The Princess Sophia

by E. F. Benson

The room was almost empty, and Leonard put no bounds to his amusement. He stamped and choked, his mouth was full of laughter.

‘Oh, oh!’ he cried, ‘it is too funny! And, mother, I hear they are thinking of sending you to the Chamber of Horrors. I stayed in London last long leave and saw it. Oh, oh, the Chamber of Horrors, with murderers and Phœnix Park tragedians and people who have their throats cut in their baths. Oh, I shall burst!’

Sophia turned icily from him, read the description of herself through again in the catalogue, and then examined the figure. It was seated in the most realistic pose in front of a small green-cloth table. One hand held three or four playing-cards, the other was clutched on a heap of counterfeit coins. It represented her in full evening dress, with the Order of the Silver Cross and the Salamander on her shoulder, both faultlessly executed. Her dress was of white brocade, and it might have been copied by Worth himself, so she thought, from the gown which she had worn on the night of her memorable and unexpected home-coming. The pasty, formless fingers glittered with immense glass jewels; she wore a tiara of diamonds, and a copy in some cheap and tawdry material of the Rhodopé pearls.

But it was the presentment of the face that most appalled the Princess. The likeness was unmistakable, yet it was the most prodigious parody. She herself was pleasantly furnished with flesh, the waxwork bulged with fatness. Her own black eyes, with their long lashes, became wicked lakes of darkness, her fine-lipped mouth was moulded into evil and monstrous curves. Avarice sat enthroned in her greedy expression and in the clutching hand.

The Princess examined it with scrupulous care, then turned with a petrified face to Leonard, who was wiping his eyes. Every now and then a fresh gust of laughter shook him, and he held his aching ribs for fear they should burst. Sophia watched him a moment with malignity; it seemed yet doubtful whether she would run her parasol through the face of the waxwork, or box his ears; but by degrees the infection of his merriment caught her, and sitting down by him on a crimson-covered ottoman, she gave way to peal after peal of laughter. He had been on the verge of recovery, but they mutually infected one another, and in a few moments were equally lost to all power of speech, and could only point feebly and shakingly, as they shook and rolled on the sofa, at the greedy and clutching figure of the waxwork. A few more people had come into the gallery, and were attracted by this convulsed couple, but, with the supercilious contempt with which the English regard merriment in which they do not share, passed them by. Close at hand, however, sat the figure of the gambling Princess, and one by one they glanced back furtively to the real one on the crimson ottoman. There could be no mistaking, even in the convulsions of her laughter, the prototype of the figure.

Soon Princess Sophia observed this, and with a sudden accession of dignity hurried Leonard off.

‘Let me show you the way to the Chamber of Horrors,’ he said, in a voice vibrating with suppressed laughter, ‘so that you will know where to look for yourself next year.’

They could give but a superficial attention to that temple of classical criminals. Sophia longed to go back to her own figure, which exercised a strange fascination over her. She wanted to see the manager, to have him to dinner, to hail him as the first humorist in Europe. Then she protested that it was monstrous that she should have to pay to see an exhibition in which she herself was so leading an attraction. She was half inclined to demand her money back at the door, had it not been for the treat she had enjoyed in seeing herself as others, or, at any rate, that strict moralist who wrote the account of the figure, saw her. The Monument, the Zoological Gardens, the Underground Railway, even a most remarkable play at one of the West End theatres, where two ignoble gentlemen cut through a pack to see who should marry an heiress, both turning up sevens and then kings, had a touch of bathos after Madame Tussaud’s; and Leonard and Sophia went back there more than once and found the joke remained of that superlative order which is only enhanced by repetition. The Princess, even in her middle life, retained a youthful passion for being amused, but never, so she thought, had she made a better investment in joy than with those shillings she paid to the doorkeeper at the waxwork show.

She remained in England all August and September, and in the third week of that month Leonard went back to Eton. Sophia, who wished to see the place, paid him a visit there, and made herself remarkably popular by securing for the school the promise of an extra week in the next summer holidays, in honour of her visit. In eight weeks Leonard would be easily repaid for his four days’ journey to Rhodopé, and she intended him to come home, for the first time since he went to Eton. Femme propose.

She was to leave England about the middle of October, and a week before she should have started she was back in London again from a round of visits. One morning she found on her breakfast-table a letter with the Eton postmark on it, but not addressed in Leonard’s hand. She opened it without apprehension, and read the following statement in the headmaster’s neat and scholarly handwriting: