The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of View/The Siege of London/Chapter 8
VIII.
George Littlemore arrived in London on the twentieth of May, and one of the first things he did was to go and see Waterville at the Legation, where he made known to him that he had taken for the rest of the season a house at Queen Anne's Gate, so that his sister and her husband, who, under the pressure of diminished rents, had let their own town-residence, might come up and spend a couple of months with him.
"One of the consequences of your having a house will be that you will have to entertain Mrs. Headway," Waterville said. Littlemore sat there with his hands crossed upon his stick; he looked at Waterville with an eye that failed to kindle at the mention of this lady's name. "Has she got into European society?" he asked, rather languidly.
"Very much, I should say. She has a house, and a carriage, and diamonds, and everything handsome. She seems already to know a lot of people; they put her name in the Morning Post. She has come up very quickly; she's almost famous. Every one is asking about her—you 'll be plied with questions."
Littlemore listened gravely. "How did she get in?"
"She met a large party at Longlands, and made them all think her great fun. They must have taken her up; she only wanted a start."
Littlemore seemed suddenly to be struck with the grotesqueness of this news, to which his first response was a burst of quick laughter. "To think of Nancy Beck! The people here are queer people. There 's no one they won't go after. They wouldn't touch her in New York."
"Oh, New York 's old-fashioned," said Waterville; and he announced to his friend that Lady Demesne was very eager for his arrival, and wanted to make him help her prevent her son's bringing such a person into the family. Littlemore apparently was not alarmed at her ladyship's projects, and intimated, in the manner of a man who thought them rather impertinent, that he could trust himself to keep out of her way. "It is n't a proper marriage, at any rate," Waterville declared.
"Why not, if he loves her?"
"Oh, if that 's all you want!" cried Waterville, with a degree of cynicism that rather surprised his companion. "Would you marry her yourself?"
"Certainly, if I were in love with her."
"You took care not to be that."
"Yes, I did—and so Demesne had better have done. But since he's bitten—!" and Littlemore terminated his sentence in a suppressed yawn.
Waterville presently asked him how he would manage, in view of his sister's advent, about asking Mrs. Headway to his house; and he replied that he would manage by simply not asking her. Upon this, Waterville declared that he was very inconsistent; to which Littlemore rejoined that it was very possible. But he asked whether they couldn't talk about something else than Mrs. Headway. He could n't enter into the young man's interest in her, and was sure to have enough of her later.
Waterville would have been sorry to give a false idea of his interest in Mrs. Headway; for he flattered himself the feeling had definite limits. He had been two or three times to see her; but it was a relief to think that she was now quite independent of him. There had been no revival of that intimate intercourse which occurred during the visit to Longlands. She could dispense with assistance now; she knew herself that she was in the current of success. She pretended to be surprised at her good fortune, especially at its rapidity; but she was really surprised at nothing. She took things as they came, and, being essentially a woman of action, wasted almost as little time in elation as she would have done in despondence. She talked a great deal about Lord Edward and Lady Margaret, and about such other members of the nobility as had shown a desire to cultivate her acquaintance; professing to understand perfectly the sources of a popularity which apparently was destined to increase. "They come to laugh at me," she said; "they come simply to get things to repeat. I can't open my mouth but they burst into fits. It 's a settled thing that I 'm an American humorist; if I say the simplest things, they begin to roar. I must express myself somehow; and indeed when I hold my tongue they think me funnier than ever. They repeat what I say to a great person, and a great person told some of them the other night that he wanted to hear me for himself. I 'll do for him what I do for the others; no better and no worse. I don't know how I do it; I talk the only way I can. They tell me it is n't so much the things I say as the way I say them. Well, they 're very easy to please. They don't care for me; it 's only to be able to repeat Mrs. Headway's 'last.' Every one wants to have it first; it 's a regular race." When she found what was expected of her, she undertook to supply the article in abundance; and the poor little woman really worked hard at her Americanisms. If the taste of London lay that way, she would do her best to gratify it; it was only a pity she had n't known it before; she would have made more extensive preparations. She thought it a disadvantage, of old, to live in Arizona, in Dakotah, in the newly admitted States; but now she perceived that, as she phrased it to herself, this was the best thing that ever had happened to her. She tried to remember all the queer stories she had heard out there, and keenly regretted that she had not taken them down in writing; she drummed up the echoes of the Rocky Mountains and practised the intonations of the Pacific slope. When she saw her audience in convulsions, she said to herself that this was success, and believed that, if she had only come to London five years sooner, she might have married a duke. That would have been even a more absorbing spectacle for the London world than the actual proceedings of Sir Arthur Demesne, who, however, lived sufficiently in the eye of society to justify the rumor that there were bets about town as to the issue of his already protracted courtship. It was food for curiosity to see a young man of his pattern—one of the few "earnest" young men of the Tory side, with an income sufficient for tastes more marked than those by which he was known—make up to a lady several years older than himself, whose fund of Californian slang was even larger than her stock of dollars. Mrs. Headway had got a good many new ideas since her arrival in London, but she also retained several old ones. The chief of these—it was now a year old—was that Sir Arthur Demesne was the most irreproachable young man in the world. There were, of course, a good many things that he was not. He was not amusing; he was not insinuating; he was not of an absolutely irrepressible ardor. She believed he was constant; but he was certainly not eager. With these things, however, Mrs. Headway could perfectly dispense; she had, in particular, quite outlived the need of being amused. She had had a very exciting life, and her vision of happiness at present was to be magnificently bored. The idea of complete and uncriticised respectability filled her soul with satisfaction; her imagination prostrated itself in the presence of this virtue. She was aware that she had achieved it but ill in her own person; but she could now, at least, connect herself with it by sacred ties. She could prove in that way what was her deepest feeling. This was a religious appreciation of Sir Arthur's great quality—his smooth and rounded, his blooming, lily-like exemption from social flaws.
