Well, I never! Heres a gold handle to my coal-cellar door! I shall have to wipe my lily hands before I dare use it. And a fine lady of a dresser that I shall be shy to set a plain dish on. Beetles here, do you ask, woman? (To Kate.) Theyd be ashamed to show their faces in such a smart place as this, Im thinking. And whats this couple of drucken little candlesticks for the kitchen? Our Katell soon rive the fond bit handles from off them, or shes not the girl I take her for!
She banged it hard against the dresser as servants do, to make it break, but it didnt, and she looked disappointed. Mother then suggested she should unpack a favourite frying-pan she never goes anywhere without, and sent Kate out for a pound and a half of loin-chops, and cook was to fry them for our dinners.
The kitchen fire, after all, was the only one that would burn, so we ate our chops there, and sat there till bed-time. Ariadne looked like a picture, sitting at a trestle-table, and a thing like a torch burning at the back of her head. She was thoroughly disgusted, and got quite cross, and so did Elizabeth, as the evening went on. She hated trestles, and flambeaus, and dark Rembrandtish corners, and couldnt lay her hand on her things nohow, so that when we all went up to bed, Mother said to her
Good-night, Elizabeth. You have been a bit upset, havent you? I wonder we have managed to get through the day without a row!
So do I, maam, said the cook. Heaps of times Id have given you warning for twopence, but you never gave me ought to lay hold on.
A horrid wind sprang up and moaned us off to sleep. I thought once or twice of George out on the Mediterranean on a tippity yacht, and didnt quite want him to get drowned, though he had made us live in such an uncomfortable house. I had tried to colonize a little, and put up a photograph of Mother done at Ramsgate in a blue frame, to make me feel more at home. Ariadne had hung up all her necklaces on a row of nails. She has forty. There is one made of dried marrowfat peas, that she nibbles when she is nervous, and another of horses jesses, or whatever you call them, sewn on red velvet. We have a bed each, costing fourteen-and-six. They are apt to shut up with you in them. There is no carpet in our room, and there are not to be any. We are to be hardy. Nothing rouses one like a touch of cold floor in the mornings, and cools one on hot nights better than the same. Our water-jug too is an odd shape. I tilted all the water out of it on to the floor the first time I tried to use it. It must be French, it is so small. I shall not wash my hands very often in the days to come, I fancy.
Ariadne began to get reconciled to our room when she had made up her mind it was like the bower of a mediæval chatelaine, or like Princess Ursulas bedroom in Carpaccio, but I prefer Early Victorian, and cried myself to sleep.
Next morning Ben come along; he had stayed all night at the Hitchings, in Corinth Road. Jessie Hitchings likes Ben best of the family. She may marry him, when he is grown up, if she likes. He has birth, but no education, so that will make them even. The only glimmering of hope I see for Ben is that in this house there seems to be no bedroom for him, unless it is a room at the top with all the water tanks in it, which makes me think perhaps George is going to send him to school? For the present we have arranged him a bed in the butlers pantry. Ben says perhaps George means him to be butler, as he has laid it down as a rule that only women servants are to be used in Cinque Cento House. They look so much nicer than men, George says; he likes a houseful of waving cap-ribbons. Mother thinks she can work a house best on one servant, and better still on none. George doesnt mind her having any amount of boys from the Home near here, but that doesnt suit Mother. She says one boy isnt much good, that two boys is only one and a half, and that three boys is no boy at all. I suppose they get playing together? Ariadne and I would, in their place, I know, and human nature is the same, even in a Home, though I cant call ours quite that.
CHAPTER VI
GEORGE makes a point of refusing to be interviewed. He hates it, unless it is for one of the best papers. Then he says that it is a sheer kindness, and that a successful man has no right to refuse some poor devil or other the chance of making an honest pound or two. So he suffers him gladly. He even is good enough to work on the thing a little in the proof: just to give the poor fellow a lift, and prevent him making a fool of himself and getting his facts all wrong. In the end George writes the whole thing entirely from beginning to end, and makes the man a present of a complete magazine article, and a very fine one too!
