The Celebrity at Home

When George came, Ariadne and I used to take turns to go and lunch with him at his breakfast, where we had French cookery. There were leathery omelets that bounced up like the stick in the boys’ game when you touched the end of them with a spoon, and fillets that you wouldn’t have condescended to have for a pillow, but still, it was French.

We were dressed nicely and took our clean gloves in our hands, and George wasn’t ashamed of us, and introduced us to his friends. Lady Fylingdales’ Mr. Sidney Robinson said I was like George—that I had his nose. I went to bed that night with a clothes-peg out of the yard on it, to improve its shape. But the old lady was half blind, and all made of manner. I also saw the Lord Aunt Gerty might have led astray, and he hadn’t a manner of any sort, and his nose wanted to run away with his chin.

George had no fault whatever to find with the arrangements Mother had made for his comfort, and he told her so, the first time he saw her, in Baxter Gate, coming out of the Post Office. The first place George flies to in a town is the Post Office, to send telegrams. He corresponds entirely by telegram with some people; he says it is paying five-pence more for the privilege of saying less. We had been shopping. George spotted us, and Mother thought he had rather not be recognized, but he was good that day and he actually left Mr. Sidney Robinson—a commoner, married to a countess, and that exactly describes him, Aunt Gerty says—to say a word to his own wife. It was market day, and we had bought several things in the Hall across the water. A pound of blackberries and a cream cheese, and a chicken and a cabbage, each from a different old woman with a covered basket. Mother had a net and I a basket to put them in. I was glad that George did not offer to “relieve” us of them, like the young men Aunt Gerty picks up here; but he stopped and talked to us quite nicely for a long time. He and Mother seemed to have a great deal to say to each other, and the basket-handle began to cut my arm in half. Also it was a very hot day. George had on a white linen suit, and a straw hat from Panama. He looked quite cool, and like Lohengrin or the Baker’s man. Mother didn’t. She looked hot. I touched her elbow, not so much because of my arm that ached, but because she looked like that, nor did I think it looks well to stand talking in the street to gentlemen, even if it is your own husband.

“Well, George,” she said, taking my hint at once, “we must be going on. The butter is melting and the chicken grilling and the cabbage wilting while I stand here talking to you.”

“Charming!” said George, but he wasn’t thinking of us, but of Mr. Robinson, who was champing a few yards away. We said “Good-bye” without shaking hands. George, I think, might have lifted his hat. I have read of fine gentlemen who lifted their hat to an apple-woman, let alone their wife and child.

George and his friend walked off together. I suppose the Robinson man was too well-bred to ask George who his lady-friend was, as any of Aunt Gerty’s men would do, but he certainly stared a good deal. Of course he knows who we are, everybody in Whitby does, I should think, and they most likely conclude that it is less unkindness than the eccentricity of genius. If you haven’t got that blasted thing called genius, I suppose you can bear to live in the same house with your wife!

We walked slowly home with our purchases. Mother had a headache all dinner, and lay down in the afternoon.

“I met your father, Ben,” she said at supper. “His boots want a little attention.”

“I don’t believe,” said Ben crossly, “that any one ever had a more tiresome man to valet. He will wear his clothes all wrong, and then is always ragging and jawing at a fellow because they don’t look nice.”

“Hush, Ben, he is your father.”

“Hah, I was forgetting!” said Ben, and gave one of his great laughs, as if you were breaking up coal, or something. Ben is now so changeable and nervous that you never know where to have him. He is growing up all wrong, but what can you expect of a boy brought up by women? He never sees a boy of his own position, though I know that in London he has some low companions he daren’t bring to the house. The Hitchings are his only respectable friends, but they live such a long way off now. Jessie Hitchings is devoted to Ben, but she is only a girl like Ariadne and me. Mr. Hitchings told mother, years ago, that the boy was being ruined, and Mother cried and said she knew it, but could do nothing, for his father was by way of educating him at home till something could be settled. Snaps of Latin, and snacks of Greek, that is all George gives the poor boy when he has a moment, and that is never.

This is the only grievance Mother has, although Aunt Gerty is always trying to persuade her she has several, and putting her back up. Mother ends by getting cross with her.

