by Grant Allen
“Well, then, would you like to go with us, dear?” Mrs. Bouverie Barton asked kindly.
Winifred turned over the card with a wistful look. “It says, ‘Mr and Mrs. Bouverie Barton and friends,’” she repeated with emphasis. “So of course you can take whoever you like with you, can’t you, Mrs. Barton? Saturday the 3rd, from 2:30 to 6 p m. I think I might. I-’ll risk it anyhow. That’d suit me admirably. My appointment with Sir Anthony’s for two precisely.”
“Your appointment with Sir Anthony?” Mrs. Barton echoed in a grieved undertone.
Winifred coughed such a nasty dry little hacking cough. “Why, yes, Sir Anthony Wraxall,” she answered, checking herself with some difficulty from a brief paroxysm of her usual trouble. “I’ve come up this week, in fact, on purpose to consult him. Hugh made me come, my lungs have been so awfully odd lately. I’ve seen Sir Anthony twice already; and he’s punched me and pummelled me and pulled me about till there’s not much left of me whole anywhere; so on Saturday he means by summary process to get rid of the rest of me altogether. Would you mind calling for me at Sir Anthony’s at three sharp? He gives me an hour, a whole hour; an unusual concession for a man whose time’s money worth a golden guinea every three minutes.”
“My dear,” Mrs. Bouverie Barton put in tenderly everybody knows Mrs. Bouverie Barton, the most charming and sympathetic hostess in literary London “you hardly seem fit to go running about town sight-seeing at present. Does Mr. Massinger seriously realize how extremely weak and ill you are? It scarcely seems to me you ought to be troubling your poor little head about private views or anything of the sort with a cough like that upon you.”
“Oh, it isn’t much, I assure you, dear Mrs. Barton,” Winifred answered with a quiet sigh, the tears coming up into her eyes as she spoke at the touch of sympathy. “Hugh doesn’t think it’s at all serious. I’ve been a good deal troubled and worried of late, that’s all. Sir Anthony’ll set me all right soon. You see I’ve had a great deal of trouble.” The tears stood brimming her poor dim eyes. Wife and mother as she had been already, she was still young, very, very young. Her face looked pale and sadly pathetic.
Mrs. Bouverie Barton raised the small white hand gently in her own. It was thin and delicate, with long and slender consumptive fingers. Mrs. Barton’s mouth grew graver for a moment. That poor child had suffered much, she thought to herself, and she had probably much to suffer in future. How much, indeed, it was not in Winifred’s cramped little nature to confide to any one.
At 128, Bletchingley Road, the ancestral home of all the Relfs for one generation a tiny eight-roomed London house in a side-street of intense South Kensington all was bustle and flutter and feverish excitement. Edie Relf to-day was absolutely in her element. It was her joy in life, indeed, to compass the Impossible. And the Impossible now stared her frankly in the face in the concrete shape of a geometrical absurdity. She had undertaken to make the less contain the greater, all the axioms of Euclid to the contrary notwithstanding. What are space and time to a clever woman? Of no more importance in her scheme of things than to Emmanuel Kant or to Shadworth Hodgson. The Relfs had issued no fewer than three hundred and twenty separate invitation cards, each with that extensible india-rubber clause, “and friends,” so capable of indefinite and incalculable expansion. Now, the little front drawing room at Bletchingley Road could just be induced, when the furniture was abolished by Act of Parliament, and the piano removed upstairs to the back bedroom, to accommodate at a pinch some thirty-five persons, mostly chairless. Three hundred and twenty invited guests, plus an indefinite expansion under the casual category of desultory friends, cannot be reduced by any known process of arithmetic or mensuration into the limits of a space barely sufficient to supply standing-room for thirtyfive. But that was just where Eclie Relf’s organizing genius knew itself in the presence of an emergency worthy of its steel. When an insoluble difficulty dawned serene upon her puzzled view, Edie Relf’s spirits rose at once, Antaeuslike, to the occasion, and soared beyond the narrow and hampering limitations of mundane geometry. “My dear Edie,” Mrs. Relf cried in a voice of despair, “we can never, never, never pack them in anyhow.”
