Part 16

The world hears a great deal about the tact of women, but there is a great deal to be said on the subject--for and against. For while she believed she had the keenest insight into everything, Miss Rockhard, like all of her class and kind, had no more tact than an oyster, or a hedge-hog, when it behoved her to suppress her needless pleonasms, sarcasms, and little spasms of ‘pure cussedness.’ And over and above all this, petty scepticism had so worked into all her being that as soon as she had got over the first flush of admiration at her dress, the old devil whispered in her ear not to show too much astonishment or gratitude, ‘which means,’ he said, ‘that she has been too much for you.’ Therefore, with exquisite good taste and characteristic refinement, she said:

‘Well, it’s an awfully clever bit of hanky-panky, I must say. I wonder how on earth you do it!’

The fairy looked at her gravely, and replied:

‘You said seriously, before I showed you this marvel, that if I could effect it you would accept it once and for all as a proof of my power, and your first words are an utter denial of it. You are neither spontaneously grateful at heart, nor graceful nor polite in words. Society and petty persiflage and small sneering and flippant sarcasm have killed in you every noble quality. But I will give you another proof which will defy doubt. Observe! Though your figure is good you have undeniably immense hands, and your shoes, as you are aware, really look like badly built gondolas. It is a great pity and it cuts you to the very soul. Now, if I reduce these extremities of yours to something like smallness and harmony with the rest, will you believe?’

What the reader may very well believe is that this speech was as gall, worm-wood, coloquintida, nux-vomica, rue, quassia, extract of aloes, acetic acid, verjuice, vitriol, and strychnine to the palate of Miss Rockhard, but the end thereof made her forget all these amaritudes, and she gasped out:

‘Yes.’

‘And I am to hear nothing more about “hanky-panky,” or “how it is done”?’

‘No.’

‘Then be it done!’ The fairy bade her be seated and took one of her hands in her own, and began to sing a spell in a tongue which sounded softly but strangely:

‘Tāni-rani, sove a lay! Chovihani chivs apré! Tiri waster, tiri piri, Boro dukkerin mi-deary! Me bitchava lende sā, Tinkni-bitti, vel ajā!

Little lady, go to sleep! Witch lays spell upon thee deep! On thy hands and on thy feet, Let the charm be strong and fleet! So I order one and all To become both neat and small!’

So Miss Rockhard did indeed go to sleep, and on awaking found herself in her own home, lying on the sofa in her own room.

‘She would have thought it all a dream, Save that round her form Was still the dress of the fairy queen, Which fitted her “like a charm”; And her hands and feet were extremely neat, And become intensely small; “’Tis well, ’tis well,” said Jesabelle, “For now I shall beat them all.”’

It was not long before Miss Jesabelle Rockhard found that the fairy was right in declaring that it was not such an easy matter to keep a secret when its results are brilliantly paraded before society. Therefore the successful alchemists of the olden time were said to live so plainly, and to go in disguise, dodging about the world, as did Thomas Vaughan, to escape observation. And as even they found it a fearful task, it may be supposed that Miss Rockhard, who had a ten times harder secret to keep than theirs, with not one-tenth part of their sense or experience to keep it on, began to wonder anon whether she had not spoken over-hastily when she commended her own powers of discretion as a subject not open to discussion.

‘The female sex,’ writes Flaxius in his great Analysis, ‘differs from the male mostly in this, that it never takes naturally or instinctively to rum or tobacco, neither does it ever feel conscience or remorse. Fear of discovery it does indeed experience, and very sincere regret or sorrow at incurring punishment, but whether any one woman since Eve ever _regretted_ anything on principle, or _per se_, is as yet among the unfound-outs.

‘Wherein I discover,’ he observes, ‘a great and wise provision of nature. For when we consider what a vast quantity there is of confused conscience and misplaced remorse in man, we cannot be too thankful that woman is _not_ afflicted with the same calamity; it being very evident that if she were, humanity must needs take a fresh start on new principles. Therefore do I opine,’ he adds, ‘that “Things,” as Germans call the evolution of humanity, are going on best as they are, although I did have a tin of spoiled caviare brought to me this morning for breakfast.’