She was at home when Littlemore went to see her, and surrounded by several visitors, to whom she was giving a late cup of tea and to whom she introduced her compatriot. He stayed till they dispersed, in spite of the manœuvres of a gentleman who evidently desired to outstay him, but who, whatever might have been his happy fortune on former visits, received on this occasion no encouragement from Mrs. Headway. He looked at Littlemore slowly, beginning with his boots and travelling upwards, as if to discover the reason of so unexpected a preference, and then, without a salutation, left him face to face with their hostess.
"I 'm curious to see what you 'll do for me, now that you 've got your sister with you," Mrs. Headway presently remarked, having heard of this circumstance from Rupert Waterville. "I suppose you 'll have to do something, you know. I 'm sorry for you; but I don't see how you can get off. You might ask me to dine some day when she 's dining out. I would come even then, I think, because I want to keep on the right side of you."
"I call that the wrong side," said Littlemore.
"Yes, I see. It 's your sister that 's on the right side. You 're in rather an embarrassing position, ain't you? However, you take those things very quietly. There 's something in you that exasperates me. What does your sister think of me? Does she hate me?"
"She knows nothing about you."
"Have you told her nothing?"
"Never a word."
"Has n't she asked you? That shows that she hates me. She thinks I ain't creditable to America. I know all that. She wants to show people over here that, however they may be taken in by me, she knows much better. But she 'll have to ask you about me; she can't go on for ever. Then what 'll you say?"
"That you're the most successful woman in Europe."
"Oh, bother!" cried Mrs. Headway, with irritation.
"Have n't you got into European society? "
"Maybe I have, maybe I have n't. It 's too soon to see. I can't tell this season. Every one says I 've got to wait till next, to see if it 's the same. Sometimes they take you up for a few weeks, and then never know you again. You 've got to fasten the thing somehow—to drive in a nail."
"You speak as if it were your coffin," said Littlemore.
"Well, it is a kind of coffin. I 'm burying my past!"
Littlemore winced at this. He was tired to death of her past. He changed the subject, and made her talk about London, a topic which she treated with a great deal of humor. She entertained him for half an hour, at the expense of most of her new acquaintances and of some of the most venerable features of the great city. He himself looked at England from the outside, as much as it was possible to do; but in the midst of her familiar allusions to people and things known to her only since yesterday, he was struck with the fact that she would never really be initiated. She buzzed over the surface of things like a fly on a window-pane. She liked it immensely; she was flattered, encouraged, excited; she dropped her confident judgments as if she were scattering flowers, and talked about her intentions, her prospects, her wishes. But she knew no more about English life than about the molecular theory. The words in which he had described her of old to Waterville came back to him: "Elle ne se doute de rien!" Suddenly she jumped up; she was going out to dine, and it was time to dress. "Before you leave I want you to promise me something," she said off-hand, but with a look which he had seen before and which meant that the point was important. "You 'll be sure to be questioned about me." And then she paused.
"How do people know I know you?"
"You have n't bragged about it? Is that what you mean? You can be a brute when you try. They do know it, at any rate. Possibly I may have told them. They 'll come to you, to ask about me. I mean from Lady Demesne. She 's in an awful state—she 's so afraid her son 'll marry me."
Littlemore was unable to control a laugh. "I 'm not, if he has n't done it yet."
"He can't make up his mind. He likes me so much, yet he thinks I 'm not a woman to marry." It was positively grotesque, the detachment with which she spoke of herself.
"He must be a poor creature if he won't marry you as you are," Littlemore said.
This was not a very gallant form of speech; but Mrs. Headway let it pass. She only replied, "Well, he wants to be very careful, and so he ought to be!"
"If he asks too many questions, he's not worth marrying."
"I beg your pardon—he 's worth marrying whatever he does—he 's worth marrying for me. And I want to marry him—that 's what I want to do."
"Is he waiting for me, to settle it?"
"He 's waiting for I don't know what—for some one to come and tell him that I 'm the sweetest of the sweet. Then he'll believe it. Some one who has been out there and knows all about me. Of course you 're the man, you 're created on purpose. Don't you remember how I told you in Paris that he wanted to ask you? He was ashamed, and lie gave it up; he tried to forget me. But now it 's all on again; only, meanwhile, his mother has been at him. She works at him night and day, like a weasel in a hole, to persuade him that I'm far beneath him. He 's very fond of her, and he 's very open to influence—I mean from his mother, not from any one else. Except me, of course. Oh, I 've influenced him, I 've explained everything fifty times over. But some things are rather complicated, don't you know; and he keeps coming back to them. He wants every little speck explained. He won't come to you himself, but his mother will, or she 'll send some of her people. I guess she 'll send the lawyer—the family solicitor, they call him. She wanted to send him out to America to make inquiries, only she did n't know where to send. Of course I could n't be expected to give the places, they 've got to find them out for themselves. She knows all about you, and she has made the acquaintance of your sister. So you see how much I know. She 's waiting for you; she means to catch you. She has an idea she can fix you—make you say what 'll meet her views. Then she 'll lay it before Sir Arthur. So you 'll be so good as to deny everything."
Littlemore listened to this little address attentively, but the conclusion left him staring. "You don't mean that anything I can say will make a difference?"
"Don't be affected! You know it will as well as I."
"You make him out a precious idiot."
"Never mind what I make him out. I want to marry him, that 's all. And I appeal to you solemnly. You can save me, as you can lose me. If you lose me, you 'll be a coward. And if you say a word against me, I shall be lost."
"Go and dress for dinner, that 's your salvation," Littlemore answered, separating from her at the head of the stairs.