The Smart Set/Volume 22/Issue 4/The Amateur House-Party

by Inez Haynes Irwin

 

THE AMATEUR HOUSE-PARTY

By Inez Haynes Gillmore

When I read Cousin Elizabeth's letter I nearly died of shock. Here's the letter—I always keep it as one of the documents in the case. It's absolutely perfect as a thumb-nail sketch of Cousin Elizabeth herself who, since she married Oswald Ordway and walked into the Ordway millions, takes herself pretty seriously as a society personage. Mind you, I hadn't heard a word from Cousin Elizabeth since I married Mike and she sent me a repoussé silver game set for a wedding present. Game! All the game we saw for two years was hanging in the dining-rooms of Mike's Weehawken relatives. The set is even now still in the safety-vault the color of Britannia—thank you—where we dumped it the day we got home from our wedding trip.

My Dear Eleanor:

Oswald's physician has just told me that his condition is very serious indeed. (This is the first time I ever knew that Oswald had a condition, but that's just like Cousin Elizabeth—she's absolutely convinced that all her relatives sit with their noses glued to the social-gossip columns, studying out her downsittings and uprisings.) He says that Oswald simply must go into the woods somewhere and live a perfectly simple, natural, primeval life for three or four weeks. We've made up our minds to go to one of those delightful camps in the Adirondacks. (I know the kind—brass beds, steam heat and French chefs, but they won't substitute electricity for gas there because that would make it too civilized.) I'm going to do the cooking. (She do the cooking!—“just boil ten minutes and serve,” is her idea.) Now I'm awfully worried about the last week in August, for we have invited the Alfords, mother, father, the twin boys, Tom and Jerry, and their daughter, a Alford, to spend that week on Finvarra Heights. I hate to disappoint them, for it appears that Mr. Alford was brought up in the vicinity of Brierly-on-the-Hudson and he is simply dying to get back there again and hunt up the haunts of his childhood. Now, Mrs. Alford is a perfectly charming woman, but absolutely unable to run a household. Shirley has done that for her ever since she was twelve, but Shirley refuses to tie herself down this Summer—she's awfully interested in that college settlement on the East Side. (Yes, the one where all those native-born foreign girls marry millionaire boy-philanthropists.) There's no hotel in Brierly-on-the-Hudson and so I can't ask them to go there. Now, what I'm getting at is, will and Michele (she always calls my husband Michele—although Mike has assured her again and again that he isn't a Guinea—only a Mick) come down and run the house for a week? I thought Michele could get his vacation then as well as any time, and of course I would be delighted to have you invite as many of your interesting friends as you would care to have come. Please, please do, Eleanor! The Alfords are very influential socially, and I can't tell you how much depends on our keeping on the right side of them. I really can't take “no” for an answer.

Yours anxiously, ⁠
Elizabeth Houghton Ordway.

Well, I never said a word about this to Mike, but I waited until the gang came, and then I read the letter aloud to them. And before they got their breath back I invited them down in a bunch for a week at Finvarra. Well, we are bohemians, you know. Of course I know there are bohemians and bohemians, but I want you to understand that our gang wasn't of the tin-plate order at all—they were the real thing. They were all geniuses—and young, poor, unappreciated, unsuccessful, sulphitic—I don't know what more you want of a bohemian. Then they loved art for art's sake. They had a soul above gain—and all lived on and off one another in the most deliciously haphazard, fraternal way. They read one another's poetry and criticized one another's pictures. They fell in and out of love with a rapidity that made Mike and me fairly breathless, and we'd seen every one of them through I don't know how many cases of bona fide, hopeless broken heart. But what's the use of generalizing? The best way to tell you about them is to describe the people themselves.

First, there were Mike and me. Mike is a rising young physician, and I am the envied mother of Jane Elizabeth. Then there was Meta Mallory.

Now, Meta was the daughter of an artist, and—I wonder if it was prenatal influences—the most artistic-looking thing you ever saw—just like a Burne-Jones or a Rossetti or a Watts or any one of those artists whose people, Lady Blessington said, looked as if they were going to be hanged, or had just been hanged, or ought to be hanged. Her hair never looked as if it had been combed and it was just full of queer little glinty lights and soft, mysterious shadows, and her complexion actually had a perspective to it. She was all blue shadows and long sinuous lines and curves—you'd know she'd studied Delsarte just to see her put a collar-button into a shirt-waist. She had a kind of wistful, soul-saturated expression, too. Mike said she looked hungry to him, and considering she was brought up in a studio-life that was subject to all kinds of ups and downs, she had the most gorgeous profile. That artist colony at Merrivale said it was the most beautiful profile that ever came into the place, and I guess it was, for it certainly made a Greek coin look like a Grand Army button. In fact, Meta's profile was an awful handicap, for she was always vaguely conscious of it, and, instinctively, living up to it. She always met people sort of sideways when she was introduced, and at functions she always sat with the best half of her face—Yeats-Allingham said that that right side was so perfect that it made him ache—turned toward the people whom she wanted to impress.

