← catalogue

They and I

by Jerome K. Jerome · English · Gutenberg #2437 · 401,615 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of They and I
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: They and I

Author: Jerome K. Jerome


        
Release date: December 1, 2000 [eBook #2437]
                Most recently updated: March 31, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2437

Credits: Transcribed from the 1909 Bernhard Tauchnitz edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEY AND I ***


Transcribed from the 1909 Bernhard Tauchnitz edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org





                                THEY AND I


                                * * * * *

                                    BY

                             JEROME K. JEROME

                                AUTHOR OF
           “THE IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW,” “THREE MEN ON
                     THE BUMMEL,” “PAUL KELVER,” ETC.

                                * * * * *

                           _COPYRIGHT EDITION_

                                * * * * *

                                 LEIPZIG

                            BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ

                                  1909.




CHAPTER I


“IT is not a large house,” I said.  “We don’t want a large house.  Two
spare bedrooms, and the little three-cornered place you see marked there
on the plan, next to the bathroom, and which will just do for a bachelor,
will be all we shall require—at all events, for the present.  Later on,
if I ever get rich, we can throw out a wing.  The kitchen I shall have to
break to your mother gently.  Whatever the original architect could have
been thinking of—”

“Never mind the kitchen,” said Dick: “what about the billiard-room?”

The way children nowadays will interrupt a parent is nothing short of a
national disgrace.  I also wish Dick would not sit on the table, swinging
his legs.  It is not respectful.  “Why, when I was a boy,” as I said to
him, “I should as soon have thought of sitting on a table, interrupting
my father—”

“What’s this thing in the middle of the hall, that looks like a grating?”
demanded Robina.

“She means the stairs,” explained Dick.

“Then why don’t they look like stairs?” commented Robina.

“They do,” replied Dick, “to people with sense.”

“They don’t,” persisted Robina, “they look like a grating.”  Robina, with
the plan spread out across her knee, was sitting balanced on the arm of
an easy-chair.  Really, I hardly see the use of buying chairs for these
people.  Nobody seems to know what they are for—except it be one or
another of the dogs.  Perches are all they want.

“If we threw the drawing-room into the hall and could do away with the
stairs,” thought Robina, “we should be able to give a dance now and
then.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “you would like to clear out the house
altogether, leaving nothing but the four bare walls.  That would give us
still more room, that would.  For just living in, we could fix up a shed
in the garden; or—”

“I’m talking seriously,” said Robina: “what’s the good of a drawing-room?
One only wants it to show the sort of people into that one wishes hadn’t
come.  They’d sit about, looking miserable, just as well anywhere else.
If we could only get rid of the stairs—”

“Oh, of course! we could get rid of the stairs,” I agreed.  “It would be
a bit awkward at first, when we wanted to go to bed.  But I daresay we
should get used to it.  We could have a ladder and climb up to our rooms
through the windows.  Or we might adopt the Norwegian method and have the
stairs outside.”

“I wish you would be sensible,” said Robin.

“I am trying to be,” I explained; “and I am also trying to put a little
sense into you.  At present you are crazy about dancing.  If you had your
way, you would turn the house into a dancing-saloon with primitive
sleeping-accommodation attached.  It will last six months, your dancing
craze.  Then you will want the house transformed into a swimming-bath, or
a skating-rink, or cleared out for hockey.  My idea may be conventional.
I don’t expect you to sympathise with it.  My notion is just an ordinary
Christian house, not a gymnasium.  There are going to be bedrooms in this
house, and there’s going to be a staircase leading to them.  It may
strike you as sordid, but there is also going to be a kitchen: though why
when building the house they should have put the kitchen—

“Don’t forget the billiard-room,” said Dick.

“If you thought more of your future career and less about billiards,”
Robin pointed out to him, “perhaps you’d get through your Little-go in
the course of the next few years.  If Pa only had sense—I mean if he
wasn’t so absurdly indulgent wherever you are concerned, he would not
have a billiard-table in the house.”

“You talk like that,” retorted Dick, “merely because you can’t play.”

“I can beat you, anyhow,” retorted Robin.

“Once,” admitted Dick—“once in six weeks.”

“Twice,” corrected Robin.

“You don’t play,” Dick explained to her; “you just whack round and trust
to Providence.”

“I don’t whack round,” said Robin; “I always aim at something.  When you
try and it doesn’t come off, you say it’s ‘hard luck;’ and when I try and
it does come off, you say it’s fluking.  So like a man.”

“You both of you,” I said, “attach too much importance to the score.
When you try for a cannon off the white and hit it on the wrong side and
send it into a pocket, and your own ball travels on and makes a losing
hazard off the red, instead of being vexed with yourselves—”

“If you get a really good table, governor,” said Dick, “I’ll teach you
billiards.”

I do believe Dick really thinks he can play.  It is the same with golf.
Beginners are invariably lucky.  “I think I shall like it,” they tell
you; “I seem to have the game in me, if you understand.”

‘There is a friend of mine, an old sea-captain.  He is the sort of man
that when the three balls are lying in a straight line, tucked up under
the cushion, looks pleased; because then he knows he can make a cannon
and leave the red just where he wants it.  An Irish youngster named
Malooney, a college chum of Dick’s, was staying with us; and the
afternoon being wet, the Captain said he would explain it to Malooney,
how a young man might practise billiards without any danger of cutting
the cloth.  He taught him how to hold the cue, and he told him how to
make a bridge.  Malooney was grateful, and worked for about an hour.  He
did not show much promise.  He is a powerfully built young man, and he
didn’t seem able to get it into his head that he wasn’t playing cricket.
Whenever he hit a little low the result was generally lost ball.  To save
time—and damage to furniture—Dick and I fielded for him.  Dick stood at
long-stop, and I was short slip.  It was dangerous work, however, and
when Dick had caught him out twice running, we agreed that we had won,
and took him in to tea.  In the evening—none of the rest of us being keen
to try our luck a second time—the Captain said, that just for the joke of
the thing he would give Malooney eighty-five and play him a hundred up.
To confess the truth, I find no particular fun myself in playing
billiards with the Captain.  The game consists, as far as I am concerned,
in walking round the table, throwing him back the balls, and saying
“Good!”  By the time my turn comes I don’t seem to care what happens:
everything seems against me.  He is a kind old gentleman and he means
well, but the tone in which he says “Hard lines!” whenever I miss an easy
stroke irritates me.  I feel I’d like to throw the balls at his head and
fling the table out of window.  I suppose it is that I am in a fretful
state of mind, but the mere way in which he chalks his cue aggravates me.
He carries his own chalk in his waistcoat pocket—as if our chalk wasn’t
good enough for him—and when he has finished chalking, he smooths the tip
round with his finger and thumb and taps the cue against the table.  “Oh!
go on with the game,” I want to say to him; “don’t be so full of tricks.”

                                * * * * *

The Captain led off with a miss in baulk.  Malooney gripped his cue, drew
in a deep breath, and let fly.  The result was ten: a cannon and all
three balls in the same pocket.  As a matter of fact he made the cannon
twice; but the second time, as we explained to him, of course did not
count.

“Good beginning!” said the Captain.

Malooney seemed pleased with himself, and took off his coat.

Malooney’s ball missed the red on its first journey up the table by about
a foot, but found it later on and sent it into a pocket.

“Ninety-nine plays nothing,” said Dick, who was marking.  “Better make it
a hundred and fifty, hadn’t we, Captain?”

“Well, I’d like to get in a shot,” said the Captain, “before the game is
over.  Perhaps we had better make it a hundred and fifty, if Mr. Malooney
has no objection.”

“Whatever you think right, sir,” said Rory Malooney.

Malooney finished his break for twenty-two, leaving himself hanging over
the middle pocket and the red tucked up in baulk.

“Nothing plays a hundred and eight,” said Dick.

“When I want the score,” said the Captain, “I’ll ask for it.”

“Beg pardon, sir,” said Dick.

“I hate a noisy game,” said the Captain.

The Captain, making up his mind without much waste of time, sent his ball
under the cushion, six inches outside baulk.

“What will I do here?” asked Malooney.

“I don’t know what you will do,” said the Captain; “I’m waiting to see.”

Owing to the position of the ball, Malooney was unable to employ his
whole strength.  All he did that turn was to pocket the Captain’s ball
and leave himself under the bottom cushion, four inches from the red.
The Captain said a nautical word, and gave another miss.  Malooney
squared up to the balls for the third time.  They flew before him,
panic-stricken.  They banged against one another, came back and hit one
another again for no reason whatever.  The red, in particular, Malooney
had succeeded apparently in frightening out of its wits.  It is a stupid
ball, generally speaking, our red—its one idea to get under a cushion and
watch the game.  With Malooney it soon found it was safe nowhere on the
table.  Its only hope was pockets.  I may have been mistaken, my eye may
have been deceived by the rapidity of the play, but it seemed to me that
the red never waited to be hit.  When it saw Malooney’s ball coming for
it at the rate of forty miles an hour, it just made for the nearest
pocket.  It rushed round the table looking for pockets.  If in its
excitement, it passed an empty pocket, it turned back and crawled in.
There were times when in its terror it jumped the table and took shelter
under the sofa or behind the sideboard.  One began to feel sorry for the
red.

The Captain had scored a legitimate thirty-eight, and Malooney had given
him twenty-four, when it really seemed as if the Captain’s chance had
come.  I could have scored myself as the balls were then.

“Sixty-two plays one hundred and twenty-eight.  Now then, Captain, game
in your hands,” said Dick.

We gathered round.  The children left their play.  It was a pretty
picture: the bright young faces, eager with expectation, the old worn
veteran squinting down his cue, as if afraid that watching Malooney’s
play might have given it the squirms.

“Now follow this,” I whispered to Malooney.  “Don’t notice merely what he
does, but try and understand why he does it.  Any fool—after a little
practice, that is—can hit a ball.  But why do you hit it?  What happens
after you’ve hit it?  What—”

“Hush,” said Dick.

The Captain drew his cue back and gently pushed it forward.

“Pretty stroke,” I whispered to Malooney; “now, that’s the sort—”

I offer, by way of explanation, that the Captain by this time was
probably too full of bottled-up language to be master of his nerves.  The
ball travelled slowly past the red.  Dick said afterwards that you
couldn’t have put so much as a sheet of paper between them.  It comforts
a man, sometimes, when you tell him this; and at other times it only
makes him madder.  It travelled on and passed the white—you could have
put quite a lot of paper between it and the white—and dropped with a
contented thud into the top left-hand pocket.

“Why does he do that?” Malooney whispered.  Malooney has a singularly
hearty whisper.

Dick and I got the women and children out of the room as quickly as we
could, but of course Veronica managed to tumble over something on the
way—Veronica would find something to tumble over in the desert of Sahara;
and a few days later I overheard expressions, scorching their way through
the nursery door, that made my hair rise up.  I entered, and found
Veronica standing on the table.  Jumbo was sitting upon the music-stool.
The poor dog himself was looking scared, though he must have heard a bit
of language in his time, one way and another.

“Veronica,” I said, “are you not ashamed of yourself?  You wicked child,
how dare you—”

“It’s all right,” said Veronica.  “I don’t really mean any harm.  He’s a
sailor, and I have to talk to him like that, else he don’t know he’s
being talked to.”

I pay hard-working, conscientious ladies to teach this child things right
and proper for her to know.  They tell her clever things that Julius
Cæsar said; observations made by Marcus Aurelius that, pondered over,
might help her to become a beautiful character.  She complains that it
produces a strange buzzy feeling in her head; and her mother argues that
perhaps her brain is of the creative order, not intended to remember
much—thinks that perhaps she is going to be something.  A good
round-dozen oaths the Captain must have let fly before Dick and I
succeeded in rolling her out of the room.  She had only heard them once,
yet, so far as I could judge, she had got them letter perfect.

The Captain, now no longer under the necessity of employing all his
energies to suppress his natural instincts, gradually recovered form, and
eventually the game stood at one hundred and forty-nine all, Malooney to
play.  The Captain had left the balls in a position that would have
disheartened any other opponent than Malooney.  To any other opponent
than Malooney the Captain would have offered irritating sympathy.
“Afraid the balls are not rolling well for you to-night,” the Captain
would have said; or, “Sorry, sir, I don’t seem to have left you very
much.”  To-night the Captain wasn’t feeling playful.

“Well, if he scores off that!” said Dick.

“Short of locking up the balls and turning out the lights, I don’t myself
see how one is going to stop him,” sighed the Captain.

The Captain’s ball was in hand.  Malooney went for the red and
hit—perhaps it would be more correct to say, frightened—it into a pocket.
Malooney’s ball, with the table to itself, then gave a solo performance,
and ended up by breaking a window.  It was what the lawyers call a nice
point.  What was the effect upon the score?

Malooney argued that, seeing he had pocketed the red before his own ball
left the table, his three should be counted first, and that therefore he
had won.  Dick maintained that a ball that had ended up in a flower-bed
couldn’t be deemed to have scored anything.  The Captain declined to
assist.  He said that, although he had been playing billiards for upwards
of forty years, the incident was new to him.  My own feeling was that of
thankfulness that we had got through the game without anybody being
really injured.  We agreed that the person to decide the point would be
the editor of _The Field_.

It remains still undecided.  The Captain came into my study the next
morning.  He said: “If you haven’t written that letter to _The Field_,
don’t mention my name.  They know me on _The Field_.  I would rather it
did not get about that I have been playing with a man who cannot keep his
ball within the four walls of a billiard-room.”

“Well,” I answered, “I know most of the fellows on _The Field_ myself.
They don’t often get hold of anything novel in the way of a story.  When
they do, they are apt to harp upon it.  My idea was to keep my own name
out of it altogether.”

“It is not a point likely to crop up often,” said the Captain.  “I’d let
it rest if I were you.”

I should like to have had it settled.  In the end, I wrote the editor a
careful letter, in a disguised hand, giving a false name and address.
But if any answer ever appeared I must have missed it.

Myself I have a sort of consciousness that somewhere inside me there is
quite a good player, if only I could persuade him to come out.  He is
shy, that is all.  He does not seem able to play when people are looking
on.  The shots he misses when people are looking on would give you a
wrong idea of him.  When nobody is about, a prettier game you do not
often see.  If some folks who fancy themselves could see me when there is
nobody about, it might take the conceit out of them.  Only once I played
up to what I feel is my real form, and then it led to argument.  I was
staying at an hotel in Switzerland, and the second evening a
pleasant-spoken young fellow, who said he had read all my books—later, he
appeared surprised on learning I had written more than two—asked me if I
would care to play a hundred up.  We played even, and I paid for the
table.  The next evening he said he thought it would make a better game
if he gave me forty and I broke.  It was a fairly close finish, and
afterwards he suggested that I should put down my name for the handicap
they were arranging.

“I am afraid,” I answered, “that I hardly play well enough.  Just a quiet
game with you is one thing; but in a handicap with a crowd looking on—”

“I should not let that trouble you,” he said; “there are some here who
play worse than you—just one or two.  It passes the evening.”

It was merely a friendly affair.  I paid my twenty marks, and was given
plus a hundred.  I drew for my first game a chatty type of man, who
started minus twenty.  We neither of us did much for the first five
minutes, and then I made a break of forty-four.

There was not a fluke in it from beginning to end.  I was never more
astonished in my life.  It seemed to me it was the cue was doing it.

Minus Twenty was even more astonished.  I heard him as I passed:

“Who handicapped this man?” he asked.

“I did,” said the pleasant-spoken youngster.

“Oh,” said Minus Twenty—“friend of yours, I presume?”

There are evenings that seem to belong to you.  We finished that two
hundred and fifty under the three-quarters of an hour.  I explained to
Minus Twenty—he was plus sixty-three at the end—that my play that night
had been exceptional.  He said that he had heard of cases similar.  I
left him talking volubly to the committee.  He was not a nice man at all.

After that I did not care to win; and that of course was fatal.  The less
I tried, the more impossible it seemed for me to do wrong.  I was left in
at the last with a man from another hotel.  But for that I am convinced I
should have carried off the handicap.  Our hotel didn’t, anyhow, want the
other hotel to win.  So they gathered round me, and offered me sound
advice, and begged me to be careful; with the natural result that I went
back to my usual form quite suddenly.

Never before or since have I played as I played that week.  But it showed
me what I could do.  I shall get a new table, with proper pockets this
time.  There is something wrong about our pockets.  The balls go into
them and then come out again.  You would think they had seen something
there to frighten them.  They come out trembling and hold on to the
cushion.

I shall also get a new red ball.  I fancy it must be a very old ball, our
red.  It seems to me to be always tired.

“The billiard-room,” I said to Dick, “I see my way to easily enough.
Adding another ten feet to what is now the dairy will give us
twenty-eight by twenty.  I am hopeful that will be sufficient even for
your friend Malooney.  The drawing-room is too small to be of any use.  I
may decide—as Robina has suggested—to ‘throw it into the hall.’  But the
stairs will remain.  For dancing, private theatricals—things to keep you
children out of mischief—I have an idea I will explain to you later on.
The kitchen—”

“Can I have a room to myself?” asked Veronica.

Veronica was sitting on the floor, staring into the fire, her chin
supported by her hand.  Veronica, in those rare moments when she is
resting from her troubles, wears a holy, far-away expression apt to
mislead the stranger.  Governesses, new to her, have their doubts whether
on these occasions they are justified in dragging her back to discuss
mere dates and tables.  Poets who are friends of mine, coming
unexpectedly upon Veronica standing by the window, gazing upward at the
evening star, have thought it was a vision, until they got closer and
found that she was sucking peppermints.

“I should so like to have a room all to myself,” added Veronica.

“It would be a room!” commented Robin.

“It wouldn’t have your hairpins sticking up all over the bed, anyhow,”
murmured Veronica dreamily.

“I like that!” said Robin; “why—”

“You’re harder than I am,” said Veronica.

“I should wish you to have a room, Veronica,” I said.  “My fear is that
in place of one untidy bedroom in the house—a room that makes me shudder
every time I see it through the open door; and the door, in spite of all
I can say, generally is wide open—”

“I’m not untidy,” said Robin, “not really.  I know where everything is in
the dark—if people would only leave them alone.”

“You are.  You’re about the most untidy girl I know,” said Dick.

“I’m not,” said Robin; “you don’t see other girls’ rooms.  Look at yours
at Cambridge.  Malooney told us you’d had a fire, and we all believed him
at first.”

“When a man’s working—” said Dick.

“He must have an orderly place to work in,” suggested Robin.

Dick sighed.  “It’s never any good talking to you,” said Dick.  “You
don’t even see your own faults.”

“I can,” said Robin; “I see them more than anyone.  All I claim is
justice.”

“Show me, Veronica,” I said, “that you are worthy to possess a room.  At
present you appear to regard the whole house as your room.  I find your
gaiters on the croquet lawn.  A portion of your costume—an article that
anyone possessed of the true feelings of a lady would desire to keep
hidden from the world—is discovered waving from the staircase window.”

“I put it out to be mended,” explained Veronica.

“You opened the door and flung it out.  I told you of it at the time,”
said Robin.  “You do the same with your boots.”

“You are too high-spirited for your size,” explained Dick to her.  “Try
to be less dashing.”

“I could also wish, Veronica,” I continued, “that you shed your back comb
less easily, or at least that you knew when you had shed it.  As for your
gloves—well, hunting your gloves has come to be our leading winter
sport.”

“People look in such funny places for them,” said Veronica.

“Granted.  But be just, Veronica,” I pleaded.  “Admit that it is in funny
places we occasionally find them.  When looking for your things one
learns, Veronica, never to despair.  So long as there remains a corner
unexplored inside or outside the house, within the half-mile radius, hope
need not be abandoned.”

