Mrs Albert Grundy—Observations in Philistia

Now that I look again at the goddess in the pale-brown gown, these unlabelled faces of the flitting hansoms seem by comparison those of familiar companions and intimates.

I get no sense of human communion from that serene and regular countenance, with its exquisite nose, its short upper-lip and glint of pearls along the bowed line of the mouth, its correctly arched brows and wide-open, impassive blue eyes. I can see it with prophetic admiration out-queening all the others at Henley, or at Goodwood, or on the great staircase of Buckingham Palace. I can imagine it at Monte Carlo, flushed a little at the sight of retreating gold; or at the head of a great noble’s table, coldly poised above satin throat and shoulders, and stirring no muscle under the free whisperings of His Excellency to the right. I can conceive it in the Divorce Court, bearing with metallic equanimity the rude scrutiny of a thousand unlicensed eyes. But my fancy wavers and fails at the task of picturing that face at my own fireside, with the light of the home-hearth painting the fulness of her rounded chin, and reflecting back from her glance, as we talk of men and books and things, the frank gladness of real comradeship.

But – tchut! – I have no fireside, and the comrades I like best are playing halfcrown whist at the club; and these are all nice girls – hearty, healthful, handsome girls, who can walk, run, dance, swim, scull, skate, ride as no others have known or dared to do since the glacial wave of Christianity depopulated the glades and dells of Olympus. They will mate after their kind, and in its own good time along will come a new generation of straight, strong-limbed, thin-lipped, pink-and-white girls, and of tow-headed, deep-chested lads, their brothers – boys who will bully their way through Rugby and Harrow, misspell and misapprehend their way into the Army, the Navy, and the Civil Service, and spread themselves over the habitable globe, to rule, through sheer inability to understand, such Baboos and Matabele and mere Irishry as Imperial destiny delivers over to them.

The vision is not wholly joyous, as it with diffidence projects itself beyond, into that further space where new strange other generations walk – the girls still taller and more coldly tubbed, the boys astride a yet more temerarious saddle of dull dominion. Reluctant prophecy discerns beneath their considerable feet the bruised fragments of many antique trifles – the bric-à-brac of an extinct sentimental fraction that had a sense of humour and could spell – and, to please mamma, the fig-leaves have quite overspread and hidden the statues in their garden. But power is there, and empire; they still more serenely loom above the little foreign folks who cook, and sing to harps and fiddles, and paint for their amusement; such as it is under their shaping, they possess the earth.

So, as the sun goes down in the Hammersmith heavens, I take off my hat, and salute the potential mothers of the New Rome.

Glancing at some Modern Aspects of Master John Gutenberg’s ingenious but Over-rated Invention

It was very pleasant thus to meet Uncle Dudley in the Strand. Only here and there is one who can bear that test. Whole legions of our friends, decent and deeply reputable people, fall altogether out of the picture, so to speak, on this ancient yet robust thoroughfare. They do very well indeed in Chelsea or Highgate or the Pembridge country, where they are at home: there the surroundings fit them to a nicety; there they produce upon one only amiable, or at the least, natural, impressions. But to encounter them in the Strand is to be shocked by the blank incongruity of things. It is not alone that they give the effect of being lost – of wandering helplessly in unfamiliar places. They offend your perceptions by revealing limitations and shortcomings which might otherwise have been hidden to the end of time. You see suddenly that they are not such good fellows, after all. Their spiritual complexions are made up for the dim light which pervades the outskirts of the four-mile radius – and go to pieces in the jocund radiance of the Strand. It is flat presumption on their part to be ambling about where the ghosts of Goldsmith and Johnson walk, where Prior and Fielding and our Dick Steele have passed. Instinctively you go by, looking the other way.

It was quite different with Uncle Dudley. You saw at once that he belonged to the Strand, as wholly as any of our scorned and scornful sisters on its comers, competing with true insular doggedness against German cheeks and raddled accents; as fully as any of its indigenous loafers, hereditary in their riverside haunts from Tudor times, with their sophisticated joy in drink and dirt, their large self-confidence grinning through rags and sooty grime. It seemed as if I had always associated Uncle Dudley with the Strand.

