Edith Wharton - Novel 21

by The Buccaneers (v2. 1)

  “A London season?” Mrs. St George gasped, in a tone implying that her burdens and bewilderments were heavy enough already.

  Miss Testvalley laughed. “Why not? It might be much easier than New York; you ought to try,” that intrepid woman declared.

  Mrs. St George, in her bewilderment, repeated this to her eldest daughter; and Virginia, who was a thoughtful girl, turned the matter over in her mind. The New York experiment, though her mother regarded it as a failure, had not been without its compensations; especially the second winter, when Nan emerged from the school-room. There was no doubt that Nan supplemented her sister usefully; she could always think of something funny or original to say, whereas there were moments when Virginia had to rely on the length of her eyelashes and the lustre of her lips, and trust to them to plead for her. Certainly the two sisters made an irresistible pair. The Assembly ladies might ignore their existence, but the young men did not; and there were jolly little dinners and gay theatre-parties in plenty to console the exiled beauties. Still, it was bitter to be left out of all the most exclusive entertainments, to have not a single invitation to Newport, to be unbidden to the Opera on the fashionable nights. With Mrs. St George it rankled more than with her daughters. With the approach of the second summer she had thought of hiring a house at Newport; but she simply didn’t dare—and it was then that Miss Testvalley made her bold suggestion.

  “But I’ve never been to England. I wouldn’t know how to get to know people. And I couldn’t face a strange country all alone.”

  “You’d soon make friends, you know. It’s easier sometimes in foreign countries.”

  Virginia here joined in. “Why shouldn’t we try, mother? I’m sure Conchita’d be glad to get us invitations. She’s awfully good-natured.”

  “Your father would think we’d gone crazy.”

  Perhaps Mrs. St George hoped he would; it was always an added cause for anxiety when her husband approved of holiday plans in which he was not to share. And that summer she knew he intended to see the Cup Races off Newport, with a vulgar drinking crowd, Elmsworth and Closson among them, who had joined him in chartering a steam-yacht for the occasion.

  Colonel St George’s business association with Mr. Closson had turned out to be an exceptionally fruitful one, and he had not failed to remind his wife that its pecuniary results had already justified him in asking her to be kind to Mrs. Closson. “If you hadn’t, how would I have paid for this European trip, I’d like to know, and all the finery for the girls’ London season?” he had playfully reminded her, as he pressed the steamer-tickets and a letter of credit into her reluctant hand.

  Mrs. St George knew then that the time for further argument was over. The letter of credit, a vaguely understood instrument which she handled as though it were an explosive, proved that his decision was irrevocable. The pact with Mr. Closson had paid for the projected European tour, and would also, Mrs. St George bitterly reflected, help to pay for the charter of the steam-yacht, and the champagne orgies on board, with ladies in pink bonnets. All this was final, unchangeable, and she could only exhale her anguish to her daughters and their governess.

  “Now your father’s rich his first idea is to get rid of us, and have a good time by himself.”

  Nan flushed up, longing to find words in defence of the Colonel; and Virginia spoke for her. “How silly, mother! Father feels it’s only fair to give us a chance in London. You know perfectly well that if we get on there we’ll be invited everywhere when we get back to New York. That’s why father wants us to go.”

  “But I simply couldn’t go to England all alone with you girls,” Mrs. St George despairingly repeated.

  “But we won’t be alone. Of course Miss Testvalley’ll come too!” Nan interrupted.

  “Take care, Nan! If I do, it will be to try to get you on with your Italian,” said the governess. But they were all aware that by this time she was less necessary to her pupils than to their mother. And so, they hardly knew how, they had all (with Colonel St George’s too-hearty encouragement) drifted, or been whirled, into this wild project; and now, on a hot July afternoon, when Mrs. St George would have been so happy sipping her lemonade in friendly company on the Grand Union verandah, she sat in the melancholy exile of a London hotel, and wondered when the girls would get back from that awful performance they called a Drawing-room.

  There had been times—she remembered ruefully—when she had not been happy at Saratoga, had felt uncomfortable in the company of the dubious Mrs. Closson, and irritated by the vulgar exuberance of Mrs. Elmsworth; but such was her present loneliness that she would have welcomed either with open arms. And it was precisely as this thought crossed her mind that the buttons knocked on the door to ask if she would receive Mrs. Elmsworth.