Veronica was still gazing dreamily into the fire.

“I suppose,” said Veronica, “it’s reditty.”

“It’s what?” I said.

“She means heredity,” suggested Dick—“cheeky young beggar!  I wonder you
let her talk to you the way she does.”

“Besides,” added Robin, “as I am always explaining to you, Pa is a
literary man.  With him it is part of his temperament.”

“It’s hard on us children,” said Veronica.

We were all agreed—with the exception of Veronica—that it was time
Veronica went to bed.  As chairman I took it upon myself to closure the
debate.




CHAPTER II


“DO you mean, Governor, that you have actually bought the house?”
demanded Dick, “or are we only talking about it?”

“This time, Dick,” I answered, “I have done it.”

Dick looked serious.  “Is it what you wanted?” he asked.

“No, Dick,” I replied, “it is not what I wanted.  I wanted an
old-fashioned, picturesque, rambling sort of a place, all gables and ivy
and oriel windows.”

“You are mixing things up,” Dick interrupted, “gables and oriel windows
don’t go together.”

“I beg your pardon, Dick,” I corrected him, “in the house I wanted, they
do.  It is the style of house you find in the Christmas number.  I have
never seen it anywhere else, but I took a fancy to it from the first.  It
is not too far from the church, and it lights up well at night.  ‘One of
these days,’ I used to say to myself when a boy, ‘I’ll be a clever man
and live in a house just like that.’  It was my dream.”

“And what is this place like?” demanded Robin, “this place you have
bought.”

“The agent,” I explained, “claims for it that it is capable of
improvement.  I asked him to what school of architecture he would say it
belonged; he said he thought that it must have been a local school, and
pointed out—what seems to be the truth—that nowadays they do not build
such houses.”

“Near to the river?” demanded Dick.

“Well, by the road,” I answered, “I daresay it may be a couple of miles.”

“And by the shortest way?” questioned Dick.

“That is the shortest way,” I explained; “there’s a prettier way through
the woods, but that is about three miles and a half.”

“But we had decided it was to be near the river,” said Robin.

“We also decided,” I replied, “that it was to be on sandy soil, with a
south-west aspect.  Only one thing in this house has a south-west aspect,
and that’s the back door.  I asked the agent about the sand.  He advised
me, if I wanted it in any quantity, to get an estimate from the Railway
Company.  I wanted it on a hill.  It is on a hill, with a bigger hill in
front of it.  I didn’t want that other hill.  I wanted an uninterrupted
view of the southern half of England.  I wanted to take people out on the
step, and cram them with stories about our being able on clear days to
see the Bristol Channel.  They might not have believed me, but without
that hill I could have stuck to it, and they could not have been
certain—not dead certain—I was lying.

“Personally, I should have liked a house where something had happened.  I
should have liked, myself, a blood-stain—not a fussy blood-stain, a neat
unobtrusive blood-stain that would have been content, most of its time,
to remain hidden under the mat, shown only occasionally as a treat to
visitors.  I had hopes even of a ghost.  I don’t mean one of those noisy
ghosts that doesn’t seem to know it is dead.  A lady ghost would have
been my fancy, a gentle ghost with quiet, pretty ways.  This house—well,
it is such a sensible-looking house, that is my chief objection to it.
It has got an echo.  If you go to the end of the garden and shout at it
very loudly, it answers you back.  This is the only bit of fun you can
have with it.  Even then it answers you in such a tone you feel it thinks
the whole thing silly—is doing it merely to humour you.  It is one of
those houses that always seems to be thinking of its rates and taxes.”

“Any reason at all for your having bought it?” asked Dick.

“Yes, Dick,” I answered.  “We are all of us tired of this suburb.  We
want to live in the country and be good.  To live in the country with any
comfort it is necessary to have a house there.  This being admitted, it
follows we must either build a house or buy one.  I would rather not
build a house.  Talboys built himself a house.  You know Talboys.  When I
first met him, before he started building, he was a cheerful soul with a
kindly word for everyone.  The builder assures him that in another twenty
years, when the colour has had time to tone down, his house will be a
picture.  At present it makes him bilious, the mere sight of it.  Year by
year, they tell him, as the dampness wears itself away, he will suffer
less and less from rheumatism, ague, and lumbago.  He has a hedge round
the garden; it is eighteen inches high.  To keep the boys out he has put
up barbed-wire fencing.  But wire fencing affords no real privacy.  When
the Talboys are taking coffee on the lawn, there is generally a crowd
from the village watching them.  There are trees in the garden; you know
they are trees—there is a label tied to each one telling you what sort of
tree it is.  For the moment there is a similarity about them.  Thirty
years hence, Talboys estimates, they will afford him shade and comfort;
but by that time he hopes to be dead.  I want a house that has got over
all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a
young and inexperienced house.”

“But why this particular house?” urged Robin, “if, as you say, it is not
the house you wanted.”

“Because, my dear girl,” I answered, “it is less unlike the house I
wanted than other houses I have seen.  When we are young we make up our
minds to try and get what we want; when we have arrived at years of
discretion we decide to try and want what we can get.  It saves time.
During the last two years I have seen about sixty houses, and out of the
lot there was only one that was really the house I wanted.  Hitherto I
have kept the story to myself.  Even now, thinking about it irritates me.
It was not an agent who told me of it.  I met a man by chance in a
railway carriage.  He had a black eye.  If ever I meet him again I’ll
give him another.  He accounted for it by explaining that he had had
trouble with a golf ball, and at the time I believed him.  I mentioned to
him in conversation I was looking for a house.  He described this place
to me, and it seemed to me hours before the train stopped at a station.
When it did I got out and took the next train back.  I did not even wait
for lunch.  I had my bicycle with me, and I went straight there.  It
was—well, it was the house I wanted.  If it had vanished suddenly, and I
had found myself in bed, the whole thing would have seemed more
reasonable.  The proprietor opened the door to me himself.  He had the
bearing of a retired military man.  It was afterwards I learnt he was the
proprietor.

“I said, ‘Good afternoon; if it is not troubling you, I would like to
look over the house.’  We were standing in the oak-panelled hall.  I
noticed the carved staircase about which the man in the train had told
me, also the Tudor fireplaces.  That is all I had time to notice.  The
next moment I was lying on my back in the middle of the gravel with the
door shut.  I looked up.  I saw the old maniac’s head sticking out of a
little window.  It was an evil face.  He had a gun in his hand.

“‘I’m going to count twenty,’ he said.  ‘If you are not the other side of
the gate by then, I shoot.’

“I ran over the figures myself on my way to the gate.  I made it
eighteen.

“I had an hour to wait for the train.  I talked the matter over with the
station-master.

“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’ll be trouble up there one of these days.’

“I said, ‘It seems to me to have begun.’

“He said, ‘It’s the Indian sun.  It gets into their heads.  We have one
or two in the neighbourhood.  They are quiet enough till something
happens.’

“‘If I’d been two seconds longer,’ I said, ‘I believe he’d have done it.’

“‘It’s a taking house,’ said the station-master; ‘not too big and not too
little.  It’s the sort of house people seem to be looking for.’

“‘I don’t envy,’ I said, ‘the next person that finds it.’

“‘He settled himself down here,’ said the station-master, ‘about ten
years ago.  Since then, if one person has offered to take the house off
his hands, I suppose a thousand have.  At first he would laugh at them
good-temperedly—explain to them that his idea was to live there himself,
in peace and quietness, till he died.  Two out of every three of them
would express their willingness to wait for that, and suggest some
arrangement by which they might enter into possession, say, a week after
the funeral.  The last few months it has been worse than ever.  I reckon
you’re about the eighth that has been up there this week, and to-day only
Thursday.  There’s something to be said, you know, for the old man.’”

“And did he,” asked Dick—“did he shoot the next party that came along?”

“Don’t be so silly, Dick,” said Robin; “it’s a story.  Tell us another,
Pa.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Robina, by a story,” I said.  “If you mean
to imply—”

Robina said she didn’t; but I know quite well she did.  Because I am an
author, and have to tell stories for my living, people think I don’t know
any truth.  It is vexing enough to be doubted when one is exaggerating;
to have sneers flung at one by one’s own kith and kin when one is
struggling to confine oneself to bald, bare narrative—well, where is the
inducement to be truthful?  There are times when I almost say to myself
that I will never tell the truth again.

“As it happens,” I said, “the story is true, in many places.  I pass over
your indifference to the risk I ran; though a nice girl at the point
where the gun was mentioned would have expressed alarm.  Anyhow, at the
end you might have said something more sympathetic than merely, ‘Tell us
another.’  He did not shoot the next party that arrived, for the reason
that the very next day his wife, alarmed at what had happened, went up to
London and consulted an expert—none too soon, as it turned out.  The poor
old fellow died six months later in a private lunatic asylum; I had it
from the station-master on passing through the junction again this
spring.  The house fell into the possession of his nephew, who is living
in it now.  He is a youngish man with a large family, and people have
learnt that the place is not for sale.  It seems to me rather a sad
story.  The Indian sun, as the station-master thinks, may have started
the trouble; but the end was undoubtedly hastened by the annoyance to
which the unfortunate gentleman had been subjected; and I myself might
have been shot.  The only thing that comforts me is thinking of that
fool’s black eye—the fool that sent me there.”

“And none of the other houses,” suggested Dick, “were any good at all?”

“There were drawbacks, Dick,” I explained.  “There was a house in Essex;
it was one of the first your mother and I inspected.  I nearly shed tears
of joy when I read the advertisement.  It had once been a priory.  Queen
Elizabeth had slept there on her way to Greenwich.  A photograph of the
house accompanied the advertisement.  I should not have believed the
thing had it been a picture.  It was under twelve miles from Charing
Cross.  The owner, it was stated, was open to offers.”

“All humbug, I suppose,” suggested Dick.

“The advertisement, if anything,” I replied, “had under-estimated the
attractiveness of that house.  All I blame the advertisement for is that
it did not mention other things.  It did not mention, for instance, that
since Queen Elizabeth’s time the neighbourhood had changed.  It did not
mention that the entrance was between a public-house one side of the gate
and a fried-fish shop on the other; that the Great Eastern
Railway-Company had established a goods depot at the bottom of the
garden; that the drawing-room windows looked out on extensive chemical
works, and the dining-room windows, which were round the corner, on a
stonemason’s yard.  The house itself was a dream.”

“But what is the sense of it?” demanded Dick.  “What do house agents
think is the good of it?  Do they think people likely to take a house
after reading the advertisement without ever going to see it?”

“I asked an agent once that very question,” I replied.  “He said they did
it first and foremost to keep up the spirits of the owner—the man who
wanted to sell the house.  He said that when a man was trying to part
with a house he had to listen to so much abuse of it from people who came
to see it that if somebody did not stick up for the house—say all that
could be said for it, and gloss over its defects—he would end by becoming
so ashamed of it he would want to give it away, or blow it up with
dynamite.  He said that reading the advertisement in the agent’s
catalogue was the only thing that reconciled him to being the owner of
the house.  He said one client of his had been trying to sell his house
for years—until one day in the office he read by chance the agent’s
description of it.  Upon which he went straight home, took down the
board, and has lived there contentedly ever since.  From that point of
view there is reason in the system; but for the house-hunter it works
badly.

“One agent sent me a day’s journey to see a house standing in the middle
of a brickfield, with a view of the Grand Junction Canal.  I asked him
where was the river he had mentioned.  He explained it was the other side
of the canal, but on a lower level; that was the only reason why from the
house you couldn’t see it.  I asked him for his picturesque scenery.  He
explained it was farther on, round the bend.  He seemed to think me
unreasonable, expecting to find everything I wanted just outside the
front-door.  He suggested my shutting out the brickfield—if I didn’t like
the brickfield—with trees.  He suggested the eucalyptus-tree.  He said it
was a rapid grower.  He also told me that it yielded gum.

“Another house I travelled down into Dorsetshire to see.  It contained,
according to the advertisement, ‘perhaps the most perfect specimen of
Norman arch extant in Southern England.’  It was to be found mentioned in
Dugdale, and dated from the thirteenth century.  I don’t quite know what
I expected.  I argued to myself that there must have been ruffians of
only moderate means even in those days.  Here and there some robber baron
who had struck a poor line of country would have had to be content with a
homely little castle.  A few such, hidden away in unfrequented districts,
had escaped destruction.  More civilised descendants had adapted them to
later requirements.  I had in my mind, before the train reached
Dorchester, something between a miniature Tower of London and a mediæval
edition of Ann Hathaway’s cottage at Stratford.  I pictured dungeons and
a drawbridge, perhaps a secret passage.  Lamchick has a secret passage,
leading from behind a sort of portrait in the dining-room to the back of
the kitchen chimney.  They use it for a linen closet.  It seems to me a
pity.  Of course originally it went on farther.  The vicar, who is a bit
of an antiquarian, believes it comes out somewhere in the churchyard.  I
tell Lamchick he ought to have it opened up, but his wife doesn’t want it
touched.  She seems to think it just right as it is.  I have always had a
fancy for a secret passage.  I decided I would have the drawbridge
repaired and made practicable.  Flanked on each side with flowers in
tubs, it would have been a novel and picturesque approach.”

“Was there a drawbridge?” asked Dick.

“There was no drawbridge,” I explained.  “The entrance to the house was
through what the caretaker called the conservatory.  It was not the sort
of house that goes with a drawbridge.”

“Then what about the Norman arches?” argued Dick.

“Not arches,” I corrected him; “Arch.  The Norman arch was downstairs in
the kitchen.  It was the kitchen, that had been built in the thirteenth
century—and had not had much done to it since, apparently.  Originally, I
should say, it had been the torture chamber; it gave you that idea.  I
think your mother would have raised objections to the kitchen—anyhow,
when she came to think of the cook.  It would have been necessary to put
it to the woman before engaging her:—

“‘You don’t mind cooking in a dungeon in the dark, do you?’

“Some cooks would.  The rest of the house was what I should describe as
present-day mixed style.  The last tenant but one had thrown out a
bathroom in corrugated iron.”

“Then there was a house in Berkshire that I took your mother to see, with
a trout stream running through the grounds.  I imagined myself going out
after lunch, catching trout for dinner; inviting swagger friends down to
‘my little place in Berkshire’ for a few days’ trout-fishing.  There is a
man I once knew who is now a baronet.  He used to be keen on fishing.  I
thought maybe I’d get him.  It would have looked well in the Literary
Gossip column: ‘Among the other distinguished guests’—you know the sort
of thing.  I had the paragraph already in my mind.  The wonder is I
didn’t buy a rod.”

“Wasn’t there any trout stream?” questioned Robin.

“There was a stream,” I answered; “if anything, too much stream.  The
stream was the first thing your mother noticed.  She noticed it a quarter
of an hour before we came to it—before we knew it was the stream.  We
drove back to the town, and she bought a smelling-bottle, the larger
size.

“It gave your mother a headache, that stream, and made me mad.  The
agent’s office was opposite the station.  I allowed myself half an hour
on my way back to tell him what I thought of him, and then I missed the
train.  I could have got it in if he had let me talk all the time, but he
would interrupt.  He said it was the people at the paper-mill—that he had
spoken to them about it more than once; he seemed to think sympathy was
all I wanted.  He assured me, on his word as a house-agent, that it had
once been a trout stream.  The fact was historical.  Isaac Walton had
fished there—that was prior to the paper-mill.  He thought a collection
of trout, male and female, might be bought and placed in it; preference
being given to some hardy breed of trout, accustomed to roughing it.  I
told him I wasn’t looking for a place where I could play at being Noah;
and left him, as I explained to him, with the intention of going straight
to my solicitors and instituting proceedings against him for talking like
a fool; and he put on his hat and went across to his solicitors to
commence proceedings against me for libel.

“I suppose that, with myself, he thought better of it in the end.  But
I’m tired of having my life turned into one perpetual first of April.
This house that I have bought is not my heart’s desire, but about it
there are possibilities.  We will put in lattice windows, and fuss-up the
chimneys.  Maybe we will let in a tablet over the front-door, with a
date—always looks well: it is a picturesque figure, the old-fashioned
five.  By the time we have done with it—for all practical purposes—it
will be a Tudor manor-house.  I have always wanted an old Tudor
manor-house.  There is no reason, so far as I can see, why there should
not be stories connected with this house.  Why should not we have a room
in which Somebody once slept?  We won’t have Queen Elizabeth.  I’m tired
of Queen Elizabeth.  Besides, I don’t believe she’d have been nice.  Why
not Queen Anne?  A quiet, gentle old lady, from all accounts, who would
not have given trouble.  Or, better still, Shakespeare.  He was
constantly to and fro between London and Stratford.  It would not have
been so very much out of his way.  ‘The room where Shakespeare slept!’
Why, it’s a new idea.  Nobody ever seems to have thought of Shakespeare.
There is the four-post bedstead.  Your mother never liked it.  She will
insist, it harbours things.  We might hang the wall with scenes from his
plays, and have a bust of the old gentleman himself over the door.  If
I’m left alone and not worried, I’ll probably end by believing that he
really did sleep there.”

“What about cupboards?” suggested Dick.  “The Little Mother will clamour
for cupboards.”

It is unexplainable, the average woman’s passion for cupboards.  In
heaven, her first request, I am sure, is always, “Can I have a cupboard?”
She would keep her husband and children in cupboards if she had her way:
that would be her idea of the perfect home, everybody wrapped up with a
piece of camphor in his or her own proper cupboard.  I knew a woman once
who was happy—for a woman.  She lived in a house with twenty-nine
cupboards: I think it must have been built by a woman.  They were
spacious cupboards, many of them, with doors in no way different from
other doors.  Visitors would wish each other good-night and disappear
with their candles into cupboards, staggering out backwards the next
moment, looking scared.  One poor gentleman, this woman’s husband told
me, having to go downstairs again for something he had forgotten, and
unable on his return to strike anything else but cupboards, lost heart
and finished up the night in a cupboard.  At breakfast-time guests would
hurry down, and burst open cupboard doors with a cheery “Good-morning.”
When that woman was out, nobody in that house ever knew where anything
was; and when she came home she herself only knew where it ought to have
been.  Yet once, when one of those twenty-nine cupboards had to be
cleared out temporarily for repairs, she never smiled, her husband told
me, for more than three weeks—not till the workmen were out of the house,
and that cupboard in working order again.  She said it was so confusing,
having nowhere to put her things.

The average woman does not want a house, in the ordinary sense of the
word.  What she wants is something made by a genii.  You have found, as
you think, the ideal house.  You show her the Adams fireplace in the
drawing-room.  You tap the wainscoting of the hall with your umbrella:
“Oak,” you impress upon her, “all oak.”  You draw her attention to the
view: you tell her the local legend.  By fixing her head against the
window-pane she can see the tree on which the man was hanged.  You dwell
upon the sundial; you mention for a second time the Adams fireplace.

“It’s all very nice,” she answers, “but where are the children going to
sleep?”

It is so disheartening.

If it isn’t the children, it’s the water.  She wants water—wants to know
where it comes from.  You show her where it comes from.

“What, out of that nasty place!” she exclaims.

She is equally dissatisfied whether it be drawn from a well, or whether
it be water that has fallen from heaven and been stored in tanks.  She
has no faith in Nature’s water.  A woman never believes that water can be
good that does not come from a water-works.  Her idea appears to be that
the Company makes it fresh every morning from some old family recipe.

