The Celebrity at Home

It is fairer at any rate for Ariadne to review books than George, because she doesn’t write them. People who write books shouldn’t have the right to say what they think of other people’s; it is like a mother listening to tales in the nursery, and putting one child in the corner to please another. I once went into the study and saw George walking up and down, and throwing light bits of furniture about.

“D—m the fellow! He’s stolen the babe unborn of an excellent plot of mine, and mauled it and ruined it, beyond recognition!”

It was no use my putting in my word, and saying, “Well, then, George, you can use it again.” He went on fuming and fussing, loudly dictating a regular corker of a review.

“I’ll let him have it! Go on, please, Miss Mander. ‘The signal ineptitude of this author’s——’”

I am sure that was going to be a very unpleasant review to read, though I never saw it in print.

Ariadne is sentimental, and doesn’t care for realistic novels at all, which is a pity, as George’s greatest friend, and the person who comes oftenest to this house, is a realist, and wrote a novel called The Laundress. He lived in Shoreditch in a tenement dwelling for a whole year to learn how to write it from the laundresses themselves,—he went to tea with a different laundress every afternoon? The one he wrote about had three diamond rings and three husbands to match. He himself wore flannel shirts then, not nice frock-coats such as he has now, but the flannel shirts weren’t because he was poor, but so as not to frighten the laundresses by looking too smart. Then the book came out, and there was a great fuss about it, and it was published at sixpence, and our cook bought it, and it lies on the kitchen-table beside the cookery-book.

That is the reason Mr. Aix, being a realist, makes more money than Papa, who is an idealist. You see, Duchesses and Countesses want to hear all about laundresses, just as much as cooks do, but though Duchesses and Countesses are interested in mediæval knights and maidens, cooks—nor yet laundresses—aren’t.

“The suburbs do not appreciate me as they do you, old man!” he says sometimes. “If I was proper, they wouldn’t even look at me!”

“Ay! the suburbs?” George says dreamily; “the kind, the mild, the tenderly trustful suburbs. I manipulate them freely. I have taught Peckham Rye and Clapham that there are stranger things in Pall Mall and Piccadilly than are dreamt of in their simple philosophy–”

“You have tickled the Philistines, not smitten them!” says Mr. Aix.

“I have shocked them—they love being shocked! I have startled them—that does them good. I have puzzled them—not altogether unpleasantly. I have inured them to Dukes and familiarized them with Duchesses, as the butcher hardens his pony to a motor-car. I reduce to a common, romantic denominator–”

“You are like those useful earthworms of le père Darwin, bringing up soil and interweaving strata,” said Mr. Aix wearily.

George accepted the worm reluctantly, and went on. “Yes, I dominate the lower strata, they dote on any topsy-turvy upper-class gospel I chose at the moment to formulate for their crass benefit. Miss Mander, did you ever envisage Peckham?”

“I lived there and sold matches once,” said she, “and, moreover, I’ve kept a Home for distressed female-authors in the Isle of Dogs.”

“Is there anything you haven’t done?” said Mr. Aix, quite jealous of a woman interfering in his own line. He always makes a point of living among his raw material. When he was writing The Serio-Comic, in order to get the serious atmosphere—which I should have thought gin would have done for well enough—he went every night of his life to some music hall or other, and went behind and talked to them, and fastened their frocks at the back for them, and put in hair-pins when they stuck out just as they were going on. Then he stood them drinks, and didn’t preach for his life, for if he had, the serio-comics wouldn’t have told him anything or shown him the secret of their inner life. He had to pretend that he thought them and their life all that was perfect. Christina calls this novel “The Sweetmeat in the Gutter,” and loves it, though George says it is as broad as it’s long, and that ladies shouldn’t read it. But Christina has been to Klondike and seen the seamy side, so it doesn’t matter. I have read The Serio-Comic, and I can’t see anything wrong. There’s more seriousness than fun in it. Miss Deucie Dulcimer’s real name is Frances Raggles, and she’s the mother of five in the course of three hundred and fifty pages, and there’s a brandy-and-soda in every chapter.

Mr. Aix is forty, but he looks like a boy. He has a snub soft nose like Lady Scilly’s pug, with wrinkles on the bridge of it. He wears spectacles because of his weak eyes, and he always says “Quite so,” as if he were good-natured enough to agree with Providence in everything. He is the opposite of George, who is proud to be considered cat-like. Perhaps that is why they are friends. If Mr. Aix were a dog, he would knock over everything with his tail. He has no tact. He never drinks anything but water, and does calisthenics before breakfast with an exerciser on a door. He is the kind of man who would put stops in a telegram—so very punctilious. His eyes are wall, and look different ways, and Aunt Gerty says that once at a dance he asked two girls for the same polka, and they both accepted, because he looked at them both at the same time.

He is about the only person who doesn’t think Ariadne pretty, so Ariadne naturally dislikes him. She can’t help it. If we didn’t let her think she was pretty, she would have jaundice, or something lingering of that sort. She snubs Mr. Aix, but somehow he won’t consider himself snubbed. It comes of having no sense of decency, as the reviews say of him. Christina chaffs him, and teases him about his next novel, and asks him if it is to be called The Dustman or The General, and what the locale is to be, the scullery or the collecting-places just outside London?

I have an idea that it will be called The Seamstress, for he has lately taken to coming up into the little entresol on the stairs where we sit and stitch, and make our frocks, and asking us to teach him to sew. He puts out a hand like a sheaf of bananas, Ariadne fits a needle into one of them, and he cobbles away quite painstakingly for an hour.

