# The Adventure of Mrs. Farbman

Upon what little chances do the wheels of life turn! Had it not been for a curried egg I might at this moment be begging my bread in the streets of London, Chippet might never have become Sir Gordon Chippet, K.B.E.—our lives, in fact, might have ended in dismal and untimely failure.
THE ADVENTURE OF MRS. FARBMAN
By HUGH WALPOLE
IT would be quite impossible at this later date to say with any accuracy as to whose idea it really was. I suspect, of course, that the credit is Chippet's, he being the romantic one of the three and the man of ideas. I (the professional writer) ought to have been the man of ideas, but I was suffering just at that time I remember from a surfeit of realism; romance seemed to me something dead-gone and long abandoned. Chippet, of course, maintained exactly the opposite of this. I can see him now with his blue eyes, his fair hair, his trustful, pleading expression, urging upon us that the London of these up-and-down after-the-war years was the most romantic place in the world. "Stevenson's London," he said, "was nothing to it, and you remember how, when he brought out the 'New Arabian Nights,' everyone was amazed that he could find so much colour and excitement in this drab, dull, smoke-haunted underground-driven town."
"I don't remember," I answered rather stiffly. "I don't know what age you take me for, Bubbles, but I may remark that I was in my cradle when the 'New Arabian Nights' was published."
"Well, anyway," said Chippet, "never mind that. The point is that London has never been so romantic, so absurd, and so full of excitement as it is at this particular moment."
It was, I believe, this very conversation that gave Chippet his idea.
We were having lunch in Borden's rooms, and we were all rather alarmed—alarmed because we were running very low in funds and saw no means of increasing them. Chippet had just retired from the diplomatic service, Borden was supposed to be a sporting journalist, but the sporting paper which had been his principal ally had just died from want of encouragement; I was a serious realistic novelist—I need, therefore, say no more as to the reasons of my penury.
Something must be done and that soon. Chippet thought it would be very jolly if we could only all go into something together. We were great friends, understood one another thoroughly, and the gifts that we enjoyed were opposite enough to make us very useful allies. It was just then, I believe, that Chippet had his great idea.
"Why shouldn't we …"
We all laughed.
"Oh, but that …" we cried.
"No, but really …" he answered. "I don't see …"
"Come, now," we answered, "they won't …" .
"I believe that they will …" he replied.
The idea seemed certainly less fantastic when we examined it more closely. It was also a New Idea. It had most certainly never been tried before.
"The first thing to do," said Chippet, now immensely excited, "is to circularise the right people. Very careful we have to be. Let's draw up a list of names."
In this matter of circularising we were certainly fortunate, because between us we covered a lot of ground. Chippet was aristocratic, being a cousin of the Beauminsters. Borden's uncle had one of the best stables in Great Britain, and had won the Grand National. Borden's younger brother was stand-off half for Cambridge, and had every chance of gaining his International cap next season, now that Kershaw and Davies were confessing themselves too old for the game. And I? Well, I was a friend of Hallard's, and had contributed on two occasions to his high-brow "monthly." I was a member of the Garrick and Beefsteak Clubs, and Peter Westcott, who is now, since the publication of "The Fiery Tree," generally recognised to be about the most promising novelist we have, is quite a friend of mine. I stood, in fact, for Upper Bohemia. There were, indeed, very few sides of London life that the one or other of us did not touch. Our circular letter had every chance of making a true sensation. This letter was our joint effort. To this very day I pride myself on its admirable strategy and aplomb.
It ran as follows:
   Private and Personal.
   Dear Sir (or Madam),
   We must apologise for disturbing you and for taking up your valuable time in this very unwarranted manner. You may be assured that we would not do so were it not for the fact that we believe that we have a suggestion of real interest to make to you. It is admittedly difficult, in these times of progress and over-sophistication, to discover some need of human beings hitherto unsatisfied. From cocoa-nuts to boot-trees everything can to-day, when transit is so rapid and trade so often dishonest, be supplied. We flatter ourselves, however, that we have discovered one almost universal need that has hitherto most curiously escaped the attention of the benefactors of the human race. Sir (or Madam), have you not in your immediate household or in your surrounding circle of friends and acquaintances a Bore? … We admit that the question is abrupt and startling, and that is why we have placed after it in the most modern and realistic manner those suspensive dots. It is, however, meant to startle; it is intended to shake you abruptly from the lethargy of habit and the indifference of custom. We will not define to you more nearly what precisely is intended by the term "bore." We do not do so because in the first place time is precious, and in these days paper expensive, and for the second more excellent reason that what is a Bore to One is not a Bore to Another. We are in this case addressing you personally and individually. We ask you to look round and, considering your household, decide whether there is not one person, man, woman, or child, whom you would like to see removed from your immediate vicinity. Perhaps there is no one; in which case we offer you our most hearty congratulations, and beg you to read no further in this letter, which is not for you. If, on the other hand, and human nature being what it is, in the more likely case there is such a one, we do beg you to apply to us and to see whether we cannot do something for you whether in improvement or modification or even in the total disappearance of your personal and individual Bore.
