The Celebrity at Home

“Oh, I do just despise your waist!” she said to Ariadne; “I’ve been looking at it all the way we’ve come.”

Christina absently took hold of her whip and then rattled it back in its socket. She then scolded Jane till I should have thought any ordinary child couldn’t have gone on sitting up, but this one did, never saying a word, but pursed her mouth in till there was hardly a line to be seen. Then Christina began to tell us how dull she had found it living in the country, and how difficult to get acclimatized at first.

“But in the end, the country rubs off on one,” she sighed, “and a good thing too. Oh, the mistakes I made at first! You know that Peter and I have both been staying with the dear Bishop of Guyzance.”

“Oh, Christina, you have changed!” said I.

“I know, dear, three services on Sunday and a shilling for the offertory. So different from Newton Hall and Farm Street. As I was saying, I came back from Lale Castle the day before yesterday, post haste, to hatch some chickens–”

“I thought a hen did that?” ventured Ariadne.

“Right you are! I pretended to Peter that it was an insane desire to kiss the baby, but I was an hour in the house before I even thought of the child. The hen was due to hatch fifteen. I interviewed her every hour, much to her disgust. At last, crack!—one came out–”

“You mean chipped the shell,” said Ariadne primly.

“Right again! I put it in a basket by the kitchen fire, the servants shunted it for dinner, it got cold, it died in the night. Yesterday five more happened, I popped them in the mild oven for a minute, just then some one pinched my baby—he screamed, and went on screaming like an electric-bell gone wrong. I had to go and look after him—cook made a blazing fire, do you see?—I have only saved five out of that brood.”

“How very funny!” said Ariadne, who wasn’t a bit amused.

I was. Christina told us of a little hen Peter had before, who had been used to be set to ducks, and who had learned to march them all down to the nearest pond. The first lot of chickens had been driven to a watery and unfamiliar death.

“Would you like to go and be photographed to-morrow?” she asked Ariadne, and Ariadne was on the qui vive at once. “They all think one an unnatural parent here, if one doesn’t take one’s brood to be perpetuated at Oldfort every year. But the trains there are so awkward for us. I am fighting the railway authorities tooth and nail, trying to persuade them to put on a slip carriage. They do it for Keiller and his marmalade, so why not for me? Say! I am on the pony’s neck! I am going to put the seat back, take the reins a minute!”

Ariadne didn’t of course like her giving them to me, but everybody always sees at once that I am the practical one.

When the seat was arranged she went bubbling on.

“Next week is our Harvest Festival and School feast, and Ball in the school-house. The gaieties of this Parish! I haven’t had tea with myself for a whole week. I am a very hard worker, you don’t know! Peter says I lie awake at nights thinking of stodgy moral books to recommend for the Village Library. I recommend some, not all, of my late patron’s, your father’s, works. The Vicar here is a dear old dodderer, and was so shocked when I recommended him The Road to Rome! It’s a book of travel, you know. We have a young man here, too, quite an eligible, he told me so. He is so shy, you see, he says the wrong thing. I wonder whether you’ll make anything of him? To a flirt, all things are possible.”

“I am not a flirt—now,” said Ariadne.

She was nearly giving the whole thing away, only the pony bolted, at least Christina said it was an attempt at bolting. “My God, pony!” she said to it, and it stopped, shocked at her swearing, I suppose.

“And there’s Simon Hermyre in the neighbourhood. Henderland is not more than ten miles off.”

Ariadne at once sat tight—too tight. It was almost painful, and showed in her face too.

Just as we were driving in at the gate of Rattenraw, Jane Emerson Tree spoke again, and actually about Ariadne’s body.

“Any way, it’s on all crooked,” she said, as if she was continuing the previous discussion. Peter came out to meet us, and she was lifted down. They couldn’t, I suppose, leave her sitting and just put her away in the coach-house all night. That is what I should have done, and cooled her hot blood. But I saw how it was when we got in and were having tea. She had hers “laced”—I mean brandy in it. Peter is awfully proud of her and thinks she will be a great actress and astonish the world some day. She certainly mimicked Peter to his face. I will let her know if I catch her mimicking Ariadne! Peter enjoyed it. The moment a child is really rude, people think it is going to do great things. I have noticed that. Now I would no sooner think of criticizing a grown-up person’s things to her face as I would of—kissing Emerson Tree’s very ugly mug, though I wouldn’t tell her so, otherwise than by my reluctance to embrace her. Peter calls her “the little witch.”

