A Lame Dog's Diary

by S. Macnaughtan

CHAPTER IX.

Mrs. Fielden's motor car is still a matter of absorbing interest to the inhabitants of Stowel. When it breaks down, as it frequently does, there is always a crowd round it immediately. Our friends and neighbours in the town have an ingenuous respect for anything that costs a great deal of money, and they are quite congratulatory to any one who has been for a drive with Mrs. Fielden, and they talk about the motor and its owner, and who has seen it, and who has not, over their afternoon tea.

The motor car is a noisy, evil-smelling vehicle of somewhat rowdy appearance, which leaves a trail behind it as of a smoking lamp. It drew up at our door to-day, and kicked and snorted impatiently until we were ready to get into it. The next moment, with a final angry snort and plunge, it started down the drive and whizzed through the village and up the hill on the other side without pausing to take breath.

"The worst of a motor car is," said Mrs. Fielden, "that one gets through everything so quickly. In London I get my shopping done in about a quarter of an hour, and then I take a turn round Regent's Park, and I find I have put away about ten minutes, so I fly down to Richmond, and even then it is too early to go to tea anywhere. Talking of tea—isn't everybody very hungry? I am really ravenous—and that is the motor car's fault, too. Because one has learned to want one's meals by the amount of business one has got through, and when one has done a whole afternoon's work in three-quarters of an hour, one is dying for tea, just as if it were five o'clock."

"I have always been ravenous since I was in South Africa," said one of Mrs. Fielden's colonels, who had driven over in the motor car to take care of her and to bring us back. "I don't know when I shall satisfy the pangs of hunger which I acquired on the veldt."

"I think I shall call on Mr. Ellicomb," said Mrs. Fielden. "I believe he has excellent afternoon teas, and he is making me an enamel box which I should like to see."

Ellicomb said once or twice, as we sat in his picturesque house with its blue china and old brass work, that he only wished we had given him warning that we were coming. We found him with an apron on, working at his enamels; and when he had displayed this work to us, he showed us his bookbinding, and his fretwork-carving, and his type-writing machine. Afterwards we had tea, which Ellicomb poured very deftly into his blue cups, having first warmed the teapot and the cups, and flicked away one or two imaginary specks of dirt from the plates with what appeared to be a small lace-trimmed dinner-napkin.

Mrs. Fielden began to admire his majolica ware, of which she knows nothing whatever, and Ellicomb took her for a tour round his rooms, and asked her to guess the original uses of his drain-tiles and spittoons and copper ham-pots. Afterwards we were taken into a very small conservatory adjoining his house, where every plant was displayed to us in turn; and we were subsequently shown his coal-cellar and his larder and his ash-pit before we were allowed to return to the house.

Ellicomb smiles more often than any other man I know, and he had only one epithet to apply to his house. "It's so cosy," he said. "Isn't it cosy?" "I do think it's a cosy little place."

Mrs. Fielden was charmed with everything, and deprecated the idea that she might consider the little house very small after Stanby.

"I always think," she said, "that I should much prefer to live in a place like this, and then the people who come to see one really would pay one a little attention, instead of talking of nothing but the house."

The Colonel laughed and apologized.

"Oh, I know I'm not half good enough for Stanby," said Mrs. Fielden, smiling. "But I really can't help it! I was brought up in a house with hot and cold water upstairs, and white paint, and I suppose I never can really appreciate anything else."

The dignity of Mrs. Fielden's surroundings has never affected her in the very smallest degree, and I do not believe that the traditions of the house interest her in the very least. I am quite aware that she asked me to write out the history of Lady Hylda, for instance, simply because it is part of her charm always to ask one to do something for her. It is the fashion to wait upon Mrs. Fielden's behests, and it would appear almost an unkindness to her many men friends if she did not give them some commission to do when they go up to town. Her manner of thanking one for a service is almost as pretty as her manner of asking for it, and I am really not surprised that she is the most popular woman in the country-side.

Mr. Ellicomb said ecstatically that the dim twilight at Stanby was one of the most impressive things he knew; and he added, with a shudder, that he always expected to see ghosts there.

Mrs. Fielden does not believe in ghosts except on those occasions when she has some one very charming to defend her, and she spends her evenings in a cheerful white boudoir in the modern part of the house.

