The Second E. F. Benson Megapack Page 12
Amelie had two answers to that—the first an indignant letter, printed in large type throughout the American press, denouncing this massacre, and the second another ball. The letter Mrs. Cicero B. Dace did not object to at all, since it but enhanced her notoriety, but she objected to the ball very much indeed, since Amelie’s ingenious mind hit on the simple and exquisite plan of dispensing with the band, and having in its place a choir of three hundred singers, who, in batches of one hundred at a time, sang the dance tunes. The effect was contagious, and dancers joined in also, producing, as the press said, the “most stupendously lyrical effect since the days of Sappho.” Then Mrs. Cicero B. Dace sat down and thought again, lighting upon the famous idea of the auction ball, in which a real English Duke acted as auctioneer, and before each dance put up the ladies for auction, to be bid for by the men who wished to be their partners. But Amelie swiftly sent for Arthur Bolney Ross, and he and a friend of hers, who was backing her in this struggle for sovereignty, continued to bid for her for so long that, out of sinister compassion for her hostess, she stepped down from the rostrum and refused to dance with either, for fear that there should be no more dancing for anybody. This completely spoiled the success of the auction ball, and while Mrs. Cicero B. Dace was still staggering from its failure, Amelie annihilated her altogether by giving her inimitable glacier ball on the hottest night of the year. A refrigerating apparatus was rigged up on the walls of her ballroom, and their entire surface thickly coated with real ice. Glass channels, fringed with blue gentians, were made round the margin of the floor, to carry off the melting water, while accomplished members of the band yodelled at intervals to carry out the Swiss illusion. She and the auctioneer Duke—whom she had captured from under the nose of Mrs. Cicero B. Dace—dressed in knickerbockers, with a rope round his shoulder and an ice-axe in his hand, led the cotillion, and Mrs. Cicero B. Dace, having in vain tried to point out that the gentians were three parts artificial flowers, retired at 1 A.M. in floods of tears.
Such were Amelie Ross’s social achievements when, unlike Alexander the Great, she bethought herself that there were more worlds to conquer, and decided to extend her dominions over England. Her godmother, of course, knew her history, having, indeed, assisted at the history she had already made, and on the night of her arrival at the Ritz Hotel, dined with her there in her charming room looking over the Green Park, before going with her to her box at the opera. As regards this first appearance of her god-daughter, Violet Brackenbury had laid her plans very carefully, and explained them as they dined.
“I have asked nobody else at all, dear Amelie,” she said, “because I want everybody to be wild to find out who you are, and nobody will be able to say. Curiosity is the best sauce of all.”
Amelie became thoroughly American for a moment.
“My!” she said. “Don’t you mean that your folk over here haven’t seen hundreds and hundreds of pictures of me in the papers?”
“Probably not one, my dear. And I’ve only told one woman that you are coming. You are going to burst on everybody tonight, you and your lovely face, and your six feet of height, and your wonderful hair, and your wonderful pearls, and the most wonderful gown that you’ve got. I want all London for an hour or two to be wild to know who you are, and I have told the box-attendant to take your name off the door, and not to let anybody in between the acts. Afterwards I shall take you to the dance at Alice Middlesex’s, which, luckily, ever so luckily, is tonight. She is the one person I have told.”
“The Duchess of Middlesex?” asked Amelie.
“Yes; and she is quite certain to ask you if you know Lady Creighton, that dreadful countrywoman of yours who is climbing into London like a monkey and hopping about it like a flea. She tried to patronize Alice, and Alice won’t get over it either in this world or the next. So tell her that Lady Creighton is not received in New York—which I believe is the case, isn’t it?—and look very much surprised at the idea of knowing her. I can’t tell you how important that is.”
Amelie frowned slightly.
“But Elsie Creighton telephoned to me half an hour ago,” she said, “asking me to lunch with her tomorrow to meet—”
“It doesn’t matter whom she asked you to meet. If she asked you to meet the entire Royal Family, you would be wise to refuse. You don’t want U> climb into London on the top of a hurdy-gurdy.”
