The City of Masks

by George Barr McCutcheon

He had never quite outgrown the temperament which makes for a good and dependable butler,—and that, in a way, accounts for the contention that "it is always something," and also for the excellent credit of the house he headed. Mr. Cricklewick made no effort to deceive himself. He occasionally deceived his wife in a mild and innocuous fashion by secretly reverting to form, but not for an instant did he deceive himself. He was a butler and he always would be a butler, despite the fact that the business and a certain section of the social world looked upon him as a very fine type of English gentleman, with a crest in his shop window and a popularly accepted record of having enjoyed a speaking acquaintance with Edward, the late King of England. Indeed, the late king appears to have enjoyed the same privilege claimed and exercised by the clerks, stenographers and floorwalkers in his employ, although His Majesty had a slight advantage over them in being free to call him "Cricky" to his face instead of behind his back.

Mr. Cricklewick, falling into a snug fortune when he was forty-five and at a time when the Marquis felt it to be necessary to curtail expenses by not only reducing his staff of servants but also the salaries of those who remained, married very nicely into a draper's family, and soon afterward voyaged to America to open and operate a branch of the concern in New York City. His fortune, including the savings of twenty years, amounted to something like thirty thousand pounds, most of which had been accumulated by a sheep-raising brother who had gone to and died in Australia. He put quite a bit of this into the business and became a partner, making himself doubly welcome to a family that had suffered considerably through competition in business and a complete lack of it in respect to the matrimonial possibilities of five fully matured daughters.

Mr. Cricklewick had the further good sense to marry the youngest, prettiest and most ambitious of the quintette, and thereby paved the way for satisfactory though wholly unexpected social achievements in the City of Now York. His wife, with the customary British scorn for Americans, developed snobbish tendencies that rather alarmed Mr. Cricklewick at the outset of his business career in New York, but which ultimately produced the most remarkable results.

Almost before he was safely out of the habit of saying "thank you" when it wasn't at all necessary to say it, his wife had him down at Hot Springs, Virginia, for a month in the fall season, where, because of his exceptionally mellifluous English accent and a stateliness he had never been able to overcome, he was looked upon by certain Anglo-maniacs as a real and unmistakable "toff."

Cricklewick had been brought up in, or on, the very best of society. From his earliest days as third groom in the Camelford ménage to the end of his reign as major-domo, he had been in a position to observe and assimilate the manners of the elect. No one knew better than he how to go about being a gentleman. He had had his lessons, not to say examples, from the first gentlemen of England. Having been brought up on dukes and earls,—and all that sort of thing,—to say nothing of quite a majority in the House of Lords, he was in a fair way of knowing "what's what," to use his own far from original expression.

You couldn't fool Cricklewick to save your life. The instant he looked upon you he could put you where you belonged, and, so far as he was concerned, that was where you would have to stay.

It is doubtful if there was ever a more discerning, more discriminating butler in all England. It was his rather astonishing contention that one could be quite at one's ease with dukes and duchesses and absolutely ill-at-ease with ordinary people. That was his way of making the distinction. It wasn't possible to be on terms of intimacy with the people who didn't belong. They never seemed to know their place.

The next thing he knew, after the Hot Springs visit, his name began to appear in the newspapers in columns next to advertising matter instead of the other way round. Up to this time it had been a struggle to get it in next to reading matter on account of the exorbitant rates demanded by the newspapers.

He protested to his wife. "Oh, I say, my dear, this is cutting it a bit thick, you know. You can't really be in earnest about it. I shouldn't know how to act sitting down at a dinner table like that, you know. I am informed that these people are regarded as real swells over 'ere,—here, I should say. You must sit down and drop 'em a line saying we can't come. Say we've suddenly been called out of town, or had bad news from home, or—"

"Rubbish! It will do them no end of good to see how you act at table. Haven't you had the very best of training? All you have to do—"