The Brontes Went to Woolworths (4 page)

‘I get you. But does Martin know it’s mother’s birthday? – Because, if she does . . . and Sheil will be sure to have told her . . . and we can’t tell Sheil
why
we don’t want the things put by her place. Poor Martin hasn’t many legs to stand on with the kid
’

‘ –one ought to leave her one. I see. Look here.
I
know. We’ll all give mother
one
of our things at table – the most fetid of the lot
’

‘What ho!’ appreciated Katrine.

‘And K, how are you off for dibs?’

‘Thrift, thrift, Horatio. It’ll be another month before I get m’ hands on any twinkling, chinking dem’d mint sauce.’

I gave Katrine two pounds because I am the man of the family now, and I sometimes feel as though she and Sheil were my daughters. At mother’s place there were three small parcels, and we were so decorous at breakfast that we nearly burst, and spent the time trying not to catch each other’s eye, while mother thanked us and Miss Martin looked on, poor catfish! (She hurried out later on and bought mother a bunch of roses, and I wondered what Martin birthday mornings were like.) But we rushed mother into the drawing-room and were able to be ourselves for quite twenty minutes.

There were eleven parcels, all told. Ironface had sent a big box of Fullers’ chocolates, and Crellie a glass powderbowl with his card inside (Colonel Crellie: United Services Club). He had bought the present with his ear-money, for we think he must keep it there, as he has no pockets. Dion Saffyn had sent a stall for a play we knew mother wanted to see (‘with fond love from Saffy’), and Polly a big bunch of lilies of the valley (‘From my father’s garden, with kindest thoughts from Mary Arbuthnot Saffyn’), so then mother guessed that Polly was in one of her County moods, and probably being a little jealous of our intimacy with her husband. Pauline and Ennis only sent cards, because it was felt that they couldn’t afford presents except at Christmas, on their salaries.

But the best thing came from Toddington. Three lovely pairs of silk stockings and his card (‘With very many happy returns to my dear Mrs Carne from her old friend Toddy.’ Garrick Club. Athenæum), and mother hugged us all and said, ‘Oh
thank
you, Toddy, the old dear!’

And then she began to open our presents.

The end-of-term shows at the Dramatic School were so funny that my nose began to bleed, and I had to grope my way out and yell it off in the cloak-rooms. But mother, shuddering with giggles, sat it all out so as to be able to say what there was to say to Katrine. Her
rôles
included Polonius, and she’d just got to ‘costly thy habit’ when her beard came half off and swung like a pendulum for the rest of the scene, and in
The Professor’s Love Story
(Oh! what a bad play!) the gate stuck, and pinned that whimsical recluse to his own fence. And later on, mother told me, one of the girls (as a farmer) had to fill a pipe and smoke it, and she stuffed the bowl so full that a man in the audience said ‘Christ’ out loud, and of course it wouldn’t draw, and the girl pulled nearly all of it out again, and mother said, ‘The stage was knee-deep in shag. That girl ought to get on.’ And Toddington, sitting by mother, looked austere and tolerant, and said that these mishaps must be very trying, where all were working so hard. And afterwards, he drove us home in his car. Mitchell, his chauffeur, is beginning to know our address so well, now, that we have often noticed a slight tendency on his part to cough like a stage butler whenever it is mentioned, and once I told it as a joke to Toddy, and he was down on Mitchell like a ton of bricks. Toddy has a tongue like a whip-lash. It is only to be expected.

My novel went off to a publisher a fortnight ago, and I am cold with excitement. Toddy thinks it ‘exceedingly good,’ and said I was a clever child, and took me to the Ritz to celebrate, and made rather a stir as so many people recognised him. Mildred wasn’t there. She is altogether a little unapproachable, and although she has ‘called,’ we all felt it was more or less to countenance her husband’s friends.

But as time goes on – it is nearly a year, now, since the jury summons – she is gradually beginning to show us another side of herself. She drove me back, for instance, a week ago, to her house, and gave me a cherry brandy and had one herself, and suddenly kicked off her shoes and said she was sick of her life and whatever was the use of tiring oneself out in the season for a pack of people who didn’t care a dump for her? And mother said, ‘How Toddy would loathe her saying “whatever!” But I always told you Mildred wasn’t as top-shelfish as you think she is. After all . . . Brockley is anybody’s name.’

Mother is so sane; she can always be trusted to come out with something reassuring. Bogeys hate her.

I said, ‘Then
why
did Toddy marry her?’

‘Oh well, you know how it is. And he was only in his twenties. And I expect she was pretty.’

And then I said, ‘
Isn’t
it rum to think that Toddy eats, and shaves and has tiny little liver attacks?’

‘But of course he does! I expect he takes pills by the spoonful! He looks what Mildred would call “bileyfied.” ’

‘Oh, he
doesn’t
!’

Mother pulled my chin. ‘I believe you think he goes about on a gilded elephant.’

‘Well,’ I countered, ‘can you
see
him in a train, or a bus?’

‘But of
course
I can! I bet he takes buses every day of his life.’

‘Well, I can’t see him doing it,’ I answered truthfully. And then I went into the library and had an inferiority complex. The season was still on, and cars were rolling by full of expensive people who were in demand; hard-eyed girls who do all the right things and don’t speak our language at all; who are so jolly sure of themselves, so positive about life, and whose highest tribute to joy is a drawled ‘Mahvellous!’

I tried to explain it all to mother, once, and she said, ‘These girls have no shadows.’

