VI
Miss Mary Craig Kimbrough came traveling. It was natural that a young lady from Mississippi should desire to see art galleries and meet celebrities in England; and if she came as the guest of an earl and a countess, that would surely be respectable according to Mississippi standards. It so happened that the noble earl was a bit of a radical and had had his own marital scandal. He had gone to Reno, Nevada, and got himself divorced from an unsatisfactory marriage; then, upon his remarriage in England, his peers had haled him before them, convicted him of bigamy, and sentenced him to six months in jail.
A tremendous uproar in its day, but it had been many days ago; the English nobility are a numerous family, which Mississippi could hardly be expected to keep straight. Craig’s father had the general impression, held by every old-fashioned Southern gentleman, that the English nobility are a depraved lot; but on the other hand, Craig’s mother knew that they are socially irresistible. She proved it whenever, at a gathering of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she was asked for news about her daughter who was visiting the Countess Russell in London.
“Aunt Molly” was a plump little Irish lady, the warmest hearted soul that ever carried a heavy title. She had had her own divorce tragedy, and her warm Irish heart was with Thyrsis. She had published two or three novels, and for writing purposes had a retreat, an ancient cottage on the edge of a village not far from Eton. It was so low that you had to stoop to get through the doorway, and its chimney had smoked for at least three hundred years; but it was newly plastered inside, and furnished with antiques and bright chintzes. Here Aunt Molly brought her protegée, and Thyrsis came from Holland to collect local color for the new novel, Sylvia, which he was making out of Craig’s tales of her girlhood in the Far South. In after years the heroine would stop in the middle of an anecdote, look puzzled, and say, “Did that really happen to me? Or is it one of the things we made up for Sylvia?”
One glimpse of the British aristocracy at home. The novel Thyrsis was writing dealt with a splendid young Harvard millionaire, one of whose friends remarks that he deliberately cultivated the brutal manners of the British upper classes toward their social inferiors. Craig was distressed by this, insisting that it couldn’t be true; finally it was agreed that Aunt Molly should be the arbitrator. The problem was submitted, and this high authority laughed and said, “Well, look at Frank!” She went on to tell anecdotes portraying the bad manners of his lordship, her husband; also of his uncles and his cousins, Lord This and the Marquis of That and the Duke of Other. Craig subsided, and the sentence stands as it was written.
Thyrsis, himself, walking along the road in his everyday clothes, saw a fancy equipage drive up and halt, while the occupants asked him the way to a certain place; having been politely answered, the lady and gentleman drove on without so much as a nod of thanks. On another occasion, while walking, he attempted to ask the way of a gentleman out for a constitutional, and this person stalked by without a sound or a glance. Mentioning this experience to a conventional Englishman, Thyrsis received the following explanation: “But if one entered into talk with any stranger who hailed him on the road, one might meet all sorts of undesirable persons!”