As regards the dress and jewellery of Miss Rockhard, it was a complete--or, as the French say, an insane--success. Her friends and the public admired it with an envy which, as she often perceived, amounted to agony; and there were peeresses who suffered the tortures of the damned, and with them millionairesses who panted like harts for the water-brook, with desire to learn the secret of those transcendental toilets; which was all like nectar and ambrosia to her small soul. And as she had the thin good sense and cautious taste to rarely use expensive fabrics, and was very chary with diamonds and the like; and being clever, soon acquired a stock of evasive phrases and satirical retorts for the most direct questions, she might have long escaped detection.

The first error which she committed was the very common one for all her kind, of ingratitude. For as regarded Flaxius, the very fact of her success irritated her, when she reflected that he had entirely established all his assertions, and completely got the better of her--after all her assumption of superior intelligence--and as she recalled him, every time she donned a dress, with renewed vexation, the feeling grew in time to tormenting hatred, there being no vindictiveness like that for benefits received. Nor was she any better disposed towards the fairy, since every time she was teased by questioners she said to herself: ‘Pest take the creature! why couldn’t she just as well have given me the clothes without any condition. ’Tis ever the way with these mysterious snobs, they always do everything by halves in a petty way, so as to render gratitude impossible. I believe that vulgar teasing is a part of their low nature.’

Now when the moral obligation to keep a secret is gone, and the buttresses are, so to speak, knocked away, it generally requires but a little push to overthrow the whole building. And this push came ere long from an unexpected quarter.

Miss Jesabelle Rockhard was born, and lived, in undeniably good society, but had never had more than very scanty sniffs of ‘the purer atmosphere of _Dukedom_.’ As the melancholy Jacques, with refined wit, remarks, even the word is ‘a spell to call fools together,’ albeit printers have spoiled his spelling. Now it befell that a duchess of twenty-four carats, a dame of irrepressible power, stronger at every point than poor Miss Jesabelle, and one whose _flamberg_ or six-feet two-handed sword was not to be lightly turned by the latter’s fencing foil--fenced she never so wisely--had set her whole soul on learning the secret of the exquisite toilets. Hitherto Miss Rockhard had only gentler breezes to resist, but now there was a cyclone brewing, before which, had she been wise, she would have fled unto the uttermost parts of the earth.

The duchess soon learned--indeed ’twas common talk--that the now famous Miss Rockhard guarded with great care the secret of her dresses. She made adroit, special, long-continued inquiry--who would not be detective for a duchess?--and the more she was confirmed in the report, the more obstinately was she determined to penetrate the mystery.

‘O thou poor Jesabelle,’ writes Flaxius, ‘whom I did greatly love with all thy faults--since devil a one was there of them thine own--all being drawn from good society--how gladly would I have averted from thee the fate which I saw gathering over thy graceful head; how gladly would I have clucked unto thee, as the cock clucketh unto the hen to come to him when he has found a grain, albeit he often swallows it ere she gets there!--or done anything in reason, to _paratonnerre_ away the crash and flash in the dark gathering cloud--it could not be! All that we _could_ do was to await the explosion, pick up the pieces, glue them together as well as possible and so, _en avant_!

‘It is written in the Babylonian chronicle of the great Rabbi Ganef Ben Nofgur, that “even as a monkey will, in doing mischief, manifest as much mind as would make him the equal of man, so a woman, to find out a secret which is none of her business, will show the genius of seven devils. For ten measures of intermeddling were sent down by Aschmodai upon earth, and the daughters of Israel got nine of them.”’

