Clifford Boyleston said that all the wit and wisdom he heard passed over his head like water over a duck’s back. He had given up trying to understand and now only made a semblance of listening. But Harry Oakland, the versatile critic, said that Albert was taking it all in; he found it all too, too marvellous, and with his poor, muddled brain he was trying desperately to make head or tail of the wonderful things he heard. Of course in the City he must boast of the distinguished persons he knew, perhaps there he was a light of learning and letters, an authority on the ideal; it would be perfectly divine to hear what he made of it all. Harry Oakland was one of Mrs Albert Forrester’s staunchest admirers, and had written a brilliant and subtle essay on her style. With his refined and even beautiful features he looked like a San Sebastian who had had an accident with a hair-restorer; for he was uncommonly hirsute. He was a very young man, not thirty, but he had been in turn a dramatic critic, and a critic of fiction, a musical critic, and a critic of painting. But he was getting a little tired of art and threatened to devote his talents in future to the criticism of sport.
Albert, I should explain, was in the city and it was a misfortune that Mrs Forrester’s friends thought she bore with meritorious fortitude that he was not even rich. There would have been something romantic in it if he had been a merchant prince who held the fate of nations in his hand or sent argosies, laden with rare spices, to those ports of the Levant the names of which have provided many a poet with so rich and rare a rhyme. But Albert was only a currant merchant and was supposed to make no more than just enabled Mrs
Albert Forrester to conduct her life with distinction and even with liberality. Since his occupation kept him in his office till six o’clock he never managed to get to Mrs Albert Forrester’s Tuesdays till the most important visitors were gone. By the time he arrived, there were seldom more than three or four of her more intimate friends in the drawing-room, discussing with freedom and humour the guests who had departed, and when they heard Albert’s key in the front door they realized with one accord that it was late. In a moment he opened the door in his hesitating way and looked mildly in. Mrs Albert Forrester greeted him with a bright smile.
‘Come in, Albert, come in. I think you know everybody here.’
Albert entered and shook hands with his wife’s friends.
‘Have you just come from the City?’ she asked eagerly, though she knew there was nowhere else he could have come from. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you, my dear. I had tea in my office.’
Mrs Albert Forrester smiled still more brightly and the rest of the company thought she was perfectly wonderful with him.
Ah, but I know you like a second cup. I will pour it out for you myself.’
She went to the tea-table and, forgetting that the tea had been stewing for an hour and a half and was stone cold, poured him out a cup and added milk and sugar. Albert took it with a word of thanks, and meekly stirred it, but when Mrs Forrester resumed the conversation which his appearance had interrupted, without tasting it put it quietly down. His arrival was the signal for the party finally to break up, and one by one the remaining guests took their departure. On one occasion, however, the conversation was so absorbing and the point at issue so important that Mrs Albert Forrester would not hear of their going.
‘It must be settled once for all. And after all,’ she remarked in a manner that for her was almost arch, ‘this is a matter on which Albert may have something to say. Let us have the benefit of his opinion.’
It was when women were beginning to cut their hair and the subject of discussion was whether Mrs Albert Forrester should or should not shingle. Mrs Albert Forrester was a woman of authoritative presence. She was large-boned and her bones were well covered; had she not been so tall and strong it might have suggested itself to you that she was corpulent. But she carried her weight gallantly. Her features were a little larger than life-size and it was this that gave her face doubtless the look of virile intellectuality that it certainly possessed. Her skin was dark and you might have thought that she had in her veins some trace of Levantine blood: she admitted that she could not but think there was in her a gypsy strain and that would account, she felt, for the wild and lawless passion that sometimes characterized her poetry. Her eyes were large and black and bright, her nose like the great Duke of Wellington’s, but more fleshy, and her chin square and determined. She had a big mouth, with full red lips, which owed nothing to cosmetics, for of these Mrs Albert Forrester had never deigned to make use; and her hair, thick, solid, and grey, was piled on top of her head in such a manner as to increase her already commanding height. She was in appearance an imposing, not to say an alarming, female.
