Mrs Albert Grundy—Observations in Philistia

“I remember that there has been talk about it,” I said; “but hardly that the talk was mine. Truth is, I don’t know a single Academician, even by sight.”

It was clear that they did not believe me. Mrs Albert continued: “Lady Wallaby expressed surprise, only last evening, that we should consent to go about among the outsiders. She and her daughter never do.”

“Outsiders!” I was tempted into saying. “Why, they can paint the head off the Academy!”

Miss Timby-Hucks simpered outright. “You do say such droll things!” she remarked, somewhat obscurely. “Mamma always declares that you remind her of the Sydney Bulletin.”

“Whom do you take to the Academy Show Sunday? – or perhaps I oughtn’t to ask,” came from Ermyntrude.

“No, we have no right to inquire,” said Mrs Albert; and I turned to the window and the enshrouded lawn once more.

All at once the fog lifted. The bonnets were produced again. Nearly three hours of daylight remained to us. Tidings that the horse was too lame to be taken out only staggered Mrs Albert for the briefest fraction of time. There were still four-wheelers in Gilead. Besides, if the driver happened to be sober, he would know the streets so much better than their stupid coachman. This would be of advantage, because time was so limited. We should have to just run in, say “How-d’ye-do,” take a flying look round, and scamper out again, Mrs Albert said. By firmly adhering to this rule, she estimated that we might do sixteen or seventeen studios.

Heaven alone knows how many we did “do.” Nor have I any clear recollections of what we saw. A confused vision remains to me of long hall-ways lined with frames and packing-cases; half-an-acre, more or less, of painted canvas, out of which only here and there a pair of bright eyes, a glowing field of poppies, or the sheen from a satin gown, fixed itself disconnectedly on the memory; hordes and hordes of tall young women helping themselves to tea and cakes; and always the pathetic figure of the artist’s wife, or sister, tired to very death, standing by the door with a wearied smile on her lips, and the polite falsehood, “So good of you to come!” on her tongue. I wondered, I remember, if she never forgot herself and said instead, “So kind of you to go!” But under Mrs Albert’s system there was no time to wait and see.

Once, indeed, we dallied over our task. Mrs Albert encountered a lady from Wormwood Scrubs of her acquaintance, who was indiscreet enough to mention that she had been asked to stop here for supper. The news spread through the petticoated portion of my group as by magic. Miss Timby-Hucks came over and asked me, so audibly that the artist-host had to blush and turn away, if I didn’t think it would be a deliciously romantic experience to sup in one of these lofty studios, with the gaslight on the armour, and the great, solemnly silent pictures looking down upon us as we ate. Mrs Albert lingered for some time looking at this artist’s work with her head on one side, and eyes filled with rapt, dreamy enjoyment – but nothing came of it.

It was after we had been back in Fern-bank for an hour or more – our own cold repast nearly over – that Mrs Albert thought of something. She laid down her fork with a gesture of annoyance. “It has just occurred to me,” she said; “we never went to that Mr Whistler’s, whose pictures are on exhibition in Bond Street. Everybody’s talking about him, and I did so want not to miss his studio.”

“I don’t think he has a Show Sunday,” I said. “I never heard of it, if he has.”

“O no, it is only these last few weeks that anybody has heard of him,”

Mrs Albert replied. “I read the first announcement about his beautiful pictures in The Daily Tarradiddle only the other day.”

“Whistler? Whistler?” put in Uncle Dudley. “Why, surely he’s not new. Why – I remember – he was mixed up in a law-suit, wasn’t it, years ago?”

“O no, Dudley,” responded Mrs Albert; “I was under that same impression, till Lady Wallaby set me right. It seems that was another man altogether – some foreign adventurer who pretended to be able to paint and imposed upon people – don’t you recall how The Tarradiddle exposed him? – and Mr Burnt-Jones had him arrested, or something – O, quite a dreadful person. But this Mr Whistler is an Englishman. I read in The Illustrated London News that he represented modern British Art. That alone would make it quite clear it was a different man. I did so want to see him! Lady-Wallaby tells me she has heard he is extremely amusing in his conversation – and quite presentable manners, too.”

“Why don’t you ask him to dinner?” said Mr Albert Grundy. “If he’s amusing it’s more than most of the men you drum up are.”