If you do succeed in reconciling her to the water, then she feels sure
that the chimneys smoke; they look as if they smoked.  Why—as you tell
her—the chimneys are the best part of the house.  You take her outside
and make her look at them.  They are genuine sixteenth-century chimneys,
with carving on them.  They couldn’t smoke.  They wouldn’t do anything so
inartistic.  She says she only hopes you are right, and suggests cowls,
if they do.

After that she wants to see the kitchen—where’s the kitchen?  You don’t
know where it is.  You didn’t bother about the kitchen.  There must be a
kitchen, of course.  You proceed to search for the kitchen.  When you
find it she is worried because it is the opposite end of the house to the
dining-room.  You point out to her the advantage of being away from the
smell of the cooking.  At that she gets personal: tells you that you are
the first to grumble when the dinner is cold; and in her madness accuses
the whole male sex of being impractical.  The mere sight of an empty
house makes a woman fretful.

Of course the stove is wrong.  The kitchen stove always is wrong.  You
promise she shall have a new one.  Six months later she will want the old
one back again: but it would be cruel to tell her this.  The promise of
that new stove comforts her.  The woman never loses hope that one day it
will come—the all-satisfying kitchen stove, the stove of her girlish
dreams.

The question of the stove settled, you imagine you have silenced all
opposition.  At once she begins to talk about things that nobody but a
woman or a sanitary inspector can talk about without blushing.

It calls for tact, getting a woman into a new house.  She is nervous,
suspicious.

“I am glad, my dear Dick,” I answered; “that you have mentioned
cupboards.  It is with cupboards that I am hoping to lure your mother.
The cupboards, from her point of view, will be the one bright spot; there
are fourteen of them.  I am trusting to cupboards to tide me over many
things.  I shall want you to come with me, Dick.  Whenever your mother
begins a sentence with: ‘But now to be practical, dear,’ I want you to
murmur something about cupboards—not irritatingly as if it had been
prearranged: have a little gumption.”

“Will there be room for a tennis court?” demanded Dick.

“An excellent tennis court already exists,” I informed him.  “I have also
purchased the adjoining paddock.  We shall be able to keep our own cow.
Maybe we’ll breed horses.”

“We might have a croquet lawn,” suggested Robin.

“We might easily have a croquet lawn,” I agreed.  “On a full-sized lawn I
believe Veronica might be taught to play.  There are natures that demand
space.  On a full-sized lawn, protected by a stout iron border, less time
might be wasted exploring the surrounding scenery for Veronica’s lost
ball.”

“No chance of a golf links anywhere in the neighbourhood?” feared Dick.

“I am not so sure,” I answered.  “Barely a mile away there is a pretty
piece of gorse land that appears to be no good to anyone.  I daresay for
a reasonable offer—”

“I say, when will this show be ready?” interrupted Dick.

“I propose beginning the alterations at once,” I explained.  “By luck
there happens to be a gamekeeper’s cottage vacant and within distance.
The agent is going to get me the use of it for a year—a primitive little
place, but charmingly situate on the edge of a wood.  I shall furnish a
couple of rooms; and for part of every week I shall make a point of being
down there, superintending.  I have always been considered good at
superintending.  My poor father used to say it was the only work I seemed
to take an interest in.  By being on the spot to hurry everybody on I
hope to have the ‘show,’ as you term it, ready by the spring.”

“I shall never marry,” said Robin.

“Don’t be so easily discouraged,” advised Dick; “you are still young.”

“I don’t ever want to get married,” continued Robin.  “I should only
quarrel with my husband, if I did.  And Dick will never do anything—not
with his head.”

“Forgive me if I am dull,” I pleaded, “but what is the connection between
this house, your quarrels with your husband if you ever get one, and
Dick’s head?”

By way of explanation, Robin sprang to the ground, and before he could
stop her had flung her arms around Dick’s neck.

“We can’t help it, Dick dear,” she told him.  “Clever parents always have
duffing children.  But we’ll be of some use in the world after all, you
and I.”

The idea was that Dick, when he had finished failing in examinations,
should go out to Canada and start a farm, taking Robin with him.  They
would breed cattle, and gallop over the prairies, and camp out in the
primeval forest, and slide about on snow-shoes, and carry canoes on their
backs, and shoot rapids, and stalk things—so far as I could gather, have
a sort of everlasting Buffalo-Bill’s show all to themselves.  How and
when the farm work was to get itself done was not at all clear.  The
Little Mother and myself were to end our days with them.  We were to sit
about in the sun for a time, and then pass peacefully away.  Robin shed a
few tears at this point, but regained her spirits, thinking of Veronica,
who was to be lured out on a visit and married to some true-hearted
yeoman: which is not at present Veronica’s ambition.  Veronica’s
conviction is that she would look well in a coronet: her own idea is
something in the ducal line.  Robina talked for about ten minutes.  By
the time she had done she had persuaded Dick that life in the backwoods
of Canada had been his dream from infancy.  She is that sort of girl.

I tried talking reason, but talking to Robin when she has got a notion in
her head is like trying to fix a halter on a two-year-old colt.  This
tumble-down, six-roomed cottage was to be the saving of the family.  An
ecstatic look transfigured Robina’s face even as she spoke of it.  You
might have fancied it a shrine.  Robina would do the cooking.  Robina
would rise early and milk the cow, and gather the morning egg.  We would
lead the simple life, learn to fend for ourselves.  It would be so good
for Veronica.  The higher education could wait; let the higher ideals
have a chance.  Veronica would make the beds, dust the rooms.  In the
evening Veronica, her little basket by her side, would sit and sew while
I talked, telling them things, and Robina moved softly to and fro about
her work, the household fairy.  The Little Mother, whenever strong
enough, would come to us.  We would hover round her, tending her with
loving hands.  The English farmer must know something, in spite of all
that is said.  Dick could arrange for lessons in practical farming.  She
did not say it crudely; but hinted that, surrounded by example, even I
might come to take an interest in honest labour, might end by learning to
do something useful.

Robina talked, I should say, for a quarter of an hour.  By the time she
had done, it appeared to me rather a beautiful idea.  Dick’s vacation had
just commenced.  For the next three months there would be nothing else
for him to do but—to employ his own expressive phrase—“rot round.”  In
any event, it would be keeping him out of mischief.  Veronica’s governess
was leaving.  Veronica’s governess generally does leave at the end of
about a year.  I think sometimes of advertising for a lady without a
conscience.  At the end of a year, they explain to me that their
conscience will not allow them to remain longer; they do not feel they
are earning their salary.  It is not that the child is not a dear child,
it is not that she is stupid.  Simply it is—as a German lady to whom Dick
had been giving what he called finishing lessons in English, once put
it—that she does not seem to be “taking any.”  Her mother’s idea is that
it is “sinking in.”  Perhaps if we allowed Veronica to lie fallow for
awhile, something might show itself.  Robina, speaking for herself, held
that a period of quiet usefulness, away from the society of other silly
girls and sillier boys, would result in her becoming a sensible woman.
It is not often that Robina’s yearnings take this direction: to thwart
them, when they did, seemed wrong.

We had some difficulty with the Little Mother.  That these three babies
of hers will ever be men and women capable of running a six-roomed
cottage appears to the Little Mother in the light of a fantastic dream.
I explained to her that I should be there, at all events for two or three
days in every week, to give an eye to things.  Even that did not content
her.  She gave way eventually on Robina’s solemn undertaking that she
should be telegraphed for the first time Veronica coughed.

On Monday we packed a one-horse van with what we deemed essential.  Dick
and Robina rode their bicycles.  Veronica, supported by assorted bedding,
made herself comfortable upon the tailboard.  I followed down by train on
the Wednesday afternoon.




CHAPTER III


IT was the cow that woke me the first morning.  I did not know it was our
cow—not at the time.  I didn’t know we had a cow.  I looked at my watch;
it was half-past two.  I thought maybe she would go to sleep again, but
her idea was that the day had begun.  I went to the window, the moon was
at the full.  She was standing by the gate, her head inside the garden; I
took it her anxiety was lest we might miss any of it.  Her neck was
stretched out straight, her eyes towards the sky; which gave to her the
appearance of a long-eared alligator.  I have never had much to do with
cows.  I don’t know how you talk to them.  I told her to “be quiet,” and
to “lie down”; and made pretence to throw a boot at her.  It seemed to
cheer her, having an audience; she added half a dozen extra notes.  I
never knew before a cow had so much in her.  There is a thing one
sometimes meets with in the suburbs—or one used to; I do not know whether
it is still extant, but when I was a boy it was quite common.  It has a
hurdy-gurdy fixed to its waist and a drum strapped on behind, a row of
pipes hanging from its face, and bells and clappers from most of its
other joints.  It plays them all at once, and smiles.  This cow reminded
me of it—with organ effects added.  She didn’t smile; there was that to
be said in her favour.

I hoped that if I made believe to be asleep she would get discouraged.
So I closed the window ostentatiously, and went back to bed.  But it only
had the effect of putting her on her mettle.  “He did not care for that
last,” I imagined her saying to herself, “I wasn’t at my best.  There
wasn’t feeling enough in it.”  She kept it up for about half an hour, and
then the gate against which, I suppose, she had been leaning, gave way
with a crash.  That frightened her, and I heard her gallop off across the
field.  I was on the point of dozing off again when a pair of pigeons
settled on the window-sill and began to coo.  It is a pretty sound when
you are in the mood for it.  I wrote a poem once—a simple thing, but
instinct with longing—while sitting under a tree and listening to the
cooing of a pigeon.  But that was in the afternoon.  My only longing now
was for a gun.  Three times I got out of bed and “shoo’d” them away.  The
third time I remained by the window till I had got it firmly into their
heads that I really did not want them.  My behaviour on the former two
occasions they had evidently judged to be mere playfulness.  I had just
got back to bed again when an owl began to screech.  That is another
sound I used to think attractive—so weird, so mysterious.  It is
Swinburne, I think, who says that you never get the desired one and the
time and the place all right together.  If the beloved one is with you,
it is the wrong place or at the wrong time; and if the time and the place
happen to be right, then it is the party that is wrong.  The owl was all
right: I like owls.  The place was all right.  He had struck the wrong
time, that was all.  Eleven o’clock at night, when you can’t see him, and
naturally feel that you want to, is the proper time for an owl.  Perched
on the roof of a cow-shed in the early dawn he looks silly.  He clung
there, flapping his wings and screeching at the top of his voice.  What
it was he wanted I am sure I don’t know; and anyhow it didn’t seem the
way to get it.  He came to this conclusion himself at the end of twenty
minutes, and shut himself up and went home.  I thought I was going to
have at last some peace, when a corncrake—a creature upon whom Nature has
bestowed a song like to the tearing of calico-sheets mingled with the
sharpening of saws—settled somewhere in the garden and set to work to
praise its Maker according to its lights.  I have a friend, a poet, who
lives just off the Strand, and spends his evenings at the Garrick Club.
He writes occasional verse for the evening papers, and talks about the
“silent country, drowsy with the weight of languors.”  One of these times
I’ll lure him down for a Saturday to Monday and let him find out what the
country really is—let him hear it.  He is becoming too much of a dreamer:
it will do him good, wake him up a bit.  The corncrake after awhile
stopped quite suddenly with a jerk, and for quite five minutes there was
silence.

“If this continues for another five,” I said to myself, “I’ll be asleep.”
I felt it coming over me.  I had hardly murmured the words when the cow
turned up again.  I should say she had been somewhere and had had a
drink.  She was in better voice than ever.

It occurred to me that this would be an opportunity to make a few notes
on the sunrise.  The literary man is looked to for occasional description
of the sunrise.  The earnest reader who has heard about this sunrise
thirsts for full particulars.  Myself, for purposes of observation, I
have generally chosen December or the early part of January.  But one
never knows.  Maybe one of these days I’ll want a summer sunrise, with
birds and dew-besprinkled flowers: it goes well with the rustic heroine,
the miller’s daughter, or the girl who brings up chickens and has dreams.
I met a brother author once at seven o’clock in the morning in Kensington
Gardens.  He looked half asleep and so disagreeable that I hesitated for
awhile to speak to him: he is a man that as a rule breakfasts at eleven.
But I summoned my courage and accosted him.

“This is early for you,” I said.

“It’s early for anyone but a born fool,” he answered.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.  “Can’t you sleep?”

“Can’t I sleep?” he retorted indignantly.  “Why, I daren’t sit down upon
a seat, I daren’t lean up against a tree.  If I did I’d be asleep in half
a second.”

“What’s the idea?” I persisted.  “Been reading Smiles’s ‘Self Help and
the Secret of Success’?  Don’t be absurd,” I advised him.  “You’ll be
going to Sunday school next and keeping a diary.  You have left it too
late: we don’t reform at forty.  Go home and go to bed.”  I could see he
was doing himself no good.

“I’m going to bed,” he answered, “I’m going to bed for a month when I’ve
finished this confounded novel that I’m on.  Take my advice,” he said—he
laid his hand upon my shoulder—“Never choose a colonial girl for your
heroine.  At our age it is simple madness.”

“She’s a fine girl,” he continued, “and good.  Has a heart of gold.
She’s wearing me to a shadow.  I wanted something fresh and
unconventional.  I didn’t grasp what it was going to do.  She’s the girl
that gets up early in the morning and rides bare-back—the horse, I mean,
of course; don’t be so silly.  Over in New South Wales it didn’t matter.
I threw in the usual local colour—the eucalyptus-tree and the
kangaroo—and let her ride.  It is now that she is over here in London
that I wish I had never thought of her.  She gets up at five and wanders
about the silent city.  That means, of course, that I have to get up at
five in order to record her impressions.  I have walked six miles this
morning.  First to St. Paul’s Cathedral; she likes it when there’s nobody
about.  You’d think it wasn’t big enough for her to see if anybody else
was in the street.  She thinks of it as of a mother watching over her
sleeping children; she’s full of all that sort of thing.  And from there
to Westminster Bridge.  She sits on the parapet and reads Wordsworth,
till the policeman turns her off.  This is another of her favourite
spots.”  He indicated with a look of concentrated disgust the avenue
where we were standing.  “This is where she likes to finish up.  She
comes here to listen to a blackbird.”

“Well, you are through with it now,” I said to console him.  “You’ve done
it; and it’s over.”

“Through with it!” he laughed bitterly.  “I’m just beginning it.  There’s
the entire East End to be done yet: she’s got to meet a fellow there as
big a crank as herself.  And walking isn’t the worst.  She’s going to
have a horse; you can guess what that means.—Hyde Park will be no good to
her.  She’ll find out Richmond and Ham Common.  I’ve got to describe the
scenery and the mad joy of the thing.”

“Can’t you imagine it?” I suggested.

“I’m going to imagine all the enjoyable part of it,” he answered.  “I
must have a groundwork to go upon.  She’s got to have feelings come to
her upon this horse.  You can’t enter into a rider’s feelings when you’ve
almost forgotten which side of the horse you get up.”

I walked with him to the Serpentine.  I had been wondering how it was he
had grown stout so suddenly.  He had a bath towel round him underneath
his coat.

“It’ll give me my death of cold, I know it will,” he chattered while
unlacing his boots.

“Can’t you leave it till the summer-time,” I suggested, “and take her to
Ostend?”

“It wouldn’t be unconventional,” he growled.  “She wouldn’t take an
interest in it.”

“But do they allow ladies to bathe in the Serpentine?” I persisted.

“It won’t be the Serpentine,” he explained.  “It’s going to be the Thames
at Greenwich.  But it must be the same sort of feeling.  She’s got to
tell them all about it during a lunch in Queen’s Gate, and shock them
all.  That’s all she does it for, in my opinion.”

He emerged a mottled blue.  I helped him into his clothes, and he was
fortunate enough to find an early cab.  The book appeared at Christmas.
The critics agreed that the heroine was a delightful creation.  Some of
them said they would like to have known her.

Remembering my poor friend, it occurred to me that by going out now and
making a few notes about the morning, I might be saving myself trouble
later on.  I slipped on a few things—nothing elaborate—put a notebook in
my pocket, opened the door and went down.

Perhaps it would be more correct to say “opened the door and was down.”
It was my own fault, I admit.  We had talked this thing over before going
to bed, and I myself had impressed upon Veronica the need for caution.
The architect of the country cottage does not waste space.  He dispenses
with landings; the bedroom door opens on to the top stair.  It does not
do to walk out of your bedroom, for the reason there is nothing outside
to walk on.  I had said to Veronica, pointing out this fact to her:

“Now don’t, in the morning, come bursting out of the room in your usual
volcanic style, because if you do there will be trouble.  As you
perceive, there is no landing.  The stairs commence at once; they are
steep, and they lead down to a brick floor.  Open the door quietly, look
where you are going, and step carefully.”

Dick had added his advice to mine.  “I did that myself the first
morning,” Dick had said.  “I stepped straight out of the bedroom into the
kitchen; and I can tell you, it hurts.  You be careful, young ’un.  This
cottage doesn’t lend itself to dash.”

Robina had fallen down with a tray in her hand.  She said that never
should she forget the horror of that moment, when, sitting on the kitchen
floor, she had cried to Dick—her own voice sounding to her as if it came
from somewhere quite far off: “Is it broken?  Tell me the truth.  Is it
broken anywhere?” and Dick had replied: “Broken! why, it’s smashed to
atoms.  What did you expect?”  Robina had asked the question with
reference to her head, while Dick had thought she was alluding to the
teapot.  In that moment, had said Robina, her whole life had passed
before her.  She let Veronica feel the bump.

Veronica was disappointed with the bump, having expected something
bigger, but had promised to be careful.  We had all agreed that if in
spite of our warnings she forgot, and came blundering down in the
morning, it would serve her right.  It was thinking of all this that, as
I lay upon the floor, made me feel angry with everybody.  I hate people
who can sleep through noises that wake me up.  Why was I the only person
in the house to be disturbed?  Dick’s room was round the corner; there
was some excuse for him.  But Robina and Veronica’s window looked
straight down upon the cow.  If Robina and Veronica were not a couple of
logs, the cow would have aroused them.  We should have discussed the
matter with the door ajar.  Robina would have said, “Whatever you do, be
careful of the stairs, Pa,” and I should have remembered.  The modern
child appears to me to have no feeling for its parent.

I picked myself up and started for the door.  The cow continued bellowing
steadily.  My whole anxiety was to get to her quickly and to hit her.
But the door took more finding than I could have believed possible.  The
shutters were closed and the whole place was in pitch darkness.  The idea
had been to furnish this cottage only with things that were absolutely
necessary, but the room appeared to me to be overcrowded.  There was a
milking-stool, which is a thing made purposely heavy so that it may not
be easily upset.  If I tumbled over it once I tumbled over it a dozen
times.  I got hold of it at last and carried it about with me.  I thought
I would use it to hit the cow—that is, when I had found the front-door.
I knew it led out of the parlour, but could not recollect its exact
position.  I argued that if I kept along the wall I should be bound to
come to it.  I found the wall, and set off full of hope.  I suppose the
explanation was that, without knowing it, I must have started with the
door, not the front-door, the other door, leading into the kitchen.  I
crept along, carefully feeling my way, and struck quite new things
altogether—things I had no recollection of and that hit me in fresh
places.  I climbed over what I presumed to be a beer-barrel and landed
among bottles; there were dozens upon dozens of them.  To get away from
these bottles I had to leave the wall; but I found it again, as I
thought, and I felt along it for another half a dozen yards or so and
then came again upon bottles: the room appeared to be paved with bottles.
A little farther on I rolled over another beer-barrel: as a matter of
fact it was the same beer-barrel, but I did not know this.  At the time
it seemed to me that Robina had made up her mind to run a public-house.
I found the milking-stool again and started afresh, and before I had gone
a dozen steps was in among bottles again.  Later on, in the broad
daylight, it was easy enough to understand what had happened.  I had been
carefully feeling my way round and round a screen.  I got so sick of
these bottles and so tired of rolling over these everlasting
beer-barrels, that I abandoned the wall and plunged boldly into space.

