Latter Day Helens

The Eleventh of a Series of Impressions of Modem Feminine Types: Thalia—the Huntress

W. L. GEORGE

IT is morning—early morning, for the day is long and so must be made longer. Thalia sits at her desk—not a desk of painted wood and gold, nor of Queen Anne afflicted with curvature—a desk of business and work, loaded with an address-book as big as a bible (Thalia's bible), with city directories, and Who's Who, telephone directories, and many copies of The Worst Facts About the Best People. There is just room to write upon her impressive note-paper, headed with an address fit to impress still more—to create the desire to know Thalia, to obtain her acquaintance as a decoration for virtue, perhaps for valour. And she writes:

DEAR TELAMON,

I wish you would take tea with me on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or, if that is impossible, the week holds yet four more days. I desire your presence. I crave for it. I hang upon every word that falls from your silent lips. But do not believe that if you come your trouble will stay unrewarded. For I promise you that you shall meet Athos, the well-known author of the Pom Pantomime (with real dogs). Also I have Lady Cloris, who has promised to bring her eleventh husband. You know, of course, that Lady Cloris, so beautiful, and made more beautiful by frequent photographs in the papers, has broken the divorce record in the State of Indiafornia. Please write to me, Telamon, wire me, cable me, telephone me. And come, Telamon: not merely I, but all the great await you.

Your devoted,

THALIA.

The Notoriety of Telamon

THALIA is devoted to Telamon. She became devoted to him on the day when he went along the street in an English pink hunting coat, plaid trousers, and an Irish black hat in which was stuck a clay pipe. Telamon attracted a great deal of notice, and soon attracted Thalia. He gave rise to a coat craze, and it was concluded that this pink came straight from Piccadilly. Telamon was interviewed, photographed, and became celebrated for the length of his fingernails. Thus he became celebrated with Thalia: toenails would have done just as well.

Indeed Thalia always likes that which is liked. She has a touching sense of the taste of the majority, redeemed occasionally by a dash into the taste of the minority, convertible she thinks into that of a greater number. It is easy to know Thalia, if you want to. If you do not want to, it also often happens. You need only to cause public opinion to pick you out from among your fellows by bravery, bigamy, or bounce. You need only to be somebody, and then you can be Thalia's. You will be fed by her, loved by her, introduced by her: can a woman do more?

The secret of her success is simple: she trades solely upon the fact that mankind is never quite sure that it exists, and that it gains this assurance exclusively from flattery. Thalia sees to that. Thanks to her, anyone for an hour may feel a great man. So much for the great, who come to her to drink the nectar of adulation and the benedictine of a prohibition state.

As for the not so great, who must be taken into account, for, after all, the great once were small, Thalia gives them the bubbling joy of contemplating those who have arrived at the place for which they have not yet started. She reveals to the bourgeoisie that the great have noses which they can blow; the newly rich may come to her to see English lecturers eating ham with a poetic air, and autographing with grace and speed anything except cheques.

He who goes to Thalia, hunted down and snared, or gently lured as a lark by a mirror, stays. If praise and delicate fare will not hold him, then must he be detained by suasion or artifice. If Thalia's quarry, having eaten enough and feeling the first pangs of surfeit of popularity, tries to escape, to leave behind the aching gap of his absence from the drawing room, then Thalia becomes active and feline. She winds about the escaping quarry with promises and threats: "Oh, you mustn't go. Do wait a minute, just one minute. Lord Theseus said he'd come. And I do so want you to meet Artemis, you know, the model. The famous model. Oh, you mustn't go. Why, Artemis was telling me only yesterday that she'd sat up all night reading your book Mudlarking as a Sport, by One of the Larks. You see," says Thalia, with a pleased air, "I've read it too. I know it well." So the lark stays . . . and sings.

