Atlanta Georgian. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1912-1939, April 20, 1913, Image 66

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Hi «lits Reserved ('nmpaiiy. Gircut Britain The Pretty Pickle The Picture That Shocked the Duke Beyond Expression. It Shows the Duchess of Westminster Doing Fancy Figures with Felix Locher, Champion Skater of Switzerland. the Proud Duchess of Westminster Has Gotten London, April 10 H OW can a woman win back an arrant husband’s love? Should she try to arouse bis jealousy? Is she Justified in imitating bis conduct? These questions, which must have exercised many a woman's heart, receive practical answers from the extraordinary case of the Duke and Duchess of Westminster. The Duke, who is the richest peer in England, and the Ducbess, who is the handsomest woman in English society, have separated. The llnal break is attributed to the Duchess’s daring and unconventional efforts to win back the Duke's affections. Now that the disaster has occurred, the greater share of the suffering and disgrace must fall upon the woman. The eloquent words of Scripture, very slightly changed to fit the sex of the person concerned, may now be aptly applied to the Duchess of Westminster: “And the last state of that woman is worse than the first." In other words, you cannot get rid of one wrong by committing an other. Here it should be noted that the wrong-do ing, If It can be so-called, attributed to the Duchess consists merely of social unconventioualities. No body accuses her of go ing to the same lengths as her husband. 8octety still exacts a higher standard of mor ality from the woman than the man. The wife and mother who depurts In the leBst degree from the highest standards of pro priety and dignity will surely suffer. The Duke of Westminster has spent his whole life, since he reached years of indiscretion, in pursuing the phantom of pleasure. He is to-day only thirty-four years of age. He suc ceeded to his title ami estates when he was twenty years old and came into unrestrained enjoyment of the property a year later. He possesses 2,000 acres in the heart of fashionable London and 40,- 000 acres in various parts of the country. He has three palatini houses, in none of which he lives He enjoys an income of at least $5,000,000 a year. With his devotion to pleasure, he ndngles a strong interest in polo. This is the serious side of his life. He will come to the United States next Summer to watch the training of the polo team that is coming to play the Americans for the Interna tional cup. In 1900 he became engaged to the beautiful Miss Shelagh West, daugh ter of Colonel and Mrs. Cornwallis West, the latter of whom was a great ornament of the old, gay Prince of Wales's set. The Wests have another daughter, the Princess of Pless, w ho is equally beautiful. Immediately after his engagement the Duke went to the Boer war, and there he lost no time in becoming entangled with a notorious charmer. Miss West nearing of this, the en gagement was interrupted, but it was patched up again and the marriage occurred in 1901. Married life had only just started when the Duke began to neglect his wife and his domestic duties. He preferred the society of sporting men and women of the stage to that of his ow n class. He w as rarely seen in his own houses. Eaton Hall, built by his grandfather, is the largest nodern house in England. This place has been practically closed for several years. The King and Queen wished to pay a visit to the mansion, the home of one of their greatest nobles, but the Duke cleverly evaded the honor because he would have had to appear with his wife. Grosvenor House, their London residence, in the heart of the West minster estate, has also been much neglected. When the Duchess was giving a dinner party and reception Herself in All Because Honored Way of “Making Him Jealous” She Tried the Time= at the great house the Duke would be entertaining a merry party at the Gaiety. Sometimes the explanation was given that the Duke had been called abroad on business. The Duke was a particularly en thusiastic admirer of Miss Gertie Millar, one of the liveliest stars of the Gaiety Theatre. He had no hesl- The Duke in the Polo Field. Patron of Polo tation in showing himself with his theatrical friend in places where he could be seen by the Duchess and the women of his family. The Duke and Duchess maintained an unhappy and interrupted family life until about three years ago. They have two children. Lady Ursula Grosvenor, aged eleven, and Lady Mary, aged three. For the past three years the Duke has made no pretense of caring about his lovely wife. He has wandered all over Europe with out his wife and pursued every kind of adventure without the least regard for the woman who bore his name. The Duchess was deeply hurt and angered by her husband's conduct, as nearly any wife would have been. She was particularly piqued to see that he appeared to be enjoying his Bohemian mode of life thoroughly. In painful self-examination she asked herself the reason of his neglect. She felt sure that she was handsomer than any of the plebeian women in whose