I had barely started, when, looking up, I saw the sky above me: a star
was twinkling just above my head.  Had I been wide awake, and had the cow
stopped bellowing for just one minute, I should have guessed that somehow
or another I had got into a chimney.  But as things were, the wonder and
the mystery of it all appalled me.  “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
would have appeared to me, at that moment, in the nature of a guide to
travellers.  Had a rocking-horse or a lobster suddenly appeared to me I
should have sat and talked to it; and if it had not answered me I should
have thought it sulky and been hurt.  I took a step forward and the star
disappeared, just as if somebody had blown it out.  I was not surprised
in the least.  I was expecting anything to happen.

I found a door and it opened quite easily.  A wood was in front of me.  I
couldn’t see any cow anywhere, but I still heard her.  It all seemed
quite natural.  I would wander into the wood; most likely I should meet
her there, and she would be smoking a pipe.  In all probability she would
know some poetry.

With the fresh air my senses gradually came back to me, and I began to
understand why it was I could not see the cow.  The reason was that the
house was between us.  By some mysterious process I had been discharged
into the back garden.  I still had the milking-stool in my hand, but the
cow no longer troubled me.  Let her see if she could wake Veronica by
merely bellowing outside the door; it was more than I had ever been able
to do.

I sat down on the stool and opened my note-book.  I headed the page:
“Sunrise in July: observations and emotions,” and I wrote down at once,
lest I should forget it, that towards three o’clock a faint light is
discernible, and added that this light gets stronger as the time goes on.

It sounded footling even to myself, but I had been reading a novel of the
realistic school that had been greatly praised for its actuality.  There
is a demand in some quarters for this class of observation.  I likewise
made a note that the pigeon and the corncrake appear to be among the
earliest of Nature’s children to welcome the coming day; and added that
the screech-owl may be heard, perhaps at its best, by anyone caring to
rise for the purpose, some quarter of an hour before the dawn.  That was
all I could think of just then.  As regards emotions, I did not seem to
have any.

I lit a pipe and waited for the sun.  The sky in front of me was tinged
with a faint pink.  Every moment it flushed a deeper red.  I maintain
that anyone, not an expert, would have said that was the portion of the
horizon on which to keep one’s eye.  I kept my eye upon it, but no sun
appeared.  I lit another pipe.  The sky in front of me was now a blaze of
glory.  I scribbled a few lines, likening the scattered clouds to brides
blushing at the approach of the bridegroom.  That would have been all
right if later on they hadn’t begun to turn green: it seemed the wrong
colour for a bride.  Later on still they went yellow, and that spoilt the
simile past hope.  One cannot wax poetical about a bride who at the
approach of the bridegroom turns first green and then yellow: you can
only feel sorry for her.  I waited some more.  The sky in front of me
grew paler every moment.  I began to fear that something had happened to
that sun.  If I hadn’t known so much astronomy I should have said that he
had changed his mind and had gone back again.  I rose with the idea of
seeing into things.  He had been up apparently for hours: he had got up
at the back of me.  It seemed to be nobody’s fault.  I put my pipe into
my pocket and strolled round to the front.  The cow was still there; she
was pleased to see me, and started bellowing again.

I heard a sound of whistling.  It proceeded from a farmer’s boy.  I
hailed him, and he climbed a gate and came to me across the field.  He
was a cheerful youth.  He nodded to the cow and hoped she had had a good
night: he pronounced it “nihet.”

“You know the cow?” I said.

“Well,” he explained, “we don’t precisely move in the sime set.  Sort o’
business relytionship more like—if you understand me?”

Something about this boy was worrying me.  He did not seem like a real
farmer’s boy.  But then nothing seemed quite real this morning.  My
feeling was to let things go.

“Whose cow is it?” I asked.

He stared at me.

“I want to know to whom it belongs,” I said.  “I want to restore it to
him.”

“Excuse me,” said the boy, “but where do you live?”

He was making me cross.  “Where do I live?” I retorted.  “Why, in this
cottage.  You don’t think I’ve got up early and come from a distance to
listen to this cow?  Don’t talk so much.  Do you know whose cow it is, or
don’t you?”

“It’s your cow,” said the boy.

It was my turn to stare.

“But I haven’t got a cow,” I told him.

“Yus you have,” he persisted; “you’ve got that cow.”

She had stopped bellowing for a moment.  She was not the cow I felt I
could ever take a pride in.  At some time or another, quite recently, she
must have sat down in some mud.

“How did I get her?” I demanded.

“The young lydy,” explained the boy, “she came rahnd to our plice on
Tuesday—”

I began to see light.  “An excitable young lady—talks very fast—never
waits for the answer?”

“With jolly fine eyes,” added the boy approvingly.

“And she ordered a cow?”

“Didn’t seem to ’ave strength enough to live another dy withaht it.”

“Any stipulation made concerning the price of the cow?”

“Any what?”

“The young lady with the eyes—did she think to ask the price of the cow?”

“No sordid details was entered into, so far as I could ’ear,” replied the
boy.

They would not have been—by Robina.

“Any hint let fall as to what the cow was wanted for?”

“The lydy gives us to understand,” said the boy, “that fresh milk was ’er
idea.”

That surprised me: that was thoughtful of Robina.  “And this is the cow?”

“I towed her rahnd last night.  I didn’t knock at the door and tell yer
abaht ’er, cos, to be quite frank with yer, there wasn’t anybody in.”

“What is she bellowing for?” I asked.

“Well,” said the boy, “it’s only a theory, o’ course, but I should sy,
from the look of ’er, that she wanted to be milked.”

“But it started bellowing at half-past two,” I argued.  “It doesn’t
expect to be milked at half-past two, does it?”

“Meself,” said the boy, “I’ve given up looking for sense in cows.”

In some unaccountable way this boy was hypnotising me.  Everything had
suddenly become out of place.

The cow had suddenly become absurd: she ought to have been a milk-can.
The wood struck me as neglected: there ought to have been notice-boards
about, “Keep off the Grass,” “Smoking Strictly Prohibited”: there wasn’t
a seat to be seen.  The cottage had surely got itself there by accident:
where was the street?  The birds were all out of their cages; everything
was upside down.

“Are you a real farmer’s boy?” I asked him.

“O’ course I am,” he answered.  “What do yer tike me for—a hartist in
disguise?”

It came to me.  “What is your name?”

“’Enery—’Enery ’Opkins.”

“Where were you born?”

“Camden Tahn.”

Here was a nice beginning to a rural life!  What place could be the
country while this boy Hopkins was about?  He would have given to the
Garden of Eden the atmosphere of an outlying suburb.

“Do you want to earn an occasional shilling?” I put it to him.

“I’d rather it come reggler,” said Hopkins.  “Better for me kerrickter.”

“You drop that Cockney accent and learn Berkshire, and I’ll give you half
a sovereign when you can talk it,” I promised him.  “Don’t, for instance,
say ‘ain’t,’” I explained to him.  “Say ‘bain’t.’  Don’t say ‘The young
lydy, she came rahnd to our plice;’ say ‘The missy, ’er coomed down; ’er
coomed, and ’er ses to the maister, ’er ses . . . ’  That’s the sort of
thing I want to surround myself with here.  When you informed me that the
cow was mine, you should have said: ‘Whoi, ’er be your cow, surelie ’er
be.’”

“Sure it’s Berkshire?” demanded Hopkins.  “You’re confident about it?”
There is a type that is by nature suspicious.

“It may not be Berkshire pure and undefiled,” I admitted.  “It is what in
literature we term ‘dialect.’  It does for most places outside the
twelve-mile radius.  The object is to convey a feeling of rustic
simplicity.  Anyhow, it isn’t Camden Town.”

I started him with a shilling then and there to encourage him.  He
promised to come round in the evening for one or two books, written by
friends of mine, that I reckoned would be of help to him; and I returned
to the cottage and set to work to rouse Robina.  Her tone was apologetic.
She had got the notion into her head that I had been calling her for
quite a long time.  I explained that this was not the case.

“How funny!” she answered.  “I said to Veronica more than an hour ago:
‘I’m sure that’s Pa calling us.’  I suppose I must have been dreaming.”

“Well, don’t dream any more,” I suggested.  “Come down and see to this
confounded cow of yours.”

“Oh,” said Veronica, “has it come?”

“It has come,” I told her.  “As a matter of fact, it has been here some
time.  It ought to have been milked four hours ago, according to its own
idea.”

Robina said she would be down in a minute.

She was down in twenty-five, which was sooner than I had expected.  She
brought Veronica with her.  She said she would have been down sooner if
she had not waited for Veronica.  It appeared that this was just
precisely what Veronica had been telling her.  I was feeling irritable.
I had been up half a day, and hadn’t had my breakfast.

“Don’t stand there arguing,” I told them.  “For goodness’ sake let’s get
to work and milk this cow.  We shall have the poor creature dying on our
hands if we’re not careful.”

Robina was wandering round the room.

“You haven’t come across a milking-stool anywhere, have you, Pa?” asked
Robina.

“I have come across your milking-stool, I estimate, some thirteen times,”
I told her.  I fetched it from where I had left it, and gave it to her;
and we filed out in procession; Veronica with a galvanised iron bucket
bringing up the rear.

The problem that was forcing itself upon my mind was: did Robina know how
to milk a cow?  Robina, I argued, the idea once in her mind, would
immediately have ordered a cow, clamouring for it—as Hopkins had
picturesquely expressed it—as though she had not strength to live another
day without a cow.  Her next proceeding would have been to buy a
milking-stool.  It was a tasteful milking-stool, this one she had
selected, ornamented with the rough drawing of a cow in poker work: a
little too solid for my taste, but one that I should say would wear well.
The pail she had not as yet had time to see about.  This galvanised
bucket we were using was, I took it, a temporary makeshift.  When Robina
had leisure she would go into the town and purchase something at an art
stores.  That, to complete the scheme, she would have done well to have
taken a few practical lessons in milking would come to her, as an
inspiration, with the arrival of the cow.  I noticed that Robina’s steps
as we approached the cow were less elastic.  Just outside the cow Robina
halted.

“I suppose,” said Robina, “there’s only one way of milking a cow?”

“There may be fancy ways,” I answered, “necessary to you if later on you
think of entering a competition.  This morning, seeing we are late, I
shouldn’t worry too much about style.  If I were you, this morning I
should adopt the ordinary unimaginative method, and aim only at results.”

Robina sat down and placed her bucket underneath the cow.

“I suppose,” said Robina, “it doesn’t matter which—which one I begin
with?”

It was perfectly plain she hadn’t the least notion how to milk a cow.  I
told her so, adding comments.  Now and then a little fatherly talk does
good.  As a rule I have to work myself up for these occasions.  This
morning I was feeling fairly fit: things had conspired to this end.  I
put before Robina the aims and privileges of the household fairy as they
appeared, not to her, but to me.  I also confided to Veronica the result
of many weeks’ reflections concerning her and her behaviour.  I also told
them both what I thought about Dick.  I do this sort of thing once every
six months: it has an excellent effect for about three days.

Robina wiped away her tears, and seized the first one that came to her
hand.  The cow, without saying a word, kicked over the empty bucket, and
walked away, disgust expressed in every hair of her body.  Robina, crying
quietly, followed her.  By patting her on her neck, and letting her wipe
her nose upon my coat—which seemed to comfort her—I persuaded her to keep
still while Robina worked for ten minutes at high pressure.  The result
was about a glassful and a half, the cow’s capacity, to all appearance,
being by this time some five or six gallons.

Robina broke down, and acknowledged she had been a wicked girl.  If the
cow died, so she said, she should never forgive herself.  Veronica at
this burst into tears also; and the cow, whether moved afresh by her own
troubles or by theirs, commenced again to bellow.  I was fortunately able
to find an elderly labourer smoking a pipe and eating bacon underneath a
tree; and with him I bargained that for a shilling a day he should milk
the cow till further notice.

We left him busy, and returned to the cottage.  Dick met us at the door
with a cheery “Good morning.”  He wanted to know if we had heard the
storm.  He also wanted to know when breakfast would be ready.  Robina
thought that happy event would be shortly after he had boiled the kettle
and made the tea and fried the bacon, while Veronica was laying the
table.

“But I thought—”

Robina said that if he dared to mention the word “household-fairy” she
would box his ears, and go straight up to bed, and leave everybody to do
everything.  She said she meant it.

Dick has one virtue: it is philosophy.  “Come on, young ’un,” said Dick
to Veronica.  “Trouble is good for us all.”

“Some of us,” said Veronica, “it makes bitter.”

We sat down to breakfast at eight-thirty.




CHAPTER IV


OUR architect arrived on Friday afternoon, or rather, his assistant.

I felt from the first I was going to like him.  He is shy, and that, of
course, makes him appear awkward.  But, as I explained to Robina, it is
the shy young men who, generally speaking, turn out best: few men could
have been more painfully shy up to twenty-five than myself.

Robina said that was different: in the case of an author it did not
matter.  Robina’s attitude towards the literary profession would not
annoy me so much were it not typical.  To be a literary man is, in
Robina’s opinion, to be a licensed idiot.  It was only a week or two ago
that I overheard from my study window a conversation between Veronica and
Robina upon this very point.  Veronica’s eye had caught something lying
on the grass.  I could not myself see what it was, in consequence of an
intervening laurel bush.  Veronica stooped down and examined it with
care.  The next instant, uttering a piercing whoop, she leapt into the
air; then, clapping her hands, began to dance.  Her face was radiant with
a holy joy.  Robina, passing near, stopped and demanded explanation.

“Pa’s tennis racket!” shouted Veronica—Veronica never sees the use of
talking in an ordinary tone of voice when shouting will do just as well.
She continued clapping her hands and taking little bounds into the air.

“Well, what are you going on like that for?” asked Robina.  “It hasn’t
bit you, has it?”

“It’s been out all night in the wet,” shouted Veronica.  “He forgot to
bring it in.”

“You wicked child!” said Robina severely.  “It’s nothing to be pleased
about.”

“Yes, it is,” explained Veronica.  “I thought at first it was mine.  Oh,
wouldn’t there have been a talk about it, if it had been!  Oh my!
wouldn’t there have been a row!”  She settled down to a steady rhythmic
dance, suggestive of a Greek chorus expressing satisfaction with the
gods.

Robina seized her by the shoulders and shook her back into herself.  “If
it had been yours,” said Robina, “you would deserve to have been sent to
bed.”

“Well, then, why don’t he go to bed?” argued Veronica.

Robina took her by the arm and walked her up and down just underneath my
window.  I listened, because the conversation interested me.

“Pa, as I am always explaining to you,” said Robina, “is a literary man.
He cannot help forgetting things.”

“Well, I can’t help forgetting things,” insisted Veronica.

“You find it hard,” explained Robina kindly; “but if you keep on trying
you will succeed.  You will get more thoughtful.  I used to be forgetful
and do foolish things once, when I was a little girl.”

“Good thing for us if we was all literary,” suggested Veronica.

“If we ‘were’ all literary,” Robina corrected her.  “But you see we are
not.  You and I and Dick, we are just ordinary mortals.  We must try and
think, and be sensible.  In the same way, when Pa gets excited and
raves—I mean, seems to rave—it’s the literary temperament.  He can’t help
it.”

“Can’t you help doing anything when you are literary?” asked Veronica.

“There’s a good deal you can’t help,” answered Robina.  “It isn’t fair to
judge them by the ordinary standard.”

They drifted towards the kitchen garden—it was the time of
strawberries—and the remainder of the talk I lost.  I noticed that for
some days afterwards Veronica displayed a tendency to shutting herself up
in the schoolroom with a copybook, and that lead pencils had a way of
disappearing from my desk.  One in particular that had suited me I
determined if possible to recover.  A subtle instinct guided me to
Veronica’s sanctum.  I found her thoughtfully sucking it.  She explained
to me that she was writing a little play.

“You get things from your father, don’t you?” she enquired of me.

“You do,” I admitted; “but you ought not to take them without asking.  I
am always telling you of it.  That pencil is the only one I can write
with.”

“I didn’t mean the pencil,” explained Veronica.  “I was wondering if I
had got your literary temper.”

It is puzzling, when you come to think of it, this estimate accorded by
the general public to the _littérateur_.  It stands to reason that the
man who writes books, explaining everything and putting everybody right,
must be himself an exceptionally clever man; else how could he do it!
The thing is pure logic.  Yet to listen to Robina and her like you might
think we had not sense enough to run ourselves, as the saying is—let
alone running the universe.  If I would let her, Robina would sit and
give me information by the hour.

“The ordinary girl . . . ” Robina will begin, with the air of a
University Extension Lecturer.

It is so exasperating.  As if I did not know all there is to be known
about girls!  Why, it is my business.  I point this out to Robina.

“Yes, I know,” Robina will answer sweetly.  “But I was meaning the real
girl.”

It would make not the slightest difference were I even quite a high-class
literary man—Robina thinks I am: she is a dear child.  Were I Shakespeare
himself, and could I in consequence say to her: “Methinks, child, the
creator of Ophelia and Juliet, and Rosamund and Beatrice, must surely
know something about girls,” Robina would still make answer:

“Of course, Pa dear.  Everybody knows how clever you are.  But I was
thinking for the moment of real girls.”

I wonder to myself sometimes, Is literature to the general reader ever
anything more than a fairy-tale?  We write with our heart’s blood, as we
put it.  We ask our conscience, Is it right thus to lay bare the secrets
of our souls?  The general reader does not grasp that we are writing with
our heart’s blood: to him it is just ink.  He does not believe we are
laying bare the secrets of our souls: he takes it we are just pretending.
“Once upon a time there lived a girl named Angelina who loved a party by
the name of Edwin.”  He imagines—he, the general reader—when we tell him
all the wonderful thoughts that were inside Angelina, that it was we who
put them there.  He does not know, he will not try to understand, that
Angelina is in reality more real than is Miss Jones, who rides up every
morning in the ’bus with him, and has a pretty knack of rendering
conversation about the weather novel and suggestive.  As a boy I won some
popularity among my schoolmates as a teller of stories.  One afternoon,
to a small collection with whom I was homing across Regent’s Park, I told
the story of a beautiful Princess.  But she was not the ordinary
Princess.  She would not behave as a Princess should.  I could not help
it.  The others heard only my voice, but I was listening to the wind.
She thought she loved the Prince—until he had wounded the Dragon unto
death and had carried her away into the wood.  Then, while the Prince lay
sleeping, she heard the Dragon calling to her in its pain, and crept back
to where it lay bleeding, and put her arms about its scaly neck and
kissed it; and that healed it.  I was hoping myself that at this point it
would turn into a prince itself, but it didn’t; it just remained a
dragon—so the wind said.  Yet the Princess loved it: it wasn’t half a bad
dragon, when you knew it.  I could not tell them what became of the
Prince: the wind didn’t seem to care a hang about the Prince.

Myself, I liked the story, but Hocker, who was a Fifth Form boy, voicing
our little public, said it was rot, so far, and that I had got to hurry
up and finish things rightly.

“But that is all,” I told them.

“No, it isn’t,” said Hocker.  “She’s got to marry the Prince in the end.
He’ll have to kill the Dragon again; and mind he does it properly this
time.  Whoever heard of a Princess leaving a Prince for a Dragon!”

“But she wasn’t the ordinary sort of Princess,” I argued.