From which ye may understand that the duchess, finding that the treasure was deeply buried, and craftily enchanted, took great precaution and pains to disinter it. Firstly, she was merely affable to Miss Rockhard in the winsome way which shows that any one has taken a special, an _unconscious_ liking--which is a particular form of humbug treated more fully by Patrick Mac Iavel in his Treatise on the Art of Blarneying. She set on to Jesabelle an artless niece who Jesabelle thought was a fool, and who ended by fooling her--Miss Rockhard--completely. Then the duchess began a series of fondlings, pettings, little intimacies, and careful confidences, invitations to dinner and the opera--sending her carriage freely for her on all occasions. In a word, she wound round the victim such an insidious mesh of obligations that at last she judged that the roast was done to a turn, and ready to be served, carved and eaten.

So one night at a reception at the ducal palace, to which Jesabelle had come in consequence of most ingenious and urgent desire--in the utmost magnificence which she dared--her jewellery on this occasion being rather seriously splendid and dangerous--the hostess struck her _coup_ by displaying the most passionate admiration of her guest’s attire. Then with great adroitness she led the conversation to the fondness she had for Jesabelle, which subtly trained towards the obligations and kindnesses, which had by this time run up to an alarming sum. And then, suddenly recurring to the dress, she said:

‘If you are, indeed, as you say, deeply grateful to me for anything, and are sincere as I am in friendship, my dear, then acquit it all by a mere trifle, and tell me truly, without any equivocation, the secret of your marvellous dresses....’

Miss Rockhard would very much have preferred seeing an insane anarchist flourishing a bomb, and a carving-knife come dancing into her drawing-room, to this simple question from her dearest friend. And the agitation of her features showed it--almost fearfully. The duchess was delighted. ‘Now for an adroit _coup_,’ she thought, ‘and I have it.’

‘I dare say, my dear,’ she added with sweet persuasion, ‘that there is really no great mystery in it after all. You girls are so fond of making up romances. Perhaps I can even aid you with it, if perfect secrecy, experience, and love can aid. But it will not be confiding a secret, you know, for we two are one, and ’twill be as if you told it to yourself.’

When one feels a secret like an intolerable burden, or a pack of coals on one’s back--heavy as sin, and burning as remorse--the bearer catches at any excuse for betraying it. Nor was Jesabelle a little piqued by the artful hint: ‘I dare say there is really no great mystery in it after all.’ And, perhaps, the duchess, with her vast knowledge of life and invincible _prestige_, _could_ solve the mystery, so that no harm or loss could come of it; and driven to the wall as she was, and at her wits’ end, for a rupture with her Grace meant social ruin, she actually caught at the last straw--‘it will not be telling a secret, since we are one’--as if it had been a rope thrown by a life-buoyant philanthropist.

‘You will not say,’ remarked the duchess, somewhat sarcastically, ‘that it is a fairy-gift.’

At that word, Jesabelle in despair and anger exclaimed--’twas as if the very devil spoke for her and used her tongue:

‘It _is_ a fairy gift!’

The duchess uttered an appalled scream; there was a chorus of ‘Ha’s--ho’s--oh dear me’s!’ through all the gamut heard from those around--_Tableau_!

‘What is the matter?’ cried Jesabelle terrified.

‘_Look in the glass!_’ cried the duchess, pointing to a twenty-foot mirror opposite.

Miss Rockhard looked, and saw an awful sight. It was herself, arrayed in nothing but her under-garments, with a wisp of straw on her wrist, a piece of clothes-line rope about her head, and on her bosom a great threepenny brass and glass brooch. And amid her surroundings this costume looked ten times worse than it had done in Devonshire Street.

‘A lunatic! a mad woman! Wonder how she got in! Hope she won’t attack us! Wonder if she’s got a pistol? We shall all be killed! Run for the police!’ was heard on all sides. Miss Rockhard fainted. Some mysterious friend--she knew not who--stepped forward, wrapped her in a cloak, and conveyed her in a carriage to her home. Yet heavily as the blow fell on her, it struck the duchess at once almost as severely. For after all her pains, and after driving poor Jesabelle to the wall, and to insanity, all that she had got was, ‘It is a fairy-gift,’ at which even a child would laugh. She might well have exclaimed, ‘I have brought my pig to a fine market, to be sure!’ as the Princess Iona Mic Flanagan remarked, after she had driven a swine from Dublin to Cork, where it was eaten by a wolf; the incident was sung in Tara’s Psaltery, and recorded in the _Leabhair Ruad_, or Red-Book of the Nine Masters, in _Shelta_.