  “Oh, my dear!” cried poor Mrs. St George, falling on her visitor’s breast; and two minutes later the ladies were mingling their loneliness, their perplexities, their mistrust of all things foreign and unfamiliar, in an ecstasy of interchanged confidences.

  The confidences lasted so long that Mrs. Elmsworth did not return to her hotel until after her daughters. She found them alone in the dark shiny sitting-room which so exactly resembled the one inhabited by Mrs. St George, and saw at once that they were out of humour with each other if not with the world. Mrs. Elmsworth disliked gloomy faces, and on this occasion felt herself entitled to resent them, since it was to please her daughters that she had left her lazy pleasant cure at Bad Ems to give them a glimpse of the London season.

  “Well, girls, you look as if you were just home from a funeral,” she remarked, breathing heavily from her ascent of the hotel stairs, and restraining the impulse to undo the upper buttons of her strongly whale-boned Paris dress.

  “Well, we are. We’ve seen all the old corpses in London dressed up for that circus they call a Drawing-room,” said her eldest daughter.

  “They weren’t all corpses, though,” Mab interrupted.

  “What do you think, mother? We saw Jinny and Nan St George, rigged out to kill, feathers and all, in the procession!”

  Mrs. Elmsworth manifested no surprise. “Yes, I know. I’ve just been sitting with Mrs. St George, and she told me the girls had gone to the Drawing-room. She said Conchita Marable fixed it up for them. So you see it’s not so difficult, after all.”

  Lizzy shrugged impatiently. “If Conchita has done it for them we can’t ask her to do it again for us. Besides, it’s too late; I saw in the paper it was the last Drawing-room. I told you we ought to have come a month ago.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said her mother good-naturedly. “There was a Miss March came in while I was with Mrs. St George—such a sweet little woman. An American; but she’s lived for years in London, and knows everybody. Well, she said going to a Drawing-room didn’t really amount to anything; it just gave the girls a chance to dress up and see a fine show. She says the thing is to be in the Prince of Wales’s set. That’s what all the smart women are after. And it seems that Miss March’s friend, Lady Churt, is very intimate with the Prince and has introduced Conchita to him, and he’s crazy about her Spanish songs. Isn’t that funny, girls?”

  “It may be very funny. But I don’t see how it’s going to help us,” Lizzy grumbled.

  Mrs. Elmsworth gave her easy laugh. “Well, it won’t, if you don’t help yourselves. If you think everybody’s against you, they will be against you. But that Miss March has invited you and Mabel to take tea at her house next week—it seems everybody in England takes tea at five. In the country-houses the women dress up for it, in things they call ‘tea-gowns’. I wish we’d known that when we were ordering our clothes in Paris. But Miss March will tell you all about it, and a lot more besides.”

  Lizzy Elmsworth was not a good-tempered girl, but she was too intelligent to let her temper interfere with her opportunities. She hated the St George girls for having got ahead of her in their attack on London, but was instantly disposed to profit by the breach they had made. Virginia St George w
as not clever, and Lizzy would be able to guide her; they could be of the greatest use to each other, if the St Georges could be made to enter into the plan. Exactly what plan, Lizzy herself did not know; but she felt instinctively that, like their native country, they could stand only if they were united.

  Mrs. St George, in her loneliness, had besought Mrs. Elmsworth to return the next afternoon. She didn’t dare invite Lizzy and Mab, she explained, because her own girls were being taken to see the Tower of London by some of their new friends (Lizzy’s resentment stirred again as she listened); but if Mrs. Elmsworth would just drop in and sit with her, Mrs. St George thought perhaps Miss March would be coming in too, and then they would talk over plans for the rest of the summer. Lizzy understood at once the use to which Mrs. St George’s loneliness might be put. Mrs. Elmsworth was lonely too; but this did not greatly concern her daughter. In the St George and Elmsworth circles unemployed mothers were the rule; but Lizzy saw that, by pooling their solitudes, the two ladies might become more contented, and therefore more manageable. And having come to lay siege to London Miss Elmsworth was determined, at all costs, not to leave till the citadel had fallen.