   We need not say that all transactions with our firm will be dealt with in the most private and confidential manner, that in our manner of procedure we work by tact, kindnesss, and diplomacy, and, of course, in no case whatever offer personal violence, and that we are in every instance on the side of the law of our country. Will you not give us a trial? All that is needed on your side is a visit to our office between the hours of ten and five. All consultations are free of charge. May not this suggestion be the very thing for which through many months you have wearily been searching? Why not give us a trial? At least pay us a visit and see whether you like us.
   We are, Yours obediently, Boniface and Co.
I need not say that we were none of us busy men, and that we had never before written a letter of this kind. That, I think, was all to the good; the letter had undoubtedly a freshness and originality that business letters for the most part lack.
There was much discussion amongst us before the documents were finally dispatched. For one thing, it needed much argument and some sharp raising of voices before we finally decided on the name of our firm. "Boniface" was my suggestion, and I flatter myself that it was a good one.
Borden, although a thoroughly fine fellow, was always a trouble in argument; he had all the Englishman's total lack of imagination, and was inclined to repeat any idea that he had over and over again, refusing obstinately to see any point of view but his own.
We had, too, a very warm time over the question of the "suspensive dots." Borden contended that that was a ridiculous sentence to insert in a business letter, that such a thing had never been in a business letter before, and that it would put any reasonable fellow "right off us." I on my side maintained that it was precisely because it had never been in a business letter before that I had inserted it, that what we wanted was to be unusual and original, and to make people realise that we were different.
"They'll realise that soon enough," said Borden, grinning.
Very painful are those first weeks after your business is started, when you sit in your office waiting, waiting, waiting, and nobody comes.
We had two rooms in Conduit Street for our offices, and very effective they were, with grey wallpapers and a dark red carpet, but a grey paper and a Japanese print are small consolations for an overdrawn banking account and two shabby suits of clothes.
It was, I think, on the fourth or fifth day, when Chippet and I were sitting opposite one another in a very gloomy state of mind indeed, that the bell rang and the diminutive boy by name Thomas, whom we had engaged at a high salary, introduced into our room a lady.
Trained as I was in human psychology, I saw at once that she was foolish, helpless, and pretty. Here she was well over thirty, and there she was considerably under it, but she was dressed charmingly, and had an appealing, nervous smile that went, as I could see, straight to Chippet's uncritical heart. We begged her to sit down, both smiled at her, and then asked her if we could do anything for her. She hesitated a little, and then said: "I received two days ago your letter, and I have come here to see whether you could possibly help me in my great trouble."
Chippet was so deeply excited at the actual occurrence of a real live client that I could see he was ready to promise anything, so I, being older and more experienced, looking at her gravely and before Chippet could speak, made her a little speech.
"Madam," I said, "if you will let us know the nature of your trouble, we will do our best to serve you. Experience has taught us that it is wiser to make no promises until we know exactly what we are asked to perform; you can be sure of two things—first, that we will do our best for you, and, secondly, that anything you say to us will be treated in the very strictest confidence."
I was myself considerably impressed by this speech. I was disappointed to observe that she looked, nevertheless, at Chippet, and it was to him that she made her appeal.
"I've never had," she said, "a letter like yours before. There were certain things in it I didn't quite understand. I am, perhaps, taking a very wrong step in coming to you without my husband's knowledge, but what am I to do? I am desperate—really desperate. Two whole years of torture have brought me to this, or, rather, I should say 'to you.'"
Chippet leant towards her, smiling. "Perhaps, madam," he said, "if you could explain to us a little …"
"I will explain," she said, nervously rubbing her hands together. "What I am going to tell you I have never uttered to any human being before, and I do hope, gentlemen, that you will understand that I love my husband, and am only acting for his benefit, and am, indeed, thinking only of him."
I could see, of course, that this was untrue, but it apparently impressed Chippet very deeply. The lady had the face of a pretty little pig, a very tiny nose, plump cheeks, large blue eyes, and an indeterminate chin. "My name," she said, "is Mrs. Fleming—Mrs. Lestock Fleming. Perhaps you have heard of my husband?"
I saw that Chippet was about to say that he had, but, as our policy was to be from the first an honest and open one, I interrupted him again and said: "I'm afraid we haven't heard of your husband. Would you kindly tell us anything you can that will help us to understand your position?"
She opened her large blue eyes with an air of pretty surprise, and said: "Why, I thought everybody had heard of my husband. He is one of the greatest living authorities on pond life, and has written several books which have been very much praised. He gives lectures on pond life up and down the country, and it is really because of the lectures that my troubles began."
"Because you mean," said Chippet, "that you were not always able to accompany him on his lecture tours?"
"Why, no," said Mrs. Fleming. "We have two children, and my place, of course, is in my home. Devoted though we are, we have spent a considerable amount of time away from one another, and that I am sorry to say has afforded an opportunity for someone else to gain a control over my husband that he deplores just as deeply as I do myself."
"Please explain," said Chippet. "If he deplores it, I should have thought it the easiest thing in the world——"
"Oh, you don't know my husband!" Mrs. Fleming broke in. "He is one of the kindest men in the whole world, as she very well knows." She uttered the pronoun "she" with such vehemence that I jumped in my chair; her eyes flashed, her little hands were clenched together, and I could not help wondering how it was that, with such an energy of detestation ruling her breast, she had needed to come to us for any assistance.