* * * * *

When Jesabelle came to herself in the morning, a brief half-hour of deadly, sickening despair was succeeded by a good healthy reaction of rage at the duchess, the fairy, Flaxius, and all mankind. Even as the hero Hans Breitmann ungratefully wished that his teacher, Professor Schmitzerl, ‘vas in hell’ for teaching him how to ride on a bicycle, did Miss Rockhard wish that all those whose favours, gifts, and applause she had once so anxiously sought were all at the bottom of Inferno, and the devil dancing on them, because they had given her in fullest measure what she most ardently desired, yea, perjured herself to obtain!

I have here arrived, _O lector benevole_, thou _best_ of readers, at what is to us, I trust, the most interesting point, that is to say the crisis in this eventful history. It happened once during the American War that after the Confederates had been defeated in a battle, certain gallant Southern ‘chivs’ or chivalric officers, attempted to account for the failure: one attributing it to a sudden rise in the river, and another to a division not coming up in time; till at last one startled them all by asking, ‘If they didn’t think the Yankees had something to do with it?’

Even so, after making out that everybody had been against her, and shown themselves a pack of contemptible wretches, did it occur to Miss Rockhard that she Herself had counted for something in the game, and had something to Do with It. And being now, as it were, thrown into solitude, and having a fine, vigorous mind, and being withdrawn from the society which had so fearfully warped it; she began, so to speak, to straighten out again morally, and recuperate. She felt no remorse at all, but she began to study that which had made her err: a society, with its ideals of the most adroit slander; knowledge of all that is none of our business, ostentation, wealth, rank, and birth, though ever so evilly sustained, or disgraced or dishonoured; the adroitness of shallow sarcasm and silly flippancy; and the real meaning of vogue and fashion; and finally the awkward, blundering manner in which even these wretched fancies were carried out by nine-tenths of their devotees, real and accomplished men and women of the world,--the true article being a great rarity even in Belgravia.

Her self-examination was long and searching, sparing herself no pang, being as pitiless to the Me as to the Them. Having no other on whom to exercise her sarcasms, she turned them all on her own follies--not raving in despair, and calling herself a fool, but, as she indeed always did, finding out what was in the object thus illuminated and shown up. And it did her an immense amount of good. She had an awful crust of old dead shells, and a fearful lot of foul sea-weed to scrape away from the ship, ere it would sail well; but she _did_ it!

For to do Jesabelle Rockhard justice, she had pluck and bottom, grit and endurance, and was not the kind of girl to throw up the game of life because she had lost a fairy wardrobe, or even the favour of a duchess; and not being French, but right valiant English of good fighting stock, she resolved to show fight, and put a good face on a bad game.

All at once it occurred to her that the long and earnest reflection which she had given to herself and to society had developed the serious and sustained analysis of character which forms the real power of the novelist, and that which elevates him above the story-teller. She was seated at Brighton in the shingle on a fine day at noon, under an umbrella, when it came into her mind that as a novelist she could enter on a new life. It was like a great revelation, for with her clear, vigorous, well-informed mind, she grasped all the possibilities of such a career, and its tremendous power.

Once in history, when women came a-cropper in any earthly way, they went into a convent; now they go into a publisher’s--that is to say, they write or re-write a novel.

All geniuses are white-washed.

A woman of genius may pawn her reputation when an obscurity dare not look over the fence.

Make yourself a celebrity, and society will do the rest.

Nine-tenths of notoriety consists not of what people know, but what they say about anybody.

If you have sinned, there are two ways to be forgiven. Either repent your evil deeds or describe those of others.