He was standing in contemplation before a brave window, wherein American cheese, Danish butter, Norwegian fish, Belgian eggs, German sausages, Hungarian bacon, French vegetables, Australian apples, and Algerian fruits celebrate the catholicity of the modern British diet. He turned when I touched his shoulder, and drew my arm through his.

“Sir,” said Uncle Dudley, “let us take a walk along the Strand to the Law Courts, where I conceive that the tide of human existence gets the worst of it with unequalled regularity and dispatch.”

On his way he told me that his gout had quite vanished, owing to his foresight in collecting a large store of the best medical advice, and then thoughtfully and with pains disregarding it all. He demonstrated to me at two halting places that his convalescence was compatible with rich and strong drinks. He disclosed to me, as we sauntered eastward, his purpose in straying thus far afield.

“You know Mrs Albert is really a kindly soul,” he said. “It isn’t in her to keep angry. You remember how sternly she swore that she and Fernbank had seen the last of Miss Timby-Hucks. It only lasted five weeks – and now, bless me if the girl isn’t more at home on our backs than ever. She’s shunted herself off, now, into a new branch of journalism – it seems that there are a good many branches in these days.”

“It has been noticed,” I assented.

“She doesn’t write any more,” he explained, “that is, for the papers. She goes instead to the Museum or somewhere, and reads carefully every daily and weekly journal, I believe, in England. Her business is to pick out possible libels in them – and to furnish her employers, a certain firm of solicitors, with a daily list of these. They communicate with the aggrieved people, notifying them that they are aggrieved, which they very likely would not otherwise have known, and the result is, of course, a very fine and spirited crop of litigation.”

“Then that accounts for all the recent – ”

“Perhaps not quite all,” put in Uncle Dudley. “But the Timby-Hucks is both energetic and vigilant, and she tells me she is doing splendidly. She is very enthusiastic about it, naturally. She says that while the money is, of course, an object, her real satisfaction is in the humanitarian aspects of her work.”

“I am not sure that I follow,” I said doubtingly.

“No, I didn’t altogether myself at the start,” said Uncle Dudley, “but as she explains it, it is very simple. You see business is in a bad way in London – worse, they say, than usual. The number of unemployed is something dreadful to think of, so I am told by those who have thought of it. There are many thousands of people with no food, no fire, no clothes to speak of. Most people are discouraged about this. They can’t see how the thing can be improved. But Miss Timby-Hucks has a very ingenious idea. Why, she asks, do not all the Unemployed sue all the newspapers for libel? Do you catch the notion?”

“By George!” I exclaimed, “that is a bold, comprehensive thought!”

“Yes, isn’t it?” cried Uncle Dudley. “I am immensely attracted by it. For one thing, it is so secure, so certain! Broadly speaking, there are no risks at all. I suppose there has never yet been a case, no matter what its so-called merits, in which the English newspaper hasn’t been cast in damages of some sort Nobody is too humble or too shady to get a verdict against an editor or newspaper proprietor. Miss Timby-Hucks relates several most touching instances where the wolf was actually at the door, the children shoeless and hungry, the mother prostrated by drink, rain coming through the roof and so on – and everything has been changed to peace and contentment by the happy thought of bringing a libel suit. The father now wears a smile and a white waistcoat; the drains have been repaired; the little children, nicely washed and combed, kick each other’s shins with brand new boots, and sing cheerfully beneath a worsted-work motto of ‘God bless our Home!’ I find myself much affected by the thought.”

“You had always a tender heart,” I responded. “I suppose there would be no trouble about the Judges?”

“Not the least in the world,” said Uncle Dudley, with confidence. “Of course the Bench would have to be greatly enlarged, but there need be no fear on that score. There is a mysterious but beneficent rule, my boy, which you can always count upon in this making of judges – no matter how hail-fellow-well-met an eminent lawyer may be, no matter how intimate his connection with newspapers, how large his indebtedness to them for his career – the moment he gets on the Bench he catches the full, fine, old-crusted judicial spirit toward the Press. The scales fall with a bang from his eyes, and he sees the editor and newspaper proprietor as they really are – designing criminals, mercenary reprobates, social pests – to be lectured and bullied and put down. O, you may rely on the Judges! They are as safe as a new Liberal peer is to vote Tory.”