"Tell us," said Chippet gently, "who 'she' is."
"Oh, how kind you are!" said Mrs. Fleming, tears filling her eyes. "I feel better already—I feel that I can say anything to you."
"You can," said Chippet, "you can indeed,"
"About two years ago," continued Mrs. Fleming, "in Newcastle, after a lecture that my husband had given on 'Newts and their Home Life,' a lady came up and spoke to him and showed such evident interest in all that he had said that he could not but be pleased and flattered. He wrote to me about her, and I, too, was delighted that he should have found some real appreciation. I assure you, gentlemen, that I have not a spark of jealousy in my nature, and when he returned home, and showed me her photograph, I saw indeed that I had no reason for jealousy. At first I was immensely pleased at this new friendship. My husband showed me all the letters from this lady—whose name was Mrs. Farbman—and they were letters entirely concerned with natural history and kindred subjects. The trouble really began just a year and a half ago, when Mrs. Farbman came to live in London. We were living then at Golders Green, and very soon she also came to live there. I won't disguise from you that the first time I met her I disliked her intensely, and I could not help feeling that even at that time my husband was beginning to find her rather tiresome; but he is so gentle a man, so kindly and considerate, that she soon exercised over him a most terrible control. To cut a long story short, for the last year it was almost literally true that, except for the night time, she has not been out of our house. He has been engaged during the last eight months on a very important work on tadpoles and their development, and unfortunately my occupation in my household affairs and the children, and Mrs. Farbman's knowledge of shorthand, have given her an opportunity for being continually in his company."
"Is she in love with him?" Chippet interrupted. "Would you mind describing her to us? "
"She is a tall woman," said Mrs. Fleming, "rather like a man in woman's clothes. She must be well over forty, although she told us the other day that she had just celebrated her thirty-first birthday, and looked as though she expected us to give her a present, which I believe my husband would have done if I had not been there to stop it. She is a very dominating person, and, to speak quite frankly, our whole house is in terror of her. She comes to almost all our meals, and, of course, we are not very wealthy, and she eats with a very good appetite. She has driven many of our best friends out of the house because she talks a great deal, and generally on subjects that are not interesting to our friends. She professes to adore my husband, and thinks him the most marvellous of human beings, but she never allows him to have an opinion of his own, and he is now so terrified of her that last week he took to his bed for three days in order to escape her; but that was of no use, because she sat in the little dressing-room adjoining with the door open, and shouted to him the whole of the morning."
Tears filled Mrs. Fleming's eyes as she got deeper into her story; one tear even rolled down her cheek, and I could see Chippet was very deeply touched.
"Well, Mrs. Fleming," I said, "you surely don't mean to tell us that you and your husband together are unable to get rid of this woman?"
"I do indeed," she answered, "and not only I, but my sister, who lives with us, a cousin of my husband's who lives close to us, and two or three of our best friends have done all that we can, and have had no effect at all. The trouble is, you see, that my husband has not himself courage to get rid of her. She has a temper, and at the same time has made him feel as though he hadn't now an opinion of his own. He thinks that if she left him, all his work would stop, and that he gets a great deal of his inspiration from her. That is, of course, quite untrue. He wrote and worked much better before he knew her. He is simply hypnotised, gentlemen, and it is this hypnotism which I have come to you to beg you to remove."
"Hypnotism!" said Chippet. "Do you mean literally? Does she really hypnotise him?"
"No, of course I don't mean," she said, "literally that she hypnotises him, although I am sure that she does a lot of queer things that I don't understand, but he is a man very easily impressed. He is so modest, and he always believes that everybody knows better than himself, and Mrs. Farbman is clever. However much one detests her, one can't deny that."
"In short," said Chippet, wearing a look of grave importance, "what you want us to do is to remove Mrs. Farbman with the greatest kindness, but in such a way that she will never return again."
"I don't mind about the kindness," said Mrs. Fleming, looking at us very innocently, "I won't hide from you that a little suffering, physical or otherwise, would do her no sort of harm, but of course," she hurriedly added, "there must be no question of our involving ourselves with the law in any way."
I saw very clearly that now that Mrs. Fleming had surmounted the initial difficulty of speaking to complete strangers on this rather piratical subject, she was enjoying herself immensely, and was looking forward to seeing Mrs. Farbman tortured with red pincers by several long-tailed devils in a miniature Hades. Of such are even the mildest and most gentle women when another woman has interfered with their personal liberty.
"Of course," she went on, "I would hate to be cruel to anyone—I even step over a beetle if I see one on the floor—but I have suffered from Mrs. Farbman for a very long time now, and if you gentlemen can really succeed in helping her to new interests in life, I shall be grateful to you all my days."