The most certain way to make two thousand a year by writing novels is to tell all your friends in confidence that you earn one thousand.

Understandest thou this--or what?

A gypsy woman of her acquaintance from whom she bought bouquets, and whose shrewd observations had often amused her, came up and gave her what is called in tramp slang a _lyover_, in Romany a _ruzhia_, and in English a flower.

‘Tell me, Amalthea Cooper,’ she inquired, ‘what do you understand by society? Give me a sixpence worth of information!’

‘When any kind of a lot of people gets together anyhow,’ replied Amalthea, after a grave pause, ‘it’s a mob. When there’s a-many that generally assembles, such as three or four _tans_ or families, it’s what we calls in our language the _Sweti_, or our world. But when they are of the same kind of folk, and are invited to a drop of tea or beer, or to have something and a talk--and one, may be, plays a tune on a fiddle--why, that’s society.’

‘And what do they talk about?’ inquired Jesabelle.

‘Well,’ answered the gypsy with a smile, ‘mostly about how one has been sent to _staripen_, or prison, for stealin’--and what a fool he was to let himself be took--and how other folks has run off with one another wives, and the like um-moralitys, and how some larrups their _romis_, or _morts_, which is wives and missuses, and all such little _rakapen_ or gossip--and that’s what I calls society.’

‘_C’est tout comme chez nous_,’ remarked Miss Rockhard. ‘Here is your sixpence, Amalthea. Decidedly I will take to novelling.’

* * * * *

It was a magnificent success, as great as the toilets had been, and to Miss Jesabelle in her new mind infinitely more gratifying. She didn’t deserve it, good people may say, but somehow Jesabelle _did_ write brilliant books, and rose to the top of the wave. Even the incident of the evening at the duchess’s was now narrated as an eccentricity of genius, and when it was mentioned men in the clubs said: ‘Ah, my dear fellow, excuse me, you haven’t got the right rendering of that story.’ Finally it settled into two versions: one of the sporting world, which found its way into the _Blue ‘Un_, that ‘Jes’ had done it for a wager, which was in a way true; and the other more humane legend, that it was at the request of the duchess, who had begged her to sing the ‘Lunatic Bar-Maid’ in character.

And her novels were stinging, I warrant you. As she became amiable personally she grew savage in literature. She gave it to society and fashion _à la_ aquafortis; and as society did not see itself but only its friends in her scathing speeches, it was perfectly delighted. She did not touch lightly and gently and pityingly, as I have done, on its poor little imperfections; she ripped them up as with a scalper in the hands of a Red Indian, or a familiar tormentor of the Inquisition at a five o’clock tea. I never could learn that it did any good, for even the victims felt pride at being shown up in good company as worthy of note; but her books sold, and she was famous.

‘Heaven help their souls, they’d rather be’ _et cetera_.

* * * * *

It was more than a year after the events here narrated had taken place, and Miss Rockhard had greatly improved on her celebrity by a ‘stunning second,’ or another novel, that she found herself again at Brighton, seated as before under a white umbrella. She was reading proofs, which is of itself a bliss to a young writer, as strong minds as hers love to speak of ‘_my_ publisher,’ and this was mingled with a mild, vague impression of children digging with wooden spades, negro minstrels, ballad-singers, flower-girls, bathing-machines, the flow of a thousand voices, the broad-spreading, blue ocean, and ships far off and out at sea, with the sun upon their sails.

When lifting her eyes they encountered the gaze of another pair, which for an instant half prolonged her dreamy mood in dim conjecture, till she recognised in the other the somewhat remarkable character who had, indirectly, had such a wondrous influence on her fate. It was indeed the Great and Wise Flaxius, _in propria persona_, who had taken unto himself a pennyworth of chair at a little distance, which distance he promptly proceeded to diminish when he perceived that the lady had not forgotten him.

‘It is a long time since we first met,’ said Miss Rockhard. ‘Nearly two years.’