I said we were all poor, but that wasn't quite true. Meta had just had a fortune left to her. But she kept right on being a bohemian just the same, which I think was pretty handsome of her.

Then there was Lotte McGaw. Lotte was the editor of a young and thrashingly enterprising magazine. She was the youngest editor in New York. My, but that girl had a head for business! Smart as a whip and bright as a dollar doesn't do her justice. She was good-looking, too, but very different from Meta. Artists never raved about Lotte, but if you got a crowd of college men in the same room with her for an evening, unless the hostess intervened, Lotte never emerged from the heap until the dawn began to come in the windows. She had the jolliest, velvety high-colored skin—Mike said that he was sure Lotte would taste like a Baldwin apple—and the prettiest little red-and-white smile and two hide-and-seek dimples that were just Scylla and Charybdis, Mike said, when he didn't call them hell and damnation.

Then there was Percival Hereford—wouldn't you know that he was a highbrow with that name?—who wrote plays. Nobody produced them, of course. Some day, before I die, I hope I may get as far as knowing somebody who knew somebody who heard distantly of somebody who got a play produced. Still, Percival's plays were pretty good, we all thought; at least we listened to them as fast as Percy—we had to call him Percy because he was a great, hulking whale of a man with a chin so strong that it looked as if it could cut through adamant—wrote them, which was once a week, with unfailing regularity. I say we all liked them—all except Walter Mann, who was an actor and the other member of the gang, and so beautiful that it was enough to make the tears come to a woman's eyes to see so much ammunition wasted on a man—yes, hair, eyes, complexion—he had the whole superwomaning outfit. And Walter was always telling Percy—a statement that was followed by an argument good for at least a dozen pipefuls—that he couldn't write a play any more than a cow could.

Well, when I read that letter to the gang they burst into a shout of laughter. That waked the baby up, who made a try for the welkin and got away with it. For a moment it was pandemonium—plus Coney Island on a busy Sunday—in our little nest. Then to my horror and with elaborate formality they all accepted my invitation. What's more, we began to talk the proposition over—coolly, calmly and in sober earnest. Everybody was for it—even Mike. First we discussed the Alfords.

Of course, everybody knows who the Alfords are—so disgustingly rich that old man Alford is always handing out great bunches of money to this college or that and getting it back checked “tainted.” He never had a decent dollar in his jeans, so far as I can make out. If that wasn't enough, there's the daughter Shirley, who's a socialist and lives half the time down on the East Side over a little shop with a window filled with a ton of fly-specked kosher bread in one corner and a barrel of diseased kosher pickles in the other. They're so everlastingly afraid that she'll go in for anarchy and blow up the President that they can't sleep nights. But she's nothing to the two boys, Tom and Jerry.

Tom has tried to marry nearly every chorus-girl on the American stage and succeeded twice, but fortunately one of them proved to have another husband in Syracuse and the other divorced him in two months to marry his chauffeur. They're always getting a wire from Jerry that, now at last, he's met the only girl who will ever make him happy, and poor old Pa Alford has to go down in his stocking to endow another chorus-girl. (This money has never come back tagged “tainted.”) But Tom, bad as he is, is nothing to Jerry, his twin. Jerry is always coming down with virulent attacks of altruism and announcing that he's going into the ministry. They're always surrounding him with the flesh-pots to get his mind off his soul, but I think they'd do wiser to let him sow his wild oats and be done with it.

Well, the gang said if we were going to do a house-party, we were going to do it the way it ought to be done—in swell British style—and the best way to find out what the latest and most swagger British style is was simply to read “Dodo” Benson, Robert Hichens and Elinor Glyn and all the rest of the house-party school of novelists, and just take notes.

Well, there's no use in going into it all, but the result, in a nutshell, was that first, right there in the aiding and abetting presence of the gang, I accepted Cousin Elizabeth's offer, and then we began picking out our parts and hunting round to collect the clothes that would suit them.

Meta said she was going as a smart society woman. She had worn artistic colors and floating draperies all her life to suit her friends and her environment and the exigencies of her profile. Now she was going to take a vacation and dress like any other normal, decent woman to suit herself. In the week that followed she went through the shopping district like a ferret, and if anything in the way of dress-goods got by her it was only because the clerk was temporarily deranged.

