The Freaks of Mayfair

by E. F. Benson

Now there was very little truth in all that Mrs. Dealtry had been saying, and perhaps none at all in Horace Campbell’s contribution, yet while each of them really knew the other was a liar, each drank it all in with the utmost avidity. Such malice as there was about them was completely impotent malice: it could not possibly matter to Pip Rippington, for instance, whoever he was, that Mrs. Dealtry and Horace had been inventing stories about him. That he had founded a golf club was perfectly true; that Mrs. Dealtry had not been welcomed as a member of it was true also, though there was a needless suppressio veri about this fact, as everybody present was perfectly aware of it. But it amused them in some rancid manner to vent spleen, just as it perhaps amuses asps to bite. Only, and here was one of Time’s revenges, nobody ever cared what either of them said. To throw mud enough is proverbially supposed to ensure the sticking of some of it, but in the case of them and those like them, the proverb was falsified. They had said that sort of thing too often and too emphatically for anyone to attach the smallest importance to it; it was as if their victims had been inoculated for the poison of asps, and suffered no subsequent inconvenience from the bite. No one thought of bringing the laws about libel into play over them, any more than people think about invoking the protection of those laws against a taxi-driver who compensates himself in compliments for the tip he has not received. If they have any sense they get themselves into their houses and leave the vituperative driver outside. That is just what decent people did with Horace Campbell. He is outside still, biting the paving-stones.

The pity of it all is the appalling waste among asps of brains, inventive faculty, and humour. If only their gifts were used to some laudable or even only innocent purpose, the world in general would gain a great deal of entertainment, and the asps of the popularity and success that they secretly crave for. As it is, some sort of moral ptomaine has infected them, some invasion of microbes that turns their wit into poison. Whatsoever things are loathsome, whatsoever things are of ill report, they think of those things. All their wit, too, goes to waste: nobody cares two straws what they say, and the bitten are pathetically unconscious of having received any injury whatever. That fact, perhaps, if they could thoroughly realise it, might draw their fangs.

CHAPTER FIVE
THE SEA-GREEN INCORRUPTIBLE

CONSTANCE LADY WHITTLEMERE lives in a huge gloomy house in the very centre of Mayfair, has a majestic appearance, and is perfectly ready for the Day of Judgment to come whenever it likes. From the time when she learned French in the school-room (she talks it with a certain sonorous air, as if she was preaching a sermon in a cathedral) and played Diabelli’s celebrated duet in D with the same gifted instructress, she has always done her duty in every state of life. If she sat down to think, she could not hit upon any point in which she has not invariably behaved like a Christian and a lady (particularly a lady). Yet she is not exactly Pharisaical; she never enumerates even in her own mind her manifold excellences, simply because they are so much a matter of course with her. And that is precisely why she is so perfectly hopeless. She expects it of herself to do her duty, and behave as a lady should behave, and she never has the smallest misgiving as to her complete success in living up to this ideal. That being so, she does not give it another thought, knowing quite well that, whoever else may do doubtful or disagreeable things, Constance Whittlemere will move undeviatingly on in her flawless courses, just as the moon, without any diminution of her light and serenity, looks down on slums or battle-fields, strewn with the corpses of the morally or physically slain. And Lady Whittlemere, like the moon, does not even think of saying, ‘Poor things!’ She is much too lunar.

At the age of twenty-two (to trace her distressing history) her mother informed her, at the close of her fourth irreproachable London season, that she was going to marry Lord Whittlemere. She was very glad to hear it, for he was completely congenial to her, though, even if she had been very sorry to hear it, her sense of duty would probably have led her to do as she was told. But having committed that final act of filial obedience, she realized that she had a duty to perform to herself in the person of the new Lady Whittlemere, and climbed up on to a lofty four-square pedestal of her own. Her duty towards herself was as imperative as her duty towards Miss Green had been, when she learned the Diabelli duet in D, and was no doubt derived from the sense of position that she, as her husband’s wife, enjoyed. Yet perhaps she hardly ‘enjoyed’ it, for it was not in her nature to enjoy anything. She had a perfectly clear idea, as always, of what her own sense of fitness entailed on her, and she did it rigidly. ‘The Thing,’ in fact, was her rule in life. Just as it was The Thing to obey her governess, and obey her mother, so, when she blossomed out into wifehood, The Thing was to be a perfect and complete Lady Whittlemere. Success, as always, attended her conscientious realisation of this. Luckily (or unluckily, since her hope of salvation was thereby utterly forfeited) she had married a husband whose general attitude towards life, whose sense of duty and hidebound instincts, equalled her own, and they lived together, after that literal solemnization of holy matrimony in St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, for thirty-four years in unbroken harmony. They both of them had an unassailable sense of their own dignity, never disagreed on any topic under the sun, and saw grow up round them a copious family of plain, solid sons and comely daughters, none of whom caused their parents a single moment’s salutary anxiety. The three daughters, amply dowried, got married into stiff mahogany families at an early age, and the sons continued to prop up the conservative interests of the nation by becoming severally (i.) a soldier, (ii.) a clergyman, (iii.) a member of Parliament, (iv.) a diplomatist, and they took into all these liberal walks of life the traditions and proprieties of genuine Whittlemeres. They were all Honourables, and all honourable, and all dull, and all completely conscious of who they were. Nothing could have been nicer.

