Kitobni o'qish: «Mrs Albert Grundy—Observations in Philistia», sahifa 6

Narrating the Failure of a Loyal Attempt to Circumvent Adversity by means of Modern Appliances

If his name was Jabez, why weren’t we told so, I’d like to know?” demanded Mrs Albert of me, with a momentary flash in her weary glance. “What right had the papers to go on calling him J. Spencer, year after year, while he was deluding the innocent, and fattening upon the bodies of his dupes? To be sure, now that the mask is off, and he has fled, they speak of him always as Jabez. Why didn’t they do it before, while honest people might still have been warned? But no – they never did – and now it’s too late – too late!”

The poor lady’s voice broke pathetically upon this reiterated plaint. She bowed her head, and as I looked with pained sympathy upon the drooping angle of her proud face, I could see the shadows about her lips quiver.

A sad tale indeed it was, to which I had been listening – here in a lonesome corner of the cloistral, dim-lit solitude of the big drawing-room at Fernbank. It was not a new story. Kensington has known it by heart for a generation. Bloomsbury learned it earlier, and before that it was familiar in Soho – away off in the old days when the ruffling gentry of Golden Square fought for the chance of buying ingenious John Law’s South Sea scrip. And even then, the experience was an ancient and half-forgotten memory of Bishopsgate and the Minories. It was the old, old tragedy of broken fortunes.

Mrs Albert was clear that it began with the Liberator troubles. I had my own notion that Mr Albert Grundy was skating on thin ice before the collapse of the building societies came. However that may be, there was no doubt whatever that the cumulative Australian disasters had finished the business. There were melancholy details in her recital which I lack the courage to dwell upon. The horse and brougham were gone; the lease of Fernbank itself was offered for sale, with possession before Michaelmas, if desired; Ermyntrude’s engagement was as good as off.

“It won’t be a bankruptcy,” said Mrs Albert, lifting her face and resolutely winking the moisture from her lashes. “We shall escape that – but for the moment at least I must abandon my position in society. Dudley is over to-day looking at a small place in Highgate, although Albert thinks he would prefer Sydenham. My own feeling is that some locality from which you could arrive by King’s Cross or St Paneras would be best. One never meets anybody one knows there. Then, when matters adjust themselves again, as of course they will, we could return here – to this neighbourhood, at least – and just mention casually having been out at our country place – on the children’s account, of course. And Floribel is delicate, you know.”

“Oh well, then,” I said, trying to put buoyance into my tone, “it isn’t so had after all. And you feel – Albert feels – quite hopeful about things coming right again?”

My friend’s answering nod of affirmation had a certain qualifying dubiety about it. “Yes, we’re hopeful,” she said. “But a fortnight ago, I felt positively sanguine. Nobody ever worked harder than I did to deserve success, any way. I only failed through gross treachery – and that, too, at the hands of the very people of whom I could never, never have believed it. When you find the aristocracy openly actuated by mercenary motives, as I have done this past month, it almost makes you ask what the British nation is coming to!”

“Dear me!” I exclaimed, “is it as bad as that?”

“You shall judge for yourself,” said Mrs Albert gravely. “You know that I organised – quite early in the Spring – the Loyal Ladies’ Namesake Committee of Kensington. I do not boast in saying that I really organised it, quite from its beginnings. The idea was mine; practically all the labour was mine. But when one is toiling to realise a great ideal like that, one frequently loses sight of small details. I ought to have known better – but I took a serpent to my bosom. I was weak enough to associate with me in the enterprise that monument of duplicity and interested motives – the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn. Why, she hadn’t so much as an initial letter to entitle her to belong – ”

“I am not sure that I follow you,” I put in. “Ladies’ Namesake Committee – initial letter – I don’t seem to grasp the idea.”

“It’s perfectly simple,” explained Mrs Albert. “The idea was that all the ladies – our set, you know – whose name was ‘May’ should combine in subscribing for a present.”

“But your name is Emily,” I urged, thoughtlessly.

“Oh, we weren’t exactly literal about it,” said Mrs Albert; “we couldn’t be, you know. It would have shut out some of our very best people. But I came very near the standard, indeed. My second name is Madge. You take the first two letters of that, and the ‘y’ from Emily, and there you have it. Oh, I assure you, very few came even as near it as that – and as I said to Dudley at the time, if you think of it, even her name isn’t really May. It’s only a popular contraction. But that Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn, she had no actual right whatever to belong. Her names are Hester Winifred Edith. She hasn’t even one letter right!”