Inexperienced though we were in business, we were both of us already aware that when a client begins to talk fluently of gratitude, it means that there will be less fluency when the hour for the commercial side of the bargain arrives, so I said very gravely: "We will do our very best for you, Mrs. Fleming, but you must understand that we cannot absolutely pledge ourselves to success. Our terms are that you pay us one hundred pounds if our endeavours succeed, and fifty pounds in any case, succeed or fail. We cannot, of course, pledge our word that Mrs. Farbman will never return to you again. We can only promise you that we will not claim success until she has been removed from you for three months. An occasional visit during those three months does not count against us. The way we would put it would be that, after watching the case for three months, we are all definitely of the opinion that Mrs. Farbman's attentions have been removed elsewhere, and we shall settle this question by asking Mrs. Farbman herself as to whether this is so. Are these terms satisfactory to you?"
"One hundred pounds is a great deal of money," said Mrs. Fleming, her beautiful eyes filling with tears.
I saw that Chippet would probably be touched if I left them alone. It is both fortunate and unfortunate to have in such a firm as ours a prominent official dangerously susceptible to feminine charm, so I said very sternly indeed: "Those are our terms, Mrs. Fleming. Take them or leave them, as you please." But, as I had foreseen, once the picture of Mrs. Farbman, unhappy and isolated, had penetrated Mrs. Fleming's imagination, she was caught and held.
"I agree," she said. "But please, gentlemen, be as quick as you can in helping us. I feel that if I have to suffer as I have done during these last months, I shall poison Mrs. Farbman with powdered glass or hyoscin or strangle her in her sleep."
"What!" interrupted Chippet, greatly interested, "Does she actually sleep in your house?"
"On several occasions," said Mrs. Fleming, her little cheeks flushed with anger, "she has insisted on sleeping in our spare room, in case she should have some ideas for my husband's book in the middle of the night."
"I don't see," said Chippet, "why she shouldn't have those ideas in her own house as well as yours."
"She says," said Mrs. Fleming, "that it's all a matter of atmosphere. Everything is atmosphere, according to her. There is, for instance, all the difference in the world between the thoughts that you have in a hot bath and in a cold one, and what you feel like after breakfast and what you feel like before tea."
"There's nothing very original about that," said Chippet.
"In my opinion," said Mrs. Fleming, "there's nothing very original about Mrs. Farbman anywhere, but you shall see for yourself."
II.
On the very next evening Chippet and I had our first meal in the house of the Flemings. Because I am a realistic novelist, there is nothing, I suppose, in this modern world of ours that can possibly surprise me. The Flemings' house, Mr. Fleming, the numerous little Flemings, and the great Mrs. Farbman herself, were all exactly as I had expected them. There is something to me strangely depressing about Golders Green, and the Flemings' house would have been depressing anywhere. It was one of those houses in which the kitchen is in the middle of the drawing-room, and dusty palms in large glazed pots stand cheek by jowl with onions frying in the pan and water sizzling in the copper for the children's weekly bath. It was one of those houses in which every sound made by anybody within a five-mile radius is heard ten times intensified wherever you may happen to be. It is also one of those houses in which the boards creak, the windows rattle, soot falls down the chimney, the cat fights the dog, the babies fight one another, and the cook gives notice, all in your immediate proximity. I was very sorry indeed for Mr. Fleming, who was a very, very long, thin man with a forehead so high and a chin so receding that you felt that the only way to give his face any real help was to push it all down a little and then to hold it in position with iron bands for a year or two; but he had nice, mild eyes, a straggling and desolate moustache, and an anxious, deprecating air that so often goes with clever, absent-minded genius.
Mrs. Farbman, of course, was exactly what I expected her to be—one of those men in women's clothing, as flat as a board, with that contemptuous curl of the lip that belongs almost invariably to masculine women when they are in the presence of the inferior sex.
She took up a great deal of room in that small house. The masculine jacket that she wore had its pockets full of papers. She was always producing a fountain-pen from the centre of her masculine bosom and taking innumerable little notes in little pocket-books, writing them down with an air of finality as though it were the day of the last judgment and she was settling the destinies of all the poor human beings who were waiting in frightened, huddled masses at her large, uncomely feet. It was quite natural that Chippet and I disliked her at sight. It was equally natural that she disliked and despised us. Mrs. Fleming introduced us as two young men who had been immensely attracted by what they knew of her husband's genius and had come thirsting for more information. Mr. Fleming was as touched as a child by my eager inquiries about newts and their habits, and one or two remarks that Chippet made about snails and their different geographical varieties brought tears of pleasure into his eyes; but I realised that Mrs. Farbman detected us at once for the humbugs that we were. I realised also, during that first meal, which consisted very strangely of scrambled eggs, cheese cakes and meringues, both that Mrs. Fleming was not a good housekeeper, and that this business of ours, into which we had entered with so light a hearty was going to be no easy one. Half-way through dinner, supper, or breakfast, whichever you like to call it, there was a sharp little contest between Chippet and Mrs. Farbman. Mrs. Farbman had a terrible habit of leaning her bare and bony elbows on the table, supporting a face which exactly resembled that of an intelligent and over-educated horse upon them, and staring at the speaker of the moment with a penetrating glance of contemptuous scorn. She was so staring at Chippet, who was trying to explain to Mr. Fleming that when he was a small boy he had kept snails in a cigar-box and harnessed them to match-boxes, and made them run races with one another, which, he went on, he would never have done had he only known, as he knew now, what interesting creatures they were and how sensitive in their feelings.