Lotte decided to go as the frilly girl who stays in bed until afternoon and then gets up for tea, about five, in a smashing tea-gown, who lies in the hammock and reads “Gyp” in the original with one hand, languidly smoking a cigarette or eating marrons glacés with the other.

She took two days off and rounded up all her rich relatives in Brooklyn. Lotte is awfully well-connected, you know—although their branch of the family is poor enough—and came back with a trunkful of gowns and pettiskirts that made a buyer fresh from Paris look like a marked-down sale, a collection of silk stockings that temporarily put the aurora borealis out of commission and a cigarette-case that she borrowed from her cousin, Lila McGaw—yes, the one that married that bankrupt French count—with her initials L. M. on it in diamonds.

Walter Mann said he'd go simply as a gentleman. There was nothing else for him to do and, fortunately, he'd always acted in those high-class English plays that make you sick and cynical for a week, and he had the most startling array of English clothes I ever saw. Loud? Well, I should say so! He couldn't come into the same room with our sleeping babe in any one of them.

Percival Hereford said he couldn't go as a gentleman because his two suits were too much on the blink—at least he'd have to be an awfully high-class gentleman to carry such a thing off, and he didn't quite dare attempt it. He was afraid he couldn't be rude and eccentric enough. Walter Mann said quite enviously that it was the “fat” part and he wished he could see him (Walter) in it. For a while we were quite in despair about poor Percy. Then a wonderful idea came to him—to go as Walter's valet. He was writing a play, it appears, in which there was a servants' ball, and he wanted to know what butlers and footmen and stable-boys talked about.

I was going, of course, as a fashionable young mother—it made me sick, though, to think of neglecting the baby—but I knew that I owed it to her—she'd never get such another chance and I'd do it if it killed me.

Well, we all arrived at Finvarra Heights at Brierly-on-the-Hudson promptly, as per schedule, on Monday morning, the second of August, with so much baggage—I mean luggage; with so many trunks—I mean boxes; guns, fishing-rods, tennis-racquets, golf-sticks, that I was ashamed to look the stationmaster in the face. In fact, I guess we overdid it, for I heard one of the servants say to another: “Say, they forgot to bring the tent.”

The house was simply magnificent. It made the Waldorf-Astoria look like a beer-garden—it was simply encrusted with turrets, towers, balconies, piazzas, cupolas, rotundas, minarets, bay-windows, bow-windows, sun-parlors and every other architectural excrescence that an idle woman just breaking into society could think of. Inside there were elevators—I mean lifts—drawing-rooms and libraries, full of lovely clean, uncut books galore, each furnished in a different period, a dance-hall, billiard-room, a gun-room and a swimming-tank. There were suites of rooms for us to inhabit such time as we desired privacy. Privacy! You'd have had to chain any one of us down in the next week. Outside, the gardens and lawns just covered the whole visible face of nature. And there were stables full of motors and blooded horses, hothouses, golf courses, tennis courts and yachts and motor-boats in the boathouse.

It was pretty awkward at first living up to the servants, but we were all quick-witted and guessed in an instant what they expected of us, and did it with neatness and despatch. Walter, for instance, drank Scotch all the time we were there, though he loathes it, and Mike was always calling for a “peg.”

Lotte, according to the demands of her part, went right to bed the moment we arrived, although I knew she was simply dying of curiosity to see how the rest of us would play up. Meta put herself into the hands of a delicious little French maid who made such ducks and drakes of the English language that Meta kept asking for things she didn't want in order to keep her going. Percival disappeared in the direction of the servants' quarters, and Walter calmly got into immaculate riding togs and went off on the best horse in the stable. While they were away the Alfords came.

Mrs. Alford and Shirley were correct and distinguished in their nice, simple traveling-clothes. Mr. Alford, fat-faced and beery, with the most innocent, confiding, good-natured blue eyes I ever saw, looked as if he would take Chinese money as fast as you handed it out to him. They came just as tea was being served, and Mrs. Alford sank into a chair and drank three cups without winking.

In the midst of this Meta, very lovely in a blue radium silk, came down the stairs, followed, a little later, by Lotte in a frilly, fluffy, frivolous, oyster-white. chiffony thing with a long tail to it. Close upon her Mike sauntered in, very immaculate in his afternoon things, and Walter at his heels. Walter was my pride and joy. He just waited for introductions and then, laughingly insisting that he must get out of his riding togs, he vanished, to reappear in a little while, the glass of fashion and the mold of form. It was almost too perfect.