“My! What’s a hurdy-gurdy?” asked Amelie, whose English lessons had not taught her that word.
“Hurdy-gurdy? Street organ. It doesn’t matter. You don’t want to know people, if you understand; you want to make people want to know you. My plan is not that you should climb up, but that you should spread down.”
Amelie instantly caught this.
“I see,” she said. “I’m to begin at the top. But Elsie Creighton said there was a Prince coming to lunch tomorrow. I thought that was a good beginning.”
“Not so good as the Creighton woman is bad. Did you accept, by the way?”
“Why, yes.”
“Then telephone tomorrow exactly at lunch-time to say you are ill, and lunch with me very obviously downstairs in the restaurant. In fact, it couldn’t have happened better. It will mark you off very definitely from her and her crowd. I don’t mean to say that there are not charming people among it, but it would never do to enter London under her wing. Perhaps just at present, darling, you had better ask me before you accept invitations. It is so important to cut the right people.”
Amelie was completely cordial over this.
“I expect that is what I have got to learn,” she said. “And now for tonight—will my dress do?”
Lady Brackenbury regarded this admirable costume and shook her head.
“No, I don’t think it will,” she said. “It is lovely, but you want something more arresting. You, with your wonderful complexion, can stand anything. Orange, now—haven’t you got a hit-in-the-face of orange? I want everybody to be forced to look at you, and you’ll do the rest. You see I have made myself as plain and inconspicuous as possible, to act as a foil. It is noble of me, but then I am noble. And all the pearls, please, just all the pearls, with the big diamond fender on your head. Tomorrow, at the French Embassy, you shall wear the simplest gown you have got, and one moonstone brooch, price three-and-sixpence.”
* * * *
Such was the opening of Amelie’s amazing campaign, the incidents and successes of which followed swift and bewildering. Under Violet’s capable guidance she began, not by collecting round her that brisk and hungry section of well-born London which is always ready to sing for its dinner, and by giving huge entertainments to bring together a crowd at all costs, but by attracting and attaching a small band of the people who mattered. Lady Brackenbury knew very well that even in the most democratic town in the world certain people, not necessarily Princes or Prime Ministers, were large pieces in the great haphazard game of chess; the crowd meantime, after whom Amelie secretly hankered, would only get more eager to be admitted. In particular, Lady Creighton starved for her entry. She asked Amelie to dine any Tuesday in June, when she was giving her series of musical parties, but Amelie found, to her great regret, that she was engaged on all those festive occasions. But she gave a musical party herself—London was prey this year to a disordered illusion that it liked music—and Melba and Caruso sang there—informally, so it seemed, just happening to sing—to not more than fifty people, who sat in armchairs at their ease, instead of elbowing each other in squashed and upright rows. In vain did Lady Creighton spread an assiduous report that the artists had sung out of tune and that the peaches were sour. Everyone knew that she had not been there, and that she alluded to another sort of fruit. Violet Brackenbury was successful in persuading Amelie not to send any account of this brilliant little affair to the papers, and to refuse all scraps to the writers for the press. But she was careful to provide for a far more telling publicity.
Gradually, craftily, a reef at a time, Violet allowed her friend to let out her sails. She left
her flat at the Ritz and rurally installed herself in a spacious house in the middle of Regent’s Park. There was a big field attached to the house, and, yielding to a severe attack of Americanism, which she thought it might be dangerous to suppress, Violet permitted her to give a haymaking party of the Newport type. Hay was brought in from the country and scattered over the field, and mixed up with roses and gardenias, while the guests on arrival were presented with delightful little ebony pitchforks with silver prongs, or cedarwood rakes. But this symptom caused her a little uneasiness, for it was obvious that Amelie thought her haymaking party a much brighter achievement than the previous concert.
* * * *
The expansion continued. Amelie and her friend strolled into Christie’s one morning, and found a tussle going on between two eminent dealers over the possession of a really marvellous string of pearls. At a breathless pause, after the first “Going!” that followed a fresh bid, Amelie said in her most ringing American voice, “I guess I’ll sail in right now,” and began bidding herself. The crowd of dilettante London, which delights in seeing other people spend large sums of money, parted for her, and she moved gloriously up the auction-room and took her stand just behind one of the Mosaic little gentlemen who wanted the pearls so badly.
