Joking apart

by Mrs. Dowdall

The house is like nothing you can ever have seen unless you have been in one of the large provincial towns. It is not a town house nor a country house nor a cottage. It is more as if its father were a seaside hotel, and its mother were a villa, and it took after an aunt who had been a country house. There are two tennis lawns and a croquet lawn fenced round by netting. There are round flower beds and wide borders full of flowers of the sort that gardeners always delight in. I don’t mean the job gardeners that you and I labour under—they wouldn’t allow us to have any beds at all, because flowers “make work.” I mean the experienced and rather huffy gardeners, who are employed by the rich, and who are indifferent to work because they don’t do any. I think that Waring and Gillow must, originally, have supplied the garden as well as the furniture, because the flowers are all in “suites,” and they go so well with the curtains. They look unusually expensive, and as if they wouldn’t have very much smell. The roses, which all belong to the very best families, and are named after baronets’ wives, live apart in a sheltered elegance of their own. The vegetables and the hens amuse themselves as they like behind the garage. The clean and prosperous-looking garage, dividing the vegetables from the flowers, has a funny resemblance to the position of their owner and his place of business in the social scale. In former days there would have been a discreet plantation of shrubs between the stables and the flower garden, between traffic and the retreat of elegance. Now the shrubs are behind the garage, but still in front of the lowest society (the vegetables and the hens). Next year I confidently expect so see a hen lolling with a parasol under every rose bush, and rhubarb flourishing in the window boxes. It will be quite sad for the poor democrats when they have removed the last social barrier. They will have, as it were, to teach the amœba to check the hens and the vegetables.

The garage shelters an any-number-of-horse-power Rolls-Royce, which must not be used too often, and an open car with a canvas hood. This one jolts so much that when we are all in it we grind against one another the whole way, like stones washed about on the beach. The chauffeur hates it, and has blown it up twice, but they always stick it together again to save the Rolls-Royce. I forgot to say that in the West End, so to speak, of the garden there is a hot-house where they keep the huffiest gardener of all. He must not be spoken to except in questions, but if you ask the right kind—not knowing too much, and yet not being at all silly—he gives you three spiky things, one red, one blue, and one yellow, which don’t look nice in a vase, and which you can’t wear.

Every one here is hospitable in a way that exasperates, because it embarrasses me, and I cannot understand why it should. I have often felt this anger with people who are ill at ease in their bodies. Whenever I find them doing some kindly, simple thing, it is as if I had stumbled into their bedrooms when they were having a bath. In the same way I cannot be as friendly as I feel, because they would dislike it as much as if I wore an unconventionally low-cut dress. The man himself is so nervously suspicious of friendliness that he sometimes makes me think of a darling old scarecrow in a field from which all the crops have been gathered long ago. Or can you imagine a Lifeguards-man feeling so shy and indelicate without his full-dress uniform that he insists on wearing a tea-tray strapped to his chest when he is off duty? That is the sort of defensive attitude that Millport people adopt towards their friends.

The children are a little disappointing. They have cracky voices and want too much. They have been brought up by a nurse who is accustomed to every luxury except freedom of opinion, and has, therefore, no repose of manner, and they themselves are in a perpetual state of discontent, looking for El Dorado in their neighbours’ larders. Children have a certain community with animals, which makes it unnatural for them to desire anything that they cannot—by fair means or foul—get for themselves, and although these twins and their brother are still young enough to have some remnants of individual taste, they are rapidly settling down into their parents’ habit of systematic borrowing—borrowed hopes and fears, borrowed likes and dislikes—everything, in fact, except a borrowed husband. I do not want a borrowed husband, but for the life of me I cannot understand why it should be necessary to draw the line there when everything else, from the phrase on our lips to our idea of Divine Revelation, is borrowed from the borrowings of our neighbours.

To-morrow I am going to begin on the first portrait. You will probably say that it is unnecessary to have any sittings at all, as with a grain of imagination it would be easy to paint a portrait that would fit any commercial gentleman. But I am beginning to know something about the species and to recognize differences between them, just as my particular one knows a difference between grains of corn. Of course, in many things there is a certain uniformity between him and others of his kind. His house, for instance, is like the houses of his friends, but that is partly because bad architecture is a sort of head-and-hand disease which breaks out in some architect’s office and spreads rapidly to others. A man gets a bad house in his head, and the design is carried from one town to another until people get used to living in bad houses just as they once got used to being marked with small-pox, and very few of them have the intelligence and the technical knowledge to invent a cure even if they have the time or the money. Naturally, good houses are built sometimes, but their architects are probably in a state of moral health that can only be transmitted by the slower process of breeding. It does not seem to be contagious. I wish that somebody would investigate the pathology of taste.

Neither are my sitter’s habits altogether peculiar to himself, because of the borrowing propensities of his womenkind. He has not the time nor the energy, when he gets home in the evening, to think out what he wants, therefore he exercises his personal taste at the office, and borrows comfortably, like the others, when he is at home. I hope you understand all this stuff about borrowing; I know that we have all got to live on other people, but while it seems suitable to borrow a neighbour’s fowl if we eat it up and it is made into blood and muscle and energy, yet it is merely disgusting to swallow it whole and then treat it as the whale treated Jonah. I have been living lately in drawing-rooms that are strewn with conversational Jonahs.

But there are bits of the man which are quite his own, and these bits he keeps in town. Every day at five o’clock he hangs up his individuality on a nail behind his office door, and when he comes home he slips on an easy suit of tastes provided for him by his wife. What a revolution there would be if he once brought home the creature whom he hangs up at the office! He knows good from bad there; he is not imposed upon by meaningless phrases; he can conceive a fine scheme, and is master of the technical details necessary to its perfection. I believe that his honesty and shrewdness would teach him discrimination in the things which he buys for his house, but the poor man is too tired to fight the battle of honesty both against thieves abroad and against his wife at home, so he gladly accepts any opinions upon unimportant subjects so long as they admit of comfortable arm-chairs and are not too expensive.

Now and then he indulges in one of his natural vices, as, for instance, when he allowed himself to enjoy the over-ripe melons and choir boys of my pictures, although he knew quite well that his wife would rather have commissioned some one equally bad but with a safer reputation. In this case he had enough support from Bessie and her friends to make it possible for him to indulge his taste without appearing absolutely eccentric. So now I think you know why I am here.

He met me himself at the station, with the small car, not the Rolls-Royce. It is about twenty minutes rattle out to Holly Park, where he lives. “Longmoor” is the name of the house. I noticed it on the fragile gatepost as we squeezed and scraped up to the front door, just missing the lobelias. A butler came out, looking exceedingly angry. I have seen inscrutable, wooden servants, and rough, loutish servants, and flighty, silly servants, but I never before saw permanently angry servants, such as they keep in Millport. The creatures are quite good-tempered when you get to know them; the anger is just a trade-mark to show that they are the genuine, old, tawny Millport, and would sooner give a month’s notice than put up with something—I have not yet discovered what! One imagines that a certain amount of abstract indignation is necessary to them in the same way as a parrot requires chillies in its food. It may be difficult to digest “the best families,” unless one is indignant with everybody who differs from them.

There was a tremendous barking when we arrived; a dog barking in just the same tone of voice as the butler looked. I could hear it shrieking: “What’s this? What’s it all about? Who said so? Who has come? What are they for? Don’t let them in! I shall have to hear something first before I can give an opinion!”