“But the ‘power of the Press’?” I urged. “If the newspapers combine in protest, and – ”

“You talk at random!” said Uncle Dudley almost austerely. “I should say the most certain, the most absolutely reliable, element in the whole case is the fact that newspapers do not combine. Whenever one editor gets hit, all the others grin. One journal is mulcted in heavy damages: the rest have all a difficulty in dissembling their delight. You read in natural history that kites are given to falling upon one of their kind which gets wounded or decrepit, and picking out its eyes. Well, kites are also made of newspapers.”

“And juries?” I began to ask.

“Here we are,” remarked Uncle Dudley, turning in toward the guarded portals of the great hall.

“I have a friend among the attendants here, a thoughtful and discerning man. I will learn from him where we may look for the spiciest case. He takes a lively interest in the flaying of editors. I believe he was once a printer. He will tell us where the axe gleams most savagely to-day: where; we shall get the most journalistic blood for our money. You were speaking of juries. Just take a look at one of them – if you are not afraid of spoiling your luncheon – and you will see that they speak for themselves. They regard all newspapers as public enemies – particularly when the betting tips have been more misleading than usual. They stand by their kind. They ‘give the poor man a chance’ without hesitation, without fail. They are here to avenge the discovery of movable types, and they do it. Come with me, and witness the disembowelling of a daily, the hamstringing of a sub-editor – a publisher felled by the hand of the Law like a bullock. Since the bear-pits of Bankside were closed there has been no such sport.”

Unhappily, it turned out that none of the Judges had come down to the Courts that day. There was a threat of east wind in the air. “You see, if they don’t live, to a certain age they get no pensions, and their heirs turn a key in the lock on the old gentlemen in weather like this,” explained Uncle Dudley, turning disappointedly away.

Detailing certain Prudential Measures taken during the Panic incident to a Late Threatened Invasion

I HOPE,” said Mrs Albert, “that I am as free to admit my errors in judgment as another. Evidently there has been a mistake in this matter, and it is equally obvious that I am the one who must have made it. I did not need to have this pointed out to me, Dudley. What I looked to you for was advice, counsel, sympathy. You seem not to realise at all how important this is to me. A false step now may ruin everything – and you simply sit there and grin!”

“My dear sister,” replied Uncle Dudley, smoothing his face, “the smile was involuntary. It shall not recur. I was only thinking of Albert’s enthusiasm for the – ”

“Yes, I know!” put in Mrs Albert; “for that girl with the zouave jacket – ”

“And the scarlet petticoat,” prompted Uncle Dudley.

“And the crinoline,” said the lady.

“O, he did not insist upon that. I recall his exact words. ‘Whether this under-garment,’ he said, ‘be made of some stiff material like horsehair, or by means of steel hoops, is a mere question of detail.’ No, Albert expressly kept an open mind on that point.”

“I agree with you,” remarked Mrs Albert coldly, “to the extent that he certainly does keep his mind on it. He has now reverted to the subject, I should think, at least twenty times. I am not so blind as you may imagine. I notice that that Mr Labouchere also keeps on referring, every week, to another girl in her zouave jacket, whom he remembers with equal fondness, apparently.”

“Yes,” put in Uncle Dudley, “those words about the ‘stiff material like horsehair’ were in Truth. I daresay Albert simply read them there, and just unconsciously repeated them. We often do inadvertent, unthinking things of that sort.”

Mrs Albert shook her head. “It is nothing to me, of course,” she said, “but I cannot help feeling that the middle-aged father of a family might concentrate his thoughts upon something nobler, something higher, than the recollection of the charms of a red petticoat, thirty years ago. That is so characteristic of men. They cannot discuss a question broadly – ”

“Think not?” queried Uncle Dudley, with interest. “You should listen at the keyhole sometime, after you have led the ladies out from dinner.”