  “I guess I’ll go with you,” she announced, when her mother rose to put on her bonnet for the call.

  “Why, the girls won’t be there; she told me so. She says they’ll be round to see you tomorrow,” said Mrs. Elmsworth, surprised.

  “I don’t care about the girls; I want to see that Miss March.”

  “Oh, well,” her mother agreed. Lizzy was always doing things she didn’t understand, but Mab usually threw some light on them afterward. And certainly, Mrs. Elmsworth reflected, it became her eldest daughter to be in one of her mysterious moods. She had never seen Lizzy look more goddess-like than when they ascended Mrs. St George’s stairs together.

  Miss March was not far from sharing Mrs. Elmsworth’s opinion. When the Elmsworth ladies were shown in, Miss March was already sitting with Mrs. St George. She had returned on the pretext of bringing an invitation for the girls to visit Holland House; but in reality she was impatient to see the rival beauty. Miss Testvalley, the day before, had told her all about Lizzy Elmsworth, whom some people thought, in her different way, as handsome as Virginia, and who was certainly cleverer. And here she was, stalking in ahead of her mother, in what appeared to be the new American style, and carrying her slim height and small regal head with an assurance which might well eclipse Virginia’s milder light.

  Miss March surveyed her with the practised eye of an old frequenter of the marriage-market.

  “Very fair girls usually have a better chance here; but Idina Churt is dark—perhaps, for that reason, this girl might be more likely…” Miss March lost herself in almost maternal musings. She often said to herself (and sometimes to her most intimate friends) that Lord Seadown seemed to her like her own son; and now, as she looked on Lizzy Elmsworth’s dark splendour, she murmured inwardly: “Of course we must find out first what Mr. Elmsworth would be prepared to do…”

  To Mrs. Elmsworth, whom she greeted with her most persuasive smile, she said engagingly: “Mrs. St George and I have such a delightful plan to suggest to you. Of course you won’t want to stay in London much longer. It’s so hot and crowded; and before long it will be a dusty desert. Mrs. St George tells me that you’re both rather wondering where to go next, and I’ve suggested that you should join her in hiring a lovely little cottage on the Thames belonging to a friend of mine, Lady Churt. It could be had at once, servants and all—the most perfect servants—and I’ve stayed so often with Lady Churt that I know just how cool and comfortable and lazy one can be there. But I was thinking more especially of your daughters and their friends… The river’s a Paradise at their age… the punting by moonlight, and all the rest…”

  Long-past memories of the river’s magic brought a sigh to Miss March’s lips; but she turned it into a smile as she raised her forget-me-not eyes to Lizzy Elmsworth’s imperial orbs. Lizzy returned the look, and the two immediately understood each other.

  “Why, mother, that sounds perfectly lovely. You’d love it too, Mrs. St George, wouldn’t you?” Lizzy smiled, stooping gracefully to kiss her mother’s friend. She had no idea what punting was, but the fact that it was practised by moonlight suggested the exclusion of rheumatic elders, and a free field—or river, rather—for the exercise of youthful arts. And in those she felt confident of excelling.

  

  XIII.

  The lawn before Lady Churt’s cottage (or bungalow, as the knowing were beginning to say) spread sweetly to the Thames at Runnymede. With its long deck-like verandah, its awnings stretched from every window, it seemed to Nan St George a fairy galleon making, all sails set, for the river. Swans, as fabulous to Nan as her imaginary galleon, sailed majestically on the silver flood; and boats manned by beautiful bare-armed athletes sped back and forth between the flat grass-banks.

  At first Nan was the only one of the party on whom the river was not lost. Virginia’s attention travelled barely as far as the circles of calceolarias and lobelias dotting the lawn, and the vases of red geraniums and purple petunias which flanked the door; she liked the well-kept flowers and bright turf, and found it pleasant, on warm afternoons, to sit under an ancient cedar and play at the new-fangled tea-drinking into which they had been initiated by Miss March, with the aid of Lady Churt’s accomplished parlour-maid. Lizzy Elmsworth and Mab also liked the tea-drinking, but were hardly aware of the great blue-green boughs under which the rite was celebrated. They had grown up between city streets and watering-place hotels, and were serenely unconscious of the “beyondness” of which Nan had confided her mysterious sense to Guy Thwarte.