“For goodness’ sake, you Job’s comforter, you, leave off your eternal girding at George. Can’t you see, that as long as a man has his career to establish—his way to make–”

“His blessed thoroughfare is made long ago, or ought to be. That is what I can’t get over–”

“You aren’t asked to get over it. It is not your funeral, it is mine, so shut up. A man like George, who is dependant on the public favour, needs to be most absurdly particular, and careful what he does lest he injure his prestige. Look at yourself! You know very well in your own profession how very damaging it is for an actor to be married; that if an actress marries her manager, he has to pay dear for it in the receipts. She had better not figure as his wife in the bills, if she wants him to get on. You can’t eat your cake—I mean your title—and have it. No, it’s bound to be Miss Gertrude Jennynge on the bills, even if it is Mrs. What-do-you-call-it in the lodgings, with a ring on her finger, and every right to call herself a married woman. The public don’t care for spliced idols. An artist has to stand clear, and preserve his individuality, such as it is!”

“And run straight all the time. I’ll give George credit for that. But there, whatever’s the good of it to you? A man can make a woman pretty fairly miserable, even if he is stone-faithful to her. It’s then it seems all wrong somehow, and doesn’t give her a chance of paying him in his own coin!”

I think Aunt Gerty is the reason why George fights so shy of his family. He hates her style, and yet he can hardly forbid Mother seeing as much as she likes of her own sister. The trail of the stage is over us all. Not that I see anything a bit wicked about the stage myself! I have never noticed anything at all wrong, and actors and actresses are the kindest people in the world! But there is a queer, worn, threadbare, rough, second-rate feeling about them. Off the stage—and I have never seen them on—they are tired and slouchy and easy-going. Aunt Gerty is most good-tempered and will do anything to help a pal, and takes things as they come; those are her good points. But she talks such a lot about herself, and never opens a book that isn’t a novel, and wears cheap muslins and beaded slippers in the street, and lots of chains that seem to be always getting caught on men’s buttons. She calls men “fellows.” She is always going to play Juliet at one of the London houses. Meantime she puts up with provincial companies. She makes the best of it, and she tells us she is going to play Nerissa in the Bacon Company, as if she had got engaged for a parlourmaid in a good house, and discusses Ariel as if Ariel were a tweeny or up-and-down girl between the sky and the earth, and Puck a smart clever Buttons. She speaks of her nice legs as a workman might of his bag of tools. She can sing and dance, when she isn’t asked to act. She has cut all her hair short to make it easier for wigs. Her great extravagance is in wigs. She calls them “sliding roofs” for convenience in talking about them in trains and omnibuses. When she did wear her own hair she dyed it, so I like the wigs better, as there’s no deception.

If Mother was ever an actress, which I don’t somehow believe, though Jessie Hitchings said once that she had heard people say so, it has all been knocked out of her. She dresses very well, always in simpler things than Aunt Gerty. She left off her waist years ago, to please George, and now that it is the fashion not to have one, she is in the right box—I mean stays. Her hair is brown, and she mayn’t frizzle it, so it is soft and pretty like a baby’s. She generally wears black, over lovely white frilled petticoats that she gets up herself to keep the bills down. She has such little hands that she can pick her gloves out of the five-and-a-half boxes at sales, which are always much reduced. So few people have small hands. She may not wear high heels, and that is a grief to her, as she isn’t very tall, but hers are very pretty feet, and she can dance.

George doesn’t know that she can dance. I do. Once Mr. Aix asked her to dance for him when I was in the room. Aunt Gerty played on the tin-kettle piano. Mother danced a cake-walk, which I thought very ugly, and then a queer step that a friend had taught her when she was a child. In one part of it she was dancing on her hands and her feet at the same time. It was the queerest thing, and she left her dress down for that and it lay in swirls about the carpet. Mr. Aix said it was the dance that Salome must have danced before Herod, and he quite understood John the Baptist, and where did she get it? But Mother wouldn’t tell him. She said it was a memory of her stormy youth in the East End.