"Humbug!" said Mrs. Farbman suddenly.
"I beg your pardon?" said Chippet nervously.
"What you're saying about snails," said Mrs. Farbman, "is humbug. You never cared in the least about snails, and you don't care about them now."
"Excuse me," said Chippet, flushing angrily, "allow me to have my own opinion about the things I care for and the things I don't."
"Oh, you can have your own opinion," said Mrs. Farbman, "but I wasn't born yesterday, you know," which, indeed, was the truest thing she ever said.
I saw at once that these were the worst possible tactics for us to adopt. I tried to kick Chippet under the table, but most unfortunately kicked Mrs. Farbman instead. She turned her attention to me, and I did my best to be as charming as I knew how, but really the woman was intolerable. She assumed complete command of the house, and when one of the children was heard crying in the next room, and Mrs. Fleming rose to go to her, Mrs. Farbman said: "Sit down, Flora, sit down; don't make a fool of yourself." When a very untidy maid-servant brought in the meringues, Mrs. Farbman, glaring at her, said: "What was that noise that I heard in the kitchen just now?"
"Nothing," said the maid, tossing her head.
"It was the loudest nothing I've ever heard," said Mrs. Farbman. "That china shall be deducted from your wages."
She ruled, in fact, the house with a rod of iron.
Now, this is the really interesting feature of this our first adventure. You will certainly say that Mrs. Farbman, as I have described her to you, is a good deal of a caricature, and to that I would reply that more people are caricatures than you probably know, and that many people are caricatures at first sight and cease to be so when we know them a little better. Now, this, I repeat, is the curious and interesting thing—that before the end of our meal I was beginning to be quite fond of Mrs. Farbman. I cannot explain this except by saying that, as I am a modern novelist, the most extravagant types have an interest for me, but, apart from this professional tenderness, there was something about Mrs. Farbman that was lonely, touching, and pathetic. With that swift perception of human nature that is one of the finest gifts I possess, I saw that she was a lonely, unloved woman, whose rudeness and masculinity were largely a covering for a longing for affection and some sort of commendation of her talents and erudition.
Mr. Fleming was, in all probability, the only human being in all her life who had appreciated her brain and industry, and it it was for that appreciation that she clung to him more than for anything else.
After dinner we sat in the small, stuffy sitting-room that smelt of mixed biscuits and stale eau-de-Cologne, and Mrs. Farbman held forth at interminable length on the connection between the psycho-analysis and the suffragette movement. She had a great deal to say, and she said it vigorously, and I saw at once that she was longing for our appreciation, as eager for it, indeed, as a small girl who is reciting for the first time her school piece before a crowd of indifferent relations. That was a picture that I shall never forget—the close, ill-smelling room, overcrowded with marine pictures, china ornaments, bamboo book-cases, albums of family photographs, ferns, and human beings, with Mr. Fleming's long body stretching right across the floor, his eyes closed and sunk deep into his forehead, his bony hands clasped together on his lap, Mrs. Fleming angry, watching Mrs. Farbman with indignant eyes, Chippet, distressed already by the certainty that we were going to fail in this our very first case, and Mrs. Farbman, seated like a man, leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, staring into space, her voice rolling on and on, and words like "Freud" "Jung," "inhibition," "Mrs. Pankhurst," and "Bolshevism" spattering the floor with such vigour and energy that it seemed as though they must leave permanent marks on the faded carpet.
Yes, I liked her better and better as the evening proceeded. I remember once, at the Zoo, seeing a large monkey in the corner of its cage, chattering, making fantastic gestures, scratching itself in impossible places, doing everything it could to attract the attention of a group of bored and superior monkeys who. were half asleep in another corner, and in the eyes of that large monkey there was a look of the most desperate loneliness I have ever witnessed in animal or man. Such loneliness was there in the eyes of Mrs. Farbman. More touching still was it that she herself was unaware of this, and would have been certainly most indignant had you told her of it. As she talked I saw in her all those long desolate years, that eagerness for wisdom, and longing for the possession of some human being who would care for her and her alone, that consciousness that must have come to her in spite of herself of her ugliness and oddness, that desperate sense that even this man Fleming, whom she had succeeded in attaching for a brief period, might at any moment slip from her. All these things I saw, and you may believe me or no, as you please, but before that first evening was over I felt, as I considered the project that had brought Chippet and myself to that house, something very little short of a murderer.
III.