“Ah, that was indeed treachery!” I ejaculated.

“Oh, no, that, was not what I referred to,” Mrs Albert set me right. “Of course, I was aware of her names. I had seen them in the ‘Peerage’ for years. It was what she did after her entrance that covers her with infamy. But I will narrate the events in their order. First, we collected £1100. Of course, our own contribution was not large, but Ermyntrude and I hunted the various church registers – we don’t speak of it, but even the Nonconformist ones we went through – and we got a tremendous number of Christian names more or less what was desired, and our circulars were sent to every one, far and near. As I said, we raised quite £1100. Then there came the question of the gift.”

Mrs Albert uttered this last sentence with such deliberate solemnity that I bowed to show my consciousness of its importance.

“Yes,” she went on, “the selection of the gift. Now I had in mind a most appropriate and useful present. Have you heard of the Oboid Oil Engine? No? Well, it is an American invention, and has been brought over here by an American, who has bought the European rights from the inventor. He is in the next building to Albert, in the City, and they meet almost every day at luncheon, and have struck up quite a friendship. He has connections which might be of the utmost importance to Albert, and if Albert could only have been of service to him in introducing this engine, there is literally no telling what might not have come of it. Albert does not say that a partnership would have resulted, but I can read it in his face.”

“But would an oil engine have been – under the circumstances – you know what I mean – ” I began.

“Oh, most suitable!” responded Mrs Albert with conviction. “It is really, it seems, a very surprising piece of machinery. After it’s once bought, the cheapness of running it is simply absurd. It does all sorts of things at no expense worth mentioning – anything you want it to do. It appears that if it had been invented at that time, the pyramids in Egypt could have been built by it for something like 130 per cent, less than their cost is estimated to have been – or something like that. Oh, it is quite extraordinary, I assure you. Albert says he could stand and watch it working for hours – especially if he had an interest in the company.”

“But I hadn’t heard that there were any new pyramid plans on just now – although, when I think of it, Shaw-Lefevre did have some Westminster Abbey project which – ”

“No, no!” interrupted Mrs Albert. “One of the engine’s greatest uses is in agriculture. It does everything– threshes, garners, mows, milks – or no, not that, but almost everything. No self-respecting farmer, they say, dreams of being without one – that is, of course, if he knows about it. You can see what it would have meant, if one had been thus publicly introduced on the princely farm at Sandringham. All England would have rung with demands for the Oboid – and Albert feels sure that the American man would have been grateful – and – and – then perhaps we need never have left Fernbank at all.”

My poor friend shook her head mournfully at the thought

“And the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn?” I asked.

The fire came back into Mrs Albert’s eye. “That woman,” she said, with bitter calmness, “was positively not ashamed to intrude her own mercenary and self-seeking designs upon this loyal and purely patriotic association. Why, she did it almost openly. She intrigued behind my back with whole streetsful of people that one would hardly know on ordinary occasions, paid them calls in a carriage got up for the occasion with a bright new coat of arms, made friends with them, promised them heaven only knows what, and actually secured nineteen votes to my three for the purchase of a mouldy old piece of tapestry – something about Richard III and Oliver Cromwell meeting on the battlefield, I think the subject is – which belonged to her husband’s family. Of course, my lips are sealed, but I have been told that at Christie’s it would hardly have fetched £100. I say nothing myself, but I can’t prevent people drawing certain deductions, can I? And when I reflect also that her two most active supporters in this nefarious business were Lady Thames-Ditton – whose financial difficulties are notorious – and the Countess of Wimps – whose tradespeople – well, we won’t go into that– it does force one to ask whether the fabric of British society is not being undermined at its very top. In this very day’s paper I read that the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn has hired a yacht, and will spend the summer in Norwegian waters – while we – we – ”

The door opened, and we made out through the half-light the comfortable figure of Uncle Dudley. He was mopping his brow, and breathed heavily from his long walk as he advanced.

“Well?” Mrs Albert asked, in a saddened and subdued tone, “Did you see the place?”

“There are five bedrooms on the two upper floors,” he made answer, “but there’s no bath-room, and the bus doesn’t come within four streets of the house.”

Introducing Scenes from a Foreign Country, and also conveying Welcome Intelligence, together with some Instruction

It was at a little village perched well up on one of the carriage-roads ascending the Brocken, a fortnight or so ago, that I received a wire from Uncle Dudley. It was kind of him to think of it – all the more as he had good news to tell. “Family lighted square on their feet,” was what the message said, and I was glad to gather from this that the Grundys had weathered their misfortunes, and that Mrs Albert was herself again.