I have been generous, he tells us. I have offered myself up as a burnt sacrifice. I have given myself all, without reservation. I have nothing extenuated, everything set down in malice. I have owned to strange sins that I never committed, to idiosyncrasies that took me all my time to invent, and all to bump out an article by some one else. I have been butchered to make a journalistic holiday!
This is all very nice and self-sacrificing of George, but this particular interview read very well when it came out, and made George seem a very interesting sort of man with some quaint habits, not half so funny as his real ones, though, and I think the interviewer might just as well have given those.
So, when I got a chance of telling the truth, I did, meaning to act for the best, and give Papa a good show and save him the trouble of telling it all himself, but nobody gave me credit for my good intentions, and kind heart.
In the first place, how dared I put myself forward and offer to see Georges visitors! But the young man asked for meat least, when he was told that George was out, he said might he see one of the young ladies? Of course I dont suppose that would have occurred to him, only I was leaning over the new aluminium bannisters, and caught his eye. Then an idea seemed to come into his head. The look of disappointment that had come over him when he was told that George was out changed to a little happy perky look, as if he had just thought of something amusing. He crooked his little finger at me as I slid down the bannister, and said would I do? and would he come in? Kate is a cheeky girl, but even the cook admits that Kate is not a patch upon me. Kate evidently didnt think it quite right, but she slunk away into the back premises, and left me to deal with the young man.
He handed me a card. I thought that very polite of him, and Mr. Frederick Cook, and Representative of The Bittern down in the corner, explained it all to me. We take in about a hundred rags, and thats the name of one of them. Its called The Bittern because it booms people, so George says.
I suppose you have come to interview my Father, I said. Im sorry, but he is out. Did you have an appointment?
No, I didnt, said the young man right out.
I liked his nice bold way of speaking; he was the least shy young man I ever met.
I dont believe in appointments. The subject is conscious, primed, braced up, ready with a series of cards, so to speak, which he wishes to force on the patient publica collection of least characteristic facts which he would like dragged into prominence. It is as if a man should go to the dentist with his mind made up as to the number of teeth that he is to have pulled out, a decision which should always rest with any dentist who respects himself.
He went running on like that, not a bit shy, or anything, and amused me very much.
He went running on like that, not a bit shy, or anything, and amused me very much.
But then the worst of that is, youve got no appointment with George, and he is not here to have his teeth pulled out.
I really so far wasnt quite sure if he was an interviewer or a dentist, but I kept calm.
All the better, my dear young lady, that is if you are willing to aid and abet me a little. Then we shall have a thundering good interview, I can promise you. You see, in my theory of interviewing, the actual collaboration of the patientshall we call him?is unnecessary. Indeed, it is more in the nature of an impediment. My method, which of course I have very few opportunities of practising, is to seek out his nearest and dearest, those who have the privilegeor annoyanceof seeing him at all hours, at all seasons, unawares. If a painter, tis the wife of his brush that I would question; if an author, the partner of his pendo you take me?
Yes, I took him, and as George had called me a cockatricea very favourite term of abuse with himonly that morning, and remembering how she swaggers about being Georges Egeria, I said, Youll have to go to Lady Scilly for that!
Quite so! he said very naturally. Your distinguished parent dedicated his last book to her, did he not? Did you approve, may I ask?
No, I said. People should always dedicate all their works to their wife, whether they love her or not, thats what I think!
Quite so, he said again. I see we agree famously, and between us we shall concoct a splendid interview. But now, if you would be so very good, and happen to have a small portion of leisure at your disposal
Ill do what I can for you, I said, delighted at his nice polite way of putting things. Ill take you round the house, shall I? Have you a Kodak with you? Would you like to take a snapshot at Georges typewriter?
Certainly, if she is pretty, said the silly man, and I explained that Miss Mander was out, and that it was the machine I meant. He said one machine was very like another, but that if he might see the study, where so many beautiful thoughts had taken shape? He said it quite gravely, but I felt he was laughing in his jacket all the time.
Well take it all seriam! I said, not wishing him to have all the fine words. And we will begin at the beginningI mean the atrium.
He had a little pocket-book in his hand, and he said, as I led the way through the hall, You wont mind my writing things down as they occur to me?