Thus Thalia has her will. Thus does she add the Lark to her extraordinary menagerie of strange, famous persons, seen in freedom as in their native jungle. Their variety is great. The Lark finds himself confined (in spite of Shelley who promised more to the immortal bird) with a soul painter who finds souls easier to paint than faces, because they have more colour and less line. Or perhaps with him goes a reformed and manicured convict, prepared to demonstrate that sin is merely the natural foil provided for the enchancement of virtue. Thalia also knows the president of the Society for the Revival of Cherokee Dancing, several Bolshevik millionaires who hold on to their millions like double glue, and the first bishop of a New Liturgic Faith, who will collect disciples when he can find someone to put up the advertising money. She knows everybody who is in society, and every now and then, perhaps by mistake, there drifts in somebody who has done something that matters. This does not on the whole harm him.

The Omnivorous Thalia

ALL this is not achieved without effort or without pain, for all greatness knows the pangs of childbirth. Thalia, in the pursuit of the great, has to give much time and much money, much strength. That does not matter much: if she retained these energies she might not know what to do with them. She sees everything, reads everything, hears nearly everything. She has agents who adore her, and equally valuable ones who fear that she may leave them out. No man may paint a picture, write a novel, set up a consecutive fifth, without Thalia knowing it. Not even the hens are safe: Thalia ignores them in general, but if one of them were to lay an egg as large as that of an ostrich Thalia would provide her with a dust bath in the middle of her dinner table. She sees everything, reads everything, hears everything. If something escapes her she sends her secretary to see, read, or hear, and to abstract the result into a successfully deceptive form for the purpose of greeting.

One may ask oneself why Thalia does this sort of thing, why her aunts have come to bore her and her cousins never appear at meals. No doubt what Thalia wants is to be somebody. She finds it easiest to be somebody by knowing somebody. By knowing enough people and launching enough invitations, she becomes referred to, and to be referred to is to exist. Thalia likes to feel that at her tea parties the decisions of the State are moulded. She has her share in intrigue. To her, politicians say: "Well, well, we'll see." It's so comforting. She is giving a flick to the spinning world and making it spin faster. At least, it feels faster.

She is mastered by habit. As a dog barks without reason, when there is no moon to bay, so does Thalia. She bays in the belief that there is a moon, in the hope, in the often fulfilled hope that if you bay long enough the world will make a moon out of a lantern. She is a creator and a collector. One doesn't know where one starts. Because one is celebrated, one goes to Thalia's parties: if one goes to Thalia's parties, one becomes celebrated. For this is a mixed world, rather like a jumble sale; Thalia happily buries her arms in the jumbled goods and jumbles them some more, bringing to light treasure which she captures and holds for a little while. She is always hunting, like a dustman with his hook in a dustheap. She asks of the items she finds only one thing: that they should come to the top.

A Patroness and Publicity

BY these means Thalia has become the popular Mrs. Thalia, the well-known Mrs. Thalia, Mrs. Thalia and a friend ("seen at the Races"). Thus has she become the patroness of somewhat indiscriminate movements for the saving of orphans, the improvement of the profile, and the polyhedric conception of landscape. She realizes that it is better to have one's name printed on the Acropolis than in the list of cases for trial, but it must be printed somewhere; though Thalia has not yet been driven to the law courts by the need for publicity, there is no knowing what the passage of years may bring about.

Meanwhile Thalia continues to be somebody by the continual refreshment of her collection. A little of the refreshment is compulsory, for now and then members of the collection revolt and disappear. Like a pinned butterfly that flies away with its pin, they disappear, loaded with praise and attractive meals. Sometimes the motion for social divorce comes from Thalia: the great were not so great after all. Or they did not grow. Or her good heart led her astray, she finds. It is a hard thing to do but in such cases Thalia takes her visiting list, a blue pencil, and then discards. It is almost superfluous to add that she discards only from weakness. Is she happy? Yes. No. She would be inhuman if she were anything else than that. She has no time for rest, for the graces, for beauty of body. She is alone in the multitude. She has the intimacy of none and the surface of all. Still ... she is busy.