The Celebrity at Home

“I wanted a pick-me-up so badly, I just had to go in and get it.” She said this in an apologizing sort of way, while I was just wondering how I should explain my presence in her car. She settled that for me, by saying with a little sweet smile, “Well, you pretty child, how do you like my motor-car?”

“It is the first time I–”

“Oh, of course! Would you like to be in one while it is on the move?”

I confessed I should, and she jumped in beside me, saying, “Sit still, then, child!” and moved the crissy-cross starfish thing in front, and we were off.

Mercy, what a rate! Policemen seemed to hold up their hands in amazement at us, and she looked pleased and flattered. We drove on and on, past the Hounslow turning, through miles of nursery gardens and then miles of slums, till at last the houses got smarter and bigger, and I guessed this was the part of London where George lives, only I did not ask questions. I hardly ever do. I did see a clock once, and I saw it was nearly our lunch time. I realized that I had missed rice-pudding for once, and was glad. She talked all the way along, and I listened. I find that is what people like, for she kept telling me that I was a nice child, and that she thought she should run away with me.

“You are running away with me,” I said.

“And you don’t care a bit, you very imperturbable atom! I think I shall take you home with me to luncheon. You amuse me.”

She amused me. She was a darling—so gay, so light, as if she didn’t care about anything, and had never had a stomach-ache in her whole life. If George’s high-up friends are like this, I don’t wonder he prefers them to Aunt Gerty. Mother can be as amusing as anybody,—I am not going to try to take Mother down—but even she can’t pretend she is happy as this woman seemed to be. She was like champagne,—the very dry kind George opens a bottle of when he is down, and gives Mother and me a whole glassful between us.

We were quite in a town now, and on a soft pavement made of wood, like my bedroom floor. The streets, oddly enough, grew grander and narrower. She told me about the houses as we went along.

“That is where my uncle, the Duke of Frocester, lives,” she said, and pointed to a kind of grey tomb, with a paved courtyard in a very tiny street. I knew that name—the name of the man George stays and shoots with—but of course I didn’t say anything. Then we passed a funny little house in a smaller street called after a chapel, and there was a fanlight over the door, and a great extinguisher thing on the railings.

“You have no idea what a lovely place that is inside,” she told me. “A great friend of mine lives there, and pulled it about. He took out all the inside of the house, and made false walls to the rooms. One of them has just the naked bricks and mortar showing, but then the mortar is all gilt. He always has quantities of flowers, great arum lilies shining in the gloom, and oleanders in pots, and stunted Japanese trees. He gives heavenly tea-parties and little suppers after the play. He writes plays, but somehow they have never been acted that I know of? Bachelors always do you so well. I declare, if I wasn’t going to see him this very afternoon at my club, I would go in and surprise him, now that I have got you with me, you little elf! You have certainly got the widest open eyes I ever saw. He is probably in there now, working at his little table in the window, getting up the notes for his lecture, so we should put him out abominably. I will take you to the lecture instead. And remind me to lend you one of his books,—that is, if your mother allows you to read novels.”

I explained to her that I was a little off novels, as my father kept us on them.

“Oh, does he? How interesting! I love authors! You must introduce him to me some day. Bring him to one of my literary teas. I always make a point of raising an author or so for the afternoon. It pleases my crowd so, far better than music and recitations, and played-out amusements of that kind; and then one doesn’t have to pay them. They are only too glad to come and get paid in kind looks that cost nothing. The queerer they are, the more people believe in them. I used to have Socialists, but really they were too dirty! Some authors now are quite smart, and wear their hair no longer than Lord Scilly, or so very little longer. Now, there is Morrell Aix, the man who wrote The Laundress. I took him up, but he had been obliged, he said, to live in the slums for two years to get up his facts, and you could have grown mustard and cress on the creases of his collar. And I do think, considering the advertisement he gave them, the laundresses might have taken more trouble with the poor man’s shirts!”

I knew Mr. Aix, of course, and I have often seen Mother take the clothes-brush to him, but I said nothing, for I like to show I can hold my tongue. Knowledge is power, if it’s ever so unimportant. We didn’t go far from the house with walls like stopped teeth, before she pulled up at another rather smart little door in a street called Curzon.

“Here we are at my place, and there’s Simmy Hermyre on the doorstep waiting to be asked to lunch.”

It was a nice clean house with green shutters and lovely lace curtains at the windows, that Ariadne would have been glad of for a dress, all gathered and tucked and made to fit the sash as if it had been a person. The young man standing at the front door had a coat with a waist, and a nice clean face, and a collar that wouldn’t let him turn his head quickly. He helped us out, and she laughed at him as if he was hers.

“Are you under the impression that I have asked you to lunch? Why, I don’t suppose there is any!”

Imagine her saying that when she had brought me all the way from Isleworth to have it! I didn’t, of course, say anything, and she made me go in, and the young man followed us, quite calm, although she had said there wasn’t anything for him to eat.

