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Old Maids' Club

<h2>CHAPTER X.</h2> THE GOOD YOUNG MEN WHO LIVED. "It is, indeed, a happy solution," said Lord Silverdale enviously. "To spend your life in the service of other men, yet to save it for yourself! It reconciles all ideals." "Well, you can very easily try it," said Lillie. "I have just heard from the Princess of Portman Square—she is reorganizing her household in view of her nuptials. Shall I write you a recommendation?" "No, but I will read you an Address to an Egyptian Tipcat," replied his lordship, with the irrelevancy which was growing upon him. "You know the recent excavations have shown that the little Egyptians used to play 'pussy-cat' five thousand years ago." ADDRESS TO AN EGYPTIAN TIP-CAT. <div class="poem"> <div class="stanza"> And thou has flown about—how strange a story— Full five and forty centuries ago, Ere Fayoum, fired with military glory, Received from Gurod, with purpureal show, The sea-born captives of the spear and bow; And thou has blacked, perhaps, the very finest eye That sparkled in the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty.</div> <div class="stanza"> The sight of thee brings visions panoramic Of manlier games, as Faro, Pyramids. What hands, now tinct with substances balsamic, Have set thee leaping like the sportive kids, What time the passers-by did close their lids? Did the stern Priesthood strive thy cult to smother, Or wast thou worshipped, like thy purring brother?</div> <div class="stanza"> Where is the youth by whom thou wast created And tipped profusely? Doth he frisk in glee In Aahlu, or lives he, transmigrated, [pg 148] The lower life Osiris did decree, Of fowl, or fly, or fish, or fox, or flea? Or, fallen deeper, is he politician, Stumping the land, his country's quack physician?</div> <div class="stanza"> Thou Sphynx in wood, unchanged, serene, immortal, How many States and Temples have decayed And generations passed the mystic portal Whilst thou, still young, hast gone on being played? Say, when thy popularity shall fade? And art thou—here's my last, if not my stiffest— As good a bouncer as the hieroglyphist?</div> </div> "Why, did the hieroglyphists use to brag?" asked Lillie. "Shamefully. You can no more believe in their statements than in epitaphs. There seems something peculiarly mendacious about stone as a recording medium. Only it must be admitted on behalf of the hieroglyphists that it may be the Egyptologists who are the braggers. There never was an ancient inscription which is not capable of being taken in a dozen different ways, like a party-leader's speech. Every word has six possible meanings and half a dozen probable ones. The savants only pretend to understand the stones." So saying Lord Silverdale took his departure. On the doorstep he met a young lady carrying a brown paper parcel. She smiled so sweetly at him that he raised his hat and wondered where he had met her. But it was only another candidate. She faced Turple the magnificent and smiled on, unawed. Turple ended by relaxing his muscles a whit, then ashamed of himself he announced gruffly, "Miss Mary Friscoe." After the preliminary formalities, and after having duly assured herself that there was no male ear within earshot, Miss Friscoe delivered herself of the following candid confession. "I am a pretty girl, as you can see. I wear sweet frocks [pg 149] and smiles, and my eyes are of Heaven's own blue. Men are fond of gazing into them. Men are so artistic. They admire the beautiful and tell her so. Women are so different. I have overheard my girl friends call me 'that silly little flirt.' "I hold that any woman can twist any man round her little finger or his arm round her waist, therefore I consider it no conceit to say I have attracted considerable attention. If I had accepted all the offers I received, my marriages could easily have filled a column of The Times. I know there are women who think that men are coarse, unsentimental creatures, given over to slang, tobacco, billiards, betting, brandies and sodas, smoking-room stories, flirtations with barmaids, dress and general depravity. But the women who say or write that are soured creatures, who have never been loved, have never fathomed the depth and purity of men's souls. "I have been loved. I have been loved much and often, and I speak as one who knows. Man is the most maligned animal in creation. He is the least gross and carnal of creatures, the most exquisitely pure and refined in thought and deed; the most capable of disinterested devotion, self-sacrifice, chivalry, tenderness. Every man is his own Bayard. "If men had their deserts we women—heartless, frivolous, venal creatures that we are—would go down on our knees to them, and beg them to marry us. I am a woman and again I speak as one who knows. For I am not a bad specimen of my sex. Even my best friends admit I am only silly. I am really a very generous and kind-hearted little thing. I never keep my tailor waiting longer than a year, I have made quite a number of penwipers for the poor, and I have never told an unnecessary lie in my life. I give a great deal of affection to my mother and even a little assistance in the household. I do not smoke scented [pg 150] cigarettes. I read travels and biographies as well as novels, play the