Well, maybe that wasn't a week. Our gang played the game to perfection. Cousin Elizabeth was not in the habit of serving a buffet breakfast, but I made myself solid with the English butler by—with a perfectly scandalized face—insisting upon it. People would come straggling down from their bedrooms, anywhere about eleven, giving a fair imitation of a yawn, breakfast lightly, and then separate for the sports of the day. Luncheon would see perhaps more of them. But it was not until five, when Lotte appeared to ornament a hammock in still another ravishing confection, that the clans really gathered. Lotte was a dream—French novel, jeweled cigarette-case, marrons glacés—they were always there. Of course by this time Jerry Alford—that's the high-minded, noble twin—was her slave, but she was perfect in her oh-you-nice-boy attitude toward him. Meta, of course, was overrun with Tom —that's the chorus-girl twin.

You should have seen Meta! An artist would have thrown a dozen fits at the sight of her. She looked like the heroine of a Maeterlinck drama turned Gibson girl—hair marceled in undeviating rows that you couldn't have broken with an eighteen-inch shell—manicured, massaged, osteopathed, corseted actually, perfumed and very delicately and unnecessarily made-up —and in clothes that would have made her father turn in his grave—untoned pinks and blues that would carry a mile through a fog, tailor suits, sequined evening gowns, smart suits for sailing, immaculate shirt-waist suits for golf—oh, you'd have died. There was nothing left of her but her profile, and she even forgot that for long stretches at a time.

But the Alfords—they were the fly in my amber. In the first place, Mr. Alford walked, ate and slept, I'm sure, in an old shiny frock-coat of which it is a charitable euphemism to say merely that it was spotted like a pard; and an old bunged-up straw hat that looked as if it might have been bought from the gipsies and actually had been run over by an automobile. The papers say that he is worth fifty millions, but I knew it was a hundred the moment I saw his clothes.

Mrs. Alford, a soft, fat thing, architectured in terraces, wore a series of white nighties, cut low in the neck to avoid the erosion of her combination of double chins. Beautiful materials they were and hand-embroidered and all that, but—honest—I used to feel queer about the boys seeing her about, all the time, in those glorified Mother Hubbards. She always wore a string of pearls as big as marbles—the kind that you don't believe. And her fingers were so crowded with diamonds that she never could do anything with her hands at all—Mike said he was sure she wrote letters with her feet. But she was a lovely, motherly old soul who gave me a lot of good advice and stole my baby every moment she was awake. And, my eye! how Jane Elizabeth would jump up and down on my lap when she'd see her coming.

Shirley Alford appeared now and then out from town, always in a plain but perfectly stunning tailor-suit. Our men didn't pay much attention to her—they said she was too cold. But I could see that, under that cold, unresponsive exterior, she really was a beauty if she would only give the woman in her a chance. She got acquainted with all the servants immediately, and Percival, as an example of an aspiring and ambitious valet, attracted her attention at once. She was always whizzing in or whirling out from New York at unexpected times, and Percival, who was making the best valet of modern times and had grown to know how to work an automobile more easily than a rat-trap, always acted as her chauffeur.

Everything went all right and I knew that nobody in the house—not even the servants—suspected that we weren't the real thing, until Saturday came. And then something happened.

We were all sitting out in the Italian garden, and Horrocks was just about to serve tea when Mike came walking up a path with a strange woman on one side and a strange manon the other. I stared and then arose, wondering what had happened. It didn't seem to me that any unexpected guests of Cousin Elizabeth's could have arrived; I didn't know what to think.

“Eleanor,” Mike said directly, “let me introduce Miss MacGregor and Mr. Innes-Buxton to you. Their automobile has just broken down outside our gate, and I insisted that they come in and rest before they went on.”

Of course I welcomed them both. They threw back their goggles and—well, she was a wonder. They were both English—you would know that the moment they opened their mouths. They had that cool, clean-cut English accent, spread so thick over every word that you couldn't have dispersed it with an electric battery. He was a big, jolly, tubbed-looking florid Englishman, the kind that American women always like. But she—my word!—peaches and cream, milk and roses, moonshine and honey! She looked as if she'd walked out of an English beauty-book—a huge, statuesque golden-blond. You pitied her for being born in England, for you could see by her clothes that she was middle-class, whereas if she'd only been born in America she could have become an English duchess so easily. For that's what she ought to have been—you could just see how stately she'd be in the long train and the three feathers of a presentation-gown, and her brow seemed actually molded to fit a coronet.

I was proud enough of our crowd. Lotte, lolling lazily in the hammock, was just one billowy mass of sea-green chiffon and foaming white pettiskirts. Meta wore lavender, trimmed with Irish crochet, and foxy little motifs of Chinese embroidery at just the right spots—and little wassets and dingle-dangles of black velvet with brilliant buckles everywhere—so chic that it positively made you dizzy. Her hair looked as if it had been turned out of a mold—like jelly. Mike and Walter in their white flannels were the most languidly-lovely things ever.

