The Celebrity at Home

“I could hug you for saying that, Mr. Aix.”

“No, you couldn’t,” said he. “I am popularly supposed to be repellent. A lady said I was like a white stick of celery grown in a dark cellar. Another, of music-hall celebrity, compared me to a blasted pipe-stem. I do not look for success with your sex. It was kind of you to think of it, though.”

Peter Ball meant business, or else we could not have all spoken of it so openly. George was awfully cross at the idea of having to find a new secretary. Lady Scilly said she thought he could do better than Christina, who was too forward (and too pretty). She tried very hard to flirt with Peter herself, but perhaps Peter thought he could do better, and wouldn’t. She looked into his face and said, “You great big beauty!” She told him “high” stories, as Christina and I call them, and he wouldn’t laugh. She asked him right out why he wouldn’t, and he answered equally right out, “Because I disapprove of all jesting with regard to the relations of the sexes!”

Lady Scilly looked disgusted, and left him severely alone, as he meant her to.

For weeks after this he was like a full pail of water one is afraid to carry without spilling. At last he slopped over, and asked Christina to be his wife. I wasn’t in the room, of course, but Christina was nice and told us afterwards. He went on his knees, she says, and I believe her, because I found a cushion on the floor immediately after, before the housemaid had tidied the room, and I think he had managed to put it under his knees without her seeing. Our floor is bony.

“The very moment,” she said, “he had got me to say yes, he jumped up and rushed out without his hat, to send a telegram to his mother with the good news!”

She thought this so nice of him and so flattering, as showing that he hadn’t made quite sure of her. For though we all knew she meant to take him, he was not supposed to be aware of it. Considering that Christina is grown up, she ought to be able to make a man think exactly what she wishes him to think about her. Such power comes, or should come, with advancing years, and is one of its compensations. Ariadne, of course, isn’t old enough to have left off being quite transparent, and regrets it deeply in some of her poetry.

Christina was married to Peter Ball almost directly, and Ariadne and I were her bridesmaids. Mrs. Mander gave us our dresses and hats. They were quite fashionable; she would have no nonsense or necklaces. Ariadne looked smart and like other people, for once. She didn’t look so pretty, but it is a mistake to want to go about the streets looking like a picture. Prettiness isn’t everything, and the really smartest people would disdain to look simply ready for an artist to paint them.

Simon Hermyre, Lady Scilly’s best friend, was Peter Ball’s best man. He had met Ariadne at the Scillys’, but at Christina’s wedding he said that he should not have known her again. He began to take some notice of her. She at once asked him to call, and it was a great mistake, for he never did. It is awkward for Ariadne, I admit, for Mother not going out, and George being perfectly useless as a father, she has to do all her own asking.

That can’t be helped, but Ariadne is always hasty and strikes while the iron is too hot. Simon Hermyre did rather like her, but he wasn’t quite sure that he actually wanted to take her on, and all that that means—and whether he liked her enough to risk making Lady Scilly angry about it, as of course she would be. At all events he didn’t come—his chief kept him in till six o’clock every day, or some excuse of that sort. As if a man couldn’t always manage a call if he wanted to, even if he were third secretary to some one in the planet Mars!

CHAPTER XII

WE never used to go away for more than a week every summer to Brighton or Herne Bay, but now that we live in the heart of the town, as of course St. John’s Wood is, it has been decided that we want a whole month at the sea. This year Mother and Aunt Gerty chose Whitby in Yorkshire. It is convenient for Aunt Gerty—something about a company that she is thinking of joining in the autumn. George didn’t care where we went, as he isn’t to be with us. He just forks out the money as Mother asks for it; he trusts her implicitly not to waste it, and to do things as cheap as they can be done and yet decently, because after all we are his family, and everybody knows that now.

I sometimes think he would come with us himself, if Aunt Gerty wasn’t so much about.

Ariadne and Aunt Gerty haven’t got an ounce of country fibre in them. They get at loggerheads with the country at once. The mildest cows chase them, they manage to nearly drown themselves in the tiniest ditches, the quietest old pony rears if they drive him. If they pick a mushroom it is sure to be a toadstool; if they bite into a pear there’s a wasp inside it; if they take hold of a village baby they are sure to drop it. They haven’t country good manners, they leave gates open, they trample down grass, they entice dogs away, they startle geese and set hens running, and offend everybody all round.