One doesn’t envy them, but one is alarmed by them, stupidity and all, and intimidated and impressed. And by they all went, doing Mildred Toddington sorts of things at times dedicated by everybody else to work. But, at the same time, from about this period I date the change in Mildred. She became more human, even less bred.

And I began to read books about people whose spirits were even ‘lower’ than mine, for that is the only possible book for these occasions, and I took down
Jane Eyre
, and watched Miss Martin, in one of her quenched hats, taking Sheil out for a walk.

But I couldn’t settle to anything, and I planned to take Katrine to a music-hall in the evening. We would go to an outlying hall because the turns are always better and more virile in those places, and we both love the twice-a-night atmosphere, and the sequins that are missing from the tabs, and the hurried overture with the band wiping the beer from its lips, and the advertisements of the local shops that the lantern in the family circle throws on to the screen . . . ready-to-wear trousers like drain pipes, and hats in which one wouldn’t be seen dying. And at one of the Empires there is a grocer called Soper, who always advertises, and when his slide comes we always applaud, because he is probably rather bald, and feeling his age, and bewildered by the competition of the chain stores, and because it is so terrible to have a surname like his.

And sometimes we go behind and talk to anybody I know that may be on the bill. And Katrine is all agog, and impressed with me, and I pretend I’m not a bit, though the sight of a dress-basket and the smell of the stone passages always goes to my head. Katrine will grow out of her feeling because she is only stage-struck and inexperienced, and three weeks in the provinces will settle her illusions for ever, whereas I am not a bit stage-struck any more, but the trappings will impose themselves on me for ever, though I know them for what they are.

We adore what we call ‘Hai – hup!’ turns; they are always active and all over spangles, and one gets plenty of them in the suburbs. Katrine is always sorry for the girl who only stands at the back of the set in tights and looks bright and interested, and catches things, and always wonders what her home looks like, and what she reads and really thinks about things. I don’t have to bother, because I’ve met her, and I know she thinks of nothing but the show, and clothes, and lucky charms and men, and that her home is a combined room in Kennington Road or Highbury New Park, with a cruet on the chiffonier. Comedians are far more elastic in their higher reaches, and think of plenty of things, and are apt to collect artistic objects far above their station, and are usually thoroughly good sorts and not a bit the ‘laddie’ type. And this week, Freddie Pipson was topping the bill, and I said to Katrine, ‘We’ll go and see him afterwards.’

Pipson is a wonder. He is the only justification I know for that dreadful phrase, ‘One of Nature’s gentlemen.’ He has everything except birth, and if he ever marries, his wife will be a lucky and blessèd woman. He is earning two hundred a week and was born in the slums; his handwriting is awful and his relatives unpresentable, but I would trust my life, money, and daughter to him without thinking twice. And I thought of all that while the band blared, and Pipson marched in in a comedy uniform, sword and scratch wig, and sang his famous ‘I’m the Captain of the Loyal Kitchen Rangers,’ while the house roared. He told me once that it was his landlady that gave him the idea, years ago, when he was an obscure first turn, and he wrote the chorus on an old envelope and got a try-out at Islington, ‘And it went so big, Miss Carne, I never looked back, and I’ve been singing it, off and on, ever since.’

We joined in the chorus with everybody, and Pipson suddenly saw me, and saluted, and gave that imperceptible sideways nod of the head that meant we were to come round after the show.

I’m the Captain of the Loyal Kitchen Rangers!

I lead the men to battle, in the rear,
With dispatches on my cuff,
By Jingo, I’m the stuff!

And the foe for mercy shout
When I pull my dampers out.

People say, “Who is that handsome man
Who’s standing by the butts?”

And the privates always point me out to strangers.

I’m the idol of the reg’ment, and I’m one of
Derby’s nuts, I’m the Captain of the Loyal Kitchen Rangers!

Pipson wrote it early in the War, when he had been rejected by three recruiting offices. He said to me that he had never been through such humiliation, and so he came home to find salvation on the back of an envelope. But the night he sang it to ‘real soldiers’ he nearly broke down. He gave half his salary to War charities, and gave up smoking altogether, and even now only has one drink after his work is over, though his dressing-room is like a bar, for visitors. So I nodded ‘yes’ to him. I met him first a few months ago when I was doing a series of music-hall impressions for Binton, and I couldn’t get him to talk about himself because he would talk about me. Katrine whispered ecstatically, ‘Oh,
will
somebody say “Pleased to meet you” to us?’ ‘All of them,’ I replied, ‘and what the answer is, I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s like when people say “God bless you”; one doesn’t know whether to say “Don’t mention it,” “Not at all,” or “The same to you.” ’

And then, while Pipson hurried off to change for his next number, while the band played the chorus of the Rangers and then broke into the chorus of the number to follow, I fell into one of those mental maunders that noise always induces, and wondered why one mustn’t say ‘Pleased to meet you’ when it expresses exactly what one wants to convey, and then the back of the conductor’s head gave me the idea for a music-hall sketch, and the tune gave me the outline for a ballet synopsis why, I can’t imagine, as the music – was completely unsuitable for dancers, but lights and noise are like flame to gunpowder with me, and I once planned a problem-play through watching a turn rattle out
William
Tell
on the xylophone. Theatres, halls and concerts have another effect, too; they stir me to re-living the past, and I have often come home from Queen’s Hall quite furious at disagreements I had with people, ten years ago, with whom I am really on the best of terms.