The Essential G. B. Shaw: Celebrated Plays, Novels, Personal Letters, Essays & Articles. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

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      CHAPTER V

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      A fortnight later the Sutherlands, accompanied by Mrs Beatty, were again in London, on their way to the Isle of Wight. It had been settled that Herbert should go to Ventnor for a month with his mother, so that Mary and he might sketch the scenery of the island together. He had resisted this arrangement at first on the ground that Mrs Herbert’s presence would interfere with his enjoyment; but Mary, who had lost her own mother when an infant, had ideas of maternal affection which made Adrian’s unfilial feeling shocking to her. She entreated him to come to Ventnor; and he yielded, tempted by the prospect of working beside her, and foreseeing that he could easily avoid his mother’s company whenever it became irksome to him.

      One day, whilst they were still in London at the hotel in Onslow Gardens, Mr Sutherland, seeing his daughter with her hat and cloak on, asked whither she was going.

      “I am going to the Brailsfords’, to see Madge,” she replied.

      “Now what do you want to go there for?” grumbled Mr. Sutherland. “I do not like your associating with that girl.”

      “Why, papa? Are you afraid that she will make me run away and go on the stage?”

      “I didn’t say anything of the kind. But she can’t be a very rightminded young woman, or she wouldn’t have done so herself. However, I have no objection to your calling on the family. They are very nice people — well connected; and Mr. Brailsford is a clever man. But don’t go making a companion of Madge.”

      “I shall not have the opportunity, I am sorry to say. Poor Madge! Nobody has a good word for her.”

      Mr. Sutherland muttered a string t>f uncomplimentary epithets; but Mary went out without heeding him. At Kensington Palace Gardens she found Magdalen Brailsford alone.

      “They are all out,” said Magdalen when Mary had done kissing her. “They are visiting, or shopping, or doing something else equally intellectual.I am supposed to be in disgrace; so I am never asked to go with them. As I would not go if they begged me on their knees, I bear the punishment with fortitude.”

      “But what have you done, Madge? Won’t you tell me? Aunt Jane said that her conscience would not permit her to pour such a story into my young ears; and then, of course, I refused to hear it from anybody but yourself, much to Aunt Jane’s disgust; for she was burning to tell me. Except that you ran away and went on the stage, I know nothing.

      “There is nothing else to know; for that is all that happened.”

      “But how did it come about?”

      “Will you promise not to tell?”

      “I promise faithfully.”

      “You must keep your promise; for I have accomplices who are not suspected, and who will help me when I repeat the exploit, as I fully intend to do the very instant I see my way to success. Do you know where we lived before we came to this house?”

      “No. You have lived here ever since I knew you.”

      “We had lodgings in Gower Street. Mary, did you ever ride in an omnibus?”

      “No. But I should not be in the least ashamed to do so if I had occasion.”

      “How would you like to have to make five pounds worth of clothes last you for two years?”

      “I should not like that.”

      “Lots of people have to do it. We had, when we lived in Gower Street. Father wrote for the papers; and we never had any money, and were always in debt. But we went to the theatres — with orders, of course — much oftener than we do now; and we either walked home or took our carriage, the omnibus. We were recklessly extravagant, and thought nothing of throwing away a shilling on flowers and paper fans to decorate the rooms. I am sure we spent a fortune on three-penny cretonne, to cover the furniture when its shabbiness became downright indecent. We were very fond of dwelling on the lavish way we would spend money if father ever came into the Brailsford property, which seemed the most unlikely thing in the world. But it happened, as unlikely things often do. All the rest of the family — I mean all of it that concerned us — were drowned in the Solent in a yacht accident; and we found ourselves suddenly very rich, and, as I suppose you have remarked — especially in Myra — very stingy. Poor father, whom we used to revile as a miser in Gower Street, is the only one of us who spends money as if he was above caring about it. But the worst of it is that we have got respectable, and taken to society — at least, society has taken to us; — and we have returned the compliment. I haven’t, though. I can’t stand these Kensington people with their dances and athomes. It’s not what I call living really. In Grower Street we used to know a set that had some brains. We gave ourselves airs even then; hut still on Sunday evenings we used to have plenty of people with us to supper whom you are not likely to meet here. One of them was a man named Tarleton, who made money as a theatrical agent and lost it as a manager alternately.”

      “And you fell in love with him, of course,” said Mary.

      “Bosh! Fell in love with old Tommy Tarleton! This is not a romance, but a prosaic Gower Street narrative. I never thought about him after we came here until a month ago, when I saw that he was taking a company to Windsor. I always wanted to go on the stage, because nowadays СКАЧАТЬ