So they weren’t particularly happy in the first rooms we took, at a farm just out of Whitby. There was one stuffy little best parlour, sealed up like a bottle of medecine, and one mouldy geranium looking as if it couldn’t help it on the window-sill, and the “Seven Deadly Sins” in chromo on the walls, and Rebecca at a well of Berlin wools over the mantelpiece. They covered the family Bible with an antimacassar, and Aunt Gerty’s theatrical photos without which she never travels, and suppressed the frosty ornament in a glass case of one of Mrs. Wilson’s wedding-cakes. Mrs. Wilson married early, she says, and I say she married often, for there are three of them! It was uncomfortable. Mother didn’t complain, Aunt Gerty did. She had nowhere to hang up her dresses; they were all getting spoilt; she couldn’t see to do her hair in the wretched little scrap of looking-glass, and the room was so small that she twice set fire to her bed-curtains, curling her hair, which she did twenty times a day, for there was always wind or rain or something. The walls were so thin that she could hear every word Mr. and Mrs. Wilson said to each other in the next room, quarrelling and arranging the bill and so on. She couldn’t sleep with the window shut, and all sorts of horrid buggy things came in if you left it open. It was so dreadfully lonely here, and she had never “seen so much land” in her life.

Aunt Gerty has been on tour often enough to get used to uncomfortable lodgings, lodgings not chosen by herself, very likely, and her luggage all fetched away the day before she leaves by the baggage man! But it is in a town, and that makes all the difference. Give her a strip of mirror in the door of her wardrobe, and a gas-jet ready to set fire to her window-curtains, and a row of shops outside to cheer her up, and she won’t think of grumbling.

The landlady didn’t consider us a particularly good “let.” I used to hear her in bed in the mornings explaining to Mr. Wilson, who is a railway porter, how glad she would be to be “shot” of us if it wasn’t for the money. “Ay, lass!” he would answer, and then I used to hear him turning over in bed and going to sleep again.

“They’re better to keep a week than a fortnight!” she used to say. “What with their late dinners and breakfasts in bed, and their black coffee, and all sitting down for an hour o’ mornings polishing up them ondacent brown boots—they darsen’t trust the help, no, not since she went and rubbed them with lard—poor girl, she meant well,—and she fit to rive her legs off answering the parlour bell every minute! Well, the sooner I see their backs, the better pleased I shall be!”

We took the hint and gave up the rooms, and got some nicer ones in town on the quay. Aunt Gerty left off bothering Mother to have late dinner and strong coffee, and we lived on herrings and cream cheeses, the cheapest things in Whitby. I mean the herrings. When they have a good catch, they sell them at a halfpenny each on the quay-side, or slap their children with them, or shy them at strangers. Anything to keep the market up!

Mrs. Bennison, our new landlady, isn’t a Whitby woman, but her husband is, and owns a boat, and takes Ben out sailing, and tries to make a man of him. We hardly ever see him, so we know he is happy. Mother and Aunt Gerty sit one on each side of the bow window the greater part of the day, and make blouses, and read at the same time. George would throw their books into the harbour if he caught them in their hands; they are the sort he disapproves of. I won’t say who the authors of these are, as being a literary man’s daughter it might give offence, but they are by women mostly. George vetoes women’s books too, for they are generally bad, and if they are good, they have no business to be.

Just now, George isn’t here to object, he is at Homburg, doing a cure. He always gets brain fag towards the end of the season like his other friends. It seems to me the smartest illness to have, except appendicitis. The moment Goodwood is over, they all troop off to Germany or Switzerland and pay pounds to some doctor who only makes them leave off eating and drinking too much, and go to bed a little before daylight. It is kill and then cure with the smart set, every year. George does what is right and usual—bathes in champagne at Wiesbaden, and drinks the water rotten eggs have been boiled in at Homburg. He does it in good company, to take the taste away. Mr. Aix drew us a picture of George and a Duchess walking up and down a parade, with a glass tube connected with a tumbler, in their mouths, talking about emulating “The Life of the Busy Bee” as they went along.

About the middle of August we heard he had come back to England and was paying his usual round of visits to Barefront, and Baddeley and Fylingdales Tower. Nearly all these places have real battlements and ghosts. Fylingdales Tower is near here. Mother and I and Aunt Gerty joined a cheap trip to it, the other day, and were taken all over the house for a shilling. I don’t even believe The Family was away, but stowed away pro tem. and staring at us through some chink and loathing us. I did manage to persuade Aunt Gerty not to throw away her sandwich paper in the grate of the fire-place of the room where Edward the Third had slept on his way to Alnwick, but kindly keep it till we were got into the Park. But she was very irreverent all the same, and insisted on setting her hat straight in the glass of Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, and that was the only picture she looked at at all. I don’t care for pictures much. I like the house, which is old and grey and bleached, as if it never got a good night’s sleep. Too many spirits to break its rest. I don’t believe in ghosts really, but I often wonder what are the white things one sees? I don’t see so many as I did when I was quite a child. Aunt Gerty shivered and went Brr! She hated it all, she is so very modern. She admitted that she only went with us because she had hoped George might be actually staying there, and would see his own sister-in-law among the trippers and get a nasty jar. Mother is a lady, and knew quite well that he wasn’t there, or else she would not have let Aunt Gerty go, or gone herself, even incog. George had been there recently, though, for the black-satin housekeeper said so, and that she read his books herself when she had time, or a headache. “He’s quite a pet of her ladyship’s,” she told Aunt Gerty, who had spotted one of George’s books on a table and asked questions. She was dying to tell the old thing that we were relations of the great Mr. Vero-Taylor, but dursn’t, for Mother’s eye was on her. Mother looked as pleased as Punch though, and gazed at the chairs (behind plush railings) that her husband had sat on, and at the portrait in Greek dress, by Sir Alma Tadema, of the lady who “made a pet of him.”