“Then she’s got to be,” criticised Hocker.  “Don’t you give yourself so
many airs.  You make her marry the Prince, and be slippy about it.  I’ve
got to catch the four-fifteen from Chalk Farm station.”

“But she didn’t,” I persisted obstinately.  “She married the Dragon and
lived happy ever afterwards.”

Hocker adopted sterner measures.  He seized my arm and twisted it behind
me.

“She married who?” demanded Hocker: grammar was not Hocker’s strong
point.

“The Dragon,” I growled.

“She married who?” repeated Hocker.

“The Dragon,” I whined.

“She married who?” for the third time urged Hocker.

Hocker was strong, and the tears were forcing themselves into my eyes in
spite of me.  So the Princess in return for healing the Dragon made it
promise to reform.  It went back with her to the Prince, and made itself
generally useful to both of them for the rest of the tour.  And the
Prince took the Princess home with him and married her; and the Dragon
died and was buried.  The others liked the story better, but I hated it;
and the wind sighed and died away.

The little crowd becomes the reading public, and Hocker grows into an
editor; he twists my arm in other ways.  Some are brave, so the crowd
kicks them and scurries off to catch the four-fifteen.  But most of us, I
fear, are slaves to Hocker.  Then, after awhile, the wind grows sulky and
will not tell us stories any more, and we have to make them up out of our
own heads.  Perhaps it is just as well.  What were doors and windows made
for but to keep out the wind.

He is a dangerous fellow, this wandering Wind; he leads me astray.  I was
talking about our architect.

He made a bad start, so far as Robina was concerned, by coming in at the
back-door.  Robina, in a big apron, was washing up.  He apologised for
having blundered into the kitchen, and offered to go out again and work
round to the front.  Robina replied, with unnecessary severity as I
thought, that an architect, if anyone, might have known the difference
between the right side of a house and the wrong; but presumed that youth
and inexperience could always be pleaded as excuse for stupidity.  I
cannot myself see why Robina should have been so much annoyed.  Labour,
as Robina had been explaining to Veronica only a few hours before, exalts
a woman.  In olden days, ladies—the highest in the land—were proud, not
ashamed, of their ability to perform domestic duties.  This, later on, I
pointed out to Robina.  Her answer was that in olden days you didn’t have
chits of boys going about, calling themselves architects, and opening
back-doors without knocking; or if they did knock, knocking so that
nobody on earth could hear them.

Robina wiped her hands on the towel behind the door, and brought him into
the front-room, where she announced him, coldly, as “The young man from
the architect’s office.”  He explained—but quite modestly—that he was not
exactly Messrs. Spreight’s young man, but an architect himself, a junior
member of the firm.  To make it clear he produced his card, which was
that of Mr. Archibald T. Bute, F.R.I.B.A.  Practically speaking, all this
was unnecessary.  Through the open door I had, of course, heard every
word; and old Spreight had told me of his intention to send me one of his
most promising assistants, who would be able to devote himself entirely
to my work.  I put matters right by introducing him formally to Robina.
They bowed to one another rather stiffly.  Robina said that if he would
excuse her she would return to her work; and he answered “Charmed,” and
also that he didn’t mean it.  As I have tried to get it into Robina’s
head, the young fellow was confused.  He had meant—it was
self-evident—that he was charmed at being introduced to her, not at her
desire to return to the kitchen.  But Robina appears to have taken a
dislike to him.

I gave him a cigar, and we started for the house.  It lies just a mile
from this cottage, the other side of the wood.  One excellent trait in
him I soon discovered—he is intelligent without knowing everything.

I confess it to my shame, but the young man who knows everything has come
to pall upon me.  According to Emerson, this is a proof of my own
intellectual feebleness.  The strong man, intellectually, cultivates the
society of his superiors.  He wants to get on, he wants to learn things.
If I loved knowledge as one should, I would have no one but young men
about me.  There was a friend of Dick’s, a gentleman from Rugby.  At one
time he had hopes of me; I felt he had.  But he was too impatient.  He
tried to bring me on too quickly.  You must take into consideration
natural capacity.  After listening to him for an hour or two my mind
would wander.  I could not help it.  The careless laughter of uninformed
middle-aged gentlemen and ladies would creep to me from the croquet lawn
or from the billiard-room.  I longed to be among them.  Sometimes I would
battle with my lower nature.  What did they know?  What could they tell
me?  More often I would succumb.  There were occasions when I used to get
up and go away from him, quite suddenly.

I talked with young Bute during our walk about domestic architecture in
general.  He said he should describe the present tendency in domestic
architecture as towards corners.  The desire of the British public was to
go into a corner and live.  A lady for whose husband his firm had lately
built a house in Surrey had propounded to him a problem in connection
with this point.  She agreed it was a charming house; no house in Surrey
had more corners, and that was saying much.  But she could not see how
for the future she was going to bring up her children.  She was a
humanely minded lady.  Hitherto she had punished them, when needful, by
putting them in the corner; the shame of it had always exercised upon
them a salutary effect.  But in the new house corners are reckoned the
prime parts of every room.  It is the honoured guest who is sent into the
corner.  The father has a corner sacred to himself, with high up above
his head a complicated cupboard, wherein with the help of a step-ladder,
he may keep his pipes and his tobacco, and thus by slow degrees cure
himself of the habit of smoking.  The mother likewise has her corner,
where stands her spinning-wheel, in case the idea comes to her to weave
sheets and underclothing.  It also has a book-shelf supporting thirteen
volumes, arranged in a sloping position to look natural; the last one
maintained at its angle of forty-five degrees by a ginger-jar in old blue
Nankin.  You are not supposed to touch them, because that would
disarrange them.  Besides which, fooling about, you might upset the
ginger-jar.  The consequence of all this is the corner is no longer
disgraceful.  The parent can no more say to the erring child:

“You wicked boy!  Go into the cosy corner this very minute!”

In the house of the future the place of punishment will have to be the
middle of the room.  The angry mother will exclaim:

“Don’t you answer me, you saucy minx!  You go straight into the middle of
the room, and don’t you dare to come out of it till I tell you!”

The difficulty with the artistic house is finding the right people to put
into it.  In the picture the artistic room never has anybody in it.
There is a strip of art embroidery upon the table, together with a bowl
of roses.  Upon the ancient high-backed settee lies an item of fancy
work, unfinished—just as she left it.  In the “study” an open book, face
downwards, has been left on a chair.  It is the last book he was
reading—it has never been disturbed.  A pipe of quaint design is cold
upon the lintel of the lattice window.  No one will ever smoke that pipe
again: it must have been difficult to smoke at any time.  The sight of
the artistic room, as depicted in the furniture catalogue, always brings
tears to my eyes.  People once inhabited these rooms, read there those
old volumes bound in vellum, smoked—or tried to smoke—these impracticable
pipes; white hands, that someone maybe had loved to kiss, once fluttered
among the folds of these unfinished antimacassars, or Berlin wool-work
slippers, and went away, leaving the things about.

One takes it that the people who once occupied these artistic rooms are
now all dead.  This was their “Dining-Room.”  They sat on those artistic
chairs.  They could hardly have used the dinner service set out upon the
Elizabethan dresser, because that would have left the dresser bare: one
assumes they had an extra service for use, or else that they took their
meals in the kitchen.  The “Entrance Hall” is a singularly chaste
apartment.  There is no necessity for a door-mat: people with muddy
boots, it is to be presumed, were sent round to the back.  A
riding-cloak, the relic apparently of a highwayman, hangs behind the
door.  It is the sort of cloak you would expect to find there—a
decorative cloak.  An umbrella or a waterproof cape would be fatal to the
whole effect.

Now and again the illustrator of the artistic room will permit a young
girl to come and sit there.  But she has to be a very carefully selected
girl.  To begin with, she has got to look and dress as though she had
been born at least three hundred years ago.  She has got to have that
sort of clothes, and she has got to have her hair done just that way.

She has got to look sad; a cheerful girl in the artistic room would jar
one’s artistic sense.  One imagines the artist consulting with the proud
possessor of the house.

“You haven’t got such a thing as a miserable daughter, have you?  Some
fairly good-looking girl who has been crossed in love, or is
misunderstood.  Because if so, you might dress her up in something out of
the local museum and send her along.  A little thing like that gives
verisimilitude to a design.”

She must not touch anything.  All she may do is to read a book—not really
read it, that would suggest too much life and movement: she sits with the
book in her lap and gazes into the fire, if it happens to be the
dining-room: or out of the window if it happens to be a morning-room, and
the architect wishes to call attention to the window-seat.  Nothing of
the male species, as far as I have been able to ascertain, has ever
entered these rooms.  I once thought I had found a man who had been
allowed into his own “Smoking-Den,” but on closer examination it turned
out he was only a portrait.

Sometimes one is given “Vistas.”  Doors stand open, and you can see right
away through “The Nook” into the garden.  There is never a living soul
about the place.  The whole family has been sent out for a walk or locked
up in the cellars.  This strikes you as odd until you come to think the
matter out.  The modern man and woman is not artistic.  I am not
artistic—not what I call really artistic.  I don’t go well with Gobelin
tapestry and warming-pans.  I feel I don’t.  Robina is not artistic, not
in that sense.  I tried her once with a harpsichord I picked up cheap in
Wardour Street, and a reproduction of a Roman stool.  The thing was an
utter failure.  A cottage piano, with a photo-frame and a fern upon, it
is what the soul cries out for in connection with Robina.  Dick is not
artistic.  Dick does not go with peacocks’ feathers and guitars.  I can
see Dick with a single peacock’s feather at St. Giles’s Fair, when the
bulldogs are not looking; but the decorative panel of peacock’s feathers
is too much for him.  I can imagine him with a banjo—but a guitar
decorated with pink ribbons!  To begin with he is not dressed for it.
Unless a family be prepared to make themselves up as troubadours or
cavaliers and to talk blank verse, I don’t see how they can expect to be
happy living in these fifteenth-century houses.  The modern family—the
old man in baggy trousers and a frock-coat he could not button if he
tried to; the mother of figure distinctly Victorian; the boys in flannel
suits and collars up to their ears; the girls in motor caps—are as
incongruous in these mediæval dwellings as a party of Cook’s tourists
drinking bottled beer in the streets of Pompeii.

The designer of “The Artistic Home” is right in keeping to still life.
In the artistic home—to paraphrase Dr. Watts—every prospect pleases and
only man is inartistic.  In the picture, the artistic bedroom, “in apple
green, the bedstead of cherry-wood, with a touch of turkey-red throughout
the draperies,” is charming.  It need hardly be said the bed is empty.
Put a man or woman in that cherry-wood bed—I don’t care how artistic they
may think themselves—the charm would be gone.  The really artistic party,
one supposes, has a little room behind, where he sleeps and dresses
himself.  He peeps in at the door of this artistic bedroom, maybe
occasionally enters to change the roses.

Imagine the artistic nursery five minutes after the real child had been
let loose in it.  I know a lady who once spent hundreds of pounds on an
artistic nursery.  She showed it to her friends with pride.  The children
were allowed in there on Sunday afternoons.  I did an equally silly thing
myself not long ago.  Lured by a furniture catalogue, I started Robina in
a boudoir.  I gave it to her as a birthday-present.  We have both
regretted it ever since.  Robina reckons she could have had a bicycle, a
diamond bracelet, and a mandoline, and I should have saved money.  I did
the thing well.  I told the furniture people I wanted it just as it stood
in the picture: “Design for bedroom and boudoir combined, suitable for
young girl, in teak, with sparrow blue hangings.”  We had everything: the
antique fire arrangements that a vestal virgin might possibly have
understood; the candlesticks, that were pictures in themselves, until we
tried to put candles in them; the book-case and writing-desk combined,
that wasn’t big enough to write on, and out of which it was impossible to
get a book until you had abandoned the idea of writing and had closed the
cover; the enclosed washstand, that shut down and looked like an old
bureau, with the inevitable bowl of flowers upon it that had to be taken
off and put on the floor whenever you wanted to use the thing as a
washstand; the toilet-table, with its cunning little glass, just big
enough to see your nose in; the bedstead, hidden away behind the
“thinking corner,” where the girl couldn’t get at it to make it.  A
prettier room you could not have imagined, till Robina started sleeping
in it.  I think she tried.  Girl friends of hers, to whom she had bragged
about it, would drop in and ask to be allowed to see it.  Robina would
say, “Wait a minute,” and would run up and slam the door; and we would
hear her for the next half-hour or so rushing round opening and shutting
drawers and dragging things about.  By the time it was a boudoir again
she was exhausted and irritable.  She wants now to give it up to
Veronica, but Veronica objects to the position, which is between the
bathroom and my study.  Her idea is a room more removed, where she would
be able to shut herself in and do her work, as she explains, without fear
of interruption.

Young Bute told me that a friend of his, a well-to-do young fellow, who
lived in Piccadilly, had had the whim to make his flat the reproduction
of a Roman villa.  There were of course no fires, the rooms were warmed
by hot air from the kitchen.  They had a cheerless aspect on a November
afternoon, and nobody knew exactly where to sit.  Light was obtained in
the evening from Grecian lamps, which made it easy to understand why the
ancient Athenians, as a rule, went to bed early.  You dined sprawling on
a couch.  This was no doubt practicable when you took your plate into
your hand and fed yourself with your fingers; but with a knife and fork
the meal had all the advantages of a hot picnic.  You did not feel
luxurious or even wicked: you only felt nervous about your clothes.  The
thing lacked completeness.  He could not expect his friends to come to
him in Roman togas, and even his own man declined firmly to wear the
costume of a Roman slave.  The compromise was unsatisfactory, even from
the purely pictorial point of view.  You cannot be a Roman patrician of
the time of Antoninus when you happen to live in Piccadilly at the
opening of the twentieth century.  All you can do is to make your friends
uncomfortable and spoil their dinner for them.  Young Bute said that, so
far as he was concerned, he would always rather have spent the evening
with his little nephews and nieces, playing at horses; it seemed to him a
more sensible game.

Young Bute said that, speaking as an architect, he of course admired the
ancient masterpieces of his art.  He admired the Erechtheum at Athens;
but Spurgeon’s Tabernacle in the Old Kent Road built upon the same model
would have irritated him.  For a Grecian temple you wanted Grecian skies
and Grecian girls.  He said that, even as it was, Westminster Abbey in
the season was an eyesore to him.  The Dean and Choir in their white
surplices passed muster, but the congregation in its black frock-coats
and Paris hats gave him the same sense of incongruity as would a banquet
of barefooted friars in the dining-hall of the Cannon Street Hotel.

It struck me there was sense in what he said.  I decided not to mention
my idea of carving 1553 above the front-door.

He said he could not understand this passion of the modern house-builder
for playing at being a Crusader or a Canterbury Pilgrim.  A retired
Berlin boot-maker of his acquaintance had built himself a miniature Roman
Castle near Heidelberg.  They played billiards in the dungeon, and let
off fireworks on the Kaiser’s birthday from the roof of the watch-tower.

Another acquaintance of his, a draper at Holloway, had built himself a
moated grange.  The moat was supplied from the water-works under special
arrangement, and all the electric lights were imitation candles.  He had
done the thing thoroughly.  He had even designed a haunted chamber in
blue, and a miniature chapel, which he used as a telephone closet.  Young
Bute had been invited down there for the shooting in the autumn.  He said
he could not be sure whether he was doing right or wrong, but his
intention was to provide himself with a bow and arrows.

A change was coming over this young man.  We had talked on other subjects
and he had been shy and deferential.  On this matter of bricks and mortar
he spoke as one explaining things.

I ventured to say a few words in favour of the Tudor house.  The Tudor
house, he argued, was a fit and proper residence for the Tudor
citizen—for the man whose wife rode behind him on a pack-saddle, who
conducted his correspondence by the help of a moss-trooper.  The Tudor
fireplace was designed for folks to whom coal was unknown, and who left
their smoking to their chimneys.  A house that looked ridiculous with a
motor-car before the door, where the electric bell jarred upon one’s
sense of fitness every time one heard it, was out of date, he maintained.

“For you, sir,” he continued, “a twentieth-century writer, to build
yourself a Tudor House would be as absurd as for Ben Jonson to have
planned himself a Norman Castle with a torture-chamber underneath the
wine-cellar, and the fireplace in the middle of the dining-hall.  His
fellow cronies of the Mermaid would have thought him stark, staring mad.”

There was reason in what he was saying.  I decided not to mention my idea
of altering the chimneys and fixing up imitation gables, especially as
young Bute seemed pleased with the house, which by this time we had
reached.

“Now, that is a good house,” said young Bute.  “That is a house where a
man in a frock-coat and trousers can sit down and not feel himself a
stranger from another age.  It was built for a man who wore a frock-coat
and trousers—on weekdays, maybe, gaiters and a shooting-coat.  You can
enjoy a game of billiards in that house without the feeling that comes to
you when playing tennis in the shadow of the Pyramids.”

We entered, and I put before him my notions—such of them as I felt he
would approve.  We were some time about the business, and when we looked
at our watches young Bute’s last train to town had gone.  There still
remained much to talk about, and I suggested he should return with me to
the cottage and take his luck.  I could sleep with Dick and he could have
my room.  I told him about the cow, but he said he was a practised
sleeper and would be delighted, if I could lend him a night-shirt, and if
I thought Miss Robina would not be put out.  I assured him that it would
be a good thing for Robina; the unexpected guest would be a useful lesson
to her in housekeeping.  Besides, as I pointed out to him, it didn’t
really matter even if Robina were put out.

“Not to you, sir, perhaps,” he answered, with a smile.  “It is not with
you that she will be indignant.”

“That will be all right, my boy,” I told him; “I take all
responsibility.”

“And I shall get all the blame,” he laughed.

But, as I pointed out to him, it really didn’t matter whom Robina blamed.
We talked about women generally on our way back.  I told him—impressing
upon him there was no need for it to go farther—that I personally had
come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with women was to treat
them all as children.  He agreed it might be a good method, but wanted to
know what you did when they treated you as a child.

I know a most delightful couple: they have been married nearly twenty
years, and both will assure you that an angry word has never passed
between them.  He calls her his “Little One,” although she must be quite
six inches taller than himself, and is never tired of patting her hand or
pinching her ear.  They asked her once in the drawing-room—so the Little
Mother tells me—her recipe for domestic bliss.  She said the mistake most
women made was taking men too seriously.

“They are just overgrown children, that’s all they are, poor dears,” she
laughed.

There are two kinds of love: there is the love that kneels and looks
upward, and the love that looks down and pats.  For durability I am
prepared to back the latter.

The architect had died out of young Bute; he was again a shy young man
during our walk back to the cottage.  My hand was on the latch when he
stayed me.

“Isn’t this the back-door again, sir?” he enquired.

It was the back-door; I had not noticed it.

“Hadn’t we better go round to the front, sir, don’t you think?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter—” I began.

But he had disappeared.  So I followed him, and we entered by the front.
Robina was standing by the table, peeling potatoes.

“I have brought Mr. Bute back with me,” I explained.  “He is going to
stop the night.”

Robina said: “If ever I go to live in a cottage again it will have one
door.”  She took her potatoes with her and went upstairs.

“I do hope she isn’t put out,” said young Bute.

“Don’t worry yourself,” I comforted him.  “Of course she isn’t put out.
Besides, I don’t care if she is.  She’s got to get used to being put out;
it’s part of the lesson of life.”

I took him upstairs, meaning to show him his bedroom and take my own
things out of it.  The doors of the two bedrooms were opposite one
another.  I made a mistake and opened the wrong door.  Robina, still
peeling potatoes, was sitting on the bed.

