The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore A FARCICAL NOVEL

COOMBS’

COOMBS’

Cures Cold in the Head, cures Nervous Headache, instantly relieves Hay Fever and Neuralgia in the Head, is the best remedy for Faintness and Dizziness.

CHAPTER I. WHICH INTRODUCES MISS SEMAPHORE.

Seven o’clock had struck.

The gong at 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, South Kensington, thundered under the vigorous strokes of the bow-legged German waiter. By one, by two, by three, the boarders trooped down to dinner, the more sensitive to noise stopping their ears as they descended.

The very deafest could not ignore that gong. Müller always attacked it suddenly, as if running amuck or possessed by a demon. It reverberated far and near, and echoed faintly to Gloucester Road Station. Boarders, arriving late, were seen to run when their ears caught the familiar sound.

8At the head of the central table in the fine dining-room, its three windows looking on the Gardens, sat the proprietress, Mrs. Wilcox. She was a bright-eyed, stout, florid woman of forty-five, dressed in black silk and a lace fichu secured by a cameo brooch. As she waited for her guests, she meditatively sharpened a carving knife.

By the sideboard stood her husband, Captain Wilcox, slender, dried-up, younger than his wife, and dominated by her. Where they met, and why they married, was a never-failing source of speculation in the house. It was asserted that Miss Tompkins took him in payment of a debt. Be that as it might, the mild, subdued little Captain was evidently a gentleman. He had been in a Lancer regiment, got into difficulties, and now at eight-and-thirty was a person of much less importance in his wife’s boarding-house than her imposing cook.

Though never supposed to act as master, the name and authority of Captain Wilcox were frequently evoked by Mrs. Wilcox when any unpleasant duty had to be done. He it was, for instance, who sternly insisted that no credit should be given. He stood out for the weekly settlement of accounts. 9He was responsible for certain persons receiving notice to quit. He made the unpopular rule that the drawing-room lights should be extinguished precisely at eleven. In a word, he was the Jorkins of the firm. For the rest, he held some small post in the City secured for him by his wife’s brother, helped daily with the carving, and paid for his own keep.

Besides the central table, there were round the room several smaller ones, accommodating from four to eight persons. To one of these, some men and women concerned in our story were making their way. First came Miss Augusta Semaphore, a tall, thin, and rather acid-looking woman of fifty-three. Close behind followed her sister, Miss Prudence, who was ten years younger, and accustomed to be treated as a baby. Prudence wore a fringe that hung over her eyes in separate snaky curls, and in damp weather degenerated into wisps; she was plump and fair, had a somewhat foolish smile, and, as befitted her part of giddy, little thing, any number of coquettish airs and graces.

Their neighbours were, a stately couple named Mr. and Mrs. Dumaresq, Mr. Lorimer, a clownish youth, of good family and 10aggressive patriotism, Major Jones, Mrs. Whitley, a small, mincing lady of recent and painful refinement, and finally a large and commanding woman with a terrible eye, who was vaguely believed to have taken out a medical degree.

“For what we are about to receive,” said Mrs. Wilcox, “the Lord make us truly thankful.”

With a creak and a rustle, some five-and-thirty boarders drew in their chairs. The covers were removed, and a ripple of prosy talk began.

As usual, it started with polite enquiries as to each other’s health. In boarding-houses it generally does. No one cares a button for you or your ailments, but they ask after them all the same with exasperating regularity and take no interest in the answer.

“How is your cold, Major Jones?”

“Better, thank you, Mrs. Dumaresq—and your neuralgia?”

“Much worse; I never closed my eyes last night.”

“But you are taking something for it?”—and so on, and so on, and so on.

New comers at 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, occasionally tried to be conversational. For 11a time they were lively, animated, full of good stories and repartee. People listened to them in silence, and generally took offence. Conversation as a fine art was not encouraged. It was sad to notice how in a week or a fortnight the talkers talked themselves out, and subsided into the brief commonplaces of their neighbours.

The boarders, all respectable people who read the Daily Telegraph and voted Tory when they had votes, shared the profound belief of the middle-class Briton that silence shows solidity, sound judgment, and a well-balanced mind. Profound and continued silence they considered an attainment in itself. They scarcely realised, not being introspective, that two-thirds of the people who don’t speak are silent from lack of ideas.