The recognition of her spread through the place like spilled quicksilver, and the auctioneer, with an amiable bow, caused the pearls to be handed to her for her inspection. With them still in her hand, as if it was not worth while returning them to the tray, she sky-rocketed the price by three exalting bids, the third of which was as a fire-hose on the ardour of her competitors. Her cheque-book was fetched from her car outside, and she left the room a moment afterwards, having drawn her cheque on the spot, pausing only to clasp the pearls round her neck.… And Violet, with a strange sinking of the heart, felt as if her pet tiger-cub had tasted blood again after the careful and distinguished diet on which she had been feeding it.
Amelia had a fancy to leave London early in July, and give a few parties at an immense house she had taken near Maidenhead for the month. She had had some gondolas sent over from Venice, with their appropriate gondoliers, and London found it very pleasant to float about after dinner, while the excellent string band played in an illuminated barge that accompanied the flotilla. Exciting little surprises constantly happened, such as the arrival one evening of artists from the Grand Guignol, who played a couple of thrilling little horrors in the ballroom, while on another night the great Reynolds picture belonging to the Duke of Middlesex was found to have put in an appearance on the walls. Amelie said that it was her birthday present to her husband, and made no further allusion to it. The frame had gone to be repaired, and it was draped round in clouds of silvery-grey chiffon that extended half over the wall. And had Violet Brackenbury known the outrage that her friend had planned, the frenzy of suppressed Newportism that was ready to break forth, it is probable that she would gladly have returned the cheque which she had that morning received from Amelie.
As it was, she felt wholly at ease, and inclined to congratulate herself on the unique and signal character of Amelie’s success. Never before, so she thought, had a woman so dominated the season; never, certainly, had one of her countrywomen so “mattered.” And all this, with the exception, perhaps, of the haymaking party and the incident of the pearls at Christie’s, had been gained in quiet, unsensational ways; and, lulled to content, she did not realize that the spirit that inspired the queen of hostesses was ready to flare up like an access of malarial fever. Poor unsuspecting godmother, who fondly believed that those gondolas from Venice, those Grand Guignol artists from Paris, this gem of Reynolds’s pictures, were a safety-valve, not guessing that they were but as oil poured on the flame!
The cotillion that night was to begin at twelve. Amelie was leading it herself with one of the Princes, and the big ballroom was doubly lined with seated guests, when on the stroke of twelve she entered, dressed in exact facsimile of the glorious Reynolds. As she advanced with her partner into the middle of the room, the band in the gallery struck up, and simultaneously a tongue of fire shot through the flimsy draperies round the picture, instantly enveloping it in flames. The canvas blistered and bubbled, and in ten seconds the finest Reynolds in the world was a sheet of scorched and blackened rag.
The crowd leaped to its feet, but before the panic had time to mature, the cause of it was over. There was nothing inflammable w r ithin range of the swiftly-consumed chiffon, and only little fragments of burned-out ash floated on to the floor. But the fervent and instantaneous heat had done its work.
Then for a moment there was dead silence, and Amelie’s voice was heard in its quietest, most English tones.
“Oh, isn’t that a pity!” she said.
Then arose a sudden hubbub of talk, drowning the sound of the band, which, at a signal from Amelie, had started again.
* * * *
Violet stood with her friend before the blackened canvas next morning in the empty room, drawing on her gloves.
“I don’t think you understand yet the effect of what you have done,” she said. “No one doubts that the fire was intentional, and—and I think that Lady Creighton will be of more use to you in the future than I can possibly be.”