society he took so much pleas ure. She asked several persons about this point and received reas suring answers. Then what was the reason? It could only be that these women were livelier, more amusing, more fascin ating than she. The Duchess determined to show- them how fascinating she could be. She would captivate all the men of her set just as much as Gertie Millar or Monna Delza had ever done. She would make them rave over her and fill her husband with jealousy. She organized amateur theatricals. She seeured a little one-act play called “Scaramouche," in which she played the part of a harutn scarum tomboy girl. Most of the time she wore a sweater and a skirt that came only to her knees and displayed an extremely shapely pair of underpin nings. She leaped ovcu urdyes. slid down the banisters, <• . led through windows, put her feet on the cl- He Is the Greatest in iingland. piece, smoked cigarettes—in short, did nearly everything a Duchess would not be expected to do. The piece was the success she had aimed at. One young man said to another: • Why, deah boy, this is almost as good as Gertie Millar in ’The Spring Chicken " It was really quite a triumph fo.r a Duchess to be almost as good as a musical comedy specialist In her own line. The Duke was too busy with af fairs of his own to notice this per formance at the time. Then the Duchess went away to Murren, in Switzerland, and engaged in the snow- sports for which that resort is fa mous. She skied, she tobogganed, she skated. She took perilous leaps In the air and displayed the same shapeliness that had won so much appreciation at the amateur theatri cals. She was caught In a perilous up set while toboganutng and again aroused admiration. As a skater 6he was a revelation. She became the favorite pupil of the professional instructor at Murren. She was photographed hand In hand with him over and over again per forming most intricate and dlfHcult movements. It was these photographs that caused the break. The Duke was ftirious when he saw them. He was not jealous, as his wife thought he might be. He was most righteously indignant. "No lady would be photographed in such a pose as this,” he said, an grily, to his lawyer, ‘it is most un dignified and immodest. To think that a Duchess of Westminster should be photographed hand In hand with a common, professional athlete is simply shocking. . What would my dear grandmother, who s srch a friend of Queen Victoria, iliink of it? I am indeed glad she is j— - — Odd, Troublesome Ghosts of the South Pacific— francis dwyek F AIRIES have a recognized habit, hut ghosts are universal. The spectre knows neither latitude nor longi tude. One coujd not hope to gather in a fairy on a South Sea a toll or a desert stretch in inland Australia, but the haunt ing spectre is to be met with in either place. The ghost crops up everywhere. The Australian aboriginal, the Fijian, Maori. Papuan, Dyak, Javanese, Kling and Rara- tongan have a mass of ghost lore that would take the Psychical Research Society a thousand years to investigate. Heat stirs the imagination, and the hot lands are particularly prolific in breeding stories of the supernatural. 1 was born on the borders of a region that is supposed to be one of the weirdest places on the earth. That place is the Never Never country, in inland Australia, a land of drought and heat—the God-for gotten land of Despair. Here the ghost yarn flourishes. Stock- men tell the story of the coach of death that runs nightly through the sun-smitten lauds where the white-eyed crow follows the bushman who is lost on the wastes. The coach is pulled by six black horses, whose driver never speaks, and into the coach go the souls of the lost stockmen and “swagmen” who died of want of water. We were going from New Castle to Syd ney one night in a schooner, when the man at the w-heel unloosed a yell that could havq been heard at the Nobbys that was a score of leagues astern. The whole crew rushed in his direction, and the frightened, stammering sailor asserted that a cat, black and shining, with two eyes that v gllttered like the emerald eyes, of the sleeping Buddha, had walked six times round him as he stood at his post. "Three times in one direction and three times in another,” said the sailor. "Why the dickens didn't you kick her?” asked the captain. “Kick her?" gasped the sailor. “Do you think I'd kick her? Not on your life! When all your mob came running here she beat it over the side.” There was no cat on the schooner, so the captain cursed the steersman and went back tc his cabin. Three minutes afterward another and mightier yell came from the deck, and the captain and crew again rushed to the scene. The steersman was lying fiat on his back unconscious, and when he had been brought uround he asserted that he had kicked the spectral puss on its second appearance and had been promptly knocked unconscious by what he described as “a bloomin’ electric shock that came from the durned old mouse eater's fur!” The captain cursed him and took the wheel himself, and quiet was again re stored. But not for long. The captain's yell w-as even louder and more hair-raising than