“The little witch,” he says, “was being neglected, or thought she was, at lunch the other day, and in a trice she called out to the butler, ‘I say, Holmes, old man, look alive with those potatoes, will you!’ You should have seen the old boy’s face!”

I did see the old boy’s face. He was waiting at tea.

Christina told us stories about her all tea-time; she listened quietly as she munched buns. How when she saw the new baby she said, “Dash it all! why it’s bald!” How one rainy day she was lost, and they found her with six of her village friends walking in a straight line down to the pond, barefooted and bareheaded and their mouths open, quacking, and to catch the rain-drops like ducks do. How she has done all the absurd things children do in books, such as aspinalling the cat—as if a cat ever stayed to be aspinalled!—and gunpowder into ovens, and frogs into boots, and hedgehogs into beds. (She says so, but I believe she put the clothes-brush, and Peter mistook it with his feet in the dark!) And once when a noted Socialist man had been staying there and rashly talked before her, she had given away the furniture.

“She went solemnly down the village,” said Christina, “making presents of the unearned increment in the shape of things she didn’t want and I did. Missing tensions of sewing-machines and valves of cycles and stray door-knobs and other bits of rolling stock—all disappeared. When it came to the spare sugar-tongs and my best silver scissors, however, I had to scold her. Oh, she’ll be a great actress some day.”

We listened, and I am sure no one could tell from my face how I disapproved of it all,—unless Duse the second, who, after all, was a child too, twigged how ridiculous they were making her look? Anyhow, after she had made three usual scenes and one extraordinary one because we were there, and had been noisily taken off to bed, they left off discussing her and took up a perfectly safe subject; “shoots” and who to have. Christina teases, she always did, even in the days when she used to put us head first down rabbit-holes.

“Has he a wife?” she asks, whenever Peter proposes a man.

“My dear, I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is he is a capital shot, and brings down his pheasants in good style!”

“These good shots bring down such bad wives—I mean from the house-party point of view,” she says. “To look at their choice, they would always seem to have fired recklessly into the brown and got pot luck. You see I am boxed up with your friends’ bad shots all day. I can’t possibly make my housewifely duties last all the morning, and I object to have Jane brought down in her best frock and her worst behaviour to make sport for idle women. And she hates grown-up ladies, and has the wit to come in with segments of the Wanny Crag on her boots and her hair full of straws, so as to be sent out of the drawing-room to ‘muck herself up.’”

“I don’t like that phrase, Christina!”

“Don’t be so aggressively pure, Peter!”

Ariadne and I have called him “Pure Peter” ever since, but he is not bad, really. It is a mercy when one’s friends show a little consideration in their marriage, and one mustn’t be too particular, for the world is full of bounders one might have got, and had to be civil to. Peter Ball talks about “Vickings” and keeps a chart of the weather, but except for fussy ways like that, he is quite a gentleman.

CHAPTER XVII

ARIADNE got fatter at Rattenraw, which is humiliating enough to a girl in her position. I can’t say that she kept that up at all well, beyond looking sad, sometimes when she wasn’t thinking, or at meals. She has to pretend to be distraite, for really she is very all there, and likes her dinner. Peter Ball, carving the roast red beef, holds his knife up in the air to tease her, and says to her, when she won’t answer his question whether she wants some more?—“Thinking of the old ’un, what?” He doesn’t know how near the truth he is, except in age. He knows nothing of Ariadne’s affairs, he prefers not to know, but takes her word for it that she has a secret sorrow connected with a member of his sex.

Jane Emerson Tree doesn’t take any notice of Ariadne or of me either; she is put out at not being allowed to say rude things about us. She is a free-born American citizen. Christina has made Ariadne rip the leather patch off the shoulder of the waist Jane Emerson objected to, and has lent her a common straw sailor hat, which suits her better than the billycock. A sailor hat, you see, isn’t a hat, it is a tile, and so can’t either become or unbecome.