“PUSS-CAT”
It was during the month of May some nine years ago that the beginning of the events that concerned Puss-cat took place. I was living at the time on the green outskirts of a country town, and my diningroom at the back of the house opened on to a small garden framed in brick walls some five feet high. Breakfasting there one morning, I saw a large black and white cat, with a sharp but serious face, observing me with studied attention. Now at the time there was an interregnum, and my house was without a mistress (in the shape of a cat), and it at once struck me that I was being interviewed by this big and pleasing stranger, to see if I would do. So, since there is nothing that a prospective mistress likes less than premature familiarity on the part of the householder whom she may be thinking of engaging, I took no direct notice of the cat, but continued to eat my breakfast carefully and tidily. After a short inspection, the cat quietly withdrew without once looking back, and I supposed that I was dismissed, or that she had decided, after all, to keep on her present household.
In that I proved to be mistaken: she had only gone away to think about it, and next morning, and for several mornings after that, I was subjected to the same embarrassing but not unfriendly scrutiny, after which she took a stroll round the garden to see if there were any flower-beds that would do to make ambushes in, and a convenient tree or two to climb should emergencies arise. On the fourth day, as far as I remember, I committed an error, and half-way through breakfast went out into the garden, to attempt to get on more familiar terms. The cat regarded me for a few moments with pained surprise, and went away; but after I had gone in again, she decided to overlook it, for she returned to her former place, and continued to observe. Next morning she made up her mind, jumped down from the wall, trotted across the grass, entered the dining-room, and, arranging herself in a great hurry round one hindleg, which she put up in the air like a flagstaff, proceeded to make her morning toilet. That, as I knew quite well, meant that she thought I would give satisfaction, and I was therefore permitted to enter upon my duties at once. So I put down a saucer of milk for her, which she very obligingly disposed of. Then she went and sat by the door, and said” A-a-a-a,” to show that she wished the door to be opened for her, so that she might inspect the rest of the house. So I called down the kitchen stairs, “There is come a cat, who I think means to stop. Don’t fuss her.” In this manner the real Puss-cat—though I did not know that—entered the house.
Now here I must make a short defence for my share in these things. I might, by a hasty judgment, be considered to have stolen her who soon became Puss-cat’s mamma, but anyone who has any real knowledge of cats will be aware that I did nothing of the kind. Puss-cat’s mamma was clearly dissatisfied with her last household and had, without the least doubt,
made up her mind to leave them all and take on a fresh lot of servants; and if a cat makes up her mind about anything, no power on earth except death, or permanent confinement in a room where neither doors nor windows are ever opened, will stop her taking the contemplated step. If her last (unknown) household killed her, or permanently shut her up, of course, she could not engage fresh people, but short of that they were powerless to keep her. You may cajole or bully a dog into doing what you want, but no manner of persuasion will cause a cat to deviate one hair’s breadth from the course she means to pursue. If I had driven her away she would have gone to another house, but never back to her own. For though we may own dogs and horses and other animals, it is a great mistake to think that we own cats. Cats employ us, and if we give satisfaction they may go so far as to adopt us. Besides, Pusscat’s mamma did not, as it turned out, mean to stay with me altogether: she only wanted quiet lodgings for a time.
So our new mistress went discreetly downstairs and inspected kitchen, scullery, and pantry. She spent some time in the scullery, so I was told, and felt rather doubtful. But she quite liked the new gasstove in the kitchen, and singed her tail at it, as nobody had told her that lunch was a-cooking. Also she found a mouse-hole below the wainscoting, which appeared to decide her (for, as we soon found out, she liked work), and she trotted upstairs again and sat outside the drawing-room door till somebody opened it for her. I happened to be inside, with Jill, a young lady of the fox-terrier breed, and, of course, did not know that Puss-cat’s mamma was waiting. Eventually I came out and saw her sitting there. Jill saw her, too, and eagerly ran up to her only to talk, not to fight, for Jill likes cats. But Puss-cat’s mamma did not know that, so, just in case, she slapped Jill smartly first on one side the head, and then on the other. She was not angry, but only firm and strong, and wished that from the first there should be no doubt whatever about her position. Having done that, she allowed Jill to explain, which Jill did with twitchings of her stumpy tail and attitude provocative of gambols. And before many minutes were up, Puss-cat’s mamma was kind enough to play with her. Then she suddenly remembered that she had not seen the rest of the house, and went upstairs, where she remained till lunch-time.