Mr. Aix said that she could make her fortune doing it as a turn at a Society music hall, as it would be something quite new and decadent. That is just what Society wants—the slight, morbid flavour! Then Mother put on her short skirt and did the ordinary vulgar kind of dance they teach now, and I liked it best. She was everywhere at once, smart and spreading out in all directions, like spun glass on a Christmas card. Her eyes danced too. Ben said he couldn’t have believed she was his mother!

Then Aunt Gerty performed, and she is professional. But it was not the same thing. Aunt Gerty’s legs are thick, and compared with Mother’s like forced asparagus to the little pretty, thin, field-grown kind. Mother’s dancing was emphatically dramatic, Mr. Aix said.

I asked him if Mother could act, and he answered, “My dear child, your mother can do anything she has a mind to.”

“Then why doesn’t she have a mind?” I at once said, forgetting how it would upset our household and George if she were to go on the stage. Mother naturally remembers this, and stays domestic out of virtue.

“I wish you would write a play for me, Mr. Aix,” said Aunt Gerty, “and I would get a millionaire to run it. I wonder, now, what one could do with Mr. Bowser?”

She went off in a brown study, and Mr. Aix said rudely, “I will write a play for Lucy sooner,” looking at Mother, who was sitting fanning herself with her pocket-handkerchief. “She has got the stuff in her, I do believe. Gad! What a chance! What a lever! What a facer—!”

And he dropped off into a brown study too! Mother went and mended Ben’s blazer.

Mr. Aix isn’t staying with us, we have no room in our house; he has a room over the coast-guard’s wife, but he comes in to us for his meals. I don’t believe George realizes this, or he would tell him he is throwing himself away, and losing a good chance of advertising his books. Mr. Aix’s books seem to go without advertising, more than George’s do—I suppose it is because they are so improper.

At any rate, he prefers to throw in his lot with us. One day we were all having a picnic-tea at Cock Mill. The party consisted of Mother, me and Ariadne, Aunt Gerty and Mr. Aix, and an actor friend of hers and his wife, who was acting for a week at the Saloon Theatre. Mr. Bowser, whom Aunt Gerty wants either to marry or get a theatre out of, was with us too. They call him the King of Whitby, because he owns so many plots in it, and is going to stand for it in the brewing interest next election. We had secured the nicest table, the one nearest the stream, and had just tucked our legs neatly under it, when a carriage drove up. Aunt Gerty and the King of Whitby were at that moment in the old woman’s cottage who gives us the hot water, toasting tea-cakes.

The Fylingdales’ party got out of that carriage, and George got slowly down off the box. They trooped into the enclosure, and Mr. Sidney Robinson, trying to be funny, asked the old woman if she could see her way to giving them some tea.

“Here o’ puppose, Sir!” said she, as of course she is. She pointed out the table that was left and that led them past us.

If Aunt Gerty had been there with Mr. Bowser she would certainly have claimed George as a relation and said something awkward, but she was luckily toasting tea-cakes, and had perhaps not even seen them. I saw George just look at Mother, and I saw her smile a very little, and make him a sign that he was to go right past us, and not speak or seem to know us before. Of course Mr. Aix never spoils any one’s game, not even George’s. So he went on talking hard to the actor’s wife, though I saw his lip curl. I, of course, never need be given a cue twice, so I kicked Mother hard under the table for sympathy, but preserved a calm superior.

Aunt Gerty and Mr. Bowser came out with plates full of tea-cakes they had cooked, and I didn’t know if it was the fire or Mr. Bowser had made Aunt Gerty’s cheeks so red—I hoped the latter for her sake. They had no idea of what had happened while they had been toasting and flirting, it appeared from their manners, which were bad. Aunt Gerty always puts an extra polish on hers when George is present, and even Mr. Bowser would have added a frill or so to suit the aristocracy.

Our party was very gay. Actors all can make you laugh if they can do nothing else, and our shrieks of laughter must have made the other party quite envious, for they were as quiet as a mouse and as dull as the stream all overshadowed with nut-bushes and alders that grew over it just there.

Suddenly George got up, and left them, and came over to us, and Aunt Gerty swallowed her tea the wrong way round, and had to have her shoulder thumped.

George took no notice of her, but put his hand on Mr. Aix’s shoulder and said something to him in a low voice.