Not at all! I said. If you will let me look at what you have written. I see you have put a lot already.
He laughed and handed me his book, and I read
Through dusky suites, lit by stained glass windows, whose dim cloistral light, falling on lurid hangings and gorgeous masses of Titianesque drapery, and antique ebon panelling, irresistibly suggest the languorous mysteries of a mediæval palace.... Do you think your father will like this style?
You have made it rather stuffypiled it on a good deal, the drapery and hangings, I mean! I said. Now that I know the sort of thing you write, I shant want to read any more.
I thought you wouldnt, he said, taking it back. Ill read it to you. Behind this arras might lurk Benvenuto and his dagger
Not Bens dagger, but Papas bicycle.
Well leave it there and keep it out of the interview, he said. It would spoil the unity of the effect. On, on, through softly-carpeted ante-rooms where the footstep softer falls, than petals of blown roses on the grass....
I hate poetry! I said. And we maynt walk on that part of the carpet for fear of blurring the Magellanic clouds in the pattern. Do you know anything about Magellanic clouds in carpets?
No, I confess I have never trod them before, he said, becoming all at once respectful to me. I expect he lives in a garret, and has no carpet at all, and I thought I would be good to him, and help him to bump out his article, and not cram him, but tell him where things really came from. So I drew his attention particularly to the aluminium eagle, and the pinchbeck serpent George picked up in Wardour Street. I left out Georges famous yarn about the sack of our ancestral Palace in Turin in the fifteenth century, when the Veros were finally disseminated or dissipated, whichever it is. I dont believe it myself, but George always accounts for his swarthy complexion by his Italian grandmother. Aunt Gerty says it is all his grandmother, or in other words, all liver!
We went down-stairs into the study, which is the largest room in the house.
Your father has realized the wish of the Psalmist, said The Bittern man. Set my feet in a large room!
He likes to have room to spread himself, I said, and to swing catsbooks in, I mean.
So your father uses missiles in the fury of composition?
Sometimes; but oftenest he swears, and that saves the books. He mostly swears. Look here!
I had just found a piece of paper in Miss Manders handwriting, and on it was written, Selections from the nervous vocabulary of Mr. Vero-Taylor during the last hour.
The Bittern man looked at them, and, By Jove! these are corkers! he said. Then I thought perhaps I ought not to have let him see them. There was Drayton, the ironmongers bill lying about too, and I saw him raise his eyebrows at the last item, To one chased brass handle for coal-cellar door.
Thats what I call being thorough! said The Bittern man. Im thorough myself. See this interview when it is done!
He was thorough. He looked at everything, and particularly asked to see the pen George uses. Or perhaps he uses a stylograph? he asked.
Mercy, no! I screamed out. He would have an indigestion! This is his penat least, it is this weeks pen. George is wasteful of pens; he eats one a week.
Very interesting! said he. Most authors have a fetish, but I never heard of their eating their fetish before. This will make a nice fat paragraph. Come on!
You see what friends we had become! We went into the dining-room, and I showed him the dresser, with all the blue china on, and the Turkey carpet spread on it, instead of a white onethat was how they had it in the Middle Ages. He sympathized with me about how uncomfortable Mediæval was, and if it wasnt for the honour and glory of it, how much we preferred Early Victoria, when the drawers draw, and the mirrors reflecttheres not one looking-glass in the house that poor Ariadne can see herself in when shes dressing to go out to a partyor chairs that will bear sitting on. Why, there are four in one room that we are forbidden to sit upon on pain of sudden death!
Very hard lines! said The Bittern man. I confess that this point of view had not occurred to me. I shall give prominence to it in my article. Art, like the car of some fanatical Juggernaut, crushing its votaries
Yes, I said. Mother draped a flower-pot once, and sneaked Ariadnes photograph into a plush frame. You should have heard George! To think that any wife of his Cæsars wife must be above suspicion! And as for Ariadne, he had rather see her dead at his feet than folded in blue plush.
Capital! said The Bittern man. All good grist for the interview! And now, will you show me the famous metal stairs of which I have heard so much? There are no penalties attached to that, I trust?