The Celebrity at Home

“Damn him and his play too.”

“Oh, not his play, George. Mother would be so grieved.”

Then George suddenly pulled a paper out of his pocket and said, “Read that aloud, child.”

“Is it a bit of your new novel?”

“Yes, it is a bit of my new novel. Read.”

I did.

“We talk and talk, and never act. Oh, this curse of civilization! You make excuses for S–, for your bitter enemy. Magnanimous, but effete! He is behaving well, but so unpicturesquely. He offers a woman no excuse for staying with him. Oh, Italy! Italy! You, magician, have made me long for the life of Italy, the silver incandescent sands, the passionate brown of the olives—but why should I try to outdo you in your own imitable manner?”

“Inimitable, you mean, don’t you, child? But no, we will not trust this white devil of Italy. Go and fetch me a plateful of cold meat. And here are the keys; go down to the cellar and get a bottle of Burgundy. Corton eighty-eight. You’ll see the label. We will carouse.”

I was delighted. George and I finished the bottle between us, and he ate a good supper, and said no more of Mr. Aix, or Mother either.

I almost liked George just then. I saw why Lady Scilly liked him. He is funny and gentle. I asked him to choose a school for Ben, and he said he would think about it. It is the oddest feeling to suddenly become “pals” with one’s own father. I had never known it before. There is some good in George, and his eyes are very bright.

CHAPTER XX

MY mother is changed—not horrid, but quite changed. She goes out nearly every morning at ten, with Aunt Gerty, whose manners are worse than ever, and who has a little chuckling, cheerful way of going about that simply irritates me to death! There is a secret, evidently, and George and I are out of it. It brings us together. He is not happy, no more than I am, no more than Mother is. She is excited, not happy. She has taken to wearing her mouth shut lately; once we used to tease her because she kept it open, and looked always just as if she were going to speak, or had done speaking. But Mother is a good woman. Although she gads about so much, she doesn’t neglect her household duties. She sees after George’s comfort as much as ever, and keeps all onions out of the house as usual. The more she fusses over him, the less he likes it. He shook his head once, when Mother had tidied his writing-table for him—it took her two hours—and then he said half-laughing, “A bad sign, Tempe! Read your Balzac.”

I don’t read Balzac, and I don’t know what George means. I don’t try, and I find that is the best sort of sympathy one can give. At any rate, he likes it, and he is always having me in his study, and teaching me to type-write, and saying little things, like that I have put down, under his breath. He mutters a good deal to himself, not to me, and wants not so much some one to talk to, as some one to talk at.

We hear no more of Lady Scilly. She has not been here since Ariadne was married. Ariadne was an excuse. Mother never gave her an excuse to come to see her, she had never accepted her, or been rude to her either. She simply ignored her. So Lady Scilly not having Ariadne to come and fetch, had no particular reason for coming to us, unless she came to see George, and she could have seen him more easily at “The Hutch” or her town-house, till quite recently. She used to come here about her novel, but most uncomfortably, for Christina was a sad dragon, and looked down her nose at her. Christina could curl her nostril really, which very few women can do. It is a horrid thing to have done at you, and withers you soonest of anything. Now the novel is finished, and the type-written copy, tied up like Christmas meat, is going the social round of all the literary men who have been asked to her dinner-parties with a view to their favourable opinion. I know that Mr. Frederick Cook has had it, and written her a polite letter about it, though that won’t prevent him slating it in The Bittern if he wants to. So Mrs. Ptomaine says.

I know that what Aunt Gerty said in spite, and to give Mother a stick to hit George back with when he came and found us doing dressmaking in his sacred study, was true. Lord Scilly had told George not to go to his house any more. Perhaps Lady Scilly had said he might? Having no more use for George, she may have given Lord Scilly a free hand with him, and perhaps a free foot, who knows? I think she is not nice. I am on George’s side now, as far as outside politics go, though I shall never approve of the way he treats my brother Benvenuto.

Lady Scilly came to Cinque Cento House at last, and George didn’t “look that pleased to see her,” as Elizabeth Cawthorne said afterwards. Elizabeth Cawthorne has no opinion of her, nor of the way she goes on with that German fellow. She means the man who was so rude to Ariadne at the Islingtons’, at least he was far too kind for politeness. He was a Count then, but he is also Lady Scilly’s chauffeur. He was waiting outside on her motor at this very moment, quite the servant. She took him to her aunt’s ball for the fun of it, I suppose, and it was easy to pretend he was somebody, for he looks quite military and distinguished.

Elizabeth showed her into the study, saying gruffly, “A female to see you, sir.”

“Paquerette!” said George, in real amazement, as she floated in, and when the door had closed on Elizabeth Cawthorne, went a little down on one knee and looked up into George’s face, saying, as I have heard the French do to their professors of painting or music,—“Cher maître!”

George had taught her to do this in the days when he was really her professor, and she wanted to do everything as Bohemians do in the Quartier Latin, but only the way she looked at him as she said it I could tell that she had no further use for him.