Pretty soon in came Horrocks, wheeling the tea-table—just one winking mass of old silver, old glass and old Sheffield plate—and, as I poured, he served things in his inimitable, straight, face-like-a-ramrod way. The Alfords came in from driving and, for a wonder, both had clothes on that you could look at without a blush. Of course the twins were always very smart. Shirley Alford wasn't there, and I was glad for I was afraid she would be cold and supercilious.

Well, we all acted up to the Britishers—for weren't we doing an English house-party?—and you should have heard our conversation. Walter discoursed of plays and playwrights—Ibsen, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, Rostand, Pinero, Jones, as if he'd seen them all produced in their native wilds. Meta contributed studio slang and personal-item talk of Rodin, Whistler and Sargent as if she'd sat for every one of them. Lotte piped up with references to all the latest English novelists and poets. Mike spoke casually of all the most recent surgical and medical experiments for tuberculosis—he even went a little way, far enough to lose me, at any rate—into fourth dimension. I repeated all Shirley Alford's socialist and sociological stuff. And the Alfords—when we let them interrupt—finding the strangers were globe-trotters, referred to every corner of the civilized and uncivilized globe into which their record-breaker yacht, the Wraith, had put in. They talked and talked and stayed and stayed—even I was surprised. And when finally they did go they had to pull themselves away—that was visible to the naked eye. We hated to see them go, of course, but we didn't urge them to stay. We knew that would be ill-bred. And of course nothing was said about our ever meeting again—that would have been fierce manners.

Well, they had hardly left when Shirley Alford came trailing in—all stringy and taggy and dusty from a record auto trip out from town.

“How'd Lady Penelope happen to call?” she asked at once.

“Lady Who?” we shouted.

“Why, Lady Penelope—I saw her and her brother Bertie turn out of the drive as we came along. We had a punctured tire and couldn't catch them.”

“Lady Penelope!” I gasped. “She said her name was MacGregor.”

“So it is—Lady Penelope MacGregor, and her brother's the Duke of Innes-Buxton. She's traveling incognita through the United States,” Shirley explained easily, “making sociological investigations, you know. I must find out where she is—she and I were great pals in London last season.”

Lady Penelope MacGregor! The Duke of Innes-Buxton! I did not dare to look up, for my cheeks were burning. My English house-party! She stayed so long, of course, because she was so amused. And how we must have entertained her! Late that night the gang met and went into executive session. The burden of our universal plaint was, “What do you suppose she really thought of us?”

But we heard what she thought of us curiously enough. Ten days later, after we were all back again in town comfortably being bohemians again, and luxuriating in our old clothes, a letter came from Shirley Alford announcing her engagement to Percival. In it she enclosed a letter from Lady Penelope that she said had been chasing her allover the country. The part that concerned us was this. I read it to the awe-stricken gang:

“My Dear:

“I can't tell how wonderful a country this of yours is—what a wonderful country and what wonderful people. It is, in my opinion, by way of developing the most perfect civilization the world has ever seen. I don't judge entirely by the people whom I meet through my letters, for they are like everybody, the people one meets everywhere. Nor have I made up my mind because of the evidence submitted by the extraordinary vigorous schedule of investigation to which my American friends have submitted me. It is by the accidental, the by-the-way, the haphazard experiences that I have come, after mature thought, pray believe me, to this interesting conviction.

Ten days ago, for instance, Bertie's auto broke down in a place called Brierly-on-the-Hudson. Some people were kind enough to take us in—a magnificent house, frightfully new of course—forgive me, my dear, but there are some angles of what you call my British insularity that will never wear down. But the people there, though young, were far from new. They belonged to that high caste that is born ancient as ancient. Such conversation—not talk or chatter—but genuine conversation as Bertie and I listened to, enraptured. I could scarcely tear myself away. I assure you it put a girdle round the earth.

“Here was the week-end party such as, all through my girlhood. I dreamed of finding in England—the ideal gathering of choice spirits that the lying novelists picture and again in their pages. Young alive, alert, beautifully mannered and clothed, exquisitely hospitable, frank and free, yet full of all the right reticences and reserves—a suave, gracious atmosphere. Art, poetry, music, the drama, science, travel—they were specialists in every direction and yet of such a naiveté—so ready for the new experience—so en rapport with the new thought. I have just finished writing mama a detailed account of it, and I am making it the theme of a chapter in my new book, 'Americans at Home.'”