Simon Hermyre might have been at Henderland, or at Lord Manham’s, or at Barsom, Sir Edward Fynes’ place; neither places are more than ten miles or so off; but he made no sign, nor did he answer a letter Christina wrote to him, so Ariadne was practically forced to flirt with the only other man of her own rank in the village, besides Peter. He is the Squire of Rattenraw, and lives in the old Hall, and plays the fiddle, and keeps only one servant. Yet he came in before the Conquest. That is what becomes of all our old families. He isn’t old, but very wrinkled. That comes of so frequently meeting the wind and exposure. His corduroy velvet coat and his skin are much of a muchness. He is shy and wild, as Peter remarked of the grouse this year. As I said, he is all there is, here, till Christina’s “shoots” come off, and Ariadne egged him on—the amount of egging on a shy man takes!—to ask her, and then accepted to go out fishing with him. She sat all the afternoon on a bank near by, in a biting North-west wind straight down from the Wanny Crags, that blew the egg off the sandwiches and the froth off the ginger-beer. He asked her if she felt chilly (“Chilly!” she thought) about sixteen times, and said By Gosh when he didn’t catch anything, which was frequent, and “What in thunder’s got ’em?” alluding to the trout, when at last in despair they packed up to go home. Ariadne got back to tea chilled to the bone and disappointed at the heart to find him so coarse without being interesting. She thinks all local farmers and squires ought to be like Mr. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and hide a burning lava of passion under their upper crust of cold indifference. Squire Rochester is good and dull. He does admire Ariadne, I daresay, though I am not up in the country signs of love, and it seems the least he could do for a real London beauty who is good enough to sit on a sticky and muddy bank bald of grass and full of worm-holes, and some of them protruding disgustingly as she said, for a whole afternoon watching him not catching fish!

He leaves vegetable marrows and nosegays as big as cabbages “for the ladies” at the back-door, because he is so shy. He squeezes all Christina’s rings into her hands whenever he meets her, but these are as much signs of love for Christina as for Ariadne, and Peter Ball says Ariadne must take care and not to be like “Miss Baxter (whoever she was) who refused a gent before he asked her.”

Christina thinks he is a bit attracted, and that it is a good thing for Ariadne to have a man to play with, in her forlorn condition, and that whatever the Squire gets, even a hopeless passion, that he will be able to get over it. She considers that men have a thicker sort of skin than women, and if they are unhappy, can turn up their shirt-sleeves and get very hot and throw it off. The Squire keeps lots of cattle and is by way of being butcher to the village. Christina buys a whole sheep of him sometimes. He has plenty of distractions, and she always takes the side of the woman—esprit de corpse, I think they call it. I myself think there should be the same law for men as for women, and I have a great mind to tell the Squire to save his nosegays, for Ariadne is in love with Simon. I even threatened her with this exposé, and she turned round on me, and said I should be a liar, for she wasn’t in love with Simon. Then, I said, she might as well leave off taking the biggest half of the bed at night and all the looking-glass in the morning and first go at the bath, and other special privileges she has sneaked, because she is supposed to be unhappy. I am willing to make every allowance for one so persecuted by fate, but not for a woman who enjoys all the usual pleasures of her age and sex, as if nothing was the matter. Then she cried, and said I was unkind, that she wanted all the comfort she could get, and went off fishing with the Squire to spite me, that very afternoon! What can one do with a weathercock like that!

Then Church decorating came on, and Ariadne could do without the Squire. We worked all day, and in the evening we doctored our cuts and the places where the Lord had let us get bruised and scratched in smartening up His Church for His Harvest Festival. Ariadne had a big brown bruise done by a jagged pew on her upper leg shaped like a tortoise, and so we called it, so to be able to allude to it at all times and seasons.

At lunch, Christina used to ask Ariadne how her tortoise was, and Ariadne answered demurely that it was getting a nice pea-green, or a good strong blue, till Peter and the Squire were so much puzzled, that they teased Ariadne till she let it out, and then Peter teased her worse than ever.