I was sitting at the type-writer, in the corner of the room, as if I were in my castle, and I stayed there. It was getting dark and they didn’t think of turning on the electric light. Besides, George had at first made me a little sign which I understood, because of the entente cordiale we had had for some time, to stay where I was, and I like doing what people seem to want, especially when it goes with what I want myself. Then he forgot me altogether. Lady Scilly, I believe, never saw me at all, for she never said how-do-you-do, or looked my way, and yet we had not quarrelled. George put on his “pretty woman” manner, and raised her, and made her sit in a nice high-backed chair that suited her.

“How nice of you to come! My wife is out. By the way, I may as well tell you, she is leaving me.”

I nearly fell off my chair. Lady Scilly looked upset; for she hadn’t come to see Mother, and hadn’t thought of asking whether she was out or not. She collected herself, and said to George with some dignity—

“You put it crudely.”

“I do. I never mince my words, except in books. It is as I say. I shall not oppose it. I hope that my unhappy partner may one day come to know the bourgeois happiness I have been unable to give her. Unlucky fellow that I am—cœur de célibat, you know; an Alastor of Fitz John’s Avenue, the Villon of Maresfield Gardens–”

“No woman’s such a fool as to leave a place like this–”

“What does Shelley say? Love first leaves the well-built nest–”

“You certainly are a most extraordinary man!” she mumbled. George puzzled her by changing about so.

“Yes,” he answered her, smiling. “Come, take off your furs and make yourself at home. Compromise yourself merrily. I suppose now, by all the rights and wrongs of it, I ought to invite you to bolt with me, but I am weak, I shall not.”

“Are you quite sure you won’t be stronger by the end of this interview?”

“Oh, is this an interview? Ah, why be formal and boring? Why stable the steed after the horse—I mean the novel is out? It will be a huge success, so your enemies predict. Frederick Cook of The Bittern writes me that this, the latest output of a militant aristocracy, seeking to beat us with our own weapons, is chockful of cleverness and primitive woman. What more do you want?”

“D. the novel! I want you!” she said, stamping her foot.

“Oh, throw away the fugitive husk and the rind outworn—the creed forgotten—the deed forborne—how does it go? Give a poor author a chance, now that you have sucked his commonplace book dry, and torn the heart out of his theories, butchered him to make a literary agent’s holiday.”

“You are unkind.”

“Don’t say that. It is unworthy of you. Stale! like the plot of the new novel you propose we should work out together.”

“I am prepared to go all lengths to assert–”

“Your powers of imagination. I don’t doubt it. But I have been thinking it over, and I find it a ghastly, an impossible plot. No, it would never do, not even if we made a motor-motif of it. It won’t go on all fours. It would not even begin to sell. It has none of the elements of popularity. To begin and end with, there’s not an atom of passion about it, not even so much as would lie on twenty thousand pounds of radium, and you know how much that is!”

“Don’t imply that I am incapable of passion in that insulting way!” she said quite angrily. “It shall never be said–”

“It will never be said, unless we run away and apply the test of Boulogne and social ostracism. Believe me, Paquerette, things are best as they are—going to be. There’s true evolution in it. When the feast is over, you put out the fluttering candles, tear down the wreaths, open the windows. When the novel is done–”

“I hate you to talk like this!” said she, making a cross face.

“Women hate realism.”

“Women hate lukewarmness. Pull yourself together, George, and let us lay our heads together to make Scilly—look silly. He’s mad just now, but it will pass off, he will get over it, and you will come down to us at ‘The Hutch’ as usual and more so. Dear old Scilly will be the first to climb down–”

George shook his head.

“No, no, non bis in idem. Not twice in the same place.” (I wasn’t sure if he was alluding to the kick Lord Scilly had given him or not.) “Go now, you sweet woman. I want to be alone. You are staid for.”

“Yes, yes, I must go. You remind me. The Count will be so deliciously irritated. Thanks so much, so very, very much, for all your help and timely assistance, your–”

“Has the play been worth the scandal?” George asked her, while he was kissing her hand to hide how much he loathed her, and was glad she was going. He knew, as well as I knew, that she was the kind of woman who kicks away the ladder she has just got up by with a toss of her fairy foot, and that he would never be asked to “The Hutch” again. Mr. Aix would, more probably, because he may chance to review what George has helped her to write. And it seemed to me that she has been massaged so much or so long or something, that her cheeks are like flabby oysters, and her figure brought out in all the wrong places. She was too pretty to last kittenish and fluffy as she was when I saw her come out of the public-house that first day.

“Good-bye—then—George!” she said, with something between a sneer and a sob. “We meet again—in society, not under the clock at Charing Cross.”

What should take George and her there I cannot imagine, but George bowed, and led her out, and I followed them. There was her chauffeur in the car as large as life—and as a German. Though indeed he is very good-looking.

“I can see that he is cross in every line of his back,” Lady Scilly whispered to George as she left him on the steps, and tripped down them, and got in beside her crabstick Count. He received her most coldly, and it was easy to see he was her master more than her servant.

George grunted as he fastened the door. There was an east wind blowing, and he was afraid of catching cold after standing there bareheaded.

“She will probably bolt with him before the year is out,” he said, as we went back to the study shivering. He played cat’s-cradle with me till dinner-time. It was all he was good for, he said, and as the game appeared to amuse him, I didn’t mind making a fool of myself for once.