A murderer! Yes, that's all very well, but we had our business to consider, and at the end of the first fortnight we were bound to confess that we were dangerously near to defeat. Other things were happening at this time, other clients were coming to us—of whom I may speak on another occasion—and Borden was conducting one of these with every prospect of success, but this affair of the Flemings was for Chippet and me, our ewe lamb, our first-born, our precious pet. Chippet was nearly in tears whenever he thought of it. Mrs. Fleming was becoming frankly impatient, and I could see that if we failed there would be great trouble in extracting from her the promised fifty pounds. She had begun by thinking us perfectly delightful; there was every prospect of her ending by thinking us contemptible fools. We spent a great deal of our time under the Fleming roof. Those rooms had already overflowed before our arrival, and it was not, in very truth, vastly diverting to spend hours of the day and the best part of many an evening in a small, stuffy villa in Golders Green, stepping, so to speak, from infant to infant, and eating meals of so horrible and unnatural a kind that Chippet's hitherto admirable digestion was in danger of being permanently ruined, and I myself turned quite green at the thought of scrambled eggs, a dish in which I had hitherto delighted. But the main trouble was this increasing affection of mine for Mrs. Farbman. It baffled Chippet completely. At first he supposed that I was being diplomatic and seeking to gain an influence over her. Then when he discovered that I was winning no influence at all, and that I really seemed to like to be in her society, and when he caught me on one occasion looking into her dim and grey-green eyes as I might have looked at the face of my favourite dog, he was puzzled and finally indignant.
"Good Heavens, Seymour," he said, "you don't mean to tell me that you like the woman!"
"I do like her."
"But she hates you. She hates you even worse than she hates me. She's a terrible woman!" And his voice rose into a shrill scream, as it often did when he was excited.
"I don't know that she hates me," I answered, curiously hurt at his accusation. "I think she's rather beginning to like me."
"Oh, no, she isn't," said Chippet. "I overheard her saying last night to Mrs. Fleming that she would be very glad to know how much longer those two imbecile friends of hers were coming to the house; and Mrs. Fleming said that she thought that she would like to have a clever novelist to talk to, and I won't tell you," continued Chippet, smiling maliciously, "what exactly it was that Mrs. Farbman then said about you as a novelist."
"Oh, don't mind me!" I said hurriedly, pretending not to care.
"Oh, no, I don't," said Chippet, "only I will tell you this—that time's passing, and if you're going to waste these precious hours by attempting to win Mrs. Farbman's bony heart, you are not playing the game, and we may as well dissolve partnership."
I could not deny that Chippet was right. Business was business, and however attractive I found Mrs. Farbman, something must be done to further our plans. And yet how strange and even, in an obscure way, romantic those hours in her company were! I have never known so truly stupid a woman as Mrs. Farbman was, nor have I ever known any woman capable of such a flood of apparently clever conversation that was finally quite meaningless. It was with this meaningless flood that she surrounded and overwhelmed poor Mr. Fleming. He may have been once, in the days before the arrival of Mrs. Farbman, aware of the ultimate purpose and purport of his book, but she had by now so fluently confused him, she so persistently led him off the straight track the moment that she perceived him to be upon it, she flung at his enormous but, I cannot help thinking, rather empty forehead such incessant little pellets of disconnected information, that the poor man just crumpled up and moved in a kind of stupor from phrase to phrase, seeing his newts, his tadpoles, his snails, and whatever, all scuttling away from him—I am quite aware that newts and tadpoles cannot scuttle—into a vast misty distance whence he desperately began to be aware he would never recover them.
It was for this reason, I think, more than any other, that he would really have given his immortal soul to be rid of Mrs. Farbman; but you had only to look at him, to listen to his mild, amiable voice, to watch the timid way in which he scratched his fast thinning hair, to be aware that he would never of himself be able to escape this bondage.
At the end of the third week the crisis arrived. We came, Chippet and I, one day to tea and found Mrs. Fleming alone. We could see plainly enough that she was in the very worst of tempers. "Well," she asked us, her blue eyes flashing, her little snub nose trembling with indignation, "do you mind telling me how long this farce is to continue? I hope you will forgive me if I say exactly what I think."
"That," interrupted Chippet, smiling nervously, "is what we want to hear. I know that so far we have not been a great success, but——"
"Thank you," broke in Mrs. Fleming, "I am grateful to you for admitting that much. No, you have not been a great success, and I hope your feelings won't be hurt if I tell you that I am not at all sure that you are not a pair of humbugs against whom one might very reasonably bring an action. Here have we been three weeks, and Mrs. Farbman is more securely in the house than ever before. You have done nothing," she cried, "to persuade her to leave us! You have had innumerable meals in my house, and although I am not one to grudge my friends any hospitality we can afford, yet my husband and I are not wealthy or we would not be living in Golders Green. You have done nothing, nothing, nothing!" She then burst into tears.
"Give us another week, Mrs. Fleming," said I, "and if at the end of that time we are still unsuccessful, we will call the case off, and we will not ask you to pay us a penny."
This mollified her somewhat.
"You must consider, Mrs. Fleming," continued Chippet eagerly, "that we have suggested a number of plans that you have refused to consider, such as Seymour here travelling with Mrs. Farbman in an aeroplane to Paris and leaving her there, or hiring a motor-car and going with Mrs. Farbman to the Lake District and losing her on one of the mountains, and there have been many other schemes of that kind which you have absolutely forbidden us to consider."
"There," she cried, in the middle of her tears, "doesn't that show how incompetent you are? Haven't you seen already enough of Mrs. Farbman to know that no mountains and no Paris nor anywhere else would prevent her from returning? She will follow us wherever we go. I see myself within another six months a murderess in the dock at the Old Bailey, my husband dying of a broken heart, my children thrown upon the streets!"