Once he came up when Ariadne was awfully tired, and could hardly keep her eyes open, as she always is after a dance.

“I have often wondered,” he began, “what must be the sensations of a young girl on entering on her kingdom of the ball-room. Is she dazzled, is she obfuscated by the twinkling repetition of the lights? are her senses stunned or stimulated by the ponderous beat of the time, relentless under its top-dressing of melody, like despair underlying frivolity? Is she–?”

He would have gone on for ever if I had not interrupted—

“I can tell you. She’s thinking all the time, ‘Is there a hair-pin sticking out? Is the tip of my nose shiny? Is my dress too short in front, and is it properly fastened at the back, and what does Mr. – it depends which Mister is there that evening—think of it all?”

“Don’t, Tempe!” said Ariadne.

“No, no, Miss Tempe, go on, I beg of you. Go on being indiscreet. Tell me some more things about women.”

“Do you know why women always sit on one side when they are alone in a hansom?”

“No, I have no idea. Some charmingly morbid reason, I suppose?”

“Oh, you can call it morbid, if you like,” I said. “It is only because there happens to be a looking-glass there.”

George and Mr. Aix have different publishers, but the same literary agent. A publisher once took them both to the top of a high hill in Surrey and tempted them—to sell him the rights of every novel they did for ten years, and be kept in luxury by him. But they both shook their heads and said, “You must go to Middleman!” Then he took them to a London restaurant and made them drunk, and still they shook their heads and sent him to Middleman, who makes all their bargains for them, but he can’t control all the reviews.

One morning Mr. Aix came in to see George, with a blue press-cutting in his hand; I was in the study then, as it happened, and I did not go. George never minds our hearing everything, he says it is too much of an effort to be a hero to one’s typewriter, or one’s daughter.

“I am in a rage!” Mr. Aix said, and so I suppose he was, though he looked more like a white gooseberry than ever. “Just let me get hold of this fellow they have got on The Bittern, and see if I don’t wring his neck for him!”

George didn’t say anything, and so I asked—somebody had to—“What has The Bittern man done, please?”

“Done! He has dammed me with faint praise, that’s all! I’d have the fellow know that I’m read in every pothouse, every kitchen in England! Here, George, take it, and read it, the infamous thing!”

George read it—at least he ran his eyes over it. He didn’t seem to want to see it particularly, and gave it back as if it bit him, saying—

“Well, my dear fellow, you must take the rough with the smooth—one can always learn something from criticism, or so I find!”

“What the devil do you suppose I am to learn from an incompetent paste-and-scissors understrapper like that? He wants a good hiding, that’s what he wants, and I for one would have no objection to giving it him!”

“Well, it wasn’t me wrote it, Mr. Aix,” I said, “nor Ariadne!” He isn’t supposed to know that George farms out his reviews.

Mr. Aix laughed, and left off being cross. The odd thing was, that it had only just missed being Ariadne or me, for the book certainly came in for review. Most likely George wrote it, or else why didn’t he trouble to read it, when it was given him to read? It looks as if he were growing a little tiny bit of a conscience, for he knows he ought to have said to The Bittern editor, “Avaunt! Don’t tempt an author to review his friend’s book, when he knows he cannot speak well of it for so many reasons!” That is my idea of literary morality.

CHAPTER XI

GEORGE came back from his yachting tour with the Scillys very brown and cheerful, having collected enough sunshine for a new book, and Christina is typing it at his dictation.

George is a cranky dictator, and it takes her all her time to keep in touch with him. I have watched her at it. Sometimes he stops and can’t for the life of him find the right word, and I can tell by her eyes that she knows it, and is too polite to give it him; just the way one longs to help out a stutterer. But I have seen her put the word down out of her own head long before George has shouted it at her, as he does in the end. She picks and chooses, too, a little, for George is a tidy swearer, as the cabman said. I suppose he learned it in the high society he goes among! He does it all the time he is composing; it relieves the tension, he says, and she doesn’t mind. She manages him. George pretends he knows he is being managed, which shows that he doesn’t really think he is. I asked her once why she didn’t marry, but she said the profession of typewriting was not so binding as the other, for you could get down off your high stool if you wanted.

Christina always says rude things about epigrams and marriage. She is not very old, only thirty; but she says she has outgrown them both. Of course in this house epigrams are the same as bread-and-butter, hers and ours, for George pays her a good salary for typing those that he makes ready for print. As for epigrams, she says she can make them herself, and here are some I found written out in her handwriting on a china memorandum tablet. I expect she keeps a separate tablet for her remarks on Marriage.

1. Man cannot live by epigram alone.

2. Epigrams are like the paper-streamers they fling out of the boxes at a bal masqué at the Opera. They flat fall immediately afterwards.

3. An epigram is like the deadly Upas Tree, and blights everything in the shape of conversation that grows near it.

4. Reverse an epigram and you get a platitude.

5. The savage, sour, and friendless epigram. The last sounds to me all wrong, for it has no verb. But I give it as I find it.

George’s new novel is to be called The Senior Epigrammatist, and the scene is laid in the Smart Sea Islands.

“Our well-known blend,” said Mr. Aix, “of opaline sea and crystal epigram knocks the public every time! But mark me, Christina dear, this sunlight soap won’t wash clothes. It isn’t for home consumption. It gladdens publishers’ offices, but leaves the domestic hearth cold. The fires of passion–”

“Don’t talk to me of passion,” said Christina. “I just detest the word. Passion is piggish! It’s a perfect disgrace to have primitive instincts, and I wouldn’t be seen dead with a temperament, in these days.”

She was putting a new ribbon into her typewriter and trying it. She typed something like this—