The Admirable Crichton | Page 4

There is a happy smile on his
pleasant, insignificant face, and this presumably means that he is
thinking of himself. He is too busy over nothing, this man about town,
to be always thinking of himself, but, on the other hand, he almost
never thinks of any other person. Probably Ernest's great moment is
when he wakes of a morning and realises that he really is Ernest, for we
must all wish to be that which is our ideal. We can conceive him
springing out of bed light-heartedly and waiting for his man to do the
rest. He is dressed in excellent taste, with just the little bit more which
shows that he is not without a sense of humour: the dandiacal are often
saved by carrying a smile at the whole thing in their spats, let us say.
Ernest left Cambridge the other day, a member of The Athenaeum
(which he would be sorry to have you confound with a club in London
of the same name). He is a bachelor, but not of arts, no mean
epigrammatist (as you shall see), and a favourite of the ladies. He is
almost a celebrity in restaurants, where he dines frequently, returning to
sup; and during this last year he has probably paid as much in them for
the privilege of handing his hat to an attendant as the rent of a
working-man's flat. He complains brightly that he is hard up, and that if
somebody or other at Westminster does not look out the country will go
to the dogs. He is no fool. He has the shrewdness to float with the
current because it is a labour-saving process, but he has sufficient pluck

to fight, if fight he must (a brief contest, for he would soon be toppled
over). He has a light nature, which would enable him to bob up cheerily
in new conditions and return unaltered to the old ones. His selfishness
is his most endearing quality. If he has his way he will spend his life
like a cat in pushing his betters out of the soft places, and until he is old
he will be fondled in the process.
He gives his hat to one footman and his cane to another, and mounts
the great staircase unassisted and undirected. As a nephew of the house
he need show no credentials even to Crichton, who is guarding a door
above.
It would not be good taste to describe Crichton, who is only a servant;
if to the scandal of all good houses he is to stand out as a figure in the
play, he must do it on his own, as they say in the pantry and the
boudoir.
We are not going to help him. We have had misgivings ever since we
found his name in the title, and we shall keep him out of his rights as
long as we can. Even though we softened to him he would not be a hero
in these clothes of servitude; and he loves his clothes. How to get him
out of them? It would require a cataclysm. To be an indoor servant at
all is to Crichton a badge of honour; to be a butler at thirty is the
realisation of his proudest ambitions. He is devotedly attached to his
master, who, in his opinion, has but one fault, he is not sufficiently
contemptuous of his inferiors. We are immediately to be introduced to
this solitary failing of a great English peer.
This perfect butler, then, opens a door, and ushers Ernest into a certain
room. At the same moment the curtain rises on this room, and the play
begins.
It is one of several reception-rooms in Loam House, not the most
magnificent but quite the softest; and of a warm afternoon all that those
who are anybody crave for is the softest. The larger rooms are
magnificent and bare, carpetless, so that it is an accomplishment to
keep one's feet on them; they are sometimes lent for charitable
purposes; they are also all in use on the night of a dinner-party, when

you may find yourself alone in one, having taken a wrong turning; or
alone, save for two others who are within hailing distance.
This room, however, is comparatively small and very soft. There are so
many cushions in it that you wonder why, if you are an outsider and
don't know that, it needs six cushions to make one fair head comfy. The
couches themselves are cushions as large as beds, and there is an art of
sinking into them and of waiting to be helped out of them. There are
several famous paintings on the walls, of which you may say 'Jolly
thing that,' without losing caste as knowing too much; and in cases