The Moon and Sixpence
of agents and the offers they had obtained for us; of editors and the
sort of contributions they welcomed, how much they paid a thousand, and
whether they paid promptly or otherwise. To me it was all very
romantic. It gave me an intimate sense of being a member of some mystic
brotherhood.
Chapter IV
No one was kinder to me at that time than Rose Waterford. She combined
a masculine intelligence with a feminine perversity, and the novels she
wrote were original and disconcerting. It was at her house one day that
I met Charles Strickland’s wife. Miss Waterford was giving a tea-party,
and her small room was more than usually full. Everyone seemed to be
talking, and I, sitting in silence, felt awkward; but I was too shy to
break into any of the groups that seemed absorbed in their own affairs.
Miss Waterford was a good hostess, and seeing my embarrassment came up
to me.
“I want you to talk to Mrs. Strickland,” she said. “She’s raving about
your book.”
“What does she do?” I asked.
I was conscious of my ignorance, and if Mrs. Strickland was a
well-known writer I thought it as well to ascertain the fact before I
spoke to her.
Rose Waterford cast down her eyes demurely to give greater effect to
her reply.
“She gives luncheon-parties. You’ve only got to roar a little, and
she’ll ask you.”
Rose Waterford was a cynic. She looked upon life as an opportunity for
writing novels and the public as her raw material. Now and then she
invited members of it to her house if they showed an appreciation of
her talent and entertained with proper lavishness. She held their
weakness for lions in good-humoured contempt, but played to them her
part of the distinguished woman of letters with decorum.
I was led up to Mrs. Strickland, and for ten minutes we talked
together. I noticed nothing about her except that she had a pleasant
voice. She had a flat in Westminster, overlooking the unfinished
cathedral, and because we lived in the same neighbourhood we felt
friendly disposed to one another. The Army and Navy Stores are a bond
of union between all who dwell between the river and St. James’s Park.
Mrs. Strickland asked me for my address, and a few days later I
received an invitation to luncheon.
My engagements were few, and I was glad to accept. When I arrived, a
little late, because in my fear of being too early I had walked three
times round the cathedral, I found the party already complete. Miss
Waterford was there and Mrs. Jay, Richard Twining and George Road. We
were all writers. It was a fine day, early in spring, and we were in a
good humour. We talked about a hundred things. Miss Waterford, torn
between the aestheticism of her early youth, when she used to go to
parties in sage green, holding a daffodil, and the flippancy of her
maturer years, which tended to high heels and Paris frocks, wore a new
hat. It put her in high spirits. I had never heard her more malicious
about our common friends. Mrs. Jay, aware that impropriety is the soul
of wit, made observations in tones hardly above a whisper that might
well have tinged the snowy tablecloth with a rosy hue. Richard Twining
bubbled over with quaint absurdities, and George Road, conscious that
he need not exhibit a brilliancy which was almost a by-word, opened his
mouth only to put food into it. Mrs. Strickland did not talk much, but
she had a pleasant gift for keeping the conversation general; and when
there was a pause she threw in just the right remark to set it going
once more. She was a woman of thirty-seven, rather tall and plump,
without being fat; she was not pretty, but her face was pleasing,
chiefly, perhaps, on account of her kind brown eyes. Her skin was
rather sallow. Her dark hair was elaborately dressed. She was the only
woman of the three whose face was free of make-up, and by contrast with
the others she seemed simple and unaffected.
The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very
severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which
were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with
their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in
the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees,
suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the
chimney-piece. At that time there must have been five hundred
dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was
chaste, artistic, and dull.
When we left I walked away with Miss Waterford, and the fine day and
her new hat persuaded us to saunter through the Park.
“That was a very nice party,” I said.
“Did you think the food was good? I told her that if she wanted writers
she must feed them well.”
“Admirable advice,” I answered. “But why does she want them?”
Miss Waterford shrugged her shoulders.
“She finds them amusing. She wants to be in the movement. I fancy she’s
rather simple, poor dear, and she thinks we’re all wonderful. After
all, it pleases her to ask us to luncheon, and it doesn’t hurt us. I
like her for it.”
Looking back, I think that Mrs. Strickland was the most harmless of all
the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from the rarefied heights of
Hampstead to the nethermost studios of Cheyne Walk. She had led a very
quiet youth in the country, and the books that came down from Mudie’s
Library brought with them not only their own romance, but the romance
of London. She had a real passion for reading (rare in her kind, who
for the most part are more interested in the author than in his book,
in the painter than in his pictures), and she invented a world of the
imagination in which she lived with a freedom she never acquired in the
world of every day. When she came to know writers it was like
adventuring upon a stage which till then she had known only from the
other side of the footlights. She saw them dramatically, and really
seemed herself to live a larger life because she entertained them and
visited them in their fastnesses. She accepted the rules with which
they played the game of life as valid for them, but never for a moment
thought of regulating her own conduct in accordance with them. Their
moral eccentricities, like their oddities of dress, their wild theories
and paradoxes, were an entertainment which amused her, but had not the
slightest influence on her convictions.