“Herrings in a box would find themselves comparatively roomy and comfortable,” Warren murmured, with a glance of black despondency round the four scanty walls of the tiny drawing-room. “How on earth could you ever think of asking so many?”
“Nonsense, my dears!” Edie answered with a confident smile that presaged victory. “Leave that to me. It’s my proper business. I see it all. The commanding officer should never be hampered by futile predictions of defeat and dishonor. Of course they won’t come, the greater part of them. They never do rush, I regret to say, to inspect your immortal works, Warren. But still we must arrange, for all that, as if we expected the whole united British people in case of a rush, don’t you know, mother. Some day, I feel certain the rush will arrive; a Duke will invest his spare cash in ‘Off the Nore; Morning,’ and hang it up visibly to all beholders on the silvergilt walls of his own dining-room. The picture-buying classes, with rolls of money jingling and clinking in their trousers’ pockets, will see and admire that magnificent chef-d’oeuvre or at least, if they don’t know how to admire, will determine to back a Duke’s judgment and will hurry down in their millions, with blank check-books protruding from their flaps, to crowd the studio and’ buy up the lot at a valuation. I confess even I should have some difficulty in seating and providing tea for the millions. But this lot’s easy a mere bagatelle. Let me see. We’ve only sent out cards, I think, for a poor trifle of three hundred and twenty.”
“No,” Warren corrected very gravely. “Three hundred and twenty cards, you mean, for six hundred and forty wives and husbands.”
“Some of them are bachelors, my dear,” Edie answered with a sagacious nod; “and some old maids, who never by any chance buy anything. As far as art’s concerned, the old maid may be regarded as a mere cipher. But, for argument’s sake, since you want to argufy, like the parson in the Black Country, we’ll say six hundred. Now, what’s six hundred human beings in a house like this a mansion a palace a perfect Vatican distributed over nearly four hours, and equally diffused throughout the entire establishment? Of course, my dear, you at once apply the doctrine of averages. That’s scientific. Each party stops not longer than an hour at the very outside. You never have two hundred in the place at once. And what’s two hundred? A mere trifle! I declare it affords no scope at all for a girl’s ingenuity. Like our respected ancestor, Warren Hastings, I stand aghast at my own moderation. I really wish, mother, now I come to think of it, we’d sent out invitations for a thousand.”
“Six hundred’s quite enough for me, I’m sure,” Warren replied, glancing round the room once more in palpable doubt. “How do you mean to arrange for them, Edie?”
“Oh, easy enough. Nothing could be simpler. I’ll tell you how. First of all, you throw open the foldingdoors or rather to save the room at the sides, you lift them bodily off their hinges, and stick them out of the dining-room window into the back garden.”
“They won’t go through,” Warren objected, measuring with his eye.
“Rubbish, my dear! Won’t go through, indeed! You men have no imagination and no invention. You manufacture difficulties out of pure obstructiveness. If they won’t go through whole, why, just take out the panels and unglue the wood-work, that’s all. Very well, then; that throws the drawing-room and dining-room into one good big reception-room, from which of course we remove all the furniture. Next, we range the chairs in a long row round the sides for the old ladies the old ladies are very important; keep ’em downstairs, or else they’ll prevent their husbands from buying and let the men and the able-bodied girls stand up and group themselves in picturesque clusters here and there about the vacant center. What could be easier, simpler, or more effective? A room treated so furnishes itself automatically with human properties. With tact and care, we could easily squeeze in some seventy or eighty.”
“We could,” Warren answered, after a mental calculation of square area. “But how about the pictures?”
“Hear him, mother! Oh, but men are helpless! Where should the pictures be but up in the studio, stupid! We wouldn’t take all the people up to see them at once, of course. You and I would go around, looking very affable, with a professional smile so, you know perpetually playing about the corners ofi our mouths, and carry off the men with the most purchasing faces in constant relays up to admire the immortal masterpieces. Meanwhile, mother and Mr. Hatherley, down below here, would do the polite to the old ladies and undertake the deportment business. Or perhaps Mr. Hatherley’d better be stationed on guard upstairs, to fire off some of his gushing critical remarks from time to time about the aerial perspective and the middle distances. Mr. Hatherley always knows just what to say to weigh down the balance for a hesitating purchaser.”