She was always very suitably dressed in rich materials of sombre hue and she looked every inch a woman of letters; but in her discreet way (being after all human and susceptible to vanity) she followed the fashions and the cut of her gowns was modish. I think for some time she had hankered to shingle her hair, but she thought it more becoming to do it at the solicitation of her friends than on her own initiative.
‘Oh, you must, you must,’ said Harry Oakland, in his eager, boyish way. ‘You’d look too, too wonderful.’
Clifford Boyleston, who was now writing a book on Madame de Maintenon, was doubtful. He thought it a dangerous experiment
‘I think,’ he said, wiping his eye-glasses with a cambric handkerchief, ‘I think when one has made a type one should stick to it. What would Louis XIV have been without his wig?’
‘I’m hesitating,’ said Mrs Forrester. ‘After all, we must move with the times. I am of my day and I do not wish to lag behind. America, as Wilhelm Meister said, is here and now’ She turned brightly to Albert. ‘What does my lord and master say about it? What is your opinion, Albert? To shingle or not to shingle, that is the question.’
‘I’m afraid my opinion is not of great importance, my dear,’ he answered mildly.
‘To me it is of the greatest importance,’ answered Mrs Albert Forrester, flatteringly.
She could not but see how beautifully her friends thought she treated The Philatelist
‘I insist,’ she proceeded, ‘I insist. No one knows me a you do, Albert. Will it suit me?’
‘It might,’ he answered. ‘My only fear is that with your-statuesque appearance short hair would perhaps suggest-well, shall we say, the Isle of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung.’
There was a moment’s embarrassed pause. Rose Waterford smothered a giggle, but the others preserved a stony silence. Mrs Forrester’s smile froze on her lips. Albert had dropped a brick.
‘I always thought Byron a very mediocre poet,’ said Mrs Albert Forrester at last.
The company broke up. Mrs Albert Forrester did not shingle, nor indeed was the matter ever again referred to.
It was towards the end of another of Mrs Albert Forrester’s Tuesdays that the event occurred that had so great an influence on her literary career.
It had been one of her most successful parties. The leader of the Labour Party had been there and Mrs Albert Forrester had gone as far as she could without definitely committing herself to intimate to him that she was prepared to throw in her lot with Labour. The time was ripe and if she was ever to adopt a political career she must come to a decision. A member of the French Academy had been brought by Clifford Boyleston and, though she knew he was wholly unacquainted with English, it had gratified her to receive his affable compliment on her ornate and yet pellucid style. The American Ambassador had been there and a young Russian prince whose authentic Romanoff blood alone prevented him from looking a gigolo. A duchess who had recently divorced her duke and married a jockey had been very gracious; and her strawberry leaves, albeit sere and yellow, undoubtedly added tone to the assembly. There had been quite a galaxy of literary lights. But now all, all were gone but Clifford Boyleston, Harry Oakland, Rose Waterford, Oscar Charles, and Simmons. Oscar Charles was a little, gnome-like creature, young but with the wizened f
ace of a cunning monkey, with gold spectacles, who earned his living in a government office but spent his leisure in the pursuit of literature.
He wrote little articles for the sixpenny weeklies and had a spirited contempt for the world in general. Mrs Albert Forrester liked him, thinking he had talent, but though he always expressed the keenest admiration for her style (it was indeed he who had named her the mistress of the semi-colon), his acerbity was so general that she also somewhat feared him. Simmons was her agent; a round-faced man who wore glasses so strong that his eyes behind them looked strange and misshapen. They reminded you of the eyes of some uncouth crustacean that you had seen in an aquarium. He came regularly to Mrs Albert Forrester’s parties, partly because he had the greatest admiration for her genius and partly because it was convenient for him to meet prospective clients in her drawing-room.