Having admired all the majolica plates in the house, and having completely bewildered her host by showing an interest in him and his possessions one minute, and complete indifference the next, Mrs. Fielden fell into one of those little silences which are so characteristic of her. Her silence is one of the most provoking things about her. She has been witty and amusing the moment before, and then relapses into silence in the most natural manner possible, and her face takes a certain wistful look, and a man wonders how he can comfort her or whether he has offended her.

"I think we ought to go now," she said, coming out of this wistful reverie like a child awaking from sleep. "Is every one ready?"

We got into the motor car again, and sped onwards along the smooth white road. Every turn made a picture which I suppose an artist would love to paint. There were red-roofed cottages smothered in orchards of plum blossom, and simple palings set across gaps in the hedges, with gardens beyond filled with spring flowers. Now a labourer, gray-coated and bent with age, passed by like a flash, as he tramped slowly homewards from his work; and some school children, loitering to pick primroses under a hedge, dropped their slates and satchels in the ditch, and called to each other to take care, while they clung together and shouted "Hurrah!" as we passed.

The park gates of Stanby are lion guarded and of stone, and then a long carriage-drive takes one up to the house. The park round the old gray pile was starred with primroses, and ghost-like little lambs were capering noiselessly in the fields. The scent of wallflowers was blown to us from a great brown ribbon of them round the walls of the lodgekeeper's house as we swung through the gates. The sheep in the park, bleating to their young, drew away from the palings where they had been rubbing their woolly sides, and made off to the farther corner of the field, and Mrs. Fielden's gray pony in the paddock tossed his heels in a vindictive fashion at us from a distance of fifty yards or more. And the motor car drew up with a jerk at the great doors of the house.

Stanby is not quite so large now as it originally was, immense though the house undoubtedly is, and only some ruins on the north side show where the chapel used to stand. A mound within the ruin's walls marks the resting-place of Hylda—Hylda, whose history I wrote out at the request of Mrs. Fielden, and sent to her; but I don't suppose she has ever read it.

The evening of our arrival at Stanby it pleased Mrs. Fielden to put on an old-fashioned dress of stiffest brocade, which she had found in some old chest in the house. She wore a high comb of pearls in her dark hair, and she looked a very regal and beautiful figure in the great dining-hall and drawing-rooms of her house. She did not play Bridge, as the others did, but sat on a carved high-backed chair near my sofa, and told me many of the old stories of the house, and asked me to write down some of them for her.

"I sent you the story of Hylda more than a week ago," I said, "and I don't suppose you ever read it."

"I did read it," said Mrs. Fielden gently, "and I liked it very much."

She had put on an unapproachable mood with her beautiful stiff brocade gown, and the gentleness of her voice seemed to heighten rather than to lessen her royalty. The radiance and the holiday air, which are Mrs. Fielden's by divine right, were not dimmed to-night so much as transformed. There was a subtle aromatic scent of dried rose-leaves clinging to the old brocade dress, and about herself a sort of fragrance of old-world dignity and beauty. The pearl comb in her hair made her look taller than usual.

A deerhound got up from his place by the fire and came and laid his head on her lap, and some footmen in old-fashioned bright blue liveries came in to arrange the card-tables and hand round coffee. Everything was stately and magnificent in the house.

"And you pretend," I said, "that you do nothing; yet probably the whole ordering of this house devolves upon you."

"I am quite a domestic person sometimes," said Mrs. Fielden.

"It is rather bewildering," I said, "to find that you are everything in turn."

And the next morning she wore a short blue skirt, with a silver belt round her waist, and spent the morning punting on the lake with Anthony Crawshay.

"I hope I look after you all properly," she said at lunch-time, in a certain charming deprecating way she has of speaking sometimes. "There really are punts, and horses, and motor cars, and things, if you want them. Will you all order what you like?"

Each man at the table then offered to take Mrs. Fielden for a ride, or a drive, or a row, and not one of them could be quite sure that she had refused to go with him.

"I want to go for a turn in the garden and talk about books," she said to me as we left the dining-room. And then I found that I was sitting in her boudoir having coffee with her, and that every one else was excluded from the room—how it was done I have not the slightest idea—and that by-and-by we left it by the open French windows, and were strolling in the garden in the spring sunshine. The garden, with its high walls, is sheltered from every wind that blows, and there are wide garden-seats in it painted white, and every border was bright with early spring flowers.