“Edie,” Warren cried, flinging himself down with a disgusted face upon the dining-room sofa, “I hate all this horrid advertising and touting, for all the world as if one were the catchpenny proprietor of a patent medicine, instead of an honest hard-working British artist!”
“I know you do, my dear boy,” Edie answered imperturbably; “and that’s all the more reason why those who have the charge of you should undertake to push you and tout for you against your will, till they positively make you achieve the success you yourself will never have the meanness to try for. But, thank goodness, I don’t mind puffing. I’m intriguer enough myself for the whole family. If it hadn’t been for my egging you on, and pestering you and bullying you and keeping you up to it, we should never have got up this private view of your things at all. And now, having started and arranged the entire show, I mean to work it my own way without interference. I’m the boss who runs this concern, I can tell you, Warren. Decidedly, Mr. Hatherley shall stop upstairs, with his hair down his back, and deliver wild panegyrics in an ecstatic voice on the aerial perspective and the middle distances. I shall nudge him when a probable purchaser comes in, to make him turn on the aerial perspective. I only wish with all my heart we had dear old Elsie over here to help us.”
“But the tea, Edie? How about the tea, dear?” Mrs. Relf interposed with a doubtful countenance.
“And you too, Brutus!” her daughter cried, looking down on her with a despondent shake of the head, which implied a profound and melancholy shock of disappointment. “I thought, mother, I’d brought you up better than that! The tea, my beloved, will be duly laid out in your own bedroom, which I mean to transform, for this occasion only, with entirely new scenery, decorations, and properties throughout, into a gorgeously furnished oriental lounge and enchanted coffee divan. There, Martha, attired as a Circassian slave or at least in her best bib and tucker shall serve out ices, sherbet, and spiced dainties, every one from silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon. The door into my own bedroom will also be open, and in that spacious apartment we shall have a sort of grand supplementary tea and refreshment room, where the Jackson’s parlor-maid, borrowed for the occasion, as Circassian number two, and becomingly endued in a Liberty apron and a small red cap (price ninepence), shall dispense claret-cup, sponge-cake, and Hamburg grapes to the deserving persons who have earned their restoratives by the encouragement of art through a judicious purchase. The thing’s as easy as ABC. I’ve not the least doubt it’ll run me off my legs. I shall perish in the attempt but I shall die victorious.”
“In your own bedroom, dear!” Mrs. Relf cried aghast. “You’ll have the tea in your own bedroom! But where on earth shall we sleep, Edie?”
Edie looked down at her once more with a solemn glance of high disdain. ‘“Sleep!” she cried. “Did you say sleep, mother? The craven wretch who dreams of sleeping at such a crisis is unworthy of being Warren Relf’s progenitor. Or ought it to be progenitrix in the feminine, I wonder? We shall sleep, if at all, my dear (which I greatly doubt), -on the floor in the box-room, already occupied by the iron legs of the three best bedsteads. But don’t be afraid. Leave it all to me, darling. Trust your daughter; and your daughter, as usual, will pull you through. If there’s anything on earth I love, it’s a jolly good muddle.”