I explained we had made a mistake.  Robina said it was of no consequence
whatever, and, taking the potatoes with her, went downstairs again.
Looking out of the window, I saw her making towards the wood.  She was
taking the potatoes with her.

“I do wish we hadn’t opened the door of the wrong room,” groaned young
Bute.

“What a worrying chap you are!” I said to him.  “Look at the thing from
the humorous point of view.  It’s funny when you come to think of it.
Wherever the poor girl goes, trying to peel her potatoes in peace and
quietness, we burst in upon her.  What we ought to do now is to take a
walk in the wood.  It is a pretty wood.  We might say we had come to pick
wild flowers.”

But I could not persuade him.  He said he had letters to write, and, if I
would allow him, would remain in his room till dinner was ready.

Dick and Veronica came in a little later.  Dick had been to see Mr. St.
Leonard to arrange about lessons in farming.  He said he thought I should
like the old man, who wasn’t a bit like a farmer.  He had brought
Veronica back in one of her good moods, she having met there and fallen
in love with a donkey.  Dick confided to me that, without committing
himself, he had hinted to Veronica that if she would remain good for
quite a long while I might be induced to buy it for her.  It was a sturdy
little animal, and could be made useful.  Anyhow, it would give Veronica
an object in life—something to strive for—which was just what she wanted.
He is a thoughtful lad at times, is Dick.

The dinner was more successful than I had hoped for.  Robina gave us
melon as a _hors d’œuvre_, followed by sardines and a fowl, with potatoes
and vegetable marrow.  Her cooking surprised me.  I had warned young Bute
that it might be necessary to regard this dinner rather as a joke than as
an evening meal, and was prepared myself to extract amusement from it
rather than nourishment.  My disappointment was agreeable.  One can
always imagine a comic dinner.

I dined once with a newly married couple who had just returned from their
honeymoon.  We ought to have sat down at eight o’clock; we sat down
instead at half-past ten.  The cook had started drinking in the morning;
by seven o’clock she was speechless.  The wife, giving up hope at a
quarter to eight, had cooked the dinner herself.  The other guests were
sympathised with, but all I got was congratulation.

“He’ll write something so funny about this dinner,” they said.

You might have thought the cook had got drunk on purpose to oblige me.  I
have never been able to write anything funny about that dinner; it
depresses me to this day, merely thinking of it.

We finished up with a cold trifle and some excellent coffee that Robina
brewed over a lamp on the table while Dick and Veronica cleared away.  It
was one of the jolliest little dinners I have ever eaten; and, if
Robina’s figures are to be trusted, cost exactly six-and-fourpence for
the five of us.  There being no servants about, we talked freely and
enjoyed ourselves.  I began once at a dinner to tell a good story about a
Scotchman, when my host silenced me with a look.  He is a kindly man, and
had heard the story before.  He explained to me afterwards, over the
walnuts, that his parlourmaid was Scotch and rather touchy.  The talk
fell into the discussion of Home Rule, and again our host silenced us.
It seemed his butler was an Irishman and a violent Parnellite.  Some
people can talk as though servants were mere machines, but to me they are
human beings, and their presence hampers me.  I know my guests have not
heard the story before, and from one’s own flesh and blood one expects a
certain amount of sacrifice.  But I feel so sorry for the housemaid who
is waiting; she must have heard it a dozen times.  I really cannot
inflict it upon her again.

After dinner we pushed the table into a corner, and Dick extracted a sort
of waltz from Robina’s mandoline.  It is years since I danced; but
Veronica said she would rather dance with me any day than with some of
the “lumps” you were given to drag round by the dancing-mistress.  I have
half a mind to take it up again.  After all, a man is only as old as he
feels.

Young Bute, it turned out, was a capital dancer, and could even reverse,
which in a room fourteen feet square is of advantage.  Robina confided to
me after he was gone that while he was dancing she could just tolerate
him.  I cannot myself see rhyme or reason in Robina’s objection to him.
He is not handsome, but he is good-looking, as boys go, and has a
pleasant smile.  Robina says it is his smile that maddens her.  Dick
agrees with me that there is sense in him; and Veronica, not given to
loose praise, considers his performance of a Red Indian, both dead and
alive, the finest piece of acting she has ever encountered.  We wound up
the evening with a little singing.  The extent of Dick’s repertoire
surprised me; evidently he has not been so idle at Cambridge as it
seemed.  Young Bute has a baritone voice of some richness.  We remembered
at quarter-past eleven that Veronica ought to have gone to bed at eight.
We were all of us surprised at the lateness of the hour.

“Why can’t we always live in a cottage and do just as we like?  I’m sure
it’s much jollier,” Veronica put it to me as I kissed her good night.

“Because we are idiots, most of us, Veronica,” I answered.




CHAPTER V


I STARTED the next morning to call upon St. Leonard.  Near to the house I
encountered young Hopkins on a horse.  He was waving a pitchfork over his
head and reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”  The horse looked
amused.  He told me I should find “the gov’nor” up by the stables.  St.
Leonard is not an “old man.”  Dick must have seen him in a bad light.  I
should describe him as about the prime of life, a little older than
myself, but nothing to speak of.  Dick was right, however, in saying he
was not like a farmer.  To begin with, “Hubert St. Leonard” does not
sound like a farmer.  One can imagine a man with a name like that writing
a book about farming, having theories on this subject.  But in the
ordinary course of nature things would not grow for him.  He does not
look like a farmer.  One cannot say precisely what it is, but there is
that about a farmer that tells you he is a farmer.  The farmer has a way
of leaning over a gate.  There are not many ways of leaning over a gate.
I have tried all I could think of, but it was never quite the right way.
It has to be in the blood.  A farmer has a way of standing on one leg and
looking at a thing that isn’t there.  It sounds simple, but there is
knack in it.  The farmer is not surprised it is not there.  He never
expected it to be there.  It is one of those things that ought to be, and
is not.  The farmer’s life is full of such.  Suffering reduced to a
science is what the farmer stands for.  All his life he is the good man
struggling against adversity.  Nothing his way comes right.  This does
not seem to be his planet.  Providence means well, but she does not
understand farming.  She is doing her best, he supposes; that she is a
born muddler is not her fault.  If Providence could only step down for a
month or two and take a few lessons in practical farming, things might be
better; but this being out of the question there is nothing more to be
said.  From conversation with farmers one conjures up a picture of
Providence as a well-intentioned amateur, put into a position for which
she is utterly unsuited.

“Rain,” says Providence, “they are wanting rain.  What did I do with that
rain?”

She finds the rain and starts it, and is pleased with herself until some
Wandering Spirit pauses on his way and asks her sarcastically what she
thinks she’s doing.

“Raining,” explains Providence.  “They wanted rain—farmers, you know,
that sort of people.”

“They won’t want anything for long,” retorts the Spirit.  “They’ll be
drowned in their beds before you’ve done with them.”

“Don’t say that!” says Providence.

“Well, have a look for yourself if you won’t believe me,” says the
Spirit.  “You’ve spoilt that harvest again, you’ve ruined all the fruit,
and you are rotting even the turnips.  Don’t you ever learn by
experience?”

“It is so difficult,” says Providence, “to regulate these things just
right.”

“So it seems—for you,” retorts the Spirit.  “Anyhow, I should not rain
any more, if I were you.  If you must, at least give them time to build
another ark.”  And the Wandering Spirit continues on his way.

“The place does look a bit wet, now I come to notice it,” says
Providence, peeping down over the edge of her star.  “Better turn on the
fine weather, I suppose.”

She starts with she calls “set fair,” and feeling now that she is
something like a Providence, composes herself for a doze.  She is
startled out of her sleep by the return of the Wandering Spirit.

“Been down there again?” she asks him pleasantly.

“Just come back,” explains the Wandering Spirit.

“Pretty spot, isn’t it?” says Providence.  “Things nice and dry down
there now, aren’t they?”

“You’ve hit it,” he answers.  “Dry is the word.  The rivers are dried up,
the wells are dried up, the cattle are dying, the grass is all withered.
As for the harvest, there won’t be any harvest for the next two years!
Oh, yes, things are dry enough.”

One imagines Providence bursting into tears.  “But you suggested yourself
a little fine weather.”

“I know I did,” answers the Spirit.  “I didn’t suggest a six months’
drought with the thermometer at a hundred and twenty in the shade.
Doesn’t seem to me that you’ve got any sense at all.”

“I do wish this job had been given to someone else,” says Providence.

“Yes, and you are not the only one to wish it,” retorts the Spirit
unfeelingly.

“I do my best,” urges Providence, wiping her eyes with her wings.  “I am
not fitted for it.”

“A truer word you never uttered,” retorts the Spirit.

“I try—nobody could try harder,” wails Providence.  “Everything I do
seems to be wrong.”

“What you want,” says the Spirit, “is less enthusiasm and a little
commonsense in place of it.  You get excited, and then you lose your
head.  When you do send rain, ten to one you send it when it isn’t
wanted.  You keep back your sunshine—just as a duffer at whist keeps back
his trumps—until it is no good, and then you deal it out all at once.”

“I’ll try again,” said Providence.  “I’ll try quite hard this time.”

“You’ve been trying again,” retorts the Spirit unsympathetically, “ever
since I have known you.  It is not that you do not try.  It is that you
have not got the hang of things.  Why don’t you get yourself an
almanack?”

The Wandering Spirit takes his leave.  Providence tells herself she
really must get that almanack.  She ties a knot in her handkerchief.  It
is not her fault: she was made like it.  She forgets altogether for what
reason she tied that knot.  Thinks it was to remind her to send frosts in
May, or Scotch mists in August.  She is not sure which, so sends both.
The farmer has ceased even to be angry with her—recognises that
affliction and sorrow are good for his immortal soul, and pursues his way
in calmness to the Bankruptcy Court.

Hubert St. Leonard, of Windrush Bottom Farm, I found to be a
worried-looking gentleman.  He taps his weather-glass, and hopes and
fears, not knowing as yet that all things have been ordered for his ill.
It will be years before his spirit is attuned to that attitude of
tranquil despair essential to the farmer: one feels it.  He is tall and
thin, with a sensitive, mobile face, and a curious trick of taking his
head every now and again between his hands, as if to be sure it is still
there.  When I met him he was on the point of starting for his round, so
I walked with him.  He told me that he had not always been a farmer.
Till a few years ago he had been a stockbroker.  But he had always hated
his office; and having saved a little, had determined when he came to
forty to enjoy the rare luxury of living his own life.  I asked him if he
found that farming paid.  He said:

“As in everything else, it depends upon the price you put upon yourself.
Now, as a casual observer, what wage per annum would you say I was
worth?”

It was an awkward question.

“You are afraid that if you spoke candidly you would offend me,” he
suggested.  “Very well.  For the purpose of explaining my theory let us
take, instead, your own case.  I have read all your books, and I like
them.  Speaking as an admirer, I should estimate you at five hundred a
year.  You, perhaps, make two thousand, and consider yourself worth
five.”

The whimsical smile with which he accompanied the speech disarmed me.

“What we most of us do,” he continued, “is to over-capitalise ourselves.
John Smith, honestly worth a hundred a year, claims to be worth two.
Result: difficulty of earning dividend, over-work, over-worry, constant
fear of being wound up.  Now, there is that about your work that suggests
to me you would be happier earning five hundred a year than you ever will
be earning two thousand.  To pay your dividend—to earn your two
thousand—you have to do work that brings you no pleasure in the doing.
Content with five hundred, you could afford to do only that work that
does give you pleasure.  This is not a perfect world, we must remember.
In the perfect world the thinker would be worth more than the mere
jester.  In the perfect world the farmer would be worth more than the
stockbroker.  In making the exchange I had to write myself down.  I earn
less money, but get more enjoyment out of life.  I used to be able to
afford champagne, but my liver was always wrong, and I dared not drink
it.  Now I cannot afford champagne, but I enjoy my beer.  That is my
theory, that we are all of us entitled to payment according to our market
value, neither more nor less.  You can take it all in cash.  I used to.
Or you can take less cash and more fun: that is what I am getting now.”

“It is delightful,” I said, “to meet with a philosopher.  One hears about
them, of course; but I had got it into my mind they were all dead.”

“People laugh at philosophy,” he said.  “I never could understand why.
It is the science of living a free, peaceful, happy existence.  I would
give half my remaining years to be a philosopher.”

“I am not laughing at philosophy,” I said.  “I honestly thought you were
a philosopher.  I judged so from the way you talked.”

“Talked!” he retorted.  “Anybody can talk.  As you have just said, I talk
like a philosopher.”

“But you not only talk,” I insisted, “you behave like a philosopher.
Sacrificing your income to the joy of living your own life!  It is the
act of a philosopher.”

I wanted to keep him in good humour.  I had three things to talk to him
about: the cow, the donkey, and Dick.

“No, it wasn’t,” he answered.  “A philosopher would have remained a
stockbroker and been just as happy.  Philosophy does not depend upon
environment.  You put the philosopher down anywhere.  It is all the same
to him, he takes his philosophy with him.  You can suddenly tell him he
is an emperor, or give him penal servitude for life.  He goes on being a
philosopher just as if nothing had happened.  We have an old tom-cat.
The children lead it an awful life.  It does not seem to matter to the
cat.  They shut it up in the piano: their idea is that it will make a
noise and frighten someone.  It doesn’t make a noise; it goes to sleep.
When an hour later someone opens the piano, the poor thing is lying there
stretched out upon the keyboard purring to itself.  They dress it up in
the baby’s clothes and take it out in the perambulator: it lies there
perfectly contented looking round at the scenery—takes in the fresh air.
They haul it about by its tail.  You would think, to watch it swinging
gently to and fro head downwards, that it was grateful to them for giving
it a new sensation.  Apparently it looks on everything that comes its way
as helpful experience.  It lost a leg last winter in a trap: it goes
about quite cheerfully on three.  Seems to be rather pleased, if
anything, at having lost the fourth—saves washing.  Now, he is your true
philosopher, that cat; never minds what happens to him, and is equally
contented if it doesn’t.”

I found myself becoming fretful.  I know a man with whom it is impossible
to disagree.  Men at the Club—new-comers—have been lured into taking bets
that they could on any topic under the sun find themselves out of
sympathy with him.  They have denounced Mr. Lloyd George as a traitor to
his country.  This man has risen and shaken them by the hand, words being
too weak to express his admiration of their outspoken fearlessness.  You
might have thought them Nihilists denouncing the Russian Government from
the steps of the Kremlin at Moscow.  They have, in the next breath,
abused Mr. Balfour in terms transgressing the law of slander.  He has
almost fallen on their necks.  It has transpired that the one dream of
his life was to hear Mr. Balfour abused.  I have talked to him myself for
a quarter of an hour, and gathered that at heart he was a
peace-at-any-price man, strongly in favour of Conscription, a vehement
Republican, with a deep-rooted contempt for the working classes.  It is
not bad sport to collect half a dozen and talk round him.  At such times
he suggests the family dog that six people from different parts of the
house are calling to at the same time.  He wants to go to them all at
once.

I felt I had got to understand this man, or he would worry me.

“We are going to be neighbours,” I said, “and I am inclined to think I
shall like you.  That is, if I can get to know you.  You commence by
enthusing on philosophy: I hasten to agree with you.  It is a noble
science.  When my youngest daughter has grown up, when the other one has
learnt a little sense, when Dick is off my hands, and the British public
has come to appreciate good literature, I am hoping to be a bit of a
philosopher myself.  But before I can explain to you my views you have
already changed your own, and are likening the philosopher to an old
tom-cat that seems to be weak in his head.  Soberly now, what are you?”

“A fool,” he answered promptly; “a most unfortunate fool.  I have the
mind of a philosopher coupled to an intensely irritable temperament.  My
philosophy teaches me to be ashamed of my irritability, and my
irritability makes my philosophy appear to be arrant nonsense to myself.
The philosopher in me tells me it does not matter when the twins fall
down the wishing-well.  It is not a deep well.  It is not the first time
they have fallen into it: it will not be the last.  Such things pass: the
philosopher only smiles.  The man in me calls the philosopher a
blithering idiot for saying it does not matter when it does matter.  Men
have to be called away from their work to haul them out.  We all of us
get wet.  I get wet and excited, and that always starts my liver.  The
children’s clothes are utterly spoilt.  Confound them,”—the blood was
mounting to his head—“they never care to go near the well except they are
dressed in their best clothes.  On other days they will stop indoors and
read Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs.’  There is something uncanny about twins.
What is it?  Why should twins be worse than other children?  The ordinary
child is not an angel, Heaven knows.  Take these boots of mine.  Look at
them; I have had them for over two years.  I tramp ten miles a day in
them; they have been soaked through a hundred times.  You buy a boy a
pair of boots—”

“Why don’t you cover over the well?” I suggested.

“There you are again,” he replied.  “The philosopher in me—the sensible
man—says, ‘What is the good of the well?  It is nothing but mud and
rubbish.  Something is always falling into it—if it isn’t the children
it’s the pigs.  Why not do away with it?’”

“Seems to be sound advice,” I commented.

“It is,” he agreed.  “No man alive has more sound commonsense than I
have, if only I were capable of listening to myself.  Do you know why I
don’t brick in that well?  Because my wife told me I would have to.  It
was the first thing she said when she saw it.  She says it again every
time anything does fall into it.  ‘If only you would take my advice’—you
know the sort of thing.  Nobody irritates me more than the person who
says, ‘I told you so.’  It’s a picturesque old ruin: it used to be
haunted.  That’s all been knocked on the head since we came.  What
self-respecting nymph can haunt a well into which children and pigs are
for ever flopping?”

He laughed; but before I could join him he was angry again.  “Why should
I block up an historic well, that is an ornament to the garden, because a
pack of fools can’t keep a gate shut?  As for the children, what they
want is a thorough good whipping, and one of these days—”

A voice crying to us to stop interrupted him.

“Am on my round.  Can’t come,” he shouted.

“But you must,” explained the voice.

He turned so quickly that he almost knocked me over.  “Bother and
confound them all!” he said.  “Why don’t they keep to the time-table?
There’s no system in this place.  That is what ruins farming—want of
system.”

He went on grumbling as he walked.  I followed him.  Halfway across the
field we met the owner of the voice.  She was a pleasant-looking lass,
not exactly pretty—not the sort of girl one turns to look at in a
crowd—yet, having seen her, it was agreeable to continue looking at her.
St. Leonard introduced me to her as his eldest daughter, Janie, and
explained to her that behind the study door, if only she would take the
trouble to look, she would find a time-table—

“According to which,” replied Miss Janie, with a smile, “you ought at the
present moment to be in the rick-yard, which is just where I want you.”

“What time is it?” he asked, feeling his waistcoat for a watch that
appeared not to be there.

“Quarter to eleven,” I told him.

He took his head between his hands.  “Good God!” he cried, “you don’t say
that!”

The new binder, Miss Janie told us, had just arrived.  She was anxious
her father should see it was in working order before the men went back.
“Otherwise,” so she argued, “old Wilkins will persist it was all right
when he delivered it, and we shall have no remedy.”

We turned towards the house.

“Speaking of the practical,” I said, “there were three things I came to
talk to you about.  First and foremost, that cow.”

“Ah, yes, the cow,” said St. Leonard.  He turned to his daughter.  “It
was Maud, was it not?”

“No,” she answered, “it was Susie.”

“It is the one,” I said, “that bellows most all night and three parts of
the day.  Your boy Hopkins thinks maybe she’s fretting.”

“Poor soul!” said St. Leonard.  “We only took her calf away from her—when
did we take her calf away from her?” he asked of Janie.

“On Thursday morning,” returned Janie; “the day we sent her over.”

“They feel it so at first,” said St. Leonard sympathetically.