A very trying scene, in sooth. Mrs. Fleming's tears were as bad as Mrs. Farbman's psycho-analysis, and, quite frankly, of the two women I infinitely preferred Mrs. Farbman.
That night Chippet and I were in despair. We suspected that we had, after all, no real talent for this particular business, and it intensely chagrined us both that our partner Borden—whom we had always rather despised as an over-muscled and brainless sportsman—should be bringing his first case, that remarkable one of the Twickenham footballer, to a really successful issue while we were failing.
Upon what little chances do the wheels of life turn! Had it not been for a curried egg I might at this moment be begging my bread in the streets of London, Chippet might never have become Sir Gordon Chippet, K.B.E.—our lives, in fact, might have ended in dismal and untimely failure.
On the following evening we were once more dining at the Flemings'. It was a melancholy meal; even Mrs. Farbman was rather silent, my heart was like lead. Sardines had been our first course—those especially greasy and enormous sardines that are like miniature whales, with huge spine-bones warranted to defeat the strongest teeth. Our second course was a dish of curried eggs, better cooked, I must honestly confess, than anything that we had yet eaten under the Fleming roof. I was sitting opposite Mrs. Farbman. The dish went its round, went round a second time. It was enough for me to have caught one glance, one gesture, one spark of a grey-green eye. That night, as we found our places in the Hampstead Tube, I clutched Chippet by the arm and murmured excitedly in his ear: "I believe we are saved; I believe I have found a way out at last."
"What do you mean?" he replied so loudly that a row of Evening Standards descended and a succession of astonished faces stared in our direction.
"Wait," I answered. "I must think this out to-night, but I believe the key is discovered."
IV.
The following afternoon I went to the Flemings' house and found Mrs. Farbman there alone. I came in without her hearing me, and caught her seated low down in a crazy rocking-chair, staring in front of her, the inevitable note-book on her lap, and in her eyes that same monkey-like absorption of loneliness that I had noticed before. I stood there for a moment watching her. I knew so well what she wanted, and yet I was taking away from her the closest semblance to that need that she had ever found. In all this, as you will have by now perceived, the Flemings themselves were very shadowy creatures to me. I have a scorn of human beings who are unable themselves to remove burdens for which they themselves are responsible, and that scorn was going to make my work difficult for me in many ways. What would happen, I could not but ask myself, if it was in these cases to be always the bore who roused my sympathy instead of the sufferers from the bore? Well, if that were so, I should learn something more about my fellow-beings than I had known before, and that same learning is, I imagine, the chief aid to knowing something more about oneself, which, in its own turn, is the first purpose of life.
Well, to get on with my story. The first words that sprang from my lips—and they literally did spring, to my own intense surprise—were: "Oh, Mrs. Farbman, I wish you liked me better—I do like you so much!"
This remark, when she had supposed that there was no one in the room beside herself, naturally made her jump. She turned round to me, note-book slipping on to the floor; then, when she saw who it was, she gave a kind of grunt of dissatisfaction and turned her back on me again. Then she said, speaking as it were to no one in particular: "I don't like many people in this world, and young men like yourself and your friend are abhorrent to me."
"Why?" I asked, coming forward.
"You are useless, conceited, and ignorant!"—finishing her words with a snap, as though they were final.
"You can't expect me to agree with that," I answered. "Chippet and I have a very decent opinion of ourselves."
"What are you doing here," she asked, suddenly turning round and looking at me. "What are you here for at all? You don't like Mrs. Fleming, you laugh at her husband, and yet you come here every day. Why?"
"Maybe to see you, Mrs. Farbman."
"Stuff!" she replied. "You are neither of you intelligent enough to interest me, and unless I am interested I am not attractive. I am quite aware of that. Besides, it's been perfectly obvious that you have both disliked me intensely from the very beginning. Are you trying, for some purpose of your own, to get me out of this house?"
"Suppose I am," I answered, "is there any chance of my succeeding?"
"Yes," she replied quickly, "if you can offer me anything better. If you want to know the truth, I have been for many months now so bored here that I could scream. I'd leave Mr. Fleming to-morrow if I could fill my life some other way; but I simply can't face the loneliness and emptiness that would come after all my occupation here. Of course I've been cheating myself. I've been pretending to myself that Mr. Fleming's work is important—which it isn't in the least—and I've liked the sense of authority that I've found here. I like ordering about, but I know quite well that even Mr. Fleming will be delighted to see the last of me, and Mrs. Fleming, of course, will light such a bonfire of ecstasy when I'm gone that it will illumine the whole of Golders Green for miles around. But where am I to go? What am I to do? I've been calling myself for years a modern woman, and there's another side, you know, to the modern woman question that many people don't consider. We go in for men's work, men's lives, men's ways of thought, and then we have to cling on like drowning men to a raft, cling on to a boat that's overcrowded already, the occupants of which are always digging at us with boat-hooks to push us back into the sea again, and shouting with joy when we drop off and drown. There's room for a few of us, but not for many. Besides, as you have probably already observed, I am not really clever enough. I have got a muddled, feminine brain. I cover my ignorance of facts with lots of talk, and hope the people will be taken in. I can't expect at my time of life, and with my appearance, to take anyone in as thoroughly as I've taken Mr. Fleming, and even he isn't taken in any longer, as you see. If I lose my hold on this little boat, I drown altogether. At my time of life I must think no longer of love and marriage. Well, then, where am I?"