As a matter of fact, in such a milieu, subjects for conversation of general interest were almost impossible to find. By tacit consent, politics and religion were tabooed, since the discussion of either invariably ended in a quarrel. Though the boarders read novels, they did not talk about them, and they took no great interest in literature or art. A man who was supposed to have written a book was 12rather cold-shouldered, for the Englishman—and in this case, as the preacher put it, man embraces woman—whatever his respect for literature in the abstract, thinks but meanly of those who produce it, if they do not happen to be celebrities. To be sure they are generally poor.

“Vill you beef, muddon, schiken, or feal?” whispered Müller, making his round when soup and fish had been removed.

“Veal, please,” said Miss Semaphore.

“Feal, blease,” said Müller under his breath, to impress the order on his mind.

“Vill you beef, muddon, schiken, or feal, Madame?”

“A portion—a tiny portion of the—a—chest of the fowl,” said Mrs. Whitley.

“Roast beef,” growled Mr. Lorimer, and Müller echoed “beef,” adding “blease” on his own account.

“I saw you to-day, Major Jones, but you did not see me,” said the younger Miss Semaphore archly, when the interest of choosing had subsided.

“You what?” asked Major Jones mildly. He was rather deaf.

“I said that I saw you to-day—down in the City, you know. Fancy! I went all 13that distance by myself in an omnibus! There is such a sweet shop for bargains in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and you passed me just as I turned in.”

“You should not go into the City unescorted,” said Miss Augusta Semaphore severely; “I have told you that over and over again, but you are so heedless. It is not comme il faut.”

“What do you think would happen to her?” asked Mr. Lorimer gruffly. He was a young man of combative instincts and no manners, with whom Miss Semaphore waged a deadly but, on her side, perfectly civil warfare.

“My dear father,” went on Miss Semaphore, without taking any notice, “who was a distinguished military officer, strongly objected to girls going about alone.”

“That was all very well thirty years ago,” objected Mr. Lorimer, “but nowadays, if people conduct themselves properly, there is no earthly reason why they should not go about alone at fit and proper hours, once they have come to years of discretion.”

“I can assure you,” said Mrs. Dumaresq, assuming a grand air, and slightly raising her voice, as she always did when she meant to 14impress her hearers, “I can assure you that in diplomatic circles, a lady shopping without an escort, or at any rate without a maid, is unheard of.”

In every boarding-house throughout the British Islands there is to be found a person who is the intimate friend of the Prince of Wales. At 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, Mrs. Dumaresq was that person.

“Yes, all very well amongst a lot of horrid foreigners,” said Mr. Lorimer obstinately; “no wonder ladies are afraid to go about alone where there’s a set of ugly, unwashed rascals that would run a dagger into them as soon as look at them, but grown-up Englishwomen in their own country may do what they please.”

“I do not approve of ladies going anywhere alone. It may do for middle-class persons,” said Mrs. Dumaresq haughtily, “but I can assure you, from personal knowledge, that it is not done in diplomatic circles. When we lived at Belgrade, there was a Mrs. Twickenham who used to act in the most unconventional way, and one day the Princess—a dear old friend of ours—the Princess Hatzoff—you must have heard of her, first cousin to the Czar, a delightful 15woman and so attached to me—said, ‘Dearest Mimi’—she always called me Mimi—‘are English ladies in their own country, ladies of position such as you and I, allowed this liberty, not to say license, of action?’ and I replied, ‘No, Helène, certainly not.’”

The Misses Semaphore, Mrs. Whitley, and the lady doctor listened attentively to these reminiscences, but Mr. Lorimer was not impressed.

“I maintain,” he said, “that this is a free country, and that those ideas are old-fashioned.”

“I assure you that is not the opinion of the Princess Hatzoff, a woman who mixed in the very best society; nor was it the opinion of my dear friend, the ex-Empress of the French, Mr. Lorimer,” replied Mrs. Dumaresq with a lofty air. “However, we will discuss the matter no further. In diplomacy one learns to avoid subjects on which one’s experiences are different from those of other people, and so not likely to agree.”

There was a subdued acidity in Mrs. Dumaresq’s tone, there was a battle-breathing obstinacy in Mr. Lorimer’s accent that led peaceful Miss Prudence to change the conversation.

16“The poor dear Empress,” she said, “how I pity her!”

“Ah, you should have seen her in her splendour. Were you in Paris before the war?”