George had written from Homburg once or twice to me, and I used to read his letters out to Mother, who naturally wanted to hear his news. She was a little annoyed because he didn’t mention if he was wearing the thicker vests as the weather was getting chilly, and begged me to ask him to be explicit in my next, but I did not, because it might have shamed him in the eyes of his countesses if he left the letter about, as of course he would. George respects the sanctity of private communication so much, that he never tore up a letter in his life; the housemaid collects them when she is doing his room, and brings them to Mother, who hasn’t time to read them, any more than the housemaid has.

The third week in August George wrote to me, and told me to engage him rooms in Fylingdales Crescent on the East Cliff. You might have knocked me down with a feather!

Mother was hurt at George’s having written to me, not her, on such a pure matter of business, until I explained that he merely did it to please the child! One doesn’t mind making oneself out a baby to avoid hurting a mother’s feelings. I don’t know if Mother quite accepted this explanation, but she said no more about it, and told Mr. Aix the good news. He is in lodgings here, to be near us—Aunt Gerty thinks it is to be near her, and he lets her think anything she likes. He looks forward to George’s coming with great interest, and says he will look like some rare exotic on the beach, such as a humming-bird or a gazelle. Aunt Gerty at once got hold of the visitors’ list.

“Let’s see which of his little lot is coming to Whitby?” she said, and hunted carefully through three columns till she found that Adelaide Countess of Fylingdales, Mr. Sidney Robinson, nurse baby and suite, were at the Fylingdales Hotel, on the East Cliff. Lord Fylingdales, her eldest son, is the widower of a Gaiety girl who actually died after she had been a Countess a year, poor dear! Aunt Gerty knew her. He is Lord of the Manor here, and his portrait is all over the place.

“Old Adelaide’s a shocking frump, Lucy; you needn’t distress yourself about her!” said Aunt Gerty consolingly to Mother.

“I am not distressing myself about her, Gertrude,” replied my Mother, and she didn’t look at all distressed in her neat short blue serge seaside dress, and shady hat. She looked ten.

“I know her son,” Aunt Gerty went on. “A fish without a backbone. I very nearly had the privilege of leading him astray myself. It is Irene Lauderdale now, I hear.”

“I wish you’d stow your theatrical recollections, Gerty,” said Mother. “Come, Tempe, get your things on, we will go and take rooms for your father and my husband.”

“Brava!” said Mr. Aix. “Capital accent there.”

“Oh, you go along!” said Mother, and we went off at once and engaged George’s rooms. We got very nice large ones, with dark green outside shutters to the windows, and took a great deal of trouble to explain George’s little ways to them, for their sake as well as his. Ben will valet him. Mother told the people that he is bringing his man, who will, however, sleep out. George never gets up till twelve, French fashion.

Poor Ben, he may as well make himself useful, for he certainly isn’t ornamental just now. He can’t speak, he can only croak, and though he isn’t very big, he seems to have the power of burrowing inside himself and bringing up a great voice like a steam-roller. He is not a manly man, yet, but he certainly is a boily boy. He has got some spots on his face that he thinks much bigger than they really are, and he keeps them and himself out of sight as much as possible. He says just now he doesn’t care at all what he does, he doesn’t even mind playing servant for a bit, if George would like it. Mother tells him he is a good boy and the comfort of her life, and that if she can manage it, she will get him sent to college after this, only he had better please the mammon of unrighteousness all he can. So he means to be a good valet to the Mammon.

The Fylingdales Hotel is in the best part of the town, on the East Cliff, and they dine late there every evening, and don’t pull the blinds down, and the townspeople walk backwards and forwards, and watch the people dining at seven-thirty, dressed in their nudity. I think evening dress looks quite wrong at the seaside. Aunt Gerty and Mother put on a different blouse every evening, and look nice and cosy and comfortable, though George does say sarcastic things about the tyranny of the blouse, and the way Aunt Gerty will call it Blowse. I wash my face, that is all the dressing I do. Ben puts on an old smoker of George’s, and flattens out his hair to support the character of being the only gentleman of the party, unless Mr. Aix is there to supper, and the less said about Mr. Aix’s clothes the better.

