None of the rest of his family had anything approaching t.i.tian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as a table decoration.
It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.
Therefore the family was relieved when the vicar"s daughter undertook the reformation of Reginald. Her name was Amabel; it was the vicar"s one extravagance. Amabel was accounted a beauty and intellectually gifted; she never played tennis, and was reputed to have read Maeterlinck"s _Life of the Bee_. If you abstain from tennis _and_ read Maeterlinck in a small country village, you are of necessity intellectual. Also she had been twice to Fecamp to pick up a good French accent from the Americans staying there; consequently she had a knowledge of the world which might be considered useful in dealings with a worldling.
Hence the congratulations in the family when Amabel undertook the reformation of its wayward member.
Amabel commenced operations by asking her unsuspecting pupil to tea in the vicarage garden; she believed in the healthy influence of natural surroundings, never having been in Sicily, where things are different.
And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night.
Reginald recalled the lilies of the field, "which simply sat and looked beautiful, and defied compet.i.tion."
"But that is not an example for us to follow," gasped Amabel.
"Unfortunately, we can"t afford to. You don"t know what a world of trouble I take in trying to rival the lilies in their artistic simplicity."
"You are really indecently vain of your appearance. A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks."
"You agree with me that the two are incompatible. I always say beauty is only sin deep."
Amabel began to realise that the battle is not always to the strong-minded. With the immemorial resource of her s.e.x, she abandoned the frontal attack, and laid stress on her una.s.sisted labours in parish work, her mental loneliness, her discouragements--and at the right moment she produced strawberries and cream. Reginald was obviously affected by the latter, and when his preceptress suggested that he might begin the strenuous life by helping her to supervise the annual outing of the bucolic infants who composed the local choir, his eyes shone with the dangerous enthusiasm of a convert.
Reginald entered on the strenuous life alone, as far as Amabel was concerned. The most virtuous women are not proof against damp gra.s.s, and Amabel kept her bed with a cold. Reginald called it a dispensation; it had been the dream of his life to stage-manage a choir outing. With strategic insight, he led his shy, bullet-headed charges to the nearest woodland stream and allowed them to bathe; then he seated himself on their discarded garments and discoursed on their immediate future, which, he decreed, was to embrace a Baccha.n.a.lian procession through the village.
Forethought had provided the occasion with a supply of tin whistles, but the introduction of a he-goat from a neighbouring orchard was a brilliant afterthought. Properly, Reginald explained, there should have been an outfit of panther skins; as it was, those who had spotted handkerchiefs were allowed to wear them, which they did with thankfulness. Reginald recognised the impossibility, in the time at his disposal, of teaching his shivering neophytes a chant in honour of Bacchus, so he started them off with a more familiar, if less appropriate, temperance hymn. After all, he said, it is the spirit of the thing that counts. Following the etiquette of dramatic authors on first nights, he remained discreetly in the background while the procession, with extreme diffidence and the goat, wound its way lugubriously towards the village. The singing had died down long before the main street was reached, but the miserable wailing of pipes brought the inhabitants to their doors. Reginald said he had seen something like it in pictures; the villagers had seen nothing like it in their lives, and remarked as much freely.
Reginald"s family never forgave him. They had no sense of humour.
REGINALD ON WORRIES
I have (said Reginald) an aunt who worries. She"s not really an aunt--a sort of amateur one, and they aren"t really worries. She is a social success, and has no domestic tragedies worth speaking of, so she adopts any decorative sorrows that are going, myself included. In that way she"s the ant.i.thesis, or whatever you call it, to those sweet, uncomplaining women one knows who have seen trouble, and worn blinkers ever since. Of course, one just loves them for it, but I must confess they make me uncomfy; they remind one so of a duck that goes flapping about with forced cheerfulness long after its head"s been cut off. Ducks have _no_ repose. Now, my aunt has a shade of hair that suits her, and a cook who quarrels with the other servants, which is always a hopeful sign, and a conscience that"s absentee for about eleven months of the year, and only turns up at Lent to annoy her husband"s people, who are considerably Lower than the angels, so to speak: with all these natural advantages--she says her particular tint of bronze is a natural advantage, and there can be no two opinions as to the advantage--of course she has to send out for her afflictions, like those restaurants where they haven"t got a licence. The system has this advantage, that you can fit your unhappinesses in with your other engagements, whereas real worries have a way of arriving at meal-times, and when you"re dressing, or other solemn moments. I knew a canary once that had been trying for months and years to hatch out a family, and everyone looked upon it as a blameless infatuation, like the sale of Delagoa Bay, which would be an annual loss to the Press agencies if it ever came to pa.s.s; and one day the bird really did bring it off, in the middle of family prayers. I say the middle, but it was also the end: you can"t go on being thankful for daily bread when you are wondering what on earth very new canaries expect to be fed on.
