The Celebrity at Home. Violet Hunt
came in I saw why, for it was George!
Lady Scilly grabbed my arm, and said, “Don’t call out, child!”
As if I was going to! But now I saw why she had kept calling him the lecturer instead of saying his name whenever she had spoken of him before. Now I saw why she was so full of nods and winks and grins, and had brought me to the lecture so particularly. Now I saw why the old gentleman had called her a fairy—that meant a tease, and I wasn’t going to gratify her by seeming upset or anything. Not I! So I sat quite still as she told me, and George began.
I borrowed a pencil of the Ollendorff man, and put down some notes to remind me of what George said, for Ariadne. It took me some time to get used to the funny little voice George put on to lecture with, quite different to his Isleworth voice. Presently when I began to catch on a little I found that the lecture was all about novels and the good of them, as Lady Scilly had said. This is the sort of thing—
“A novel,” said my father, “is apt to hold a group of quite ordinary, uninteresting characters, wallowing in their clammy, stale environment, like fishes in an aquarium, held together by a thin thread of narrative, and bounded by the four walls of the author’s experience. His duty is to enlarge that experience, for to novels we go, not so much for amusement as for a criticism of Life. That portion of life which comes under the reader’s own observation is naturally so restricted, so vastly disproportionate, to the whole great arcana.” (I do hope I got this down right!) “The novelist should be omniscient and omnipotent.” (Once I got these two great words, all the rest seemed child’s play.) “A great responsibility lies with the purveyors of this necessary panorama of existence, the men who monopolize the furnishing and regulating of the supply.” (Loud applause.) “The right man, or peradventure, the right woman” (he bowed at Lady Scilly), “knows, or ought to know, so many sides, while the reader, alas, knows but one, and is so tired of that one!”
Everybody sighed and groaned a little to show how tired they were, and George went on—
“I see my audience is in touch with me. It works both ways.” (What works both ways? I must have left something out.) “A Duchess of my acquaintance said some poignant, pregnant words—as indeed all her words are pregnant and poignant” (he bowed to an old corpulent lady in another part of the room)—“to me the other day. She said that her novel of predilection was not a society novel. ‘I know it all, don’t I, like the palm of my hand?’ she objected. ‘I know how to behave in a drawing-room and how not to behave in a boudoir!’ So she complained. The substance of her complaint, as I understand it, is this;—what she wants is worlds not realized! She wants to see the actress in her drawing-room, the flower-girl in her garret, the laundress at her tub, the burglar at his work——”
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—
“We left behind the painted buoy
That tosses at the harbour-mouth,
And madly danced our hearts with joy
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–!
CHAPTER V
IT is no fun for George now, when everybody knows he is a married man. Lady