“Not if I know it!” Mr. Aix answered, quite violently, adding, “Many thanks, old fellow, I am happier where I am.”

George looked awfully put out. Of course I knew what he wanted. Those smart people up at the other table had expressed a wish to see Mr. Aix. He is a successful though painfully realistic novelist, and George had told them he was actually sitting at the next table, and had promised to bring him over to them to be introduced. In his disappointment, he glared at us all, especially the actor, who didn’t care a brass farthing for George’s displeasure, and went on eating tea-cake ad nauseam.

“Oh, all right!” said George, to cover his vexation, “if you prefer to bury yourself in a–”

“Easy all!” Mr. Aix said. “Leave everybody to enjoy themselves in their own way. And we are depriving your delightful friends of–”

George had turned and gone back to his delightful friends long before Mr. Aix had finished his sentence, and Aunt Gerty patted the poor man on the back till he wriggled.

“Loyal fellow!” she said several times. She had got well on to it now, and she started a fit of giggles that lasted all the rest of the time we were there. It didn’t matter much, for we were all quite drunk on weak tea and laughter.

But we turned as silent as mice as the Fylingdales’ party, having had enough of their dull tea, streamed past us, and got into their carriage, and rolled away. George was not with them. I dare say he had got over the hedge and gone round to meet the break by the road, not wanting to walk past our party again, and to avoid unpleasantness. I supposed he had paid for the tea; but no, this grand party forgot to do that, so that in the end Mr. Aix paid for their refreshment for the old woman’s sake that she should not suffer.

When they had gone, we felt relieved; but it sobered us somehow. Aunt Gerty and the gentlemen smoked quietly, and we were so still that we could hear the little beck bubbling over the loose stones beside us. Then Aunt Gerty was persuaded to recite something, and she did “Loraine, Loraine, Loree!” in a shy, modest voice. You see these were all her real bosses, and she valued their approval, and the actor’s wife is considered very stiff in the profession. She herself sang “The banks of Allan Water” very sadly and solidly, and Aunt Gerty cried. To cheer us all up again the actor—rather a famous one, Mr. D—L–, did one of his humorous recitations out of his London repertory for us, so that we nearly died with laughing, and Aunt Gerty dried her tears, and whispered to me that trying to laugh like a lady was so painful that she longed to take a short cut out of her stays.

CHAPTER XIII

LADY SCILLY came to Whitby and took a big house in St. Hilda’s Terrace.

“They can’t be parted long, poor things!” Aunt Gerty said, and Mother hushed her. She brought her great friend Miss Irene Lauderdale with her, for a good blow, before she went to America.

Then all the shops came out with portraits of Irene, in “smalls” as Dick Turpin, and Irene as “The Pumpeydore,” and Irene as Greek Slave, and Irene in Venus. They had her on picture postcards too in all the principal stationers’ windows. I should have thought she would have been ashamed to walk down the street, hung with her own likeness like a row of looking-glasses that reflected her. But these very languid—what Aunt Gerty calls “la-di-dah” sort of people—can stand anything, so long as it’s public.

When she wasn’t dressed up as Turpin or Pompadour or Venus, she was just a tall, thin, and ragged-looking woman. She had red lips that stuck out a long, long way, and crinkly red hair, and large eyes like two gig-lamps coming at you down the street. She generally had a dog with her, and its lead kept getting twisted round the wheels of carts, and round my father’s legs as he walked along Skinner Street beside her. He wouldn’t have stood that from any one but a popular favourite.

I was walking along behind them a few days after she came, with Aunt Gerty. They stopped at Truelove’s and looked at the picture-postcards. She became very serious all at once.

“I must go in and procure Myself!” she said to George, sniggling. In they went, and Aunt Gerty and I walked in after them. Mrs. Truelove’s shop and library are very dark. As for the morality of it, we had as good a right to buy picture-postcards as they, and, as I had ascertained from other rencounters of this kind, George knows very well how to ignore his family when needful for his policy. I do not resent it, for one never knows how a daughter’s presence may interfere with a father’s plans and arrangements, and I am sure I don’t want to injure his sales!