At present she"s rather in a Balkan state of mind about the treatment of the Jews in Roumania. Personally, I think the Jews have estimable qualities; they"re so kind to their poor--and to our rich. I daresay in Roumania the cost of living beyond one"s income isn"t so great. Over here the trouble is that so many people who have money to throw about seem to have such vague ideas where to throw it. That fund, for instance, to relieve the victims of sudden disasters--what is a sudden disaster? There"s Marion Mulciber, who _would_ think she could play bridge, just as she would think she could ride down a hill on a bicycle; on that occasion she went to a hospital, now she"s gone into a Sisterhood--lost all she had, you know, and gave the rest to Heaven.
Still, you can"t call it a sudden calamity; _that_ occurred when poor dear Marion was born. The doctors said at the time that she couldn"t live more than a fortnight, and she"s been trying ever since to see if she could. Women are so opinionated.
And then there"s the Education Question--not that I can see that there"s anything to worry about in that direction. To my mind, education is an absurdly over-rated affair. At least, one never took it very seriously at school, where everything was done to bring it prominently under one"s notice. Anything that is worth knowing one practically teaches oneself, and the rest obtrudes itself sooner or later. The reason one"s elders know so comparatively little is because they have to unlearn so much that they acquired by way of education before we were born. Of course I"m a believer in Nature-study; as I said to Lady Beauwhistle, if you want a lesson in elaborate artificiality, just watch the studied unconcern of a Persian cat entering a crowded salon, and then go and practise it for a fortnight. The Beauwhistles weren"t born in the Purple, you know, but they"re getting there on the instalment system--so much down, and the rest when you feel like it. They have kind hearts, and they never forget birthdays. I forget what he was, something in the City, where the patriotism comes from; and she--oh, well, her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent. So public-spirited of her. I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she"s so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly. Not that it really matters nowadays, as I told her: I know some perfectly virtuous people who are received everywhere.
REGINALD ON HOUSE-PARTIES
The drawback is, one never really _knows_ one"s hosts and hostesses. One gets to know their fox-terriers and their chrysanthemums, and whether the story about the go-cart can be turned loose in the drawing-room, or must be told privately to each member of the party, for fear of shocking public opinion; but one"s host and hostess are a sort of human hinterland that one never has the time to explore.
There was a fellow I stayed with once in Warwickshire who farmed his own land, but was otherwise quite steady. Should never have suspected him of having a soul, yet not very long afterwards he eloped with a lion-tamer"s widow and set up as a golf-instructor somewhere on the Persian Gulf; dreadfully immoral, of course, because he was only an indifferent player, but still, it showed imagination. His wife was really to be pitied, because he had been the only person in the house who understood how to manage the cook"s temper, and now she has to put "D.V." on her dinner invitations. Still, that"s better than a domestic scandal; a woman who leaves her cook never wholly recovers her position in Society.
I suppose the same thing holds good with the hosts; they seldom have more than a superficial acquaintance with their guests, and so often just when they do get to know you a bit better, they leave off knowing you altogether. There was _rather_ a breath of winter in the air when I left those Dorsetshire people. You see, they had asked me down to shoot, and I"m not particularly immense at that sort of thing. There"s such a deadly sameness about partridges; when you"ve missed one, you"ve missed the lot--at least, that"s been my experience. And they tried to rag me in the smoking-room about not being able to hit a bird at five yards, a sort of bovine ragging that suggested cows buzzing round a gadfly and thinking they were teasing it. So I got up the next morning at early dawn--I know it was dawn, because there were lark-noises in the sky, and the gra.s.s looked as if it had been left out all night--and hunted up the most conspicuous thing in the bird line that I could find, and measured the distance, as nearly as it would let me, and shot away all I knew.
They said afterwards that it was a tame bird; that"s simply _silly_, because it was awfully wild at the first few shots. Afterwards it quieted down a bit, and when its legs had stopped waving farewells to the landscape I got a gardener-boy to drag it into the hall, where everybody must see it on their way to the breakfast-room. I breakfasted upstairs myself. I gathered afterwards that the meal was tinged with a very unchristian spirit. I suppose it"s unlucky to bring peac.o.c.k"s feathers into a house; anyway, there was a blue-pencilly look in my hostess"s eye when I took my departure.
Some hostesses, of course, will forgive anything, even unto pavonicide (is there such a word?), as long as one is nice-looking and sufficiently unusual to counterbalance some of the others; and there _are_ others--the girl, for instance, who reads Meredith, and appears at meals with unnatural punctuality in a frock that"s made at home and repented at leisure. She eventually finds her way to India and gets married, and comes home to admire the Royal Academy, and to imagine that an indifferent prawn curry is for ever an effective subst.i.tute for all that we have been taught to believe is luncheon. It"s then that she is really dangerous; but at her worst she is never quite so bad as the woman who fires _Exchange and Mart_ questions at you without the least provocation.