For these thirty-four years, then, Lady Whittlemere and her husband lived together in harmony and exquisite expensive pomposity. Had Genesis been one of the prophetical books, their existence might be considered as adumbrated by that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Only there was no serpent of any kind, and their great house in shelter of the Wiltshire downs had probably a far pleasanter climate than that of Mesopotamia. Their sons grew up plain but strong, they all got into the cricket Eleven at Eton, and had no queer cranky leanings towards vegetarianism like Abel, or to homicide like Cain, while the daughters until the time of their mahogany marriages grew daily more expert in the knowledge of how to be Whittlemeres. Three months of the year they spent in London, three more in their large property in the Highlands of Scotland, and the remaining six were devoted to Home Life at Whittlemere, where the hunting season and the shooting season with their large solid parties ushered in the Old English Christmas, and were succeeded by the quietness of Lent. Then after Easter the whole household, from major-domo to steward’s-room boy, went second-class to London, while for two days Lord and Lady Whittlemere ‘picnicked’ as they called it at Whittlemere, with only his lordship’s valet and her ladyship’s maid, and the third and fourth footmen, and the first kitchen-maid and the still-room maid and one housemaid to supply their wants, and made their state entry in the train of their establishment to Whittlemere House, Belgrave Square, where they spent May, June, and July.

But while they were in the country no distraction consequent on hunting or shooting parties diverted them from their mission in life, which was to behave like Whittlemeres. About two hundred and thirty years ago, it is true, a certain Lord Whittlemere had had ‘passages,’ so to speak, with a female who was not Lady Whittlemere, but since then the whole efforts of the family had been devoted to wiping out this deplorable lapse. Wet or fine, hunting and shooting notwithstanding, Lord Whittlemere gave audience every Thursday to his estate-manager, who laid before him accounts and submitted reports. Nothing diverted him from his duty, any more than it did from distributing the honours of his shooting lunches among the big farmer-tenants of the neighbourhood. There was a regular cycle of these, and duly Lord Whittlemere with his guests lunched (the lunch in its entirety being brought out in hampers from The House) at Farmer Jones’s, and Farmer Smith’s, and Farmer Robertson’s, complimented Mrs. Jones, Smith and Robertson on the neatness of their gardens and the rosy-facedness of their children, and gave them each a pheasant or a hare. Similarly whatever Highnesses and Duchesses were staying at The House, Lady Whittlemere went every Wednesday morning to the Mothers’ Meeting at the Vicarage, and every Thursday afternoon to pay a call in rotation on three of the lodgekeepers’ and tenants’ wives. This did not bore her in the least: nothing in the cold shape of duty ever bored her. Conjointly they went to church on Sunday morning, where Lord Whittlemere stood up before the service began and prayed into his hat, subsequently reading the lessons, and giving a sovereign into the plate, while Lady Whittlemere, after a choir practice on Saturday afternoon, played the organ. It was the custom for the congregation to wait in their pews till they had left the church, exactly as if it was in honour of Lord and Lady Whittlemere that they had assembled here. This impression was borne out by the fact that as The Family walked down the aisle the congregation rose to their feet. Only the footman who was on duty that day preceded their exit, and he held the door of the landau open until Lady Whittlemere and three daughters had got in. Lord Whittlemere and such sons as were present then took off their hats to their wife, mother, sisters and daughters and strode home across the Park.

And as if this was not enough propriety for one day, every Sunday evening the vicar of the parish came to dine with the family, directly after evening service. He was bidden to come straight back from evensong without dressing, and in order to make him quite comfortable Lord Whittlemere never dressed on Sunday evening, and made a point of reading the Guardian and the Church Family Newspaper in the interval between tea and dinner, so as to be able to initiate Sabbatical subjects. This fortunate clergyman was permitted to say grace both before and after meat, and Lord Whittlemere always thanked him for ‘looking in on us.’ To crown all he invariably sent him two pheasants and a hare during the month of November and an immense cinnamon turkey at Christmas.