And jolly as the muddle undoubtedly was, Edie Relf did pull them through in the end with triumphant strategy. Saturday the 3rd was a brilliant success. Bletchingley Road, that mere suburban byway, had never before in its checkered career beheld so many real live carriages together. The six hundred, or at least a very fair proportion of them, boldly they drove and well, down that narrow side street. All the world wondered. The neighbors looked on and admired with vicarious pride. They felt themselves raised in the social scale by their close proximity to so fashionable a gathering. Number 128 itself was a changed character; it hardly knew its own ground-plan. In the drawing-room and dining-room, thrown wide into one, a goodly collection of artists and picture-buyers and that poor residuum, the general public, streamed through incessantly in a constant tide on its way to the studio. The tea-room (late Mrs. Relf’s bedroom) blazed out resplendent in borrowed plumes oriental rugs, Japanese fans, and hanging parasols, arranged a la Liberty. Rout seats covered with eastern stuffs lined the walls and passages. The studio, in particular, proudly posed as a work of art of truly Whistleresque magnificence. Talk about tone! The “effect was unique. Warren Relf himself, who for three nights previously had “had a bed out” at the lodgings next door, and swallowed down a hasty chop for luncheon at the Cheyne Row Club, had superintended in person the hanging of the wonderful sage-green cretonne and the pale maize silk that so admirably threw up the dainty colors of his delicate and fantastic sea-pieces. Elsewhere, Edie alone had reigned supreme. And as two of the clock chimed from Kensington church tower on that eventful afternoon, she murmured aside to her mother, with an enraptured gaze at the scarlet and green kakemonos on the walls of the staircase: “My dear, there’s not a speck of dust in this house, nor a bone in my body that isn’t aching.”
When the hired man from the mews behind flung open the drawing-room door in his lordly way and announced in a very loud voice, “Mrs. Bouverie Barton and Mrs. Hugh Massinger,” neither Warren nor Edie was in the front room to hear the startling announcement, which would certainly for the moment have taken their breath away. For communications between the houses of Relf and Massinger had long since ceased. But Warren and Edie were both upstairs. So Winifred and her hostess passed idly in (just shaking hands by the doorway with good old Mrs. Relf, who never by any chance caught anybody’s name) and mingled shortly with the mass of the visitors. Winifred was very glad indeed of that, for she wanted to escape observation. Sir Anthony’s report had been far from reassuring. She preferred to remain as much in the background as possible that afternoon: all she wished was merely to observe and to listen.
As she stood there mingling with the general crowd and talking to some chance acquaintance of old London days, she happened to overhear two scraps of conversation going on behind her. The first was one that mentioned no names; and yet, by some strange feminine instinct, she was sure it was of herself the speakers were talking.
“Oh, yes,” one voice said in a low tone, with the intonation that betrays a furtive side-glance; “she’s far from strong in fact, very delicate. He married her for her money of course: that’s clear. She hadn’t much else, poor little thing, except a certain short-lived beaute du diable, to recommend her. And she has no go in her; she won’t live long. You remember what Galton remarks about heiresses? They’re generally the last decadent members, he says, of a moribund stock whose strength is failing. They bear no children, or if any, weaklings; most of them break down with their first infant; and they die at last prematurely of organic feebleness. Why, he just sold himself outright for the poor girl’s property; that’s the plain English of it; and now, I hear, with his extravagant habits, he’s got himself after all into monetary difficulties.”
“Agricultural depression?” the second voice inquired an older man’s, and louder.
“Worse than that, I fear; agri
cultural depression and an encroaching sea. Besides which, he spends too freely. But execuse me, Dr. Moutrie,” in a very low tone: “I’m afraid the lady’s rather near us.”
Winifred strained her ears to the utmost to hear the rest; but the voices had sunk too low now to catch a sound, and the young man with w r hom she was supposed to be talking had evidently got tired of the very perfunctory Yeses and Noes she was dealing out to him right and left at irergular intervals with charming irrelevance. She roused herself, and endeavored spasmodically to regain the lost thread of her proper conversation. But even as she did so, another voice, far more distinct, from a lady in front, caught her attention with the name “Miss Challoner.” Winifred pricked up her ears incontinently. Could it be of her Elsie that those two were talking? Challoner’s not such a very uncommon name, to be sure! And yet and yet, there are not so many Miss Challoners, either, distributed up and down the surface of Europe, as to make the coincidence particularly improbable. Challoners are not so plentiful as blackberries. It might every bit as well be Elsie as any other Miss Challoner unattached. Winifred strained her ears once more to catch their talk with quickened interest.
“Oh yes,” the second lady addressed made answer cheerfully; “she was very well when we last saw her in April at San Remo. We had the next villa to the Relfs on the hillside, you know. But Miss Challoner doesn’t come to England now; she was going as usual to St. Martin Lantosque to spend the summer, when we left the Riviera. She always goes there as soon as the San Remo season’s over.”