Mrs Albert Forrester, for whom he had long laboured with but a trifling recompense, was not sorry to put him in the way of earning an honest penny, and she took care to introduce him, with warm expressions of gratitude, to anyone who might be supposed to have literary wares to sell. It was not without pride that she remembered that the notorious and vastly lucrative memoirs of Lady St Swithin had been first mooted in her drawing-room.
They sat in a circle of which Mrs Albert Forrester was the centre and discussed brightly and, it must be confessed, somewhat maliciously the various persons who had been that day present. Miss Warren, the pallid female who had stood for two hours at the tea-table, was walking silently round the room collecting cups that had been left here and there. She had some vague employment, but was always able to get off in order to pour out tea for Mrs Albert Forrester, and in the evening she typed Mrs Albert Forrester’s manuscripts. Mrs Albert Forrester did not pay her for this, thinking quite rightly that as it was she did a great deal for the poor thing; but she gave her the seats for the cinema that were sent her for nothing and often presented her with articles of clothing for which she had no further use.
Mrs Albert Forrester in her rather deep, full voice was talking in a steady flow and the rest were listening to her with attention. She was in good form and the words that poured from her lips could have gone straight down on paper without alteration. Suddenly there was a noise in the passage as though something heavy had fallen and then the sound of an altercation.
Mrs Albert Forrester stopped and a slight frown darkened her really noble brow
‘I should have thought they knew by now that I will not have this devastating racket in the flat. Would you mind ringing the bell, Miss Warren, and asking what is the reason of this tumult?’
Miss Warren rang the bell and in a moment the maid appeared. Miss Warren at the door, in order not to interrupt Mrs Albert Forrester, spoke to her in undertones. But Mrs Albert Forrester somewhat irritably interrupted herself
‘Well, Carter, what is it? Is the house falling down or has the Red Revolution at last broken out?’
‘If you please, ma’am, it’s the new cook’s box,’ answered the maid. ‘The porter dropped it as he was bringing it in and the cook got all upset about it.’
‘What do you mean by “the new cook”?’
‘Mrs Bulfinch went away this afternoon, ma’am,’ said the maid.
Mrs Albert Forrester stared at her.
‘This is the first I’ve heard of it. Had Mrs Bulfinch given notice? The moment Mr Forrester comes in tell him that I wish to speak to him.’
‘Very good, ma’am.’
The maid went out and Miss Warren slowly returned to the tea-table. Mechanically, though nobody wanted them, she poured out several cups of tea. ‘What a catastrophe!’ cried Miss Waterford.
‘You must get her back,’ said Clifford Boyleston. ‘She’s a treasure, that woman, a remarkable cook, and she gets better and better every day.’
But at that moment the maid came in again with a letter on a small plated salver and handed it to her mistress.
‘What is this?’ said Mrs Albert Forrester.
‘Mr Forrester said I was to give you this letter when you asked for him, ma’am,’ said the maid.
Where is Mr Forrester then?’
‘Mr Forrester’s gone, ma’am,’ answered the maid as though the question surprised her.
‘Gone? That’ll do. You can go.’
The maid left the room and Mrs Albert Forrester, with a look of perplexity on her large face, opened the letter. Rose Waterford has told me that her first thought was that Albert, fearful of his wife’s displeasure at the departure of Mrs Bulfinch, had thrown himself in the Thames. Mrs Albert Forrester read the letter and a look of consternation crossed her face.
‘Oh, monstrous,’ she cried. ‘Monstrous! Monstrous!’
‘What is it, Mrs Forrester?’
Mrs Albert Forrester pawed the carpet with her foot like a restive, high-spirited horse pawing the ground, and crossing her arms with a gesture that is indescribable (but that you sometimes see in a fishwife who is going to make the very devil of a scene) bent her looks upon her curious and excessively startled friends.
‘Albert has eloped with the cook.’