  The two mothers, after their first bewildered contact with Lady Churt’s servants, had surrendered themselves to these accomplished guides, and lapsed contentedly into their old watering-place habits. To Mrs. St George and Mrs. Elmsworth the cottage at Runnymede differed from the Grand Union at Saratoga only in its inferior size, and more restricted opportunities for gossip. True, Miss March came down often with racy tit-bits from London, but the distinguished persons concerned were too remote to interest the exiles. Mrs. St George missed even the things she had loathed at Saratoga—the familiarity of the black servants, the obnoxious sociability of Mrs. Closson, and the spectacle of the race-course, with ladies in pink bonnets lying in wait for the Colonel. Mrs. Elmsworth had never wasted her time in loathing anything. She would have been perfectly happy at Saratoga and in New York if her young ladies had been more kindly welcomed there. She privately thought Lizzy hard to please, and wondered what her own life would have been if she had turned up her nose at Mr. Elmsworth, who was a clerk in the village grocery-store when they had joined their lot; but the girls had their own ideas, and since Conchita Closson’s marriage (an unhappy affair, as it turned out) had roused theirs with social ambition, Mrs. Elmsworth was perfectly willing to let them try their luck in England, where beauty such as Lizzy’s (because it was rarer, she supposed) had been known to raise a girl almost to the throne. It would certainly be funny, she confided to Mrs. St George, to see one of their daughters settled at Windsor Castle (Mrs. St George thought it would be exceedingly funny to see one of Mrs. Elmsworth’s); and Miss March, to whom the confidence was passed on, concluded that Mrs. Elmsworth was imperfectly aware of the difference between the ruler of England and her subjects.

  “Unfortunately their Royal Highnesses are all married,” she said with her instructive little laugh; and Mrs. Elmsworth replied vaguely: “Oh, but aren’t there plenty of other Dukes?” If there were, she could trust Lizzy, her tone implied; and Miss March, whose mind was now set on uniting the dark beauty to Lord Seadown, began to wonder if she might not fail again, this time not as in her own case, but because of the young lady’s too-great ambition.

  Mrs. Elmsworth also missed the friendly bustle of the Grand Union, the gentlemen coming from New York on Saturdays with the Wall Street news, and the flutter caused in the dining-room when i
t got round that Mr. Elmsworth had made another hit on the market; but she soon resigned herself to the routine of bézique with Mrs. St George. At first she too was chilled by the silent orderliness of the household; but though both ladies found the maid-servants painfully unsociable, and were too much afraid of the cook ever to set foot in the kitchen, they enjoyed the absence of domestic disturbances, and the novel experience of having every wish anticipated.

  Meanwhile the bungalow was becoming even more attractive than when its owner inhabited it. Parliament sat exceptionally late that year, and many were the younger members of both Houses, chafing to escape to Scotland, and the private secretaries and minor government officials, still chained to their desks, who found compensations at the cottage on the Thames. Reinforced by the guardsmen quartered at Windsor, they prolonged the river season in a manner unknown to the oldest inhabitants. The weather that year seemed to be in connivance with the American beauties, and punting by moonlight was only one of the midsummer distractions to be found at Runnymede.

  To Lady Richard Marable the Thames-side cottage offered a happy escape from her little house in London, where there were always duns to be dealt with, and unpaid servants to be coaxed to stay. She came down often, always bringing the right people with her, and combining parties, and inventing amusements, which made invitations to the cottage as sought-after as cards to the Royal enclosure. There was not an ounce of jealousy in Conchita’s easy nature. She was delighted with the success of her friends, and proud of the admiration they excited. “We’ve each got our own line,” she said to Lizzy Elmsworth, “and if we only back each other up we’ll beat all the other women hands down. The men are blissfully happy in a house where nobody chaperons them, and they can smoke in every room, and gaze at you and Virginia, and laugh at my jokes, and join in my nigger songs. It’s too soon yet to know what Nan St George and Mab will contribute; but they’ll probably develop a line of their own, and the show’s not a bad one as it is. If we stick to the rules of the game, and don’t play any low-down tricks on each other,” (“Oh, Conchita!” Lizzy protested, with a beautiful pained smile) “we’ll have all London in our pocket next year.”