"I call this my Grove of Academe," said Mrs. Fielden.

"Why?"

"Because I think it has a nice classical sound; and it is here I come with my friends and discuss metaphysics."

"It seems to me you have a great many friends," I said.

"I was thinking," said Mrs. Fielden thoughtfully, "of adding another to their number."

"I have a constitutional dislike to worshipping in crowded temples," I said.

Mrs. Fielden became silent.

It would be forging a sword against themselves did men allow women to know what a powerful weapon silence is. A soft answer turneth away wrath, but a woman's silence makes a man's heart cry out: "My dear, did I hurt you? Forgive me!"

At the end of five minutes or so of silence Mrs. Fielden turned towards me and smiled, and the garden seemed to be filled with her. There was no room for anything else but herself and that bewildering smile she gave me.

"How is the diary getting on?" she said.

"The diary," I answered, "continues to record our godly, righteous, and sober life——"

"Oh," said Mrs. Fielden quickly, "don't you think it is possible to be too good sometimes? That is really what I wanted to say to you—I brought you into the garden to ask you that."

"It is an interesting suggestion," I remarked, "and I think we ought to give it to Eliza Jamieson for one of her discussions."

"I do not wish to discuss it with Eliza Jamieson," said Mrs. Fielden, "but with you. You know there really is a great danger in becoming too good; for although I do not think that you would grow wings, or hear passing bells, or anything of that sort, still you might become a little dull, might you not?"

"I don't think it would be possible to become duller than I am," I replied. "You have more than once told me that I am not amusing. So long as my sister is not aware of the fact, I do not in the least mind admitting that I find every day most horribly tedious. I suppose I shall get accustomed to it in time, but I don't enjoy being an invalid."

"You have watched the Jamiesons making flannel petticoats for the poor," went on Mrs. Fielden, "and you have had the Curate to tea, and you have been to the Taylors' party, and if it does not kill you, I am sure you will become like people in those books which one gives as prizes to choir-boys."

"One so often mistakes monotony for virtue," I said. "I believe I was beginning to think that there was almost a merit in getting accustomed to a sofa and a crutch."

"Oh, but it is a sin!" exclaimed Mrs. Fielden. "It is a sin to get accustomed to anything that is disagreeable. But that is what comes of studying philosophy!"

"I suppose reasoning is always bad," I said humbly.

"Yes," said Mrs. Fielden; "and it is so unnatural, too."

"I heard a man say the other day," I said, "that solitude is always sententious. And he pointed out that foreigners, who are never alone, base their ethics upon conduct; but that English people, who simply do not understand the life of the boulevards and cafés and family affection, sit apart in the solitude of their garrets or studies, and decide that the right or the wrong of a thing consists in what they think about it."

Then I recollected that this garden was the Grove of Academe, and that it was here that Mrs. Fielden discussed metaphysics with all her friends. "What cure do you propose?" I said shortly.

"Why not go to London for a little while and enjoy yourselves?" said Mrs. Fielden. "Put off the conventionalities of Stowel, as the Miss Traceys do, and do something amusing and gay."

"Did you ever hear of the man in the Bastille," I said, "who had been in prison so long that when he was offered his freedom he elected to remain where he was?"

"But you must break out of the Bastille long before it comes to that!" said Mrs. Fielden. "Couldn't you do something exciting? I am sure nothing else will restore your moral tone."

"How is it to be done?" I asked. "We must recognize the limitations of our environment."

"You are going to be philosophical," said Mrs. Fielden; "you are going to quote Protagoras, or Pythagoras, or Plato, which will not convince me in the least. Philosophy tries to make people believe that things are exactly the reverse of what they are. I don't think that alters the sum total of things very much. Because, by the time that you have proved that all agreeable things are disagreeable, and all unpleasant things are pleasant, you are in exactly the same position as you were before. I dare say it fills up people's time to turn everything upside down and stand everything on its head, but it is not amusing."

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"Couldn't you enjoy yourselves a little?" said Mrs. Fielden, putting on her wistful voice.