“It sounds a brutal sentiment,” I said, “but I was wondering if by any
chance you happened to have by you one that didn’t feel it quite so much.
I suppose among cows there is no class that corresponds to what we term
our ‘Smart Set’—cows that don’t really care for their calves, that are
glad to get away from them?”

Miss Janie smiled.  When she smiled, you felt you would do much to see
her smile again.

“But why not keep it up at your house, in the paddock,” she suggested,
“and have the milk brought down?  There is an excellent cowshed, and it
is only a mile away.”

It struck me there was sense in this idea.  I had not thought of that.  I
asked St. Leonard what I owed him for the cow.  He asked Miss Janie, and
she said sixteen pounds.  I had been warned that in doing business with
farmers it would be necessary always to bargain; but there was that about
Miss Janie’s tone telling me that when she said sixteen pounds she meant
sixteen pounds.  I began to see a brighter side to Hubert St. Leonard’s
career as a farmer.

“Very well,” I said; “we will regard the cow as settled.”

I made a note: “Cow, sixteen pounds.  Have the cowshed got ready, and buy
one of those big cans on wheels.”

“You don’t happen to want milk?” I put it to Miss Janie.  “Susie seems to
be good for about five gallons a day.  I’m afraid if we drink it all
ourselves we’ll get too fat.”

“At twopence halfpenny a quart, delivered at the house, as much as you
like,” replied Miss Janie.

I made a note of that also.  “Happen to know a useful boy?” I asked Miss
Janie.

“What about young Hopkins,” suggested her father.

“The only male thing on this farm—with the exception of yourself, of
course, father dear—that has got any sense,” said Miss Janie.  “He can’t
have Hopkins.”

“The only fault I have to find with Hopkins,” said St. Leonard, “is that
he talks too much.”

“Personally,” I said, “I should prefer a country lad.  I have come down
here to be in the country.  With Hopkins around, I don’t somehow feel it
is the country.  I might imagine it a garden city: that is as near as
Hopkins would allow me to get.  I should like myself something more
suggestive of rural simplicity.”

“I think I know the sort of thing you mean,” smiled Miss Janie.  “Are you
fairly good-tempered?”

“I can generally,” I answered, “confine myself to sarcasm.  It pleases
me, and as far as I have been able to notice, does neither harm nor good
to anyone else.”

“I’ll send you up a boy,” promised Miss Janie.

I thanked her.  “And now we come to the donkey.”

“Nathaniel,” explained Miss Janie, in answer to her father’s look of
enquiry.  “We don’t really want it.”

“Janie,” said Mr. St. Leonard in a tone of authority, “I insist upon
being honest.”

“I was going to be honest,” retorted Miss Janie, offended.

“My daughter Veronica has given me to understand,” I said, “that if I buy
her this donkey it will be, for her, the commencement of a new and better
life.  I do not attach undue importance to the bargain, but one never
knows.  The influences that make for reformation in human character are
subtle and unexpected.  Anyhow, it doesn’t seem right to throw a chance
away.  Added to which, it has occurred to me that a donkey might be
useful in the garden.”

“He has lived at my expense for upwards of two years,” replied St.
Leonard.  “I cannot myself see any moral improvement he has brought into
my family.  What effect he may have upon your children, I cannot say.
But when you talk about his being useful in a garden—”

“He draws a cart,” interrupted Miss Janie.

“So long as someone walks beside him feeding him with carrots.  We tried
fixing the carrot on a pole six inches beyond his reach.  That works all
right in the picture: it starts this donkey kicking.”

“You know yourself,” he continued with growing indignation, “the very
last time your mother took him out she used up all her carrots getting
there, with the result that he and the cart had to be hauled home behind
a trolley.”

We had reached the yard.  Nathaniel was standing with his head stretched
out above the closed half of his stable door.  I noticed points of
resemblance between him and Veronica herself: there was about him a like
suggestion of resignation, of suffering virtue misunderstood; his eye had
the same wistful, yearning expression with which Veronica will stand
before the window gazing out upon the purple sunset, while people are
calling to her from distant parts of the house to come and put her things
away.  Miss Janie, bending over him, asked him to kiss her.  He complied,
but with a gentle, reproachful look that seemed to say, “Why call me back
again to earth?”

It made me mad with him.  I was wrong in thinking Miss Janie not a pretty
girl.  Hers is that type of beauty that escapes attention by its own
perfection.  It is the eccentric, the discordant, that arrests the roving
eye.  To harmony one has to attune oneself.

“I believe,” said Miss Janie, as she drew away, wiping her cheek, “one
could teach that donkey anything.”

Apparently she regarded willingness to kiss her as indication of
exceptional amiability.

“Except to work,” commented her father.  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he
said.  “If you take that donkey off my hands and promise not to send it
back again, why, you can have it.”

“For nothing?” demanded Janie woefully.

“For nothing,” insisted her father.  “And if I have any argument, I’ll
throw in the cart.”

Miss Janie sighed and shrugged her shoulders.  It was arranged that
Hopkins should deliver Nathaniel into my keeping some time the next day.
Hopkins, it appeared, was the only person on the farm who could make the
donkey go.

“I don’t know what it is,” said St. Leonard, “but he has a way with him.”

“And now,” I said, “there remains but Dick.”

“The lad I saw yesterday?” suggested St. Leonard.  “Good-looking young
fellow.”

“He is a nice boy,” I said.  “I don’t really think I know a nicer boy
than Dick; and clever, when you come to understand him.  There is only
one fault I have to find with Dick: I don’t seem able to get him to
work.”

Miss Janie was smiling.  I asked her why.

“I was thinking,” she answered, “how close the resemblance appears to be
between him and Nathaniel.”

It was true.  I had not thought of it.

“The mistake,” said St. Leonard, “is with ourselves.  We assume every boy
to have the soul of a professor, and every girl a genius for music.  We
pack off our sons to cram themselves with Greek and Latin, and put our
daughters down to strum at the piano.  Nine times out of ten it is sheer
waste of time.  They sent me to Cambridge, and said I was lazy.  I was
not lazy.  I was not intended by nature for a Senior Wrangler.  I did not
see the good of being a Senior Wrangler.  Who wants a world of Senior
Wranglers?  Then why start every young man trying?  I wanted to be a
farmer.  If intelligent lads were taught farming as a business, farming
would pay.  In the name of commonsense—”

“I am inclined to agree with you,” I interrupted him.  “I would rather
see Dick a good farmer than a third-rate barrister, anyhow.  He thinks he
could take an interest in farming.  There are ten weeks before he need go
back to Cambridge, sufficient time for the experiment.  Will you take him
as a pupil?”

St. Leonard grasped his head between his hands and held it firmly.  “If I
consent,” he said, “I must insist on being honest.”

I saw the woefulness again in Janie’s eyes.

“I think,” I said, “it is my turn to be honest.  I have got the donkey
for nothing; I insist on paying for Dick.  They are waiting for you in
the rick-yard.  I will settle the terms with Miss Janie.”

He regarded us both suspiciously.

“I will promise to be honest,” laughed Miss Janie.

“If it’s more than I’m worth,” he said, “I’ll send him home again.  My
theory is—”

He stumbled over a pig which, according to the time-table, ought not to
have been there.  They went off hurriedly together, the pig leading, both
screaming.

Miss Janie said she would show me the short cut across the fields; we
could talk as we went.  We walked in silence for awhile.

“You must not think,” she said, “I like being the one to do all the
haggling.  I feel a little sore about it very often.  But somebody, of
course, must do it; and as for father, poor dear—”

I looked at her.  Her’s is the beauty to which a touch of sadness adds a
charm.

“How old are you?” I asked her.

“Twenty,” she answered, “next birthday.”

“I judged you to be older,” I said.

“Most people do,” she answered.

“My daughter Robina,” I said, “is just the same age—according to years;
and Dick is twenty-one.  I hope you will be friends with them.  They have
got sense, both of them.  It comes out every now and again and surprises
you.  Veronica, I think, is nine.  I am not sure how Veronica is going to
turn out.  Sometimes things happen that make us think she has a beautiful
character, and then for quite long periods she seems to lose it
altogether.  The Little Mother—I don’t know why we always call her Little
Mother—will not join us till things are more ship-shape.  She does not
like to be thought an invalid, and if we have her about anywhere near
work that has to be done, and are not always watching her, she gets at it
and tires herself.”

“I am glad we are going to be neighbours,” said Miss Janie.  “There are
ten of us altogether.  Father, I am sure, you will like; clever men
always like father.  Mother’s day is Friday.  As a rule it is the only
day no one ever calls.”  She laughed.  The cloud had vanished.  “They
come on other days and find us all in our old clothes.  On Friday
afternoon we sit in state and nobody comes near us, and we have to eat
the cakes ourselves.  It makes her so cross.  You will try and remember
Fridays, won’t you?”

I made a note of it then and there.

“I am the eldest,” she continued, “as I think father told you.  Harry and
Jack came next; but Jack is in Canada and Harry died, so there is
somewhat of a gap between me and the rest.  Bertie is twelve and Ted
eleven; they are home just now for the holidays.  Sally is eight, and
then there come the twins.  People don’t half believe the tales that are
told about twins, but I am sure there is no need to exaggerate.  They are
only six, but they have a sense of humour you would hardly credit.  One
is a boy, and the other a girl.  They are always changing clothes, and we
are never quite sure which is which.  Wilfrid gets sent to bed because
Winnie has not practised her scales, and Winnie is given syrup of squills
because Wilfried has been eating green gooseberries.  Last spring Winnie
had the measles.  When the doctor came on the fifth day he was as pleased
as punch; he said it was the quickest cure he had ever known, and that
really there was no reason why she might not get up.  We had our
suspicions, and they were right.  Winnie was hiding in the cupboard,
wrapped up in a blanket.  They don’t seem to mind what trouble they get
into, provided it isn’t their own.  The only safe plan, unless you happen
to catch them red-handed, is to divide the punishment between them, and
leave them to settle accounts between themselves afterwards.  Algy is
four; till last year he was always called the baby.  Now, of course,
there is no excuse; but the name still clings to him in spite of his
indignant protestations.  Father called upstairs to him the other day:
‘Baby, bring me down my gaiters.’  He walked straight up to the cradle
and woke up the baby.  ‘Get up,’ I heard him say—I was just outside the
door—‘and take your father down his gaiters.  Don’t you hear him calling
you?’  He is a droll little fellow.  Father took him to Oxford last
Saturday.  He is small for his age.  The ticket-collector, quite
contented, threw him a glance, and merely as a matter of form asked if he
was under three.  ‘No,’ he shouted before father could reply; ‘I ’sists
on being honest.  I’se four.’  It is father’s pet phrase.”

“What view do you take of the exchange,” I asked her, “from stockbroking
with its larger income to farming with its smaller?”

“Perhaps it was selfish,” she answered, “but I am afraid I rather
encouraged father.  It seems to me mean, making your living out of work
that does no good to anyone.  I hate the bargaining, but the farming
itself I love.  Of course, it means having only one evening dress a year
and making that myself.  But even when I had a lot I always preferred
wearing the one that I thought suited me the best.  As for the children,
they are as healthy as young savages, and everything they want to make
them happy is just outside the door.  The boys won’t go to college; but
seeing they will have to earn their own living, that, perhaps, is just as
well.  It is mother, poor dear, that worries so.”  She laughed again.
“Her favourite walk is to the workhouse.  She came back quite excited the
other day because she had heard the Guardians intend to try the
experiment of building separate houses for old married couples.  She is
convinced she and father are going to end their days there.”

“You, as the business partner,” I asked her, “are hopeful that the farm
will pay?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered, “it will pay all right—it does pay, for the
matter of that.  We live on it and live comfortably.  But, of course, I
can see mother’s point of view, with seven young children to bring up.
And it is not only that.”  She stopped herself abruptly.  “Oh, well,” she
continued with a laugh, “you have got to know us.  Father is trying.  He
loves experiments, and a woman hates experiments.  Last year it was bare
feet.  I daresay it is healthier.  But children who have been about in
bare feet all the morning—well, it isn’t pleasant when they sit down to
lunch; I don’t care what you say.  You can’t be always washing.  He is so
unpractical.  He was quite angry with mother and myself because we
wouldn’t.  And a man in bare feet looks so ridiculous.  This summer it is
short hair and no hats; and Sally had such pretty hair.  Next year it
will be sabots or turbans—something or other suggesting the idea that
we’ve lately escaped from a fair.  On Mondays and Thursdays we talk
French.  We have got a French nurse; and those are the only days in the
week on which she doesn’t understand a word that’s said to her.  We can
none of us understand father, and that makes him furious.  He won’t say
it in English; he makes a note of it, meaning to tell us on Tuesday or
Friday, and then, of course, he forgets, and wonders why we haven’t done
it.  He’s the dearest fellow alive.  When I think of him as a big boy,
then he is charming, and if he really were only a big boy there are times
when I would shake him and feel better for it.”

She laughed again.  I wanted her to go on talking, because her laugh was
so delightful.  But we had reached the road, and she said she must go
back: there were so many things she had to do.

“We have not settled about Dick,” I reminded her.

“Mother took rather a liking to him,” she murmured.

“If Dick could make a living,” I said, “by getting people to like him, I
should not be so anxious about his future—lazy young devil!”

“He has promised to work hard if you let him take up farming,” said Miss
Janie.

“He has been talking to you?” I said.

She admitted it.

“He will begin well,” I said.  “I know him.  In a month he will have
tired of it, and be clamouring to do something else.”

“I shall be very disappointed in him if he does,” she said.

“I will tell him that,” I said, “it may help.  People don’t like other
people to be disappointed in them.”

“I would rather you didn’t,” she said.  “You could say that father will
be disappointed in him.  Father formed rather a good opinion of him, I
know.”

“I will tell him,” I suggested, “that we shall all be disappointed in
him.”

She agreed to that, and we parted.  I remembered, when she was gone, that
after all we had not settled terms.

Dick overtook me a little way from home.

“I have settled your business,” I told him.

“It’s awfully good of you,” said Dick.

“Mind,” I continued, “it’s on the understanding that you throw yourself
into the thing and work hard.  If you don’t, I shall be disappointed in
you, I tell you so frankly.”

“That’s all right, governor,” he answered cheerfully.  “Don’t you worry.”

“Mr. St. Leonard will also be disappointed in you, Dick,” I informed him.
“He has formed a very high opinion of you.  Don’t give him cause to
change it.”

“I’ll get on all right with him,” answered Dick.  “Jolly old duffer,
ain’t he?”

“Miss Janie will also be disappointed in you,” I added.

“Did she say that?” he asked.

“She mentioned it casually,” I explained: “though now I come to think of
it she asked me not to say so.  What she wanted me to impress upon you
was that her father would be disappointed in you.”

Dick walked beside me in silence for awhile.

“Sorry I’ve been a worry to you, dad,” he said at last

“Glad to hear you say so,” I replied.

“I’m going to turn over a new leaf, dad,” he said.  “I’m going to work
hard.”

“About time,” I said.




CHAPTER VI


WE had cold bacon for lunch that day.  There was not much of it.  I took
it to be the bacon we had not eaten for breakfast.  But on a clean dish
with parsley it looked rather neat.  It did not suggest, however, a lunch
for four people, two of whom had been out all the morning in the open
air.  There was some excuse for Dick.

“I never heard before,” said Dick, “of cold fried bacon as a _hors
d’œuvre_.”

“It is not a _hors d’œuvre_,” explained Robina.  “It is all there is for
lunch.”  She spoke in the quiet, passionless voice of one who has done
with all human emotion.  She added that she should not be requiring any
herself, she having lunched already.

Veronica, conveying by her tone and bearing the impression of something
midway between a perfect lady and a Christian martyr, observed that she
also had lunched.

“Wish I had,” growled Dick.

I gave him a warning kick.  I could see he was on the way to getting
himself into trouble.  As I explained to him afterwards, a woman is most
dangerous when at her meekest.  A man, when he feels his temper rising,
takes every opportunity of letting it escape.  Trouble at such times he
welcomes.  A broken boot-lace, or a shirt without a button, is to him
then as water in the desert.  An only collar-stud that will disappear as
if by magic from between his thumb and finger and vanish apparently into
thin air is a piece of good fortune sent on these occasions only to those
whom the gods love.  By the time he has waddled on his hands and knees
twice round the room, broken the boot-jack raking with it underneath the
wardrobe, been bumped and slapped and kicked by every piece of furniture
that the room contains, and ended up by stepping on that stud and
treading it flat, he has not a bitter or an angry thought left in him.
All that remains of him is sweet and peaceful.  He fastens his collar
with a safety-pin, humming an old song the while.

Failing the gifts of Providence, the children—if in health—can generally
be depended upon to afford him an opening.  Sooner or later one or
another of them will do something that no child, when he was a boy, would
have dared—or dreamed of daring—to even so much as think of doing.  The
child, conveying by expression that the world, it is glad to say, is
slowly but steadily growing in sense, and pity it is that old-fashioned
folks can’t bustle up and keep abreast of it, points out that firstly it
has not done this thing, that for various reasons—a few only of which
need be dwelt upon—it is impossible it could have done this thing; that
secondly it has been expressly requested to do this thing, that wishful
always to give satisfaction, it has—at sacrifice of all its own
ideas—gone out of its way to do this thing; that thirdly it can’t help
doing this thing, strive against fate as it will.

He says he does not want to hear what the child has got to say on the
subject—nor on any other subject, neither then nor at any other time.  He
says there’s going to be a new departure in this house, and that things
all round are going to be very different.  He suddenly remembers every
rule and regulation he has made during the past ten years for the
guidance of everybody, and that everybody, himself included, has
forgotten.  He tries to talk about them all at once, in haste lest he
should forget them again.  By the time he has succeeded in getting
himself, if nobody else, to understand himself, the children are swarming
round his knees extracting from him promises that in his sober moments he
will be sorry that he made.

I knew a woman—a wise and good woman she was—who when she noticed that
her husband’s temper was causing him annoyance, took pains to help him to
get rid of it.  To relieve his sufferings I have known her search the
house for a last month’s morning paper and, ironing it smooth, lay it
warm and neatly folded on his breakfast plate.

“One thing in this world to be thankful for, at all events, and that is
that we don’t live in Ditchley-in-the-Marsh,” he would growl ten minutes
later from the other side of it.

“Sounds a bit damp,” the good woman would reply.

“Damp!” he would grunt, “who minds a bit of damp!  Good for you.  Makes
us Englishmen what we are.  Being murdered in one’s bed about once a week
is what I should object to.”

“Do they do much of that sort of thing down there?” the good woman would
enquire.

“Seems to be the chief industry of the place.  Do you mean to say you
don’t remember that old maiden lady being murdered by her own gardener
and buried in the fowl-run?  You women! you take no interest in public
affairs.”

“I do remember something about it, now you mention it, dear,” the good
woman would confess.  “Always seems such an innocent type of man, a
gardener.”

“Seems to be a special breed of them at Ditchley-in-the-Marsh,” he
answers.  “Here again last Monday,” he continues, reading with growing
interest.  “Almost the same case—even to the pruning knife.  Yes, hanged
if he doesn’t!—buries her in the fowl-run.  This is most extraordinary.”

“It must be the imitative instinct asserting itself,” suggests the good
woman.  “As you, dear, have so often pointed out, one crime makes
another.”

“I have always said so,” he agrees; “it has always been a theory of
mine.”

He folds the paper over.  “Dull dogs, these political chaps!” he says.
“Here’s the Duke of Devonshire, speaking last night at Hackney, begins by
telling a funny story he says he has just heard about a parrot.  Why,
it’s the same story somebody told a month ago; I remember reading it.
Yes—upon my soul—word for word, I’d swear to it.  Shows you the sort of
men we’re governed by.”