The thought was full of charm. It seemed as if I had never realised before how fond I was of these good people. In sober fact; I dare say that I had not dwelt much upon their woes during my holiday. But now, with this affectionately thoughtful telegram addressing me as their oldest friend, the one whom they wished to be the first to share the joy of their rescued state, it was easy enough to make myself believe that my whole vacation had been darkened with brooding over their unhappiness.

It had not occurred to me before, but that was undoubtedly why I had not liked the Harz so much this year as usual. Now that I thought of it, walking down the birch-lined footpath towards the hamlet and the telegraph office, the place seemed to have gone off a good deal. In other seasons, before the spectre of cholera flooded its sylvan retreats with an invading horde of Hamburgers, the Harzwald had been my favourite resort. I had grown to love its fir-clad slopes, its shadowed glens, its atmosphere of prehistoric myth and legend, as if I were part and product of them all. Its people, too, had come much nearer to my breast than any other Germans ever could. I had enjoyed being with them just because they were what the local schoolmaster disdainfully declared them to be —Erdzertrümmerungsprozeszuribekanntevolk– that is to say, people entirely ignorant of the scientific theories about geological upheavals and volcanic formations, and so able cheerfully to put their trust in the goblins who reared these strange boulders in fantastic piles on every hill top, and to hear with good faith the shouts of the witches as they bounded over the Hexentanzplatz. Last year it had seemed even worth the added discomfort of the swarming Hamburgers to be again in this wholesome, sweet-aired primitive place. But this year – I saw now clearly as I looked over Uncle Dudley’s message once more – it had not been so pleasant. The hotel boy, Fritzchen, whom I had watched year after year with the warmth of a fatherly well-wisher – smiling with satisfaction at his jovial countenance, his bustling and competent ways, and his comical attempts at English – had this season swollen up into a burly and consequential lout, with a straw-coloured sprouting on his upper-lip, and a military manner. They called him Fritz now, and he gave me beer out of the old keg after I had heard the new one tapped.

The evening gatherings of the villagers in the hotel, too, were not amusing as they once had been. The huge lion-maned and grossly over-bearded Kantor, or music-master, who came regularly at nightfall to thump on the table with his bludgeon-like walking stick, to roar forth impassioned monologues on religion and politics, and to bellow ceaselessly at Fritzchen for more beer, had formerly delighted me. This time he seemed only a noisy nuisance, and the half-circle of grave old retired foresters and middle-aged Jàger officers who sat watching him over their pipes, striving vainly now and again to get in a word edgewise about the auctions of felled trees in the woods, or the mutinous tendencies of the charcoal-burners, presented themselves in the light of tiresome prigs. If they had been worth their salt, I felt, they would long ago have brained the Kantor with their stoneware mugs. Even as I walked I began to be conscious that a three weeks’ stay in the Harz was a good deal of time, and that the remaining third would certainly hang on my hands.

By the time I reached the telegraph station I had my answer to Uncle Dudley ready in my mind. He liked the forcible imagery of Australia and the Far West; and I would speak to him at this joyful juncture after his own heart. It seemed that I could best do this by giving him to understand that I was celebrating his news – that I was, in one of his own phrases, “painting the town red.” It required some ingenuity to work this idea out right, but I finally wrote what appeared to answer the purpose: – “Brocken und Umgebung sind roth gemalen” – and handed it in to the man at the window.

He was a young man with close-cropped yellow hair and spectacles, holding his chin and neck very stiff in the high collar of his uniform. He glanced over my despatch, at first with careless dignity. Then he read it again attentively. Then he laid it on the table, and bent his tight-buttoned form over it as well as might be in a severe and prolonged scrutiny. At last he raised himself, turned a petrifying gaze on through his glasses at me, and shook his head.

“It is not true,” he said. “Some one has you deceived.”

“But,” I tried to explain to him, with the little German that I knew scattering itself in all directions in the face of this crisis, “it is a figure of speech, a joke, a – ”

The telegraph man stared coldly at my luckless despatch, and then at me. “You would wish to state to your friend, perhaps,” he suggested, “that they seem as if they had been coloured with red, owing to the change in the leaves.”

“No, no,” I put in. “It must be that they have been painted, are painted, or he will not me understand.”

“But, my good sir,” retorted the operator with emphasis, “they are not painted! From the door gaze you forth! What make you with this nonsense, that Brocken and vicinity are red painted?”

“Well, then,” I said wearily, oppressed by the magnitude of the task, “I don’t know how to word it myself, but you can fix it for me. Just say that I am going to paint them red – that will do just as well.