“You seem to think everybody can be asked to dinner, Albert,” the lady of the house replied. “Artists don’t dine – unless they are in the Academy, of course. Tea, yes – or perhaps supper; but one doesn’t ask people to meet them at dinner. It’s like actors – and – and non-commissioned officers.”

Affording a Novel and Subdued Scientific Light, by which divers Venerable Problems may be Observed Afresh

It is my opinion,” said Uncle Dudley, stretching out his slippered feet, and thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat – “it is my opinion that women are different from men.”

“Several commentators have advanced this view,” I replied. “For example, it has been noted that the gentle sex cross a muddy street on their heels, whereas we skip over on our toes.”

“That is interesting if true,” responded Uncle Dudley. “What I mean is that all this talk about the human race is humbug. There are two human races! And they are getting wider apart every few minutes, too!”

“Have you mentioned this to any one?” I asked.

Uncle Dudley went on developing his theme. “I daresay that for millions of years after the re-separation of the sexes this difference was too slight to be noticed at all. The cave man, for instance – the fellow who went around hunting the Ichthyosaurus with a brick tied on the end of an elm club, and spent the whole winter underground sucking the old bones, and then whittling them up into Runic buttons for the South Kensington Museum: I suppose, now, that his wife and sister-in-law, say, didn’t strike him as being specially different from himself – except, of course, in that they only got plain bones and gristle and so on to eat, whereas all the marrow and general smooth-sailing in meats went his way. You, can’t imagine him saying to himself: ‘These female people here are not of my race at all They are of another species. They are in reality as much my natural enemies as that long-toed, red-headed, brachycephalous tramp living in the gum-tree down by the swamp, who makes offensive gestures as I ride past on my tame Ursus spelous’ – now, can you?”

I frankly shook my head. “No, I don’t seem to be able to imagine that. It would be almost as hard as to guess off-hand where, when, and how you caught this remarkable scientific spasm.”

Uncle Dudley smiled. He rose, and walked with leisurely lightness up and down in front of the chimney-piece, still with his palms spread like little misplaced wings before his armpits. He smiled again. Then he stopped on the hearth-rug and looked down amiably upon me.

“Well – what d’ye think? There’s something in it, eh?”

“My dear fellow,” I began, “what puzzles me is – ”

“O, I don’t mean to say that I’ve worked it all out,” put in Uncle Dudley, reassuringly. “Why, I get puzzled myself, every once in a while. But I’m on the right track, my boy; and, as they say in Adelaide, I’m going to hang to it like a pup to a root.”

“How long have you been this way?” I asked, with an affectation of sympathy.

Uncle Dudley answered with shining eyes. “Why, if you’ll believe me, it seems now as if I’d had the germs of the idea in my mind ever since I came back to England, and began living here at Fernbank. But the thing dawned upon me – that is to say, took shape in my head – less than a fortnight ago. It all came about through being up here one evening with nothing to read, and my toe worse than usual, and Mrs Albert having been out of sorts all through dinner. Somehow, I felt all at once that I’d got to read scientific works. I couldn’t resist it. I was like Joan of Arc when the cows and sheep took partners for a quadrille. I heard voices – Darwin’s and – and – Benjamin Franklin’s – and – lots of others. I hobbled downstairs to the library, and I brought up a whole armful of the books that Mrs Albert bought when she expected Lady Wallaby was going to be able to get her an invitation to attend the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn’s Biological Conversaziones. Look there! What do you say to that for ten days’ work? And had to cut every leaf, into the bargain!”

I gazed with respect at the considerable row of books he indicated: books for the most part bound in the scarlet of the International Series or the maroon of Contemporary Science, but containing also brown covers, and even green “sport” varieties.

“Well, and what is it all about?” I asked. “Why have you read these things? Why not the reports of the Commission on Agricultural Depression, or Lewis Morris’s poems, or even – ” but my imagination faltered and broke.

“It was instinct, my boy,” returned Uncle Dudley, with impressive confidence. “There had been a thought – a great idea – growing and swelling in my head ever since I had been living in this house. But I couldn’t tell what it was. As you might say, it was wrapped up in a cocoon, like the larvæ of the lepidoptera – ahem! – and something was needed to bring it out.”

“When I was here last you were trying Hollands with quinine bitters,” I remarked casually.