There was a gasp of dismay. Then something terrible happened. Miss Warren, who was standing behind the tea-table, suddenly choked. Miss Warren, who never opened her mouth and whom no one ever spoke to, Miss Warren, whom not one of them, though he had seen her every week for three years, would have recognized in the street, Miss Warren suddenly burst into uncontrollable laughter. With one accord, aghast, they turned and stared at her. They felt as Balaam must have felt when his ass broke into speech. She positively shrieked with laughter. There was a nameless horror about the sight, as though something had on a sudden gone wrong with a natural phenomenon, and you were just as startled as though the chairs and tables without warning began to skip about the floor in an antic dance. Miss Warren tried to contain herself, but the more she tried the more pitilessly the laughter shook her, and seizing a handkerchief she stuffed it in her mouth and hurried from the room. The door slammed behind her.
‘Hysteria,’ said Clifford Boyleston.
‘Pure hysteria, of course,’ said Harry Oakland.
But Mrs Albert Forrester said nothing.
The letter had dropped at her feet and Simmons, the agent, picked it up and handed it to her. She would not take it
‘Read it,’ she said. ‘Read it aloud.’
Mr Simmons pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and holding the letter very close to his eyes read as follows:
My Dear
Mrs Bulfinch is in need of a change and has decided to leave, and as I do not feel inclined to stay on here without her I am going too. I have had all the literature I can stand and I am fed up with art.
Mrs Bulfinch does not care about marriage, but if you care to divorce me she is willing to marry me. I hope you will fmd the new cook satisfactory. She has excellent references. It may save you trouble if inform you that Mrs Bulfinch and I are living at 411 Kennington Road, S.E.
Albert
No one spoke. Mr Simmons slipped his spectacles back on to the bridge of his nose. The fact was that none of them, brilliant as they were and accustomed to find topics of conversation to suit every occasion, could think of an appropriate remark. Mrs Albert Forrester was not the kind of woman to whom you could offer condolences and each was too much afraid of the other’s ridicule to venture upon the obvious. At last Clifford Boyleston came bravely to the rescue.
‘One doesn’t know what to say,’ he observed.
There was another silence and then Rose Waterford spoke.
‘What does Mrs Bulfinch look like?’ she asked.
‘How should I know?’ answered Mrs Albert Forrester, somewhat peevishly. ‘I never looked at her. Albert always engaged the servants, she just came in for a moment so that I could see if her aura was satisfactory.’
‘But you must have seen her every morning when you did the housekeeping.’
‘Albert did the housekeeping. It was his own wish, so that I mig
ht be free to devote myself to my work. In this life one has to limit oneself.’
Did Albert order your luncheons?’ asked Clifford Boyleston.
‘Naturally. It was his province.’
Clifford Boyleston slightly raised his eyebrows. What a fool he had been never to guess that it was Albert who was responsible for Mrs Forrester’s beautiful food! And of course it was owing to him that the excellent Chablis was always just sufficiently chilled to run coolly over the tongue, but never so cold as to lose its bouquet and its savour.
‘He certainly knew good food and good wine.’
‘I always told you he had his points,’ answered Mrs Albert Forrester, as though he were reproaching her. ‘You all laughed at him. You would not believe me when I told you that I owed a great deal to him.’
There was no answer to this and once more silence, heavy and ominous, fell on the party. Suddenly Mr Simmons flung a bombshell.
‘You must get him back.’
So great was her surprise that if Mrs Albert Forrester had not been standing against the chimney-piece she would undoubtedly have staggered two paces to the rear.
‘What on earth do you mean?’ she cried. ‘I will never see him again as long as I live. Take him back? Never. Not even if he came and begged me on his bended knees.’
‘I didn’t say take him back; I said, get him back.’
But Mrs Albert Forrester paid no attention to the misplaced interruption.
‘I have done everything for him. What would he be without me? I ask you. I have given him a position which never in his remotest dreams could he have aspired to.’
None could deny that there was something magnificent in the indignation of Mrs Albert Forrester, but it appeared to have little effect on Mr Simmons. ‘What are you going to live on?’
Mrs Albert Forrester flung him a glance totally devoid of amiability. ‘God will provide,’ she answered in freezing tones.