guitar rather well, attend a Drawing Class, rise long before noon, am good-tempered, wear my ball-dresses more than once, turn winter dresses into spring frocks by stripping off the fur and putting on galon, and diversify my gowns by changing the sleeves. In short, I am a superior, thoroughly domesticated girl. And yet I have never met a man who has not had the advantage of me in all the virtues. "There was George Holly,—I regret I cannot mention my lovers in chronological order, but my memories are so vague, they all seem to fuse into one another. Perhaps it is because there is a lack of distinctiveness about men—a monotonous goodness which has its charm but is extremely confusing. One thing I do remember though, about George—at least, I think it was George. His moustache was rather bristly, and the little curled tips used to tickle one's nose comically. I was very disappointed in George, I had heard such a lot of talk about him; but when I got to really know him I found he was not a bit like it. How I came to really know him was like this. 'Mary,' he said, as we sat on the stairs, high up, so as not to be in the way of the waiters. 'Won't you say "yes" and make me the happiest man alive? Never man loved as I love now. Answer me. Do not torture me with suspense.' I was silent; speechless with happiness to think that I had won this true manly heart. I looked down at my fan. My lips were forming the affirmative monosyllable, when George continued passionately, "'Ah, Mary, speak! Mary, the only woman I ever loved.' "I turned pale with emotion. Tears came into my eyes. "'Is this true?' I articulated. 'Am I really the only woman you ever loved?' "'By my hopes of a hereafter, yes!' George was a bit [pg 151] slangy in his general conversation. The shallow world never knew the poetry he could rise to. 'This is the first time I have known what it is to love, Mary, my sweet, my own.' "'No, not your own,' I interrupted coldly, for my heart was like ice within me. 'I belong to myself, and I intend to. Will you give me your arm into the ballroom—Mr. Daythorpe must be looking for me everywhere.' "It sounds very wicked to say it, I know, but I cannot delay my confession longer. I love, I adore, I doat on wicked men, men who love not wisely but too well. When I learnt history at school I could always answer questions about the reign of Charles II., it was such a deliciously wicked period. I love Burns, Lord Byron, De Musset, Lovelace—all the nice naughty men of history or fiction. I like Ouida's guardsman, whose love is a tornado, and Charlotte Bronte's Rochester, and Byron's Don Juan. I hate, I detest milksops. And a good man always seems to me a milksop. It is a flaw—a terrible flaw in my composition, I know—but I cannot help it. It makes me miserable, but what can I do? Nature will out. "That was how I came to find George out, to discover he was not the terrible cavalier, the abandoned squire of dames the world said he was. His reputation was purely bogus. The gossips might buzz, but I had it on the highest authority. I was the first woman he had ever loved. What pleasure is there in such a conquest? It grieved me to break his heart, but I had no option. "Daythorpe was another fellow who taught me the same lesson of the purity and high emotions of his cruelly libelled sex. He, too, when driven into a corner (far from the madding crowd) confessed that I was the only woman he had ever loved. I have tried them all—poets and musicians, barristers and business-men. They all had suffered from the same incapacity for affection till they met [pg 152] me. It was quite pathetic to discover how truly all men were brothers. The only difference was that while some added I was the only woman they ever could love, others insisted that never man had loved before as they did now. The latter lovers always remind me of advertisers offering a superior article to anything in the trade. Nowhere could I meet the man I longed for—the man who had lived and loved. Once I felt stirrings towards a handsome young widower, but he went out of his way to assure me he had never cared for his first wife. After that, of course, he had no chance. <div class="image-center" style="max-width: 541px;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i153.jpg" width-obs="541" height-obs="700" alt="" /> <div class="caption"> Platonic Love. </div> </div> "Unable to discover any but good young men, I resigned myself perforce to spinsterhood. I resolved to cultivate only Platonic relations. I told young men to come to me and tell me their troubles. I encouraged them to sit at my feet and confide in me while I held their hands to give them courage. But even so they would never confess anything worth hearing, and if they did love anybody it invariably turned out to be me and me only. Yes, I grieve to say these Platonic young men were just as good as the others; leaving out the audacity of their proposing to me when I had given them no encouragement. Here again I found men distressingly alike. They are constitutionally unable to be girls' chums, they are always hankering to convert the friendship into love. Time after time anticipations of a genuine comradeship were rudely dispelled by fatuous philandering. Yet I never ceased to be surprised, and I never lost hope. Such, I suppose, is the simple