“I mean personally, in a general way. They always particularise. Albert, for example, allows all his views on this very important question to be coloured by the fact that when he was a young man he admired some girl in a short red Balmoral petticoat. Whenever conversation touches upon any phase of the whole subject of costume, out he comes with his tiresome adulation of that particular garment. Of course, I ask no questions – I should prefer not to be informed – I try not even to draw inferences – but I notice that Ermyntrude is beginning to observe the persistency with which her father – ”

“My good Emily,” urged Uncle Dudley, consolingly, “far back in the Sixties we all liked that girl; we couldn’t help ourselves – she was the only girl there was. And we think of her fondly still – we old fellows – because for us she was also the last there was! When she went out, lo and behold! we too had gone out, not to come back any more. When Albert and I babble about a scarlet petticoat, it is only as a symbol of our own far-away youth. O delicious vision! – the bright, bright red, the skirt that came drooping down over it, not hiding too much that pretty little foot and ankle, the dear zouave jacket moulding itself so delicately to the persuasive encircling arm – ”

“Dudley! I really must recall you to yourself,” said Mrs Albert. “We were speaking of quite another matter. I am in a very serious dilemma. First of all, as I explained to you, to please the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn I became one of the Vice-Presidents of the Friendly Divided Skirt Association. You know how useful she can be, in helping to bring Ermyntrude out successfully. And of course everybody knew that, even if we did have them made, we should never wear them. That was quite out of the question.”

“And then?” asked Uncle Dudley.

“Well, then, let me see – yes, next came the Neo-Dress-Improver League. I never understood what the object was, precisely; it was a kind of secession from the other, led by the Countess of Wimps, and I needn’t tell you that she is of the utmost importance to us, and there was simply nothing for me to do but to become a Lady Patroness of that. You were in extremely nice company – there were seven or eight ladies of title among the Patronesses, our names all printed together in beautiful little gilt letters – and you really weren’t committed to anything that I could make out. No —that was all right. I should do the same thing again, under the circumstances. No, the trouble came with the Amalgamated Anti-Crinoline Confederacy. That was where I was too hasty, I think.”

“That’s the thing with the protesting post-cards, isn’t it?” inquired Uncle Dudley.

“That very feature of it alone ought to have warned me,” Mrs Albert answered with despondency. “My own better sense should have told me that post-cards were incompatible with selectness. But you see, the invitations were sent out by the authoress of The Street-Sprinkler’s Secret, and that gave me the impression that it was to be literary – to represent Culture and the Arts, you know; and that appealed to me, of course, very strongly.”

“I have always feared that your literary impulses would run away with you,” Uncle Dudley declared gravely.

“It is my weak side; I don’t deny it,” replied his sister. “Where letters and authorship, and that sort of thing, you know, are concerned, it is my nature to be sympathetic. And besides, the Dowager Lady Thames-Ditton was very pronounced in favour of the movement, and I couldn’t fly in the face of that, could I? I must say, though, that I had my misgivings almost from the first. Miss Wallaby told the Rev. Mr Grayt-Scott that a lady she knew had looked over quite a peck or more of the post-cards which came in one day, and they were nine-tenths of them from Earl’s Court.”

“Yes,” remarked Uncle Dudley, “I think I have heard that the post-card reaches its most luxuriant state of literary usefulness in that locality. It was from that point that they tried to rush the Laureateship, you know.”

“Well, you can imagine how I felt when I heard it. It is all well enough to be literary – nobody realises that more than I do – and it is all very well to be loyal – of course! But one draws the line at Earl’s Court – at least, that part of it. I say frankly that it serves me right. I should have known better. One thing I cannot be too thankful for – Ermyntrude did not send a post-card. Some blessed instinct prompted me to tell her there was no hurry about it – that I did not like to see young girls too forward in such matters. And now – why – who knows – Dudley! I have an idea! Ermie shall join the Crinoline Defence League!”

“I see – the family will hedge on the crinoline issue. Capital!”

“You know, after all, we may have to wear them. It’s quite as likely as not. The old Duchess of West Ham is President of the League, and she is very influential in the highest quarters. Her Grace, I understand, is somewhat bandy, but she has always maintained the strictest Christian respectability, and her action in this matter will count for a great deal. Just think, if she should happen to take a fancy to Ermyntrude! That Miss Wallaby has thrust herself forward till she is actually a member of the Council, and she is going to deliver an address on ‘The Effect of Modesty on National Morals.’ She told our curate that at one of the meetings of the Council she came within an ace of being introduced to the Duchess herself. Now surely, if she can accomplish all this, Ermie ought to be able to do still more. Tell me, Dudley, what do you think?”

“I think,” replied Uncle Dudley musingly, “I think that the scarlet petticoat, with the zouave jack – ”

Mrs Albert interrupted him with sternness. “Don’t you see,” she demanded, “that if it does come, the dear girl will share in the credit of bringing it in, and if it doesn’t come, I shall have the advantage of having helped to stave it off. Whichever side wins, there we are.”