“Don’t fool!” Uncle Dudley admonished me. “I’m dead in earnest. As I said, it was pure instinct that led me to these books. They have made everything clear. I only wanted their help to get the husk off my discovery, and hoist it on my back, us it were, and bring it out here in the daylight. And so now you know what I’m getting at when I say: Women are different from Men.”

“That is the discovery, then?” I inquired.

Uncle Dudley nodded several times. Then he went on, with emphasised slowness: “I have lived here now for four years, seeing my sister-in-law every day, watching Ermyntrude grow up to womanhood and the little girls peg along behind her, and meeting the female friends who come here to see them – and, sir, I tell you, they’re not alone a different sex: they’re a different animal altogether! Take my word for it, they’re a species by themselves.”

“Miss Timby-Hucks is certainly very much by herself,” I remarked.

My friend smiled. “And not altogether her own fault either,” he commented. “But, speaking of science, it’s remarkable how, when you once get a firm grip on a big, central, main-guy fact, all the little facts come in of their own accord to support it. Now, there’s that young simpleton you met here at dinner a while ago: I mean Eustace Hump. Do you know that both Ermyntrude and the Timby-Hucks, and even Miss Wallaby, think that that chap is a perfect ideal of masculine wit and beauty? You and I would hesitate about using him to wad a horse-pistol with: but there isn’t one of those girls that wouldn’t leap with joy if he began proposing to her; and as for their mothers, why, the old ladies watch him as a kingfisher eyes a tadpole.”

“Your similes are exciting,” I said; “but what do they go to show?”

“My dear fellow, science can show anything. I haven’t gone all through it yet, but I tell you, it’s wonderful! Take this, for instance” – he reached for a green book on the mantel, and turned over the leaves – “now listen to this. The book is written by a man named Wallace – nice, shrewd-looking old party by his picture, you can see – and this is what he says on page 285: ‘Some peahens preferred an old pied peacock; a Canada goose paired with a Bernicle gander; a male widgeon was preferred by a pintail duck to its own species; a hen canary preferred a male greenfinch to either linnet, goldfinch, siskin, or chaffinch.’ Now, do you see that? The moment my eyes first lighted on that, I said to myself: ‘Now I understand about the girls and Eustace Hump.’ Isn’t it clear to you?”

“Absolutely,” I assented. “You ought to read a paper at the Royal Aquarium – before the Balloon Society, I mean.”

“And then look at this,” Uncle Dudley went on, with animation. “Now, you and I would ask ourselves what on earth such a gawky, spindling, poor-witted youngster as that thought he was doing among women, anyhow. But you turn over the page, and here you have it: ‘Goat-suckers, geese, carrion vultures, and many other birds of plain plumage have been observed to dance, spread their wings or tails, and perform strange love-antics.’ Doesn’t that fasten Hump to the wall like a beetle on a pin, eh?”

“But I am not sure that I entirely follow its application to your original point,” I suggested.

“About women, you mean? My boy, in science everything applies. The woods are full of applications. But seriously, women are different. As I said, in the barbarism at the back of beyond this divergence started. With the beginning of what we call civilisation, it became more and more marked. The progress of the separation increases nowadays by square-root – or whatever you call it. The sexes are wider apart to-day than ever. They like each other less; they quarrel more. You can see that in the Divorce Courts, in the diminished proportion of early marriages, in the increasing evidences of domestic infelicity all about one.”

I could not refrain from expressing the fear that all this boded ill for the perpetuity of the human race.

Uncle Dudley is a light-hearted man. He was not depressed by the apprehensions to which I had given utterance. Instead he hummed pleasantly to himself as he put Wallace back on the shelf. He began chuckling as a moment later he bethought himself to fill our glasses afresh.

“Did I ever tell you my cat story?” he asked cheerily, testing the knob to see that the door was shut. “Once a little boy came in to his father and said: ‘Pa, we won’t be troubled any more with those cats howling about on our roof at night. I’ve just been looking out of the upstairs window, and they’re all out there fighting and screaming and tearing each other to pieces. There won’t be one of them alive by morning!’ Then the father replied: ‘My son, you imagine a vain thing. When increasing years shall have furnished your mind with a more copious store of knowledge, you will grasp the fact that all this commotion and dire disturbance which you report to me only signifies more cats.’”

At this juncture the servant came in with the soda-water. We talked no more of science that evening.