Two local ladies hindered us at decoration and we could not get rid of them, as they had pulled their gardens about to give us flowers. But we had to make a rule that we wouldn’t allow gentlemen in the church during decorations. It upset Miss Weeks so that she hammered her fingers instead of the nails, and put flowers into the men’s button-holes instead of threading them into the altar-rails, in fits of absence. Miss Day, the other young lady, agreed with Christina that one must really keep a firm hand on Miss Weeks, and that she herself didn’t care for so many men-folk about, talking their nonsense, and interfering with steady work, but she was sorry, her sailor cousin had just come home and she reely could not spare more than half-an-hour every other day away from him! We were only decorating for three days.

During the half-hour she did come, however, she and Miss Weeks got on very badly, finding they could not work together, and they had it out in the middle aisle every five minutes or so. Christina and Ariadne had taken the chancel, while these two were responsible for the font, so we did not get mixed up so very much. But when Miss Weeks boxed Miss Day’s ears with a Scarborough lily, and Miss Day retorted with a double dahlia, the Vicar interposed, and ordered them out of his church just as the cook orders me out of her kitchen, and it is about as much their own, in either case.

Then we had some peace, and the Vicar used to come himself (he has no wife), and worked very hard at handing flowers to Ariadne, who did not look half bad on top of a ladder, a little weak and tottery, so that she had to be steadied by a strong hand now and then.

At home there was cooking to be done, cakes and pies and things for the village ball and tea-treat. We both cooked. Christina says there is a want of concentration about us, and that the trail of the flour-bin is all over her best chairs. She says it to callers to amuse them and to make them think her witty. Though really, Ariadne’s untidiness is trying. We find baking-powder in our workboxes, and currants as book-markers, and butter—well, everywhere but in the butter-dish! Ariadne goes about with white hair, and Peter Ball complains that the door-handles are sticky. He says that Ariadne’s cakes, when made, will form a capital hunting lunch, sustaining if eaten, and capable of breaking the nastiest fall.

Christina’s cook (cooks are the same, I see, all over the world!) gave her annual notice which is never taken any notice of, just before the Festival, when all the servants are so overworked that they get fractious. Luckily this time something happened to put them in a tearing good temper again. Farmer Dale died, and Christina blessed him for giving us a good funeral to cheer the household up a bit. So the status was preserved.

On the Sunday morning, of course, we all attended Divine Service. Peter Ball came too and read the lessons. He is called one of the pillars of the church. He once spoke to some men who were lounging about outside while the service was proceeding, and told them that he looked to them to be pillars too. They sniggered, because they felt ashamed, and one of them said, “Ay, Sir, but aren’t we men the buttresses a-leaning up against it and propping it up like?” Peter was only shocked.

We workers could not attend much on this particular occasion, any more than a cook can enjoy the dinner she has cooked. We could not take our eyes off our own special rail that we had wreathed, and kept hoping our flowers wouldn’t topple suddenly because we hadn’t tied them securely enough, or wilt during the sermon. I noticed a curious sort of doll, standing on the altar-steps, dressed in three tissue-paper flounces and a sash. As we came out I asked old John Peacock what it was, and he said, “Why, that wor t’ Kern babby!” I was no wiser. But Ariadne, who dotes on superstitions, said she would ask the Vicar. She wrote him a pretty note in her all backwards hand, and said she felt sure the doll on the altar-steps was a heathen survival of some sort. This was his answer; he was pleased.

“My dear Miss Vero-Taylor,

“Your interest in the study of folk-lore is highly commendable in one so young. The little mannikin—or rather womankin—is, as you aptly conjecture, a remnant of a custom dating from a period of the very remotest antiquity. In our Northumbrian villages it is the custom, the moment the sickle is laid down, for the villagers to dress the last sheaf in tawdry finery and carry it through the streets, finally when it presides at the Harvest, or Mell Supper, and the people dance round it singing:

‘Blest be the day that Christ was born!We’ve getten Mell of Ball’s corn!It’s well bun’ and better shorn!Hip! Hip! Hurray!’

“This custom was found, however, so prevocative of disorderly scenes that my revered predecessor here decreed that in future the Mell Doll (or Kern baby) should be simply placed on the altar-steps during Divine Service. Is it not wonderful to reflect that this grotesque image prefigures no less a personage than Ceres, the goddess of plenty, the Frigga of the Teutons, sometimes called Freia, Frey, conf. Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, passim—”

“Oh yes, pass him, pass him!” said Peter impatiently, who won’t however let any one else make fun of the church, and scolded Christina for saying,

“Rather a come-down for a goddess, wasn’t it?”