“You can scarcely expect my sister to remember Paris before the war, my dear Mrs. Dumaresq,” interposed Miss Semaphore frigidly. “It is years ago. Prudence was a mere child.”

Mrs. Dumaresq smiled slightly, and said, “Ah!” In diplomatic circles no one openly expresses disbelief in a statement.

“The dear Empress was such a friend of mine in the old days when we lived there. One day, I remember so well, we had been away for nearly a year. The Empress was standing at a window of the Palace with an aide-de-camp beside her, Comte de la Tour—you remember Comte de la Tour, Angelo?” This to her silent husband, who nodded assent. “The Empress suddenly said to the Comte, ‘Mon cher, who is that charmingly-dressed lady who has just driven past?’ The Comte, dear man, answered, ‘Oh, your Majesty, do you not know? that is Madame Dumaresq!’ The same evening we met at a ball at the Spanish Ambassador’s, and the 17Empress graciously came up to me. ‘Fancy,’ said she; ‘fancy, my dear Madame Dumaresq, I did not recognise you this morning. It is such an age since you were here; and oh! do permit me to congratulate you on the exquisite costume you wore.’”

The story made a distinct impression. The medical woman at the end of the table, who had an American’s interest in high life, stopped short in a thrilling narrative of an amputation, and listened with all her ears.

“The Empress was a very lovely woman, but I believe she was not very young when she married,” said the elder Miss Semaphore reflectively.

“Oh, dear no! Eight or nine-and-twenty at least. Some people said two-and-thirty.”

“What matter does that make?” interposed the polite Mr. Dumaresq. “A handsome woman is only the age she looks.”

Miss Semaphore sighed. She had carefully examined her face before dinner and discovered a new wrinkle. It was borne in on her that she scarcely looked as young as she felt, but she made an effort to seem as if eight-and-twenty, or, at most, two-and-thirty, was still before her.

“It must be dreadful to grow old,” said Mrs. Whitley affectedly.

18“There are so many aids to beauty nowadays,” said Mr. Dumaresq, “that no lady need look a day older than she likes.”

“But the use of cosmetics is odious,” cried Miss Semaphore. “For my part I never could understand how any one could use paints and powders.”

Good breeding was not Mr. Lorimer’s strong point, and, in boarding-houses, people say things to each other that elsewhere are the privilege of relatives.

“Dyes,” he said, looking fixedly at Miss Semaphore’s hair, “dyes are most injurious—worst of all, in fact. Horrible case in the paper the other day. A woman dyed her hair black one morning, died herself next! Instantaneous softening of the brain, they said. The stuff soaked in.”

The obvious application lent point to the sally. The medical lady, who prided herself on being a fine woman, needing no aid from art, smiled broadly. She could not, however, resist saying there was no such disease as instantaneous softening of the brain.

Mrs. Dumaresq, mindful of her diplomatic training, looked so grave that a child would have suspected something wrong. Miss Semaphore murmured “How dreadful!” 19She alone saw no personal allusion, for it never struck her that anyone could think she tinted her tresses. Miss Prudence looked as angrily at the speaker as her kind face permitted. Major Jones had just said, “Eh! what’s that?” when Mrs. Wilcox rose, and at her signal the ladies swept upstairs, leaving the men to cigars and scandal.

CHAPTER II. A BOARDING-HOUSE EVENING, AND AN IMPORTANT LETTER.

Boarding-houses all the world over have certain features in common. These are the result of haphazard association between people without common interests.

No. 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, South Kensington, was no exception to the rule. Its inmates were chiefly women, the widows and daughters of professional men. A few childless married couples lived there, and a sprinkling of unmarried men who were either old or extremely young. Some of the people were well-connected, others well-off, all were dull, a few pious. Several secretly considered themselves superior to the others. They focussed the attributes of the British Philistine, and were an object-lesson as to the low intellectual level of average respectable humanity.

21Lacking occupation and mutual outside interests, the boarders were led to discuss each other freely. The men mostly herded together in the smoking-room. The ladies gathered in the drawing-room. A sort of armed neutrality was maintained between the sexes. He or she who ventured to invade the headquarters of the other was looked on as daring or brazen as the case might be. At meals alone did some thirty-five people assemble. Even then, they were not expected to change their place at table, so had to trust to chance for agreeable neighbours.