“Is there a Mr. Strickland?” I asked
“Oh yes; he’s something in the city. I believe he’s a stockbroker. He’s
very dull.”
“Are they good friends?”
“They adore one another. You’ll meet him if you dine there. But she
doesn’t often have people to dinner. He’s very quiet. He’s not in the
least interested in literature or the arts.”
“Why do nice women marry dull men?”
“Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women.”
I could not think of any retort to this, so I asked if Mrs. Strickland
had children.
“Yes; she has a boy and a girl. They’re both at school.”
The subject was exhausted, and we began to talk of other things.
Chapter V
During the summer I met Mrs. Strickland not infrequently. I went now
and then to pleasant little luncheons at her flat, and to rather more
formidable tea-parties. We took a fancy to one another. I was very
young, and perhaps she liked the idea of guiding my virgin steps on the
hard road of letters; while for me it was pleasant to have someone I
could go to with my small troubles, certain of an attentive ear and
reasonable counsel. Mrs. Strickland had the gift of sympathy. It is a
charming faculty, but one often abused by those who are conscious of
its possession: for there is something ghoulish in the avidity with
which they will pounce upon the misfortune of their friends so that
they may exercise their dexterity. It gushes forth like an oil-well,
and the sympathetic pour out their sympathy with an abandon that is
sometimes embarrassing to their victims. There are bosoms on which so
many tears have been shed that I cannot bedew them with mine. Mrs.
Strickland used her advantage with tact. You felt that you obliged her
by accepting her sympathy. When, in the enthusiasm of my youth, I
remarked on this to Rose Waterford, she said:
“Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the
domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very
uncomfortable.”
Rose Waterford had a blistering tongue. No one could say such bitter
things; on the other hand, no one could do more charming ones.
There was another thing I liked in Mrs. Strickland. She managed her
surroundings with elegance. Her flat was always neat and cheerful, gay
with flowers, and the chintzes in the drawing-room, notwithstanding
their severe design, were bright and pretty. The meals in the artistic
little dining-room were pleasant; the table looked nice, the two maids
were trim and comely; the food was well cooked. It was impossible not
to see that Mrs. Strickland was an excellent housekeeper. And you felt
sure that she was an admirable mother. There were photographs in the
drawing-room of her son and daughter. The son—his name was Robert—was a
boy of sixteen at Rugby; and you saw him in flannels and a cricket cap,
and again in a tail-coat and a stand-up collar. He had his mother’s
candid brow and fine, reflective eyes. He looked clean, healthy, and
normal.
“I don’t know that he’s very clever,” she said one day, when I was
looking at the photograph, “but I know he’s good. He has a charming
character.”
The daughter was fourteen. Her hair, thick and dark like her mother’s,
fell over her shoulders in fine profusion, and she had the same kindly
expression and sedate, untroubled eyes.
“They’re both of them the image of you,” I said.
“Yes; I think they are more like me than their father.”
“Why have you never let me meet him?” I asked.
“Would you like to?”
She smiled, her smile was really very sweet, and she blushed a little;
it was singular that a woman of that age should flush so readily.
Perhaps her naivete was her greatest charm.
“You know, he’s not at all literary,” she said. “He’s a perfect
philistine.”
She said this not disparagingly, but affectionately rather, as though,
by acknowledging the worst about him, she wished to protect him from
the aspersions of her friends.
“He’s on the Stock Exchange, and he’s a typical broker. I think he’d
bore you to death.”
“Does he bore you?” I asked.
“You see, I happen to be his wife. I’m very fond of him.”
She smiled to cover her shyness, and I fancied she had a fear that I
would make the sort of gibe that such a confession could hardly have
failed to elicit from Rose Waterford. She hesitated a little. Her eyes
grew tender.
“He doesn’t pretend to be a genius. He doesn’t even make much money on
the Stock Exchange. But he’s awfully good and kind.”
“I think I should like him very much.”
“I’ll ask you to dine with us quietly some time, but mind, you come at
your own risk; don’t blame me if you have a very dull evening.”
Chapter VI
But when at last I met Charles Strickland, it was under circumstances
which allowed me to do no more than just make his acquaintance. One
morning Mrs. Strickland sent me round a note to say that she was giving
a dinner-party that evening, and one of her guests had failed her. She
asked me to stop the gap. She wrote:
“It’s only decent to warn you that you will be bored to extinction. It
was a thoroughly dull party from the beginning, but if you will come I
shall be uncommonly grateful. And you and I can have a little chat by
ourselves.”
It was only neighbourly to accept.
When Mrs. Strickland introduced me to her husband, he gave me a rather
indifferent hand to shake. Turning to him gaily, she attempted a small
jest.
“I asked him to show him that I really had a husband. I think he was