“Well,” she remarked to Ariadne later on, “you had better be getting up your mythology” (meaning the Bible, only Peter didn’t twig anything so wrapped up as this), “because you will be sure to be subpœna’d to take a class in the Sunday school after you have fished for it. Nemo Dodd impune lacessit!”

“Can’t Dodd lace his boots with impunity?” I asked Peter. I knew it wasn’t that, any more than Res angusta domi means “Please to keep Augusta at home,” and some others like that I have made.

Sure enough, Mr. Dodd made Ariadne take a class in his Sunday school, and Christina chuckled. It is the price of Mr. Dodd’s admiration, and he admired Ariadne very much. She is not really any happier for it, rather bored by it in fact. She spent three whole days getting up Sacred History for fear the school children, who have of course been properly brought up and grounded, should floor her, a poor feckless literary man’s daughter. Peter Ball gave her a little arithmetic. She got as far as Proportion with him. There was one sum about how many men it would take to build a wall of so many feet in so many hours. If it was Inverse Proportion, which it might be, and then again it mightn’t, you put the men under the wall and divide by the hours; as many of them as are left after such treatment is the answer. It came, stupidly enough, two-and-a-half, so I suggested to Ariadne, as I was helping her, to put Two men and a boy. Peter said she didn’t repay teaching, and saw nothing to laugh at, though his wife seemed to.

Then Ariadne started an essay club with prizes. The Squire bought those for her in Morpeth when he went in to sell pelts and hides. Fancy touching his hand after that! They were bits of his poor beasts that he had killed! Billy Scott’s short essay on the elephant, “an animal with a leg at each corner and a tail at both ends,” was funny; and Sally Moscrop’s description of “any animal she liked to choose.” She invented “The Proc,” a beast with four legs, “two of whom are bigger and longer than the others, for the Proc lives all around a hill.” Grace Paterson’s essay was quite long. “The Pin is an exceedingly useful article. It has saved the lives of many men, many women and many children by not swallering of them.”

Grace is fourteen and the beauty of the village. She has begun a tale in ten chapters. She has to write it up in the apple-tree, for fear her father should “warm” her.

She and Ariadne were the two belles of the Ball in the Parish Room on Monday evening. They both danced with the Squire, who said he was in luck to get two literary ladies to dance with him on the same night. But Ariadne walked home with him, and I went with Christina. Mr. Rochester had one of his own roses Ariadne had given him back, in his button-hole. She is so unhappy about Simon that she doesn’t care who proposes to her. That is the way girls take it—a very selfish way, but they are selfish all through when they are in love. Ariadne actually thinks the Squire thinks he proposed to her going home that night. I don’t. It was pitch dark as we went home, the village is not lighted, and it is a very wicked village. She says, long arms like tentacles came groping out from the wall in the dark, and the Squire dragged her past them. As the village young men couldn’t see, they thought her one of their own sweethearts, for by then the party had broken up and was all over the place. The chucker-out had been very much occupied and had found the brook near the school-house door very handy.

But I don’t myself think the Squire did propose. He offered to take care of her, past the tentacles, but not for life. I think if a girl is always dreading proposals and thinking of how men will feel it when refused, proposals never come to them. That is what Christina said, and that Peter Ball took her entirely by surprise, when he asked her. I knew better, for I had chaperoned that affair. She says Peter wears very well, and that there’s some gilt left on the gingerbread still. The gramophone is still in all its glory, and when she was ill up-stairs, when Jim was born, Peter used to send up a message by the nurse for her to leave the door of her room open for half-an-hour before dinner, and then she would hear it. The nurse always forbade it, but Christina always insisted on it, to please Peter, and lay with her ears stopped up with sheet till the half hour was over. It is a new gramophone, not the one he had in Leinster Gardens. That shouted itself out, I suppose? Christina found an entry in his old pocket-book—

“July 19—a memorable year in my life. I bought a new gramophone and I got married. I won’t say anything about my wife here, but the gramophone was a beauty when she was new–“

Ariadne was disgusted. She doesn’t believe Simon would say such a coarse thing. Well, I wish she had some experience on the subject, what Simon would say, that’s all!