The few girls who lived in the house had not a gay time. Poor things! They had no lovers, no interests, no society, no prospects, and incomes that required management. Once they ceased to be new arrivals, the men, all of whom were ineligible, took no notice of them. They were treated with a nonchalance more galling than unkindness, and were subtly given to understand that they could not expect the same consideration as young women outside who lived in their own homes and had parents who entertained. The elderly people, and especially Miss Semaphore, looked rigidly after the proprieties.

22Occasionally a dashing widow or an attractive and forward damsel temporarily upset the dulness. Dances were organised, round games started, heads turned. These brilliant meteors never lingered long on the horizon. Their stay usually terminated in some episode that led to a notice to quit. The succeeding flatness was the more marked.

There is no dulness in the quietest home like the dulness that falls at intervals on a boarding-house. It may be that at home one does not expect much, while living with a number of strangers one feels restless, as if something really ought to happen.

There are blanks and periods of depression, extending sometimes to months at a time, when life seems a waste. During these, efforts to get up any amusement are useless. No one will help, and so much cold water is thrown on every suggestion, that in despair the promoter abandons the project.

Such an interval was now being put through at No. 37. Conversation, as we have indicated, languished, being replaced by an occasional interchange of platitudes, failing any private or public sensation. An audacious flirtation on the part of one of the younger women, or a thrilling murder trial, 23would have interested everybody, especially the flirtation, on the progress of which the boarders would have taken turns to watch and comment on.

Relieved of all household duties, the “ladies,” as Mrs. Wilcox never failed to call them, passed the monotonous days in shopping, novel-reading, and repose. They made up temporary friendships between themselves and fell out with regularity. As usual, they were split into two factions, those who abused the proprietress and those who did not.

The drawing-room in which they nightly assembled was a spacious apartment. A Brussels carpet of pronounced pattern, red Utrecht velvet chairs—solid, as befitted furniture destined to much wear and tear—and gilt-framed mirrors, gave the apartment an early Victorian aspect. The light and airy found no place in this salon, for in boarding-houses everything breakable is broken, and nobody owns to the mischief.

Workbaskets, newspapers, and novels were brought out this evening as usual, and nearly all the party became absorbed in one or other of these excitements. They had exhausted each other, though one or two kept up a 24dribble of civil enquiries for the sake of saying something.

“What pretty work. How do you do it?”

“Oh! it is a new stitch I have just learned.”

“Were you out this afternoon?”

“No; I lay down and took a nap. Were you?”

“Yes, I went down to High Street for some wool.”

The evening to which we refer, though as dull, was not destined to be as peaceful as its fellows. The cause of the disturbance was Miss Semaphore’s dog. Miss Semaphore’s dog was a mongrel, a snappish little brute called Toutou. Its brown hair was flecked with grey, for it was old, fat, and scant of breath. Toutou had been the cause of more unpleasantness at 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, than any other inmate. If, in the quarrels of men, cherchez la femme holds good, in the quarrels of idle women who live in boarding-houses one may not unfrequently look for the dog. To-night, unfortunately for herself, Miss Belcher, one of the younger women, trod on its tail. Frankly, it was difficult to avoid treading on Toutou’s tail, for he had a trick of getting into the way that was 25simply exasperating. Miss Belcher, a nice, harmless girl, jumped as if she had been shot.

“Oh, I am so sorry!” she cried; “doggie, poor doggie, are you hurt?” and kneeling down, she tried tenderly to soothe him. Toutou was not hurt, but he howled desperately. Judging by his actions he rather enjoyed getting people into trouble. In an instant Miss Semaphore swooped down, red and angry, seized her favourite, and casting a withering glance at the crestfallen Miss Belcher, carried him off to her own particular corner.

Everyone at 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, had a special chair or a favourite corner, and great was the indignation if anyone else took it.

“It was quite an accident,” stammered Miss Belcher. “I never saw Toutou.”

“Some people,” replied Miss Semaphore, “have no eyes. They think it rather amusing to torture dumb animals, don’t they, my precious?” As she spoke, she bestowed a kiss like a peck on the top of Toutou’s ugly nose. The boarders all ceased work and listened attentively.

“But indeed, Miss Semaphore,” cried poor Miss Belcher, almost crying, “it was not my fault.”

26“I suppose, of course, it was Toutou’s,” said Miss Semaphore with sarcasm.