Touching the Experimental Graft of a Utilitarian Spirit upon the Aesthetic Instinct in our Sisters

I HAD strolled about the galleries of Burlington House for a couple of hours on Press Day, looking a little at pictures here and there, but for the most part contemplating with admiration the zeal and good faith of the ladies and gentlemen who stopped, note-book in hand, before every frame: when some one behind me gave a friendly tug at my sleeve. I turned, to find myself confronted by a person I seemed not to know – a small young woman in an alpine hat and a veil which masked everything about her face except its dentigerous smile. Even as I looked I was conscious of regret that, if acquaintances were to be made for me in this spontaneous fashion, destiny had not selected instead a certain tall, slender, dark young lady, clad all in black and cock’s-plumes, whom I had been watching at her work of notetaking in room after room, with growing interest. Then, peering more closely through the veil, I discovered that I was being accosted by Miss Timby-Hucks.

“You didn’t know me!” she said, with a vivacious half-giggle, as we shook hands; “and you’re not specially pleased to see me; and you’re asking yourself, ‘What on earth is she doing here?’ Now, don’t deny it!”

“Well, you know,” I made awkward response – “of course —Press day – ”

“Ah, but I belong to the Press,” said Miss Timby-Hucks.

“Happy Press! And since when?”

“O it’s nearly a fortnight now. And most interesting I find the work. You know, for a long time now I’ve been so restless, so anxious to find some opening to a real career, where I might be my genuine self, and be an active part of the great whirling stream of existence, and concentrate my mind upon the actualities of life – don’t you yourself think it will be just the thing for me?”

“Undoubtedly,” I replied without hesitation. “And do you find focussing yourself on the actualities – ah – remunerative?”

“Well,” Miss Timby-Hucks explained, “nothing of mine has been printed yet, you see, so that I don’t know as to that. But I am assured it will be all right. You see, I’m very intimate with a cousin of Mrs Umpelbaum, who is the wife of the proprietor of Maida Vale, and in that way it came about. Lady-reporters never have any chance, I am told, unless they have friends in the proprietor’s family, or know the editor extremely well. It all goes by favour, like – like – ”

“Like the dearest of all the actualities,” I put in. “But how is it they don’t print your stuff?”

“I haven’t written any, as yet. The difficulty was to find a subject,” Miss Timby-Hucks rejoined. “O that awful ‘subject’! I thought and thought and thought till my head was fit to burst. I went to see Mrs Umpelbaum herself, and asked her to suggest something. You know she writes a great deal for the paper herself. She said they hadn’t had any ‘Reminiscences of Carlyle’ now for some weeks; but afterwards she agreed with me that would not be quite the thing for one to begin with. She couldn’t suggest anything else, except that I should have a chat with my dressmaker. Very often in that way, she said, lady-reporters get the most entertaining revelations of gossip in high life. But it happened that just then it was not – not exactly convenient – for me to call upon my dressmaker; and so that suggestion came to nothing, too.”

“I had no idea lady-journalism was so difficult,” I remarked, with sympathy.

“O indeed, yes!” Miss Timby-Hucks went on. “One can’t expect to be en rapport, as we journalists say, with Society, without spending a great deal of money. There is one lady-reporter, Mrs Umpelbaum told me, who has made quite a leading position for herself, solely through hairdressers and American dentists. But I don’t mind admitting that that would involve more of an outlay than I could afford, just at the moment.”

“So you never got a subject?” I asked.

“Yes; finally I did. I was over at the Grundys’, telling my troubles, and Uncle Dudley – you know, being so much with the girls, I always call him that – Uncle Dudley said that the fashionable thing now was interviews, and that lady-journalists did this better than gentlemen-reporters because they had more nerve. By that I suppose he meant a more delicate nervous organisation, quicker to grasp and absorb fine shades of character. But that hardly helped me, because whom was I to interview, and about what? That was the question! But Uncle Dudley thought a moment, and was ready with a suggestion. Everything depended, he said, upon making a right start. I must pick out a personality and a theme at once non-contentious and invested with popular interest His idea was that I should begin by interviewing Mr T. M. Healy on ‘The Decline of the Deep-Sea Mock-Turtle Fisheries on the West Coast of Ireland.’ If I could get Mr Healy to talk frankly on this subject, he felt sure that I should chain public attention at a bound.”

“Superb!” I cried. “And did you do it?”