that of the steersman, and when the crew- reached -bis side they found -him fighting madly with an invisible foe. ‘‘Hit him!” he shrieked. “He’s sitting on the wheel. Hit him, you fools! The cat! The cat!” Three hours latei we piled the schooner on a reef, and we had a narrow squeak for our lives. Au island skipper, on a run from Suva to Melbourne, ill-treated a Fijian. The black died, but before he died he lifted himself on his elbow and spat upon the captain's uniform. The Fijian w-as some thing of a watch-doctor in his own corner of the world, and that captain immediately' struck trouble. The night after the Fijian expired, the door of the skipper's cabin was struck seven hard blows at midnight— blows that seemed as if they were admin- tered, with a sledge-hammer. The captain sprang from his berth, but there was no one at the door. At two bells the thing was repeated, and again at four bells. The captain was ready at the Iasi visit. He pumped five bullets through the thin panel of the closed door, but when he dashed into the passage there was no quarry to reward his marksmanship. The game continued for seven days, then a companion of the dead Fijian guaranteed to kill the ghost if the captain gave him two pounds ten shillings. The captain paid, and the fuzzy-headed native imme diately asked to have pointed out to him the spot where the dead man had spat upon the coat. This was done and the ghost-killer cut the portion out and burnt it on the deck! The door-knocking ghos! never returned! Miss Gertie Millar, of the Gaiety Theatre, Whose In fluence Over the Duke Made the Duchess “Instead of having his jealousy aroused by the Duchess’s pranks, the Duke was deeply indignant and ordered her out of his house.” Try to Arouse His Jealousy. spent in social amusements this is a severe punishment. Most certainly, the Queen will not receive her at court and Her Majes ty’s example will be followed by the leaders of the nobility and all those important persons who take their cue from the Sovereign's authorita tive consort. This means that the Duchess will either ha-e to go with out society at all or drift into the cosmopolitan Bohemian set who ar not so strict in their standards. That will be a tragedy for a Duchess of Westminster. The separation is re garded as a social calamity of the first magnitude by the Queen and all who are In agreement with her. It will strengthen the attacks of those politicians who are now seeking to abolish the hereditary element in the House of Lords and cut down the in comes of the great landowners by new- forms of taxation. The Duke of Westminster is the man most particularly aimed at in Lloyd- George’s last land taxation scheme. Undoubtedly, the affair comes at a bad time. It is hard to defend the conduct of a young man and woman enjoying health, strength and every luxury that money can give who will not live together quietly and decent ly, as law and morality re quire, but must fly apart, each pursuing pleasure In his or her own peculiar way. ‘‘Why should I labor to support this idler?” asks the laborer in the fields around deserted Eaton Hall. ‘‘I do not run away from my wife and chil dren. Why should I not use my vote to gain pos session of the land which I am work ing and which he does not want?" Thus from all classes of society most bitter roudemautlon falls upon the quarrelling Duke and Duchess. no longer here to suffer this cruel blow." The Duke, in fact, took the most narrow, cld-fashioned view of moral ity and ethics for women only. His own conduct did not influence his judgment in the least. The Duke and Duchess had already talked about separation. He seized this occasion to bring about an open rupture and put his wife in the wrong before a large element of society. He actually ordered her out of his house and she made a spirited reply. Terms of separation were then drawn up, under which the Duchess received $70,000 a year, the house in London and the second country house, Halkin House, in Flintshire. The Duke re tains the great bulk of his income and liberty to do as he pleases. Queen Mary is especially severe upon the young Duchess for „er con duct, although before the rupture she sympathized with her in the suf fering caused by her husband’s neg lect. The Queen holds very strongly that it is the duty of a woman to maintain her self-control and the integrity of her home under all conditions, no matter how her hus band may neglect her or provoke her. The Queen will not for a moment admit that a woman may answer her husband’s indiscretions by imitating them or pretend ing to imitate them. It is her duty to maintain the strict est standard of virtue in the inter ests of her descendants and the race. If her husband goes astray It becomes all the more the wife's duty The Duchess of Westminster as Herself. to set an example of right conduct in order to lead him back to the straight path. A surprising number of persons in all classes of society agree with the Queen's views. From present indi cations, it appears that the Duchess will suffer ostracism in the most in fluential circles of society. For one whose life has been almost entirely «