Violet Hunt - The Celebrity at Home

Here George made a little bob at Mr. Aix in the audience, for there he was, and there was another fit of clapping. Then he went on—

“ I mean to say that what we mostly seek in fiction is to be taken out of our own lives, and put into somebody else’s—to temporarily change our moral environment. High life is deeply interested in what is going on below stairs. Bill Sykes and ‘Liza of Lambeth, if they have any time for reading, want to know all about countesses and their attendant sprites. ” (Fancy calling Simon Hermyre that!) “ The Highest or the Lowest, but no middle course, is the novelist’s counsel of perfection. There is no second class in the literary railway.

“ Yet there is a serious issue involved in this proposition. If, for instance—only for instance, for I am very sure that most of us here will have to rely on imagination, not fact, to support my illustration—if our home is a suburban one, and our wildest actual dissipation a tea-party in Clapham or Tooting—even Clapham Rise or Upper Tooting—we must transport ourselves in seven-league boots to the better quarters of London, to visualize the giddy cultured throng in the halls of Belgravia, and set down accurately the facile inaccuracies of the small talk of Mayfair. It is the tale of the mad, bad great world that sets the heart of the matron of Kennington Common aflame, and makes her waking dreams ‘all a wonder and a wild desire.’ Que voulez vous? She is our staple standing reader. She does not want to bend her chaste thoughts towards Hornsey Rise and Cricklewood, to envisage, stimulated by the novelist’s art, its bursten boilers, its infant woes, its humdrum marrying and giving in marriage. No, she prefers, in her grey unlovely Jerry-built parlour, to gloat over the morbid, rose-coloured sins that are enacted in the halls of fashion; the voluptuous sorrows of the Bridge-end of the week; the mystery of Royal visits postponed are her chosen pabulum. To all these novelists whose ways are cast in safe and humdrum middle-class places I would say that they had best ignore their entourage as a help to local colour. In this case, character drawing, like charity, should not begin at Home. Go out, go out, young man, from thy homely nest in the suburbs, where the females of thy family hang over their flaccid meat teas in faded blouses– ”

I think it was about here that I half got up, quite determined, and Lady Scilly pinched me in several places at once.

“Don’t nip me, please,” I said. “I think somebody ought to get up and tell George he’s drivelling, and if nobody else does, I will.”

“Bless the child!” she said. “You may answer him when he’s done, if you like, and can. It will be quite amusing.”

I think that she really was a fairy, but never mind! I did think somebody ought to stop George, and take Mother’s side. So I waited, though I stopped my ears and would not listen to any more till George sat down and the secretary lady asked if some one would care to answer Mr. Vero-Taylor’s speech? Lady Scilly poked me up, and I got up so that George and all of them could see me, and I didn’t feel a bit shy—no, for I had something to say, and off I went, to speak up for Mother who wasn’t there to speak up for herself.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” I said—I noticed that George began like that—“I don’t agree at all with what the gentleman—who is my father—has been saying about Tooting—Upper Tooting, I mean. He ought to be more patriotic, as he lives at Isleworth, which is pretty nearly the same thing, part of his time anyhow, and I suppose he needn’t do it unless he likes. And as for what he says about Mother, why, I can tell everybody that Mother doesn’t read novels about Duchesses or anybody. She hasn’t time, she’s much too busy in the house, bringing us up, and cooking specially for George, and so on. That’s all!”

I sat down with a bump. George seemed to subside, and I lost him, but I hardly expected him to come and hug me. Lady Scilly went and comforted him, perhaps! I don’t know what happened, except tea and coffee, but I didn’t feel inclined, and I asked Mr. Aix to take me home.

He did, in a hansom. He held my hand all the way. We didn’t talk, but I am sure he wasn’t cross with me, and held my hand to show it. He seemed to know I was going to have a bad time.

I did. Even Mother scolded me.

Papa didn’t come near us for a week, and when he was due I asked if I might have a cold and be in bed. God sent me a real cold to make me truthful. Aunt Gerty nursed me. It wasn’t so bad. She read to me about Thumbelina and Boadicea, my two favourite heroines, one big and the other little, and poetry about my painted boy, which I love and that always makes me go to sleep. I believe it is spelt with a u, and doesn’t mean a child at all. But, I like it best my way—

While I was ill, though, I missed all the discussions about moving, and the results of the lecture and all that. Ariadne reported what she could. She said that Mother and George never mentioned me, but talked as if the drains had gone wrong, or a pipe had burst, or as if George had lost a lot of money somehow. Everything is to be altered and the world will be topsy-turvey when I get down-stairs again. Though I don’t suppose that even if I did get a chance of putting my word in, I could alter anything as I wished it? These grown-ups, once they get the bit between their teeth–!

IT is no fun for George now, when everybody knows he is a married man. Lady Scilly took care of that, and told everybody as a good joke, and all her friends at the Go-ahead Club told their friends how George Vero-Taylor’s little girl had burst into the middle of his lecture there and given him away—such fun, don’t you know! It wasn’t fun for me, for I had nothing but the consciousness of a bad action to support me in Coventry, where they all put me for a month. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if George hadn’t been at home a good deal about that time. I think I prefer George as a visitor, and so does Elizabeth Cawthorne, though she says it is more natural perhaps for a gentleman to stop with his family, though wearing to the servants.

George is a philosopher. He has been forced to own up to a family, and thus has lost a certain amount of prestige, but he is now trying a new line. At any rate, he has been a good deal talked about, and got into the newspapers, and that will sell an edition, I should think. He has a volume on the stocks. Misfortunes never come single-handed, luckily. He settled to build a house—a house that should express him and shelter his family as well. Mother didn’t want to build. If we had to move, she wanted a dear little house on the river at Datchet, or even at Surbiton, and she and I used to go down for the day third-class to see if there were any to let. We used to take a packet of sandwiches and a soda-water bottle full of milk for us both. Mother never hardly touches spirits. In this way we looked over heaps of little earwiggeries trimmed with clematises and pots of geraniums hanging from the balconies, with their poor roots higher than their heads, and manicured lawns right down to the water’s edge. George didn’t stop our doing this and taking so much trouble; I believe he thought it amused us and did him no harm. But all the time, he was hansoming it backwards and forwards to St. John’s Wood, where he meant to settle. He quietly chose a site, and bought it, and was his own architect, though a little Mr. Jortin he discovered, made the plans from his dictation. He got no credit, except for the blunders. George, being a man of the widest culture, wanted to show the world that he can do other things than write books. In Who’s Who , he doesn’t mention writing as one of his occupations, not even as one of his amusements. These are Riding, Driving, Shooting, Fishing, Fencing, Polo, Rotting and Log-rolling, or at least, that’s what his friend Mr. Aix read out to us one afternoon he came to see us, out of the very newest edition, and George was in the room too, and laughed.