Lady Scilly can’t lose her title except to change it for another and a nicer.

CHAPTER X

IT is a very odd thing that with a father a novelist, who can sell ten thousand copies of a book, you can’t get any sort of useful advice on the subject he has made peculiarly his own. Ariadne would much sooner consult the cook about such things. And it is not nice to ask advice from a person who can oblige you to follow it! George can’t in fairness advise as an author and command as a father, so the result is that Ariadne makes blunders at all these parties she goes to now. Poor girl, she only has me to consult. I say it is a mistake the moment you enter a room to fix your eyes on the man you want to dance with you, or even to ask him for a dance as Ariadne did once. She said she thought he was too shy to ask her, though he did know her a little, and she wanted to see if he danced as beautifully as he looked. A man shy! It takes a shy girl like Ariadne to imagine that! For Ariadne is both shy and superstitious. She gets that from Lady Scilly and Lady Scilly’s aunt, the Countess of Plyndyn. A very fat old lady with a corresponding hand, that when she holds it out to a fortune-teller, it is like counting the creases in a feather-bed. She makes them take count of every crease though, and begs them to invent a fate for her.

“Haven’t I got a future like other people?” she whines, and then the poor paid fortune-teller, in a great hurry, sows a crop of initials in her hand, and she is not more than pleased, and takes it as a right to have three husbands, although she is already seventy.

Lady Scilly never thinks of having an afternoon-party now without at least two fortune-tellers in different parts of the house. You see people waiting in little lumps at the doors; in a little more, and they would be tying their handkerchiefs to the handles, just as you do to bathing-machines, to say who has the right to go in first. They go in shyly, just like people who have made a stumble in the street, looking silly, and they come out looking humble, like people who have been having their hair washed. The fortune-teller doesn’t tell women the very serious things, for instance, that they are going to die themselves, though she tells them when their husbands are. They always tell Ariadne what sort of coloured man she is going to marry, but as there are only two sorts of coloured men, fair and dark, it is sure to come right sometimes. The last time the woman said, “Fair—verging on red!” and as Ariadne doesn’t know any man who has anything like red hair except Mr. Aix, whom she doesn’t care for, she frowned and said, “Are you quite sure?” The woman changed it to dark, almost black, in a great hurry, and Ariadne was pleased, for it is a safer colour. Ariadne wears a piece of wood let into a bracelet that Lady Scilly gave her, just the same as she wears herself, and touches it whenever she thinks misfortune is in the air, or when she is afraid of making a fool of herself more than usual. She took me out to gather May dew in Kensington Gardens, and very smutty it was. She always counts cherry-stones, and once at the Islingtons’ lunch when it came badly, she actually swallowed Never!

Now, in Lady Scilly’s set, they call her “The girl that swallowed Never,” and it seems to amuse them. Anything amuses them, especially a nickname. I myself wonder Ariadne did not have appendicitis, or at least that apple-tree growing out of her ear they used to tell us of when we were children. At luncheon parties now, they make a joke of refusing to help her to greengage, cherry, or plum-tart, in fact to anything countable, and Ariadne doesn’t seem to see that it is plain to them all that she is anxious to be married, which, though it is true, sounds unpleasant, at any rate for the men. She is wild to be married, and to go away and leave this house and have a house of her own that she can ask me to come and stay at, and Miss Mander. I think it is a very good wish, only why make it public? Nor she needn’t let every one know that George only gives her fifteen pounds a year to dress like a lady on. It is cheaper to dress like an artist or a Bohemian, or in character, and so she does. We don’t have any dressmaker, we hardly know the feel of one even. Mother and Ariadne make their own clothes, and Mother never going out, is able to give Ariadne a little extra off her own allowance. I don’t know how much that is. She will never tell.

Mother has all the taste that Aunt Gerty hasn’t got. It is odd, how taste skips one in a family! Aunt Gerty is like a very smart rag-doll, dressed in odds and ends to show the fashion on a small scale. And fashion after all is only a matter of “bulge.” You bulge in a different place every year, and if you can only bulge a little earlier, or leave off bulging in any particular place sooner than other people, well, you may consider you are a well-dressed woman!

Ariadne makes money doing his reviews for George. He gives her sixpence a head, when he remembers to. Dozens of books come in to our house every week, from The Bittern, and for Wild Oats. George is “Pease Blossom” on The Bittern. We don’t need to subscribe to a library, we live in a book-shop practically, for they are all sold in Booksellers’ Row afterwards. George takes the important ones, of course, and gives the smaller fry to Ariadne to do. She is his understudy. When they are ready George writes hers up, and Christina types them, and it all goes in together. He once reviewed a batch of bad ones under the heading of Darnel, and people thought him clever but malicious.

Papa doesn’t know it, but Ariadne has an understudy too. She lets the novels out to me, and gives me twopence a head. I must say that she has no idea of beating one down. I read them as carefully as I have time for—it depends on how many Ariadne gives me—and then when she is doing her hair, I sit beside her, and tell her the plots. The more improper ones she keeps to herself, but I read those for pleasure, not work, so it’s all right.

Ariadne knows about a dozen useful phrases that she didn’t invent, but found ready made. “Up to the level of this author’s reputation” is one; “marks a distinct advance,” “breezy,” “strong, or convincing,” and the opposites, “unconvincing,” “weak,” “morbid,” “effete,” are useful ones. She uses all these turn and turn about, and always mentions “a fine sense of atmosphere” if she honestly can.

She has great fun sometimes, when she meets the authors in society. She flirts with them till they get confidential, and tell her about their books, and how totally they have been misunderstood by the press, and what a crassly ignorant set reviewers are! They explain to her that not one of the whole d—d crew has the slightest sense of responsibility, especially The Bittern, which has got the most God-forsaken staff that ever paper went to the devil with! Ariadne is amused at all this and gives them another chance of conversation, and then they go on to quote her own words to her!

Once, though, she got caught, and George very nearly took all the reviewing away from her, for he had to stand the racket himself, of course. She had actually said at the end of the review that it was a pity Mr. – I forget the author’s name—did not relieve our anxiety as to the perpetrator of the hellish crime, which to the very end he allowed to remain shrouded in obscurity. Well, as a matter of fact, there was a hanging scene and dying confession in the last chapter but one, but Ariadne unfortunately burnt that before she had got to it. She was using the novel as a screen to keep the draught off the flame for heating her tongs, and so she never read that part, and had to make up her own end. The editor of The Bittern had to acknowledge the error and apologize in a footnote, because the author threatened a libel action. Ariadne doesn’t care about meeting that man in society!