"As we are in the Grove of Academe, let me point out that the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake was one of the corrupt forms of a decadent epicureanism," I said sternly.

"I am quite sure it was," said Mrs. Fielden, smiling; "but we were talking about your visit to London, were we not?"

And so I knew that the thing was settled, and I thought it very odd that Palestrina and I had not thought of the plan before.

"As it is getting cold," said Mrs. Fielden, "I am going to be a peripatetic philosopher," and she rose from the seat where we were sitting and gave me her hand to help me up, for I am still awkward with my crutch, and then let me lean on her arm as we walked up and down the broad gravel pathway.

"Don't you think," she began, "that it is a great waste of opportunity not to be wild and wicked sometimes, when one is very good?"

"I am afraid I do not quite follow you."

"What I mean is, what is the good of filling up years of curates and Taylors and flannel petticoats, unless you are going to kick them all over some day, and have a good time. You see, if you and Palestrina were not so good you would always have to pretend to be tremendously circumspect. But it seems such waste of goodness not to be bad sometimes."

"Your argument being," I said, "that an honest man may sometimes steal a horse?"

"Yes, that is what I mean," said Mrs. Fielden delightedly.

"A dangerous doctrine, and one——"

"Not Plato, please," said Mrs. Fielden.

... It ended in our taking a flat in London for some weeks. It was a small dwelling, with an over-dressed little drawing-room, and a red dining-room, and a roomy cupboard for a smoking-room.

"Remember, Palestrina," I said to my sister when we settled down, "that we are under strict orders to live a very rapid and go-ahead life while we are in London. Can you suggest anything very rowdy that a crippled man with a crutch and a tendency to chills and malaria might undertake?"

"We might give a supper-party," said Palestrina brilliantly, "and have long-stemmed champagne-glasses, and perhaps cook something in a chafing-dish. I was reading a novel the other day in which the bad characters did this. I made a note of it at the time, meaning to ask you why it should be fast to cook things in a chafing-dish or to have long-stemmed champagne-glasses?"

When the evening came Mrs. Fielden dined with us, and she and Palestrina employed themselves after dinner in rehearsing how they should behave. My sister said in her low, gurgling voice: "I think I shall sit on the sofa with my arms spread out on the cushions on either side of me, and I shall thump them sometimes, as the adventuress in a play does."

"Or you might be singing at the piano," said Mrs. Fielden, "and then when the door opens you could toss the music aside and sail across the room, and give your left hand to whoever comes in first, and say, 'What a bore! you have come!' or something rude of that sort."

Mrs. Fielden's spirit of fun inspired my quiet sister to-night, and the two women, began masquerading in a way that was sufficiently amusing to a sick man lying on a sofa.

"Or you might continue playing the piano," Mrs. Fielden went on, "after any one has been announced. I notice that that is very often done, especially in books written by the hero himself in the first person. 'She did not leave the piano as I entered, but continued playing softly, her white hands gliding dreamily over the keys.'"

"I shall do my best," Palestrina answered; "and I thought of calling all our guests by their Christian names, if only I could recollect what they are."

"Nicknames would be better," said Mrs. Fielden. "We ought to have found out, I think, something about this matter before the night of the party."

"What shall we do till they arrive?" said Palestrina.

"We must read newspapers and periodicals," Mrs. Fielden replied, "and then fling them down on the carpet. There is something about seeing newspapers on a carpet which is certainly untidy, but has a distinctly Bacchanalian touch about it."

"I wish I had a red tea-gown," sighed my sister.

"Or a white one trimmed with some costly furs," said Mrs. Fielden. "Almost any tea-gown would do."

"One thing I will have!" she exclaimed, starting in an energetic manner to her feet. "I'll turn all the lamps low, and cover them with pink-paper shades. Where is the crinkly paper and some ribbon?"

After that we sat in a rose twilight so dim that we couldn't even read the evening newspaper.

"I don't think they need have come quite so early," I said, as the first ring was heard at the door-bell.

Mrs. Fielden had insisted upon it that one actress at least should be asked. "What is a supper-party without an actress?" she had said. And Mrs. Travers at present acting in Mr. Pinero's new play, was the first to arrive.