Imagine the other day, just when I was doing my best to understand half the things I was saying, being asked by one of those seekers after country home truths how many fowls she could keep in a run ten feet by six, or whatever it was! I told her whole crowds, as long as she kept the door shut, and the idea didn"t seem to have struck her before; at least, she brooded over it for the rest of dinner.
Of course, as I say, one never really _knows_ one"s ground, and one may make mistakes occasionally. But then one"s mistakes sometimes turn out a.s.sets in the long-run: if we had never bungled away our American colonies we might never have had the boy from the States to teach us how to wear our hair and cut our clothes, and we must get our ideas from somewhere, I suppose. Even the Hooligan was probably invented in China centuries before we thought of him. England must wake up, as the Duke of Devonshire said the other day; wasn"t it? Oh, well, it was someone else.
Not that I ever indulge in despair about the Future; there always have been men who have gone about despairing of the Future, and when the Future arrives it says nice, superior things about their having acted according to their lights. It is dreadful to think that other people"s grandchildren may one day rise up and call one amiable.
There are moments when one sympathises with Herod.
REGINALD AT THE CARLTON
"A most variable climate," said the d.u.c.h.ess; "and how unfortunate that we should have had that very cold weather at a time when coal was so dear!
So distressing for the poor."
"Someone has observed that Providence is always on the side of the big dividends," remarked Reginald.
The d.u.c.h.ess ate an anchovy in a shocked manner; she was sufficiently old- fashioned to dislike irreverence towards dividends.
Reginald had left the selection of a feeding-ground to her womanly intuition, but he chose the wine himself, knowing that womanly intuition stops short at claret. A woman will cheerfully choose husbands for her less attractive friends, or take sides in a political controversy without the least knowledge of the issues involved--but no woman ever cheerfully chose a claret.
"Hors d"oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me," said Reginald: "they remind me of one"s childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like--and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d"oeuvres. Don"t you love watching the different ways people have of entering a restaurant? There is the woman who races in as though her whole scheme of life were held together by a one-pin despotism which might abdicate its functions at any moment; it"s really a relief to see her reach her chair in safety. Then there are the people who troop in with an-unpleasant-duty-to-perform air, as if they were angels of Death entering a plague city. You see that type of Briton very much in hotels abroad. And nowadays there are always the Johannesbourgeois, who bring a Cape-to-Cairo atmosphere with them--what may be called the Rand Manner, I suppose."
"Talking about hotels abroad," said the d.u.c.h.ess, "I am preparing notes for a lecture at the Club on the educational effects of modern travel, dealing chiefly with the moral side of the question. I was talking to Lady Beauwhistle"s aunt the other day--she"s just come back from Paris, you know. Such a sweet woman"--
"And so silly. In these days of the over-education of women she"s quite refreshing. They say some people went through the siege of Paris without knowing that France and Germany were at war; but the Beauwhistle aunt is credited with having pa.s.sed the whole winter in Paris under the impression that the Humberts were a kind of bicycle . . . Isn"t there a bishop or somebody who believes we shall meet all the animals we have known on earth in another world? How frightfully embarra.s.sing to meet a whole shoal of whitebait you had last known at Prince"s! I"m sure in my nervousness I should talk of nothing but lemons. Still, I daresay they would be quite as offended if one hadn"t eaten them. I know if I were served up at a cannibal feast I should be dreadfully annoyed if anyone found fault with me for not being tender enough, or having been kept too long."
"My idea about the lecture," resumed the d.u.c.h.ess hurriedly, "is to inquire whether promiscuous Continental travel doesn"t tend to weaken the moral fibre of the social conscience. There are people one knows, quite nice people when they are in England, who are so _different_ when they are anywhere the other side of the Channel."
"The people with what I call Tauchnitz morals," observed Reginald. "On the whole, I think they get the best of two very desirable worlds. And, after all, they charge so much for excess luggage on some of those foreign lines that it"s really an economy to leave one"s reputation behind one occasionally."
"A scandal, my dear Reginald, is as much to be avoided at Monaco or any of those places as at Exeter, let us say."
"Scandal, my dear Irene--I may call you Irene, mayn"t I?"
"I don"t know that you have known me long enough for that."
"I"ve known you longer than your G.o.d-parents had when they took the liberty of calling you that name. Scandal is merely the compa.s.sionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum. Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people. Tell me, who is the woman with the old lace at the table on our left? Oh, _that_ doesn"t matter; it"s quite the thing nowadays to stare at people as if they were yearlings at Tattersall"s."
"Mrs. Spelvexit? Quite a charming woman; separated from her husband"--
"Incompatibility of income?"