“No,” Miss Timby-Hucks confessed; “I went to the House and sent in my card, but it was another Irish Member who came out to see me – I think his name was Mulhooly. He was very polite, and explained that since some recent sad event in one of the Committee Rooms, fifteen I think its number was, it was the rule of his party that, when a lady sent in a card to one Member, some other Member answered it. It prevented confusion, he said, and was not in antagonism to the expressed views of the Church.”

“Talking of nothing,” I said, leading the way over to a divan, on which we seated ourselves: “you seem to have finally secured a subject. I assume you are doing the Academy for Maida Vale.”

“Yes,” replied Miss Timby-Hucks with gentle firmness; “you might say I have done it. I have been here since the very minute the doors opened, and I’ve gone twelve times round. I wish I could have seen you earlier. I should so like to have had your opinion of the various works as we passed.”

“It is better not,” I commented. “There are ladies present.”

The lady-reporter looked at me for a furtive instant dubiously. Then she smiled a little under her veil. “You do say such odd things!” she remarked. “I am glad to see that a great many ladies are present. It shows how we are securing our proper recognition in journalism. I believe there are actually more of us here than there are gentlemen-reporters – I should say gentle-men-critics. And it is the same in art, too. You can see – I’ve counted them up in my catalogue here – there are this year two hundred and forty-four lady-artists exhibiting in this Academy three hundred and forty-six works of art. Think of that! Fifty of them are described as Mrs, and there are one hundred and ninety-four who are unmarried.”

“Think of that!” I retorted.

“And there are among them,” Miss Timby-Hucks went on, “one Marchioness, one Countess, one Baroness, and one plain Lady. I am going to begin my article with this. I think it will be interesting, don’t you?”

“I’d be careful not to particularise about the plain Lady,” I suggested. “That might be too interesting.”

She was over-full of her subject to smile. “No, I mean,” she said, “as showing how the ranks of British Art are being filled from the very highest classes, and are appealing more and more to the female intellect. I don’t believe it will occur to any one else to count up in the catalogue. So that will be original with me – to enlighten my sex as to the glorious part they play in this year’s Academy.”

“But have you seen their pictures?” I asked, repressing an involuntary groan.

“Every one!” replied Miss Timby-Hucks. “They are all good. There isn’t what I should call a bad one – that is, a Frenchy or immoral one – among them. I shall say that, too, in my criticism; but of course I shall have to word it carefully, because I fancy Mr Umpelbaum is a foreigner of some sort – and you know they’re all so sensitive about the superiority of British Art.”

“It is their nature; they can’t help it,” I pointed out. “They try their best, however, to master these unworthy emotions. Sometimes, indeed, their dissimulation reaches a really high plane of endeavour.”

“They have nothing at all on the Continent like our Royal Academy, I am told,” said Miss Timby-Hucks. “That isn’t generally known, is it? I had thought of saying it.”

“It will be a safe statement,” I assured her. “You might go further, and assert that no other country at any stage of its history has had anything like the Royal Academy. It is the unique blossom of British civilisation.”

Miss Timby-Hucks seemed to like the phrase, and made a note of it on the back of her catalogue. “Yes,” she continued, “I thought of making my criticism general, dealing with things like that. But I’ve got some awfully interesting figures to put in. For example, there are sixty-eight Academicians and Associates exhibiting: they have one hundred and thirty-five oil paintings, sixteen water-colour or black-and-white drawings, eight architectural designs, and twenty-three pieces of sculpture – a total of one hundred and eighty-two works of art, or two and sixty-seven hundredths each. I got at that by dividing the total number of works by the total number of Academicians. Do you think any one else will be likely to print that first in a daily paper? Mrs Umpelbaum told me that Maida Vale made a special point of new facts. I don’t think I shall say much about the pictures themselves. What is there to say about pictures by the Academicians? As I told mamma this morning, they wouldn’t be Academicians if they didn’t paint good pictures, would they? and good pictures speak for themselves. Of course, I shall describe the subjects of Sir Frederic’s pictures – by the way, what is a Hesperides? – and some of the others: I’ll get you to pick out for me a few leading names. But I shall make my main point the splendid advance of lady-artists – I heard some one say in the other room there’d never been half so many before – and the elevating effect this has upon British Art. In fact, mightn’t I say that is what makes British Art what it is to-day?”