trustfulness of a girl's nature. In time I got to know when the explosion was coming, and this deadened the shock. I found it was usually preceded by suicidal remarks of a retrospective character. My comrades would tell me of their past lives, of the days when the world's oyster was yet unopened by them. In those dark days (tears of self-pity came into their eyes as they spoke of [pg 154] them) they were on the point of suicide—to a man. Only, one little thing always came to save them—their first brief, the acceptance of their first article, poem or song, the opportune deaths of aunts, the chance hearing of an organ-note rolling through the portal of a village church on a Sunday afternoon, a letter from an old schoolmaster. The obvious survival of the narrators rather spoiled the sensational thrill for me, but they themselves were always keenly touched by the story. And from suicide in the past to suicide in the future was an easy transition. Alas, I was the connecting link. They loved me—and unless I returned their love, that early suicide would prove to have been merely postponed. In the course of conversation it transpired that I was the first woman they had ever loved. I remember once rejecting on this account two such Platonic failures, within ten minutes of each other. One was a well-known caricaturist, and the other was the editor of a lady's paper. Each left me, declaring his heart was broken, that I had led him on shamelessly, that I was a heartless jilt and that he would go and kill himself. My brother Tom accidentally told me he saw them together about an hour afterwards at a bar in the Strand, asking each other what was their poison. So I learnt that they had spoken the truth. I had driven them to drink. And according to Tom the drink at this particular bar is superior [pg 155] to strychnine. He says men always take it in preference." <div class="image-center" style="max-width: 625px;"> <ANTIMG src="images/i154.jpg" width-obs="625" height-obs="700" alt="" /> <div class="caption"> Driven to Drink. </div> </div> "And have you then finally decided to abandon Platonics?" asked Lillie, when the flow of words came to an end. "Finally." "And you have decided to enroll in our ranks?" Miss Mary Friscoe hesitated. "Well about that part I'm not quite so certain. To tell the truth, there is one young man of my acquaintance who has never yet proposed. When I started for here in disgust at the goodness of mankind I forgot him, but in talking he has come back to my mind. I have a strong suspicion he is quite wicked. He is always painting actresses. Don't you think it would be unfair to him to take my vows without giving him a chance?" "Well, yes," said Lillie musingly, "perhaps it would. You would feel easier afterwards. Otherwise you might always reproach yourself with the thought that you had perhaps turned away from a bad man's love. You might feel that the world was not so good as you had imagined in your girlish cynicism, and then you might regret having joined us." "Quite so," said Miss Friscoe eagerly. "But he shall be the very last man I will listen to." "When do you propose to be proposed to by him?" "The sooner the better. This very day, if you like. I am going straight from here to my Drawing Class." "Very well. Then you will come to-morrow and tell me your final decision?" "To-morrow." <hr /> Miss Mary Friscoe arrived at the Drawing Class late. Her fellow students of both sexes were already at their easels and her entry distracted everybody. It was a motley [pg 156] gathering, working in motley media—charcoal, chalk, pencil, oil, water-color. One girl was modelling in clay, and one young gentleman, opera-glass in hand, was making enlarged colored copies of photographs. It was this young gentleman that Mary came out for to see. His name was Bertie Smythe. He was rich, but he would always be a poor artist. His ambition was to paint the nude. There were lilies of the valley in the bosom of Mary's art-gown, and when she arrived she unfolded the brown paper parcel she carried and took therefrom a cardboard box containing a snow-white collar and spotless cuffs, which she proceeded to adjust upon her person. She then went to the drawing-board rack and stood helpless, unable to reach down her board, which was quite two inches above her head. There was a rush of embryo R.A.'S. Those who failed to hand her the board got down the cast and dusted it for her and fixed it up according to her minute and detailed directions, and adjusted her easel, and brought her a trestle, and lent her lead-pencils, and cut them for her, and gave her chunks of stale bread, for all which services she rewarded them with bewitching smiles and profuse thanks and a thousand apologies. It took her a long time getting to work on the charcoal cluster of plums which had occupied her ever since the commencement of the term, because she never ventured to commence without holding long confabulations with her fellow-students as to whether the light was falling in exactly the same way as last time. She got them to cock their heads on one side and survey the sketch, to retreat and look at it knowingly, to measure the visual angle with a stick of charcoal, or even to manipulate delicately the great work itself. Meantime she fluttered about it, chattering, alternately enraptured and