“I would introduce you to this person” (I thought it so nice of her not to stick on the offensive words little or young!) “only it strikes me I don’t know her name.” She didn’t ask it, but went on, “It’s a most original little creature, and amused me more in an hour than you have in a year, my dear boy!”

Now, had I said anything particularly amusing? I hadn’t tried, and I do think you should leave off calling children “it” after the first six months. Mothers hate it. Still, though I didn’t think her quite polite, I told her my name—Tempe Vero-Taylor—in a low voice so that she could introduce me to her great friend, as we were going to lunch at the same table. I thought there wouldn’t be a children’s table, as she didn’t speak of children, and I was glad, for children eat like pigs and have no conversation.

Her eyebrows went up and her mouth went down, but she soon buttoned up her lips again, though they stayed open at the corners, and didn’t introduce me to Mr. Hermyre at all. I didn’t suppose I should ever meet him again, so it didn’t matter.

We went in and had lunch, and it was quite a grand lunch, hot, and as much again cold on a side-table. But I was actually offered rice-pudding! I wouldn’t have believed it, in a house like this. I refused rather curtly, but she ate it, and very little else. I generally take water at home, but I did not see why I shouldn’t taste champagne when I had the chance, and I took a great deal, quite a full glass full, and when I had taken it, I felt as if I could fight a lion. George often says when he comes back from London that he has been fighting with wild beasts at Ephesus. I wondered if I might not meet some this afternoon at the lecture at the Go-ahead Club? Lady Scilly (that’s her name) said she must take me, and I knew I should be bored, but I couldn’t very well say no.

“You may come too, Simmy,” she said to the young man; “it will be exciting, I can promise you!”

“Not if I know it,” he said. Then he tried to be kind and said, “What is the lecture about?”

“The Uses of Fiction.”

“None, that I can see, except to provide some poor devil with an income.”

“That’s a man’s view.”

“It is,” he said, “a man, and not a monkey’s. You don’t call your literary crowd men, do you?”

I was just wondering what he did call them, when Lady Scilly shut him up, and I thought she looked at me. Presently he went on—

“You’re quite spoiling your set, you know, Paquerette. I used to enjoy your receptions.”

“I don’t see why you should permit yourself to abuse my set because you’re a fifth cousin. That’s the worst of being well connected, so many people think they have the right to lecture one!”

“All the better for you, my dear! Do you suppose now, that if you were not niece to a duke and cousin to a marquis, that Society would allow you to fill your house with people like Morrell Aix and Mrs. Ptomaine and Ve–”

Lady Scilly jumped up and said she must go and dress, and if he wouldn’t come to the lecture he must go, and pushed me out of the room in front of her and on up-stairs.

“Good-bye!” she called to him over the bannisters. “Let yourself out, and don’t steal the spoons.”

That was a funny thing to say to a friend, not to say a relation! We went up into her bedroom, and her old nurse—I suppose it was her nurse, for she wore no cap and bullied her like anything—came forward.

“Put me into another gown, Miller!” she said, flopping into a chair. Miller did, putting the skirt over her head as if she had been a child, and even pulling her stockings up for her. Then she had a try at tidying me.

“Don’t bother. The child’s all right. She’s so pretty she can wear anything.”

I think personal remarks rude even if she does think me pretty, but I said nothing. She looked at herself very hard in the glass, and we went down-stairs and got into the motor again. Lady Scilly sat with her hand in mine, and a funny little spot of red on the top of the bone of her cheek that I hadn’t noticed there before. It was real.

CHAPTER IV

WE went into a house and into a large empty room with whole streets of coggley chairs and a kind of pulpit thing in the middle. A jug of water and a tumbler stood on it. There was a governessy-looking person present, presiding over this emptiness, whom Lady Scilly immediately began to order about. She was the secretary of the club, and Lady Scilly is a member of the committee.

“Where will you sit, Lady Scilly?” said this person, and she asked a good many other questions, using Lady Scilly’s name very often.

“I shall sit quite at the back this time,” Lady Scilly answered. “Too many friends immediately near him might put the lecturer out!” As she said this she looked at me wickedly, but I could not think why.

We then went away and read the comic papers for a little until the place had filled. In the reading-room we met a gentleman, who seemed to be a great friend of Lady Scilly’s. He spoke to me while she was discussing some arrangement or other with the secretary, who had followed her.

“How do you like going about with a fairy?” he asked me.

“I’m not,” I said. “She’s a grown-up woman, old enough to know–”

“Worse!” he interrupted me. “She is what I call a fairy!”

“What is a fairy?” I asked, though he seemed to me very silly, and only trying to make conversation.

“A fairy is a person who always does exactly as she likes—and as other people sometimes don’t like.”

“I see,” I said, as usual, although I did not see, as usual, “just as grown-up people do.”

“But she isn’t pretty when she is old! I wonder if you will grow up a fairy? No, I think not, you don’t look as if you could tell a lie.”