Uncle Dudley rose, and looked thoughtfully out upon the fog, and stroked his large white moustache in slow meditation. “Yes – undoubtedly,” he said at last, “there we are.”

Dealing with the Deceptions of Nature, and the Freedom from, Illusion Inherent in the Unnatural

There was once a woman – obviously a thoughtful woman – who remarked that she had noticed that if she managed to live till Friday, she invariably survived the rest of the week. I did not myself know this philosopher, who is preserved to history in one of Roscoe Conkling’s speeches, but her discovery always recurs to me about this time of year, when February begins to disclose those first freshening glimpses of sunlight and blue skies to bleared, fog-smudged and shivering London. Aha! if we have won thus far, if we have contrived to get to February, then we shall surely see the Spring. At least the one has heretofore involved the other – and there is confident promise in the smile of a noon-day once more able to cast a shadow, albeit the teeth of the east wind gleam close behind that smile.

It was a day for a walk – no set and joyous rural tramp, indeed, with pipe and wallet, and a helpful spring underfoot in the clean hard roadway, and an honest, well-balanced stick for the bell-ringing gentry who shall come at you on wheels from behind – but just an orderly, contemplative urban ramble, brisk enough for warmth, but with no hurry, and above all no destination. And it was a day, moreover, for letting one’s fellow-creatures pass along with scant notice – a winter-ridden, shuffling, mud-stained company these, conscious of being not at all worth examination – and for giving eye instead to the house-fronts in the sunshine, and radiant chimneypots and tiles above them, and the signs of blessed, unaccustomed blue still further up. There was, it is true, an undeniable disproportion between the inner look of these things, and this gladness of the heart because of them. Glancing more closely, one could see that they were not taking the sun seriously, and, for their own part, were expecting more fogs next week. And farther westward, when stucco, brick, and stone gave way to park-land, it was apparent at sight that the trees were flatly incredulous.

They say that in Ireland, where the mildness of climate has in the past prompted many experiments with exotic growths, the trees not really indigenous to the island never learn sense, but year after year are gulled by this February fraud into gushing expansively forth with sap and tender shoots, only to be gripped and shrivelled by the icy after-hand of March. The native tree, however, knows this trick of old, and greets the sham Spring with a distinctive, though well-buttoned-up wink. In Kensington Park region one couldn’t be sure that the trees really saw the joke. It is not, on the whole, a humourous neighbourhood. But at all events they were not to be fooled into premature buds and sprouts and kindred signs of silliness. Every stiffly exclusive drab trunk rising before you, every section of the brown lacework of twigs up above, seemed to offer a warning advertisement: “No connection with the sunshine over the way!”

Happily the flower-beds exhibited more sympathy. Up through the mould brave little snowdrops had pushed their pretty heads, and the crocuses, though with their veined outer cloaks of sulphur, mauve, and other tints still wrapped tight about them, wore almost a swaggering air to show how wholly they felt at home. Emboldened by this bravado, less confident fellows were peeping forth, though in such faltering fashion that one could scarcely tell which was squill, which narcissus or loitering jonquil. Still, it was good to see them. They too were glad that they had lived till February, because after that comes the Spring.

And it was better still, as I turned to stroll on, to behold coming toward me down the path, with little swinging step, and shapely head well up in air, none other than our Ermyntrude.

I say “our” because – it is really absurd to think of it – it seems only a few months ago since she was a sprawling tom-boy sort of a little girl, who sat on my knee and listened with her mouth open to my reminiscences of personal encounters with unicorns and the behemoth of Holy Writ. She must be now – by George! she is– not a minute under two-and-twenty. And that means —hélas! it undoubtedly means – that I am getting to be an old boy indeed. At Christmas-tide – I recall it now – Mrs Albert spoke of me as the oldest friend of the family. It sounded kindly at the time, and I had a special pleasure in the smile Ermyntrude wore as she, with the others, lifted her glass towards me. I won’t say what vagrant thoughts and ambitions that smile did not raise in my mind – and, lo! they were toasting me as an amiable elderly friend of the Fernbank household. No wonder I am glad to have lived till February!