dissatisfied, and when at last she started, it was by rubbing everything out. The best position for drawing happened to be next to [pg 157] Bertie Smythe. That artist was now engaged in copying the portrait of an actress. "Oh, Mr. Smythe," said Mary suddenly, in a confidential whisper. "I've got such a beautiful face for you to paint." "I know you have!" flashed Bertie, in the same intimate tone. "What a tease you are, twisting my words like that," said Mary, rapping him playfully on the knuckles with her mahl-stick. "You know what I mean quite well. It's a cousin of mine in the country." "I see—it runs in the family," said Bertie. "What runs in the family?" asked Mary. "Beautiful faces, of course." "Oh, that's too bad of you," said Mary pouting. "You know I don't like compliments." She rubbed a pellet of bread fretfully into her drawing. "I don't pay compliments. I tell the truth," said Bertie, meeting her gaze unflinchingly. "Oh, look at that funny little curl Miss Roberts is wearing to-night!" "Bother Miss Roberts. When are you going to let me have your face to paint?" "My cousin's, you mean," said Mary, rubbing away harder than ever. "No, I don't. I mean yours." "I never give away photographs to gentlemen." "Well, sit to me then." "Sit to you! Where?" "In my studio." "Good gracious! What are you talking about?" "You." "Oh, you are too tiresome. I shall never get this finished," grumbled Mary, concentrating herself so vigorously on the drawing that she absent-mindedly erased the [pg 158] last vestiges of it. She took up her plumb-line and held it in front of her cast and became absorbed in contemplating it. "You haven't answered my question, Miss Friscoe," whispered Bertie pertinaciously. "What question?" "When are you going to lend me your face?" "Look, there's Mr. Biskett going home already!" "Hang Mr. Biskett! I say, Mary——" he began passionately. "How are you getting on, Mr. Smythe?" came the creaking voice of Potts, the drawing-master, behind him. "Pretty well, thank you; how's yourself?" mechanically replied Bertie, greatly flustered by his inopportune arrival. Potts stared and Mary burst into a ringing laugh. "Look at my drawing, Mr. Potts," she said. "It will come so funny." "Why, there's nothing there," said Potts. "Dear me, no more there is," said Mary. "I—I was entirely dissatisfied with it. You might just sketch it in for me." Potts was accustomed to doing the work of most of the lady students. They used to let him do a little bit on each of his rounds till the thing was completed. He set to work on Mary's drawing, leaving her to finish being proposed to. "And you really love me?" Mary was saying, while Potts was sketching the second plum. "Can you doubt it?" Bertie whispered tremulously. "Yes, I do doubt it. You have loved so many girls, you know. Oh, I have heard all about your conquests." She thought it was best to take the bull by the horns, and her breath came thick and fast as she waited for the reply that would make or mar her life. [pg 159] Bertie's face lit up with pleasure. "Oh, but——" he began. "Ah, yes, I know," she interrupted triumphantly. "What about that actress you are painting now?" "Oh, well," said Bertie. "If you say 'yes,' I promise never to speak to her again." "And you will give up your bad habits?" she continued joyfully. "Every one. Even my cigarettes, if you say the word. My whole life shall be devoted to making you happy. You shall never hear a cross word from my lips." Mary's face fell, her lip twitched. What was the use of marrying a milksop like that? Where would be the fun of a union without mutual recriminations and sweet reconciliations? She even began to doubt whether he was wicked after all. "Did you ever really love that actress?" she whispered anxiously. "No, of course I didn't," said Bertie soothingly. "To tell the truth, I have never spoken to her in my life. I bought her photo in the Burlington arcade and I only talk with the fellows about ballet girls in order, not to be behind the times. I never knew what love was till I met you. You are the only——" Crash! bang! went his three-legged easel, upset by Mary's irrepressible movement of pique. The eyes of the class were on them in a moment, but only Mary knew that in that crash her last hope of happiness had fallen, too. <hr /> "I do trust Miss Friscoe's last chance will not prove a blank again," said Lord Silverdale, when Lillie had told him of the poor girl's disappointments. "Why?" asked the President. "Because I shrink from the viva voce examination." [pg 160] "Why?" asked the President. "I am afraid I should be so dangerous." "Why?" asked the President. "Because I have loved before. I shall be desperately in love with another woman all through the interview." "Oh, I am so sorry, but you are inadmissible," said Lillie, when Miss Friscoe came to announce her willingness to join the Club. "Why?" asked the candidate. "Because you belong to an art-class. It is forbidden by our by-laws. How stupid of me not to think of it yesterday!" "But I am ready to give it up." "Oh, I couldn't dream of allowing that on any account," said the President. "I hear you draw so well." So Mary never went before the Honorary Trier. [pg 161] <hr class="hr2" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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