"I'll tell you where you are," I answered. "You're going to dine with me to-night at the Vin Blanc in Soho."
At the word "dine" she sat up and looked at me eagerly. "The food here is awful, isn't it?"
"Yes," I answered slowly, "except for the curried eggs last night. But there are better things than curried eggs at the Vin Blanc. There is, for instance, sole meunière that is quite excellent, and they are better at whitebait than anyone in London."
"Do they have nothing but fish?" she asked.
"Oh, yes," I replied. "Come and see!"
We looked at one another steadily for quite a long time.
"You're a clever young man," she said. "You're observant. You will get on. I will dine with you to-night."
The next scene of this voracious history was played out in the little, white, low-ceilinged upstairs room of the Vin Blanc. A new actor was added to an already competent company. This was little Monsieur Pierre Duhamel (no relation, by the way, to the author of "Vie des Martyrs"), the proprietor of the Vin Blanc. I have known Monsieur Duhamel through a considerable number of years. He was a cheery little soul, round and chubby, wearing always an immaculate white apron, a little black tufted beard on his chin. He had come from Paris ten years ago, had made his little Soho restaurant pay, but had never extended it, as he might have done, to something of a large and extravagant order that would have given him very quickly enough money on which to retire for the remainder of his days. He did not wish to retire. He made enough for his living; he was unmarried and preferred, as he explained to me, "to enjoy his leisure hours."
Now, he had always burning in his soul a curious passion, and that was to marry a truly intellectual woman. He was an immense admirer of the other sex, but always from the standpoint of brain rather than of body. Physical beauty meant nothing to him, or so little as not to matter, but a clever woman, or even a stupid woman who seemed to him clever, excited him to a frenzy of admiration and desire. What he liked best was to have as a habitual customer some member of the opposite sex who, while she discussed his sole meunière and his Chateaubriand steak with real human appreciation, was also able to give him a little philosophy, a few words about the advancement of women, and a hint or two as to Bergson. The unfortunate thing was, as he had so often confided to me, that intellectual women were so seldom interested in cooking, "and, after all," he explained to me, "I have nothing to offer such a woman except a good meal, a kind heart, and an attentive manner." On one occasion, I remember, I had brought into his restaurant the lady principal of a famous women's college. He had given her such a meal as I have seldom enjoyed anywhere. It was pathetic to see the way in which he hovered round her table, hoping that everything was perfectly delightful, and then venturing a word on Bergson's book on laughter, being crushed by her quite natural gasp of astonishment and air of nervousness and look at me for reassurance. "What a droll little man!" she whispered to me. That was the fashion, alas, in which all learned women considered Monsieur Duhamel.
I will confess to you that on this evening I was immensely excited. What would come of my plan? It might so easily fail. If it failed, my last card was played. It did not fail. Monsieur Duhamel's first glance at Mrs. Farbman told him that here was an intellectual woman indeed. Mrs. Farbman's first glance at the sole meunière told her that this was a restaurant sans peur et sans reproche. I would not like to say that she was a greedy woman. I have never been able to understand why a really æsthetic appreciation of food should be held to count against a man. I fancy that good food beautifully cooked was Mrs. Farbman's approach to the spirit of beauty, and it was an approach that had been throughout her hard and rather dreary life consistently denied to her. You could see from the way in which she ate her sole that she was not considering so much the perfection of the sole itself, but that it placed her in relation to all the beautiful things in life from which Mrs. Fleming's scrambled eggs had so long isolated her. As for Monsieur Duhamel, before the sole was finished, his face beaming with smiles, he had inquired as to whether Mrs. Farbman had yet mastered Einstein's "Relativity."
Of course Mrs. Farbman had not mastered it, being in that at least entirely at one with all her fellow human beings, but she had a great deal to say about it. A flood of words poured from her, words to myself quite meaningless and to herself nearly so, but sentences long and involved, containing capital letters and quite a number of proper names. Monsieur Duhamel's ecstasy was a thing to envy. "But I see, madam," he cried, "that what you say is a profound truth. You have enlightened my mind. I cannot thank you sufficiently. If you knew what it was for one who is so persistently denied food for his mind by his inevitable pursuit of food for the body to meet someone as wise and brilliant as yourself. …"
I was soon forgotten by both of them, and when at last I pleaded an engagement, Monsieur Duhamel suggested to Mrs. Farbman that she should drink a cup of coffee in his own little room just above the room where we were sitting, I left them together.
What more need I say? Simply this, that long before the three months were out Mrs. Fleming had delivered to us the cheque for one hundred pounds; that the Fleming household was a paradise such as I never could have imagined; and Mr. Fleming, in spite of—or shall I say because of?—the departure of Mrs. Farbman, progressed with his book at double the speed of the earlier days; and that, finally, I was asked, on one beautiful summer day, to a wedding breakfast in the private room of the Vin Blanc, a breakfast that excelled both in the superb excellence of its cooking and in the vigour of intellectual conversation any meal that I had ever attended.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1941, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 82 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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