Ben makes boats all day, when he isn’t in one, and Ariadne makes poetry. Her one idea, having come to the sea for her health, is to avoid it, and seek the rather scrubby sort of woods which is all you can expect at the seaside. So every afternoon nearly we take a donkey to Ruswarp or to Cock Mill, and “ride and tie.” We used to pick out a very smart donkey, but a very naughty one. He was called Bishop Beck, perhaps for that reason, and he went slow,—that was to be expected, but when he stopped quite still and wouldn’t move for an hour or more in the middle of Cock Mill Wood, long, long after one had stopped beating him (for he looked at us and made us feel ridiculous), Ariadne said she would rather do without adventitious aid of this kind, for it interfered with her afflatus.

She walks up and down in the wood paths, finding rhymes, which seems the hardest part of poetry.

“Dreams—streams—gleams—” she goes on.

“Breams?” I suggest.

“Not a poetical image!”

“It isn’t an image, it is a fish.”

“It won’t do. Am I writing this poem or are you?”

I don’t argue. It doesn’t really matter much how Ariadne’s poems turn out. Being Papa’s daughter she is sure to find a hearty reception for her initial volume of verse.

We used to stay out till what Ariadne called Dryad time. She thought she saw white figures hiding behind the trees in the dusk. Little pellets made of nuts and acorns and dead leaves, and so on, used to fall on us out of the thickets, and Ariadne said it was the Dryads pelting us. She thinks trees are alive, and that one of the reasons you hear ghosts in all old houses, is the wood creaking because in the night it remembers it was once a tree. I prefer to believe in ordinary solid ghosts instead of rational explanations like that. But still Ariadne’s funny ideas make a walk quite interesting. Of course we never talk of such things at home, among materialists and realists like Aunt Gerty and Mother and George. George makes plenty of use of birds in his books, but he once came home from a visit to St. John’s College at Cambridge, and told us that he had been kept awake all night by a beastly nightingale under his window. Now I have never heard this much-vaunted bird, but I am sure, from Matthew Arnold’s poem where he calls it Eugenia, it must be a heavenly sound, quite worth while being kept awake by.

Ariadne and I stay out very late till it is getting dark, hoping to hear it, in Cock Mill Wood, and then we go home and race through supper, and then go out again, on the quays and piers this time. We don’t know or care what George and his friends are doing, up above us, in the smart hotel on the cliff. What I should just love would be for some of them and George to come down for a walk in the dark and perhaps meet us, and for George to say, “Who are those little wandering vagabonds flitting about like bats? Why doesn’t their father or mother keep them at home in the evenings?” It would be so nice, and Arabian Nightish!

At very high tides, we stay out very late, and take a shawl, and sit on a capstan and tuck it round us, and listen for a certain noise we love. It is when the water gets into a little corner in the heap of stones by the Scotch Head, and gets sucked in among them somehow, and then we hear a sort of sob that is better than any ghost. Ariadne and I put our heads under the shawl when we hear it, but not quite, so as to prevent us hearing properly.

The harbour smells at low water, and the town children yell and scream, and it isn’t poetical then. So Ariadne and I like to go away on the Scaur and put our fingers in anemones’ mouths, and pop seaweed purses, and pretend we are lovers cut off by the tide, as they are in novels. In the afternoons when the harbour is full we sit on the mound above the Khyber Pass, and watch the water filling up the hole between the opposite cliff and the cliff ladder. It is all quite quiet then. We don’t hear any town cries, for the children that make the noise are turned out of their playground, and their mothers out of their good drying-ground, and the boats begin to go out of the harbour in a long, soft, slow procession—

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill.

I am sure Tennyson meant Whitby when he wrote that.

One night we could not sleep because the woman next door had had her “man” drowned, and cried and moaned for hours. He was a fisherman, and we had seen his boat go out third in the row the day before. He is supposed to have fallen overboard in the night? Next day, Mother went in and gave her five shillings and she stopped crying.

Mr. Aix had a try to paint the view in front of our windows. At least he said there was no such thing in nature as a “view,” and left out the Church and the Abbey, because they “conventionalized” things so. He belongs, he said, to the Impressionist School, if any. He got quite excited about his drawing, and at last went and borrowed a station truck to sit on; it raised him a little. One day a chance lady sat down on one of the handles, and over he went. It served him right for leaving out the two best things in Whitby.