“But you shall not! It is forbidden!” exclaimed the official, holding himself like a poker, and glaring vehemence through his glasses. “It is strongly forbidden! When you one brush-mark shall make, quick to the prison go you. In Germany have we for natural beauty respect – also laws.”

Reluctantly, but of necessity, I abandoned metaphor, and in a humble spirit telegraphed in English to Uncle Dudley at his club that I was very glad. Even as my pen clung in irresolution on the paper over this word “glad,” the impulse rose in me to add: “Tired of Harz. Am returning immediately.”

“When the same here is,” remarked the operator, moodily studying the unknown words, “in Brunswick stopped it will be.”

I translated it for him, and added, “I go from here home, to be where officials their own business mind.”

He nodded, not unamiably, and replied as he handed me out my change: “Yes, I know: England. So well their own business there officials mind, that Balfour to Argentina easily comes.”

Walking up the hillside again, already quite captive to the fascination of the morrow’s homeward flight, I met at the turn of the path a family party – father, mother, and two girls in the younger teens – seated along the rocky siding, and gazing with a common air of dejection upon a portentous row of bags and portmanteaus at their feet. The notion that they were Hamburgers died still-born. Nothing more obviously un-German than these wayfarers was ever seen.

“I hope, sir,” the man spoke up as I approached, “that I am right in presuming that you speak English!”

I bowed assent, and even as I did so, recognised him. “I hope I am right,” I answered, “in thinking that I have met you before – at Mr Albert Grundy’s in London – you are the American gentleman with the Oboid Oil Engine, are you not?”

“Well, by George!” he cried, rising and offering his hand with frank delight, and introducing me in a single comprehensive wave to his wife and daughters. “Yes, sir,” he went on, “and I wish I had an Oboid here right now – up in the basement of that stone boarding-house on the knoll there – just for the sake of heating up, and shutting down the valves, and blowing the whole damned thing sky-high. That would suit me, sir, right down to the ground.”

“Were strangers here, sir,” he explained in answer to my question: “we’d seen a good deal of the Dutch at home – I mean our home – and we thought we’d like to take a look at ‘em in the place they come from. Well, sir, we’ve had our look, and we’re satisfied. We don’t want any more on our plate, thank you. One helping is an elegant sufficiency. Do you know the trick they played on us? Why, I took a team of horses yesterday from a place they called Ibsenburg or Ilsenburg, or some such name, and had it explained to my driver that he was to take us up to the top of the Brocken, there, and stop all night, and fetch us back this morning. When we got up as far as Shierke, there, it was getting pretty dark, and the women-folks were nervous, and so we laid up for the night. There didn’t seem anything for the driver to do but set around in the kitchen and drink beer, and he needed money for that, and so I gave him some loose silver, and told him to make himself at home. We got the words out of a dictionary for that —machen sie selbst zu Heim we figured ‘em out to be – and I spoke them at him slowly and distinctly, so that he had no earthly excuse for not understanding. But, would you believe it, sir, the miserable cuss just up and skipped out, horses, rig and all, while we were getting supper! And here we were this morning, landed high and dry. No conveyance, nobody to comprehend a word of English, no nothing. We haven’t seen the top of their darned mountain even.”

“What I’m more concerned about, I tell Wilbur,” put in the lady, “is seeing the bottom of it. If they had only sense enough to make valises and bonnet-boxes ball-shaped, we could have rolled ‘em down hill.”

“There’ll be no trouble about all that,” I assured them, and we talked for a little about the simple enough process of getting their luggage carried down to the village, and of finding a vehicle there. I, indeed, agreed to make one of their party on quitting the Harz, that very afternoon.

“And now tell me about the Grundys,” I urged, when these more pressing matters were out of the way. “I got a wire to-day saying – hinting that they are in luck’s way again.”

“Is that so?” exclaimed the American, at once surprised and pleased. “I’m glad to hear it. I can’t guess what it might be in. Grundy’s got so many irons in the fire – some white hot, some lukewarm, some frosted straight through – you never can tell. The funny thing is – he can’t tell himself. Why, sir, those men of yours in the City of London, they don’t know any more about business than a babe unborn. If they were in New York they’d have their eyeteeth skinned out of their heads in the shake of a lamb’s tail. Why, we’ve been milking them dry for a dozen years back. And yet, you know, somehow – ”

“Somehow – ?” I echoed, encouragingly.

“Well, sir, somehow – that’s the odd thing about it – they don’t stay milked.”