University Square, Millport.
My dear Louise,—I am still hard at it and shall probably be here for ages. No more of the Merchants’ children got measles, and he is so pleased with his portrait that I am to begin on his wife’s when I go back to Longmoor to-morrow. I have so enjoyed being with the Cambridges, and shall miss the peace of being able to Be or not to Be, as I like, without complications. I once read a medical book called, “My System of Elimination,” and it seemed to me the simplest possible cure for all evils. If any one would eliminate from the recollections of the Millport belles everything that they have seen without seeing and heard without understanding they would be so nice; really nice dears. But it makes them so fussy and nervous to masquerade as delicately bred, and intuitive, and things of that sort, when they are bound to be found out by even the most weevily specimens of the real article.
I have been helping Mrs. Cambridge to sell at a bazaar, where the special form of masquerade practised was “smart setting.” I do wish you could have seen Mrs. Bushytail being a duchess; the kind of duchess that you get in newspaper feuilletons and cheap Sunday stories—stout, short-sighted, crisp, impertinent, and great friends with the well-bred young girl who is not afraid of her.
Each of the stalls was presided over by a peeress of some sort, and “with her,” as the bazaar notices said, were two or three of the fattest flowers of Millport. They were all as nervous as lambs at Easter. Even Mrs. County’s beautiful pale face was hot, and her dress looked tight, although it was one of the new, very sloppy kind. Her particular Marchioness had on a dress of just the same shape, and it looked as if she had been to bed in it for years and yet had managed to keep it quite fresh, because she was so self-possessed that none of her ever came through her skin. Mrs. County’s garment was equally loose, but it looked about as convincing as a Greek dress does on a school-mistress in three pairs of combinations and a lamb’s-wool bodice. Mrs. County never gets flurried like this except when she is masquerading—well—like the dickens.
Mrs. Bushytail’s stall belonged to a duchess who didn’t turn up; so although for some hours Mrs. Bushytail, like good dog Tray, grew very red, and would have growled and bit her till she bled, had she happened on the duchess just then, yet, when the first shock was over, she began, like a sensible woman, to count her blessings. She soon discovered several. One was that she would be able to run the stall as she liked, and bully every one else as the duchess might have bullied her. Another substantial blessing was that strangers coming round to the stall would probably mistake her for the duchess. It must have been after the discovery of this second blessing that I caught her pretending to be short-sighted and peering at people in a supercilious way. Her expression suddenly reminded me of a cook we once had who was not quite sober, and that finished it! I had to go back to my stall and hiccup in lonely pleasure, for I did not dare to show Mrs. Cambridge; she exaggerates sometimes.
We were one of thirteen stalls who were all selling what you might class together under the head of “mats.” Mats (by which I mean embroidery on things that are not of much use to anybody) are the special industry which the bazaar was laying itself out to promote. They are made by the natives of some island in the Archipelago where Mrs. County’s boss-marchioness’s husband has some land; she says that the natives are very poor, and that she is going to try and get our Government to do something for them. The bazaar was to help to make the industry known. One of the other three stalls sold native tobacco, one Home Produce (that is, all sorts of eatables and uneatables), and the third sold books about the Industry. The boss-marchioness got some one to go out to the islands and paint pictures of the country, and her husband is building a big hotel there, and is going to run it himself. It will be a sort of paying house-party, with golf and mixed bathing and gambling, and all sorts of games, and cost a good deal to go to. You can imagine the whole gang exploiting the ladies of Millport. If you had only seen Mrs. Bushytail sitting so happily in her trap, shelling out pounds and pounds for the privilege of looking short-sighted and de haut en bas! Her three daughters—really nice girls of eighteen to twenty-five—were there, taking it all as innocently as puppies take it when their mother does tricks for a piece of cake. Mrs. Merchant, as good as gold, had another stall of mats, and I helped between her and Mrs. Cambridge. Our marchioness (I forget who she was) didn’t turn up either; and Mrs. Merchant had Lady Lacey, who is a Quaker and wouldn’t hurt a fly, so none of us had to pretend to be tired, or deaf, or immoral, or any of the things that Mrs. County and the others were playing at.
I think that the natives would have been amused if they had seen who bought their things, and why. Of course the Millport ladies are very, very kind; you must never lose sight of that for a moment. They have all—or most of them, at any rate—“come through” a good lot themselves in the way of ordinary domestic care. They live nearer to the workings of their houses than one would suppose from their wealth. They keep comparatively few servants, and those they have stand in a very human relation to their masters. The angry butlers and huffy parlour-maids, who are so confident about what is “done in the best houses,” are often quite as devoted as any aged Highland retainer to be found in literature. This means that the Bushytails and Countys, if they would only leave off being so absurd, have lots of stuffing in them. It is the nonsense on the top of the stuffing that makes Mrs. Bushytail look so tight. I have wandered off from what I meant to say, which was that they have great sympathy with any form of work, and they were really much keener about the natives than were most of the marchionesses, who, on the whole, looked as if all they asked was to be taken “back to Dixie” and their illicit unions. Most likely they are all as virtuous as Penelope, and the loose-living, passionate doll expression that they all have is as much a pose with them as it is with Mrs. County when she imitates it. I have seen really good young girls do it right up to a tennis-net, until they became busy and forgot.
We all did a roaring trade. Mrs. Cambridge made up for her lack of a marchioness by her own talent for making people do what she wants. You know the sort of old wretches who haunt bazaars? I do not know whether the number of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised, or whether they are more nuisance than they are financially worth. It is certain that they don’t spend much individually. But then a horde of locusts lay a field bare very quickly; so, owing to their numbers, they may be valuable, though I have grave doubts. Anyhow, you know them, don’t you? With long lines down the sides of their mouths, and snuffy green coats and skirts, and hats like one’s morning tea-tray, with one cup, a little jug, and some bread-and-butter on it. Mrs. Cambridge catches them with her eye, and then begins to arrange the most offensive things on her stall. The prey she intends to catch always loves any appliances for discomfort: cosies to make the good tea strong and bitter and horrible; or useless objects with a picture of a detestable cock making noises to wake every one up; or garments—but we can’t go into that. These old ladies make me shiver and feel grey, like an eclipse of the sun does; and I remember all sorts of depressing things, such as hair in brushes. They seem to bring these suggestions with them, and to be searching for horrors. They are the scavengers of every bazaar, and are really a very morbid class, I believe.
Myself I can do nothing with them, but Mrs. Cambridge is as impervious to sentiment as they are, and equally obstinate; and having her mental powers in more efficient order than theirs, she generally gets rid of more than they intended to buy—and they have to be nice about it, too, or they don’t get the things.
I enjoyed seeing Lady Claneustrigge, at the next stall, in the grip of one of these scavengers. The wretch had been to us for toast-warmers (I think she called them), and we had not got any.