"I wonder if you know any of our friends who are coming to-night?" said Palestrina. "We expect Squash Bosanquet and Dickie Fenwick." Palestrina then broke down, because we had no idea if these two men had ever answered to these names in their lives. Also she blushed, which spoilt it all, and Mrs. Fielden began to smile.

Mrs. Travers came to the party in a very simple black evening gown, and Bosanquet and Charles Fenwick came almost immediately afterwards. Anthony Crawshay was amongst the friends whom we had invited, because, Palestrina said, as we did not seem to know many fast people, we had better have some one who was sporting. There was an artist whom we considered Bohemian because he wore his hair long, but he disappointed us by coming in goloshes.

Altogether we were eight at supper. There was an attractive menu, and the long-stemmed champagne-glasses were felt to be a distinct challenge to quiet behaviour.

Palestrina thought that if she were going to be really fast she had better talk about divorce, and I heard her ask Anthony in a diffident whisper if he had read any divorce cases lately. Anthony looked startled, and in his loud voice exclaimed, "Egad! I hope you haven't!" Palestrina coloured with confusion, and I frowned heavily at her, which made it worse.

Mrs. Travers seemed to have taken it into her head that Palestrina was philanthropic, and she talked a great deal about factory girls, and Bosanquet talked about methylated ether. What it was that provoked his remarks on this subject I cannot now recall, nor why he discussed it without intermission almost throughout the entire evening, but I have a distinct recollection of hearing him dinning out the phrase "methylated ether."

It was, I think, the dullest party that even Palestrina and I have ever given, and I blame Mrs. Fielden for this. Mrs. Fielden refused to be the centre of the room. She became an onlooker at the party which she had planned, and she smiled affectionately at us both, and watched, I think, to see how the party would go off.

The long-stemmed champagne-glasses were hardly used. Several people said to me jocosely, "How is South Africa?" and to this I could think of no more suitable reply than, "It's all right." We longed for even the Pirate Boy to make a little disturbance. Palestrina whispered to me that she thought I might throw a piece of bread at some one, or do something. But the action she suggested seemed to me to be in too daring contrast to the general tone of the evening; and really, as I murmured back to her, there seemed to be very little point in throwing my bread at a guest who had done me no harm.

"I wish," she said to me when we returned to the drawing-room, "that I knew some daring little French songs. In books the girl always sings daring little French songs, and afterwards every one begins to be vulgar and delightful, like those people in 'The Christian.' I think I'll light a cigarette." She did so, and choked a little, and then wondered if Thomas would like her to smoke, and threw the cigarette into the fire. The Bohemian, who had travelled considerably, asked for a map, and told us of his last year's journeyings, tracing out the route of them for us on the map with a pin.

And Mrs. Fielden was smiling all the time.

"I suppose," I said to my sister when the last guest had departed, and we sat together in the pink light of the drawing-room before going to bed—"I suppose we carry about with us an atmosphere of slowness which it is impossible to penetrate. You are engaged to Thomas, and I am an invalid——"

"But in books," said Palestrina wistfully, "men talk about all sorts of things to girls whether they happen to be engaged or not, and they ask them to go to see galleries with them next day, or squeeze their hands. Of course, I should hate it if they did so, but still one rather expected it. To-night," she said regretfully, "no one talked to me of anything but Thomas."

"Charles Fenwick," I said, "who used to be considered amusing, has become simply idiotic since he married. He gave me an exact account of his little boy's sayings; he copied the way he asked for sugar, like the chirruping of a bird. You won't believe me, I know, but he put out his lips and chirped."

"I remember being positively warned against him," said Palestrina, "when I used to go to dances in London." She sighed, and added, "Do you think Mrs. Fielden enjoyed it?"

"I think Mrs. Fielden was distinctly amused," I replied.

"Do you think," said Palestrina, still in a disappointed tone, "that the men would have been more—more larky if we had been alone? Mrs. Fielden always looks so beautiful and dresses so well that I think she impresses people too much, and they are all trying to talk to her instead of making a row."

"I think we may as well go to bed," I said.

Palestrina rose slowly, and went towards the bell to ring for my man to help me. She lingered for a moment by my chair. "Yet books say that men require so much keeping in order," she said sadly. "I wish people would not write about what does not occur."