Aunt Gerty has been on tour often enough to get used to uncomfortable lodgings, lodgings not chosen by herself, very likely, and her luggage all fetched away the day before she leaves by the baggage man! But it is in a town, and that makes all the difference. Give her a strip of mirror in the door of her wardrobe, and a gas-jet ready to set fire to her window-curtains, and a row of shops outside to cheer her up, and she won’t think of grumbling.
The landlady didn’t consider us a particularly good “let.” I used to hear her in bed in the mornings explaining to Mr. Wilson, who is a railway porter, how glad she would be to be “shot” of us if it wasn’t for the money. “Ay, lass!” he would answer, and then I used to hear him turning over in bed and going to sleep again.
“They’re better to keep a week than a fortnight!” she used to say. “What with their late dinners and breakfasts in bed, and their black coffee, and all sitting down for an hour o’ mornings polishing up them ondacent brown boots—they darsen’t trust the help, no, not since she went and rubbed them with lard—poor girl, she meant well,—and she fit to rive her legs off answering the parlour bell every minute! Well, the sooner I see their backs, the better pleased I shall be!”
We took the hint and gave up the rooms, and got some nicer ones in town on the quay. Aunt Gerty left off bothering Mother to have late dinner and strong coffee, and we lived on herrings and cream cheeses, the cheapest things in Whitby. I mean the herrings. When they have a good catch, they sell them at a halfpenny each on the quay-side, or slap their children with them, or shy them at strangers. Anything to keep the market up!
Mrs. Bennison, our new landlady, isn’t a Whitby woman, but her husband is, and owns a boat, and takes Ben out sailing, and tries to make a man of him. We hardly ever see him, so we know he is happy. Mother and Aunt Gerty sit one on each side of the bow window the greater part of the day, and make blouses, and read at the same time. George would throw their books into the harbour if he caught them in their hands; they are the sort he disapproves of. I won’t say who the authors of these are, as being a literary man’s daughter it might give offence, but they are by women mostly. George vetoes women’s books too, for they are generally bad, and if they are good, they have no business to be.
Just now, George isn’t here to object, he is at Homburg, doing a cure. He always gets brain fag towards the end of the season like his other friends. It seems to me the smartest illness to have, except appendicitis. The moment Goodwood is over, they all troop off to Germany or Switzerland and pay pounds to some doctor who only makes them leave off eating and drinking too much, and go to bed a little before daylight. It is kill and then cure with the smart set, every year. George does what is right and usual—bathes in champagne at Wiesbaden, and drinks the water rotten eggs have been boiled in at Homburg. He does it in good company, to take the taste away. Mr. Aix drew us a picture of George and a Duchess walking up and down a parade, with a glass tube connected with a tumbler, in their mouths, talking about emulating “The Life of the Busy Bee” as they went along.
About the middle of August we heard he had come back to England and was paying his usual round of visits to Barefront, and Baddeley and Fylingdales Tower. Nearly all these places have real battlements and ghosts. Fylingdales Tower is near here. Mother and I and Aunt Gerty joined a cheap trip to it, the other day, and were taken all over the house for a shilling. I don’t even believe The Family was away, but stowed away pro tem. and staring at us through some chink and loathing us. I did manage to persuade Aunt Gerty not to throw away her sandwich paper in the grate of the fire-place of the room where Edward the Third had slept on his way to Alnwick, but kindly keep it till we were got into the Park. But she was very irreverent all the same, and insisted on setting her hat straight in the glass of Queen Elizabeth’s portrait, and that was the only picture she looked at at all. I don’t care for pictures much. I like the house, which is old and grey and bleached, as if it never got a good night’s sleep. Too many spirits to break its rest. I don’t believe in ghosts really, but I often wonder what are the white things one sees? I don’t see so many as I did when I was quite a child. Aunt Gerty shivered and went Brr! She hated it all, she is so very modern. She admitted that she only went with us because she had hoped George might be actually staying there, and would see his own sister-in-law among the trippers and get a nasty jar. Mother is a lady, and knew quite well that he wasn’t there, or else she would not have let Aunt Gerty go, or gone herself, even incog. George had been there recently, though, for the black-satin housekeeper said so, and that she read his books herself when she had time, or a headache. “He’s quite a pet of her ladyship’s,” she told Aunt Gerty, who had spotted one of George’s books on a table and asked questions. She was dying to tell the old thing that we were relations of the great Mr. Vero-Taylor, but dursn’t, for Mother’s eye was on her. Mother looked as pleased as Punch though, and gazed at the chairs (behind plush railings) that her husband had sat on, and at the portrait in Greek dress, by Sir Alma Tadema, of the lady who “made a pet of him.”
George had written from Homburg once or twice to me, and I used to read his letters out to Mother, who naturally wanted to hear his news. She was a little annoyed because he didn’t mention if he was wearing the thicker vests as the weather was getting chilly, and begged me to ask him to be explicit in my next, but I did not, because it might have shamed him in the eyes of his countesses if he left the letter about, as of course he would. George respects the sanctity of private communication so much, that he never tore up a letter in his life; the housemaid collects them when she is doing his room, and brings them to Mother, who hasn’t time to read them, any more than the housemaid has.
The third week in August George wrote to me, and told me to engage him rooms in Fylingdales Crescent on the East Cliff. You might have knocked me down with a feather!
Mother was hurt at George’s having written to me, not her, on such a pure matter of business, until I explained that he merely did it to please the child! One doesn’t mind making oneself out a baby to avoid hurting a mother’s feelings. I don’t know if Mother quite accepted this explanation, but she said no more about it, and told Mr. Aix the good news. He is in lodgings here, to be near us—Aunt Gerty thinks it is to be near her, and he lets her think anything she likes. He looks forward to George’s coming with great interest, and says he will look like some rare exotic on the beach, such as a humming-bird or a gazelle. Aunt Gerty at once got hold of the visitors’ list.