“You can’t expect everyone, dear, to possess your repertoire,” the good
woman remarks.

“Needn’t say he’s just heard it that afternoon, anyhow,” responds the
good man.

He turns to another column.  “What the devil!  Am I going off my head?”
He pounces on the eldest boy.  “When was the Oxford and Cambridge
Boat-race?” he fiercely demands.

“The Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race!” repeats the astonished youth.
“Why, it’s over.  You took us all to see it, last month.  The Saturday
before—”

The conversation for the next ten minutes he conducts himself, unaided.
At the end he is tired, maybe a trifle hoarse.  But all his bad temper is
gone.  His sorrow is there was not sufficient of it.  He could have done
with more.

Woman knows nothing of simple mechanics.  A woman thinks you can get rid
of steam by boxing it up and sitting on the safety-valve.

“Feeling as I do this morning, that I’d like to wring everybody’s neck
for them,” the average woman argues to herself; “my proper course—I see
it clearly—is to creep about the house, asking of everyone that has the
time to spare to trample on me.”

She coaxes you to tell her of her faults.  When you have finished she
asks for more—reminds you of one or two you had missed out.  She wonders
why it is that she is always wrong.  There must be a reason for it; if
only she could discover it.  She wonders how it is that people can put up
with her—thinks it so good of them.

At last, of course, the explosion happens.  The awkward thing is that
neither she herself nor anyone else knows when it is coming.  A husband
cornered me one evening in the club.  It evidently did him good to talk.
He told me that, finding his wife that morning in one of her rare
listening moods, he had seized the opportunity to mention one or two
matters in connection with the house he would like to have altered; that
was, if she had no objection.  She had—quite pleasantly—reminded him the
house was his, that he was master there.  She added that any wish of his
of course was law to her.

He was a young and inexperienced husband; it seemed to him a hopeful
opening.  He spoke of quite a lot of things—things about which he felt
that he was right and she was wrong.  She went and fetched a quire of
paper, and borrowed his pencil and wrote them down.

Later on, going through his letters in the study, he found an unexpected
cheque; and ran upstairs and asked her if she would not like to come out
with him and get herself a new hat.

“I could have understood it,” he moaned, “if she had dropped on me while
I was—well, I suppose, you might say lecturing her.  She had listened to
it like a lamb—hadn’t opened her mouth except to say ‘yes, dear,’ or ‘no,
dear.’  Then, when I only asked her if she’d like a new hat, she goes
suddenly raving mad.  I never saw a woman go so mad.”

I doubt if there be anything in nature quite as unexpected as a woman’s
temper, unless it be tumbling into a hole.  I told all this to Dick.  I
have told it him before.  One of these days he will know it.

“You are right to be angry with me,” Robina replied meekly; “there is no
excuse for me.  The whole thing is the result of my own folly.”

Her pathetic humility should have appealed to him.  He can be
sympathetic, when he isn’t hungry.  Just then he happened to be hungry.

“I left you making a pie,” he said.  “It looked to me a fair-sized pie.
There was a duck on the table, with a cauliflower and potatoes; Veronica
was up to her elbows in peas.  It made me hungry merely passing through
the kitchen.  I wouldn’t have anything to eat in the town for fear of
spoiling my appetite.  Where is it all?  You don’t mean to say that you
and Veronica have eaten the whole blessed lot!”

There is one thing—she admits it herself—that exhausts Veronica’s
patience: it is unjust suspicion.

“Do I look as if I’d eaten anything for hours and hours?” Veronica
demanded.  “You can feel my waistband if you don’t believe me.”

“You said just now you had had your lunch,” Dick argued.

“I know I did,” Veronica admitted.  “One minute you are told that it is
wicked to tell lies; the next—”

“Veronica!” Robina interrupted threateningly.

“It’s easy for you,” retorted Veronica.  “You are not a growing child.
You don’t feel it.”

“The least you can do,” said Robina, “is to keep silence.”

“What’s the good,” said Veronica—not without reason.  “You’ll tell them
when I’ve gone to bed, and can’t put in a word for myself.  Everything is
always my fault.  I wish sometimes that I was dead.”

“That I were dead,” I corrected her.  “The verb ‘to wish,’ implying
uncertainty, should always be followed by the conditional mood.”

“You ought,” said Robina, “to be thankful to Providence that you’re not
dead.”

“People are sorry when you’re dead,” said Veronica.

“I suppose there’s some bread-and-cheese in the house,” suggested Dick.

“The baker, for some reason or another, has not called this morning,”
Robina answered sweetly.  “Neither unfortunately has the grocer.
Everything there is to eat in the house you see upon the table.”

“Accidents will happen,” I said.  “The philosopher—as our friend St.
Leonard would tell us—only smiles.”

“I could smile,” said Dick, “if it were his lunch.”

“Cultivate,” I said, “a sense of humour.  From a humorous point of view
this lunch is rather good.”

“Did you have anything to eat at the St. Leonards’?” he asked.

“Just a glass or so of beer and a sandwich or two,” I admitted.  “They
brought it out to us while we were talking in the yard.  To tell the
truth, I was feeling rather peckish.”

Dick made no answer, but continued to chew bacon-rind.  Nothing I could
say seemed to cheer him.  I thought I would try religion.

“A dinner of herbs—the sentiment applies equally to lunch—and contentment
therewith is better,” I said, “than a stalled ox.”

“Don’t talk about oxen,” he interrupted fretfully.  “I feel I could just
eat one—a plump one.”

There is a man I know.  I confess he irritates me.  His argument is that
you should always rise from a meal feeling hungry.  As I once explained
to him, you cannot rise from a meal feeling hungry without sitting down
to a meal feeling hungry; which means, of course, that you are always
hungry.  He agreed with me.  He said that was the idea—always ready.

“Most people,” he said, “rise from a meal feeling no more interest in
their food.  That was a mental attitude injurious to digestion.  Keep it
always interested; that was the proper way to treat it.”

“By ‘it’ you mean . . . ?” I said.

“Of course,” he answered; “I’m talking about it.”

“Now I myself;” he explained—“I rise from breakfast feeling eager for my
lunch.  I get up from my lunch looking forward to my dinner.  I go to bed
just ready for my breakfast.”

Cheerful expectancy, he said, was a wonderful aid to digestion.  “I call
myself;” he said, “a cheerful feeder.”

“You don’t seem to me,” I said, “to be anything else.  You talk like a
tadpole.  Haven’t you any other interest in life?  What about home, and
patriotism, and Shakespeare—all those sort of things?  Why not give it a
square meal, and silence it for an hour or two; leave yourself free to
think of something else.”

“How can you think of anything,” he argued, “when your stomach’s out of
order?”

“How can you think of anything,” I argued, “when it takes you all your
time to keep it in order?  You are not a man; you are a nurse to your own
stomach.”  We were growing excited, both of us, forgetting our natural
refinement.  “You don’t get even your one afternoon a week.  You are
healthy enough, I admit it.  So are the convicts at Portland.  They never
suffer from indigestion.  I knew a doctor once who prescribed for a
patient two years’ penal servitude as the only thing likely to do him
permanent good.  Your stomach won’t let you smoke.  It won’t let you
drink—not when you are thirsty.  It allows you a glass of Apenta water at
times when you don’t want it, assuming there could ever be a time when
you did want it.  You are deprived of your natural victuals, and made to
live upon prepared food, as though you were some sort of a prize chicken.
You are sent to bed at eleven, and dressed in hygienic clothing that
makes no pretence to fit you.  Talk of being hen-pecked!  Why, the
mildest husband living would run away or drown himself, rather than
remain tied for the rest of his existence to your stomach.”

“It is easy to sneer,” he said.

“I am not sneering,” I said; “I am sympathising with you.”

He said he did not want any sympathy.  He said if only I would give up
over-eating and drinking myself, it would surprise me how bright and
intelligent I should become.

I thought this man might be of use to us on the present occasion.
Accordingly I spoke of him and of his theory.  Dick seemed impressed.

“Nice sort of man?” he asked.

“An earnest man,” I replied.  “He practises what he preaches, and whether
because, or in spite of it, the fact remains that a chirpier soul I am
sure does not exist.”

“Married?” demanded Dick.

“A single man,” I answered.  “In all things an idealist.  He has told me
he will never marry until he can find his ideal woman.”

“What about Robina here!” suggested Dick.  “Seem to have been made for
one another.”

Robina smiled.  It was a wan, pathetic smile.

“Even he,” thought Robina, “would want his beans cooked to time, and to
feel that a reasonable supply of nuts was always in the house.  We
incompetent women never ought to marry.”

We had finished the bacon.  Dick said he would take a stroll into the
town.  Robina suggested he might take Veronica with him, that perhaps a
bun and a glass of milk would do the child no harm.

Veronica for a wonder seemed to know where all her things were.  Before
Dick had filled his pipe she was ready dressed and waiting for him.
Robina said she would give them a list of things they might bring back
with them.  She also asked Dick to get together a plumber, a carpenter, a
bricklayer, a glazier, and a civil engineer, and to see to it that they
started off at once.  She thought that among them they might be able to
do all that was temporarily necessary, but the great thing was that the
work should be commenced without delay.

“Why, what on earth’s the matter, old girl?” asked Dick.  “Have you had
an accident?”

Then it was that Robina exploded.  I had been wondering when it would
happen.  To Dick’s astonishment it happened then.

Yes, she answered, there had been an accident.  Did he suppose that seven
scrimpy scraps of bacon was her notion of a lunch between four hungry
persons?  Did he, judging from himself, imagine that our family yielded
only lunatics?  Was it kind—was it courteous to his parents, to the
mother he pretended to love, to the father whose grey hairs he was by his
general behaviour bringing down in sorrow to the grave—to assume without
further enquiry that their eldest daughter was an imbecile?  (My hair,
by-the-bye, is not grey.  There may be a suggestion of greyness here and
there, the natural result of deep thinking.  To describe it in the lump
as grey is to show lack of observation.  And at forty-eight—or a trifle
over—one is not going down into the grave, not straight down.  Robina
when excited uses exaggerated language.  I did not, however, interrupt
her; she meant well.  Added to which, interrupting Robina, when—to use
her own expression—she is tired of being a worm, is like trying to stop a
cyclone with an umbrella.)  Had his attention been less concentrated on
the guzzling of cold bacon (he had only had four mouthfuls, poor
fellow)—had he noticed the sweet patient child starving before his very
eyes (this referred to Veronica)—his poor elder sister, worn out with
work and worry, pining for nourishment herself, it might have occurred to
even his intelligence that there had been an accident.  The selfishness,
the egotism of men it was that staggered, overwhelmed Robina, when she
came to think of it.

Robina paused.  Not for want of material, I judged, so much as want of
breath.  Veronica performed a useful service by seizing the moment to
express a hope that it was not early-closing day.  Robina felt a
conviction that it was: it would be just like Dick to stand there
dawdling in a corner till it was too late to do anything.

“I have been trying to get out of this corner for the last five minutes,”
explained Dick, with that angelic smile of his that I confess is
irritating.  “If you have done talking, and will give me an opening, I
will go.”

Robina told him that she had done talking.  She gave him her reasons for
having done talking.  If talking to him would be of any use she would
often have felt it her duty to talk to him, not only with regard to his
stupidity and selfishness and general aggravatingness, but with reference
to his character as a whole.  Her excuse for not talking to him was the
crushing conviction of the hopelessness of ever effecting any improvement
in him.  Were it otherwise—

“Seriously speaking,” said Dick, now escaped from his corner, “something,
I take it, has gone wrong with the stove, and you want a sort of general
smith.”

He opened the kitchen door and looked in.

“Great Scott!” he said.  “What was it—an earthquake?”

I looked in over his shoulder.

“But it could not have been an earthquake,” I said.  “We should have felt
it.”

“It is not an earthquake,” explained Robina.  “It is your youngest
daughter’s notion of making herself useful.”

Robina spoke severely.  I felt for the moment as if I had done it all
myself.  I had an uncle who used to talk like that.  “Your aunt,” he
would say, regarding me with a reproachful eye, “your aunt can be, when
she likes, the most trying woman to live with I have ever known.”  It
would depress me for days.  I would wonder whether I ought to speak to
her about it, or whether I should be doing only harm.

“But how did she do it?” I demanded.  “It is impossible that a mere
child—where is the child?”

The parlour contained but Robina.  I hurried to the door; Dick was
already half across the field.  Veronica I could not see.

“We are making haste,” Dick shouted back, “in case it is early-closing
day.”

“I want Veronica!” I shouted.

“What?” shouted Dick.

“Veronica!” I shouted with my hands to my mouth.

“Yes!” shouted Dick.  “She’s on ahead.”

It was useless screaming any more.  He was now climbing the stile.

“They always take each other’s part, those two,” sighed Robina.

“Yes, and you are just as bad,” I told her; “if he doesn’t, you do.  And
then if it’s you they take your part.  And you take his part.  And he
takes both your parts.  And between you all I am just getting tired of
bringing any of you up.”  (Which is the truth.)  “How did this thing
happen?”

“I had got everything finished,” answered Robina.  “The duck was in the
oven with the pie; the peas and potatoes were boiling nicely.  I was
feeling hot, and I thought I could trust Veronica to watch the things for
awhile.  She promised not to play King Alfred.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You know,” said Robina—“King Alfred and the cakes.  I left her one
afternoon last year when we were on the houseboat to watch some buns.
When I came back she was sitting in front of the fire, wrapped up in the
table-cloth, with Dick’s banjo on her knees and a cardboard crown upon
her head.  The buns were all burnt to a cinder.  As I told her, if I had
known what she wanted to be up to I could have given her some extra bits
of dough to make believe with.  But oh, no! if you please, that would not
have suited her at all.  It was their being real buns, and my being real
mad, that was the best part of the game.  She is an uncanny child.”

“What was the game this time?” I asked.

“I don’t think it was intended for a game—not at first,” answered Robina.
“I went into the wood to pick some flowers for the table.  I was on my
way back, still at some distance from the house, when I heard quite a
loud report.  I took it for a gun, and wondered what anyone would be
shooting in July.  It must be rabbits, I thought.  Rabbits never seem to
have any time at all to themselves, poor things.  And in consequence I
did not hurry myself.  It must have been about twenty minutes later when
I came in sight of the house.  Veronica was in the garden deep in
confabulation with an awful-looking boy, dressed in nothing but rags.
His face and hands were almost black.  You never saw such an object.
They both seemed very excited.  Veronica came to meet me; and with a face
as serious as mine is now, stood there and told me the most barefaced
pack of lies you ever heard.  She said that a few minutes after I had
gone, robbers had come out of the wood—she talked about them as though
there had been hundreds—and had with the most awful threats demanded to
be admitted into the house.  Why they had not lifted the latch and walked
in, she did not explain.  It appeared this cottage was their secret
rendezvous, where all their treasure lies hidden.  Veronica would not let
them in, but shouted for help: and immediately this awful-looking boy, to
whom she introduced me as ‘Sir Robert’ something or another, had appeared
upon the scene; and then there had followed—well, I have not the patience
to tell you the whole of the rigmarole they had concocted.  The upshot of
it was that the robbers, defeated in their attempt to get into the house,
had fired a secret mine, which had exploded in the kitchen.  If I did not
believe them I could go into the kitchen and see for myself.  Say what I
would, that is the story they both stuck to.  It was not till I had
talked to Veronica for a quarter of an hour, and had told her that you
would most certainly communicate with the police, and that she would have
to convince a judge and jury of the truth of her story, that I got any
sense at all out of her.”

“What was the sense you did get out of her?” I asked.

“Well, I am not sure even now that it is the truth,” said Robina—“the
child does not seem to possess a proper conscience.  What she will grow
up like, if something does not happen to change her, it is awful to
think.”

“I don’t want to appear a hustler,” I said, “and maybe I am mistaken in
the actual time, but it feels to me like hours since I asked you how the
catastrophe really occurred.”

“I am telling you,” explained Robina, hurt.  “She was in the kitchen
yesterday when I mentioned to Harry’s mother, who had looked in to help
me wash up, that the kitchen chimney smoked: and then she said—”

“Who said?” I asked.

“Why, she did,” answered Robina, “Harry’s mother.  She said that very
often a pennyworth of gunpowder—”

“Now at last we have begun,” I said.  “From this point I may be able to
help you, and we will get on.  At the word ‘gunpowder’ Veronica pricked
up her ears.  The thing by its very nature would appeal to Veronica’s
sympathies.  She went to bed dreaming of gunpowder.  Left in solitude
before the kitchen fire, other maidens might have seen pictured in the
glowing coals, princes, carriages, and balls.  Veronica saw visions of
gunpowder.  Who knows?—perhaps even she one day will have gunpowder of
her own!  She looks up from her reverie: a fairy godmamma in the disguise
of a small boy—it was a small boy, was it not?”

“Rather a nice little boy, he gave me the idea of having been,
originally,” answered Robina; “the child, I should say, of well-to-do
parents.  He was dressed in a little Lord Fauntleroy suit—or rather, he
had been.”

“Did Veronica know how he was—anything about him?” I asked.

“Nothing that I could get out of her,” replied Robina; “you know her
way—how she chums on with anybody and everybody.  As I told her, if she
had been attending to her duties instead of staring out of the window,
she would not have seen him.  He happened to be crossing the field just
at the time.”

“A boy born to ill-luck, evidently,” I observed.  “To Veronica of course
he seemed like the answer to a prayer.  A boy would surely know where
gunpowder could be culled.”

“They must have got a pound of it from somewhere,” said Robina, “judging
from the result.”

“Any notion where they got it from?” I asked.

“No,” explained Robina.  “All Veronica can say is that he told her he
knew where he could get some, and was gone about ten minutes.  Of course
they must have stolen it—even that did not seem to trouble her.”

“It came to her as a gift from the gods, Robina,” I explained.  “I
remember how I myself used to feel about these things, at ten.  To have
enquired further would have seemed to her impious.  How was it they were
not both killed?”

“Providence,” was Robina’s suggestion: it seemed to be the only one
possible.  “They lifted off one of the saucepans and just dropped the
thing in—fortunately wrapped up in a brown paper parcel, which gave them
both time to get out of the house.  At least Veronica got clear off.  For
a change it was not she who fell over the mat, it was the boy.”

I looked again into the kitchen; then I returned and put my hands on
Robina’s shoulders.  “It is a most amusing incident—as it has turned
out,” I said.

“It might have turned out rather seriously,” thought Robina.

“It might,” I agreed: “she might be lying upstairs.”

“She is a wicked, heartless child,” said Robina; “she ought to be
punished.”

I lent Robina my handkerchief; she never has one of her own.

“She is going to be punished,” I said; “I will think of something.”

“And so ought I,” said Robina; “it was my fault, leaving her, knowing
what she’s like.  I might have murdered her.  She doesn’t care.  She’s
stuffing herself with cakes at this very moment.”

“They will probably give her indigestion,” I said.  “I hope they do.”

“Why didn’t you have better children?” sobbed Robina; “we are none of us
any good to you.”

“You are not the children I wanted, I confess,” I answered.

“That’s a nice kind thing to say!” retorted Robina indignantly.

“I wanted such charming children,” I explained—“my idea of charming
children: the children I had imagined for myself.  Even as babies you
disappointed me.”

Robina looked astonished.

“You, Robina, were the most disappointing,” I complained.  “Dick was a
boy.  One does not calculate upon boy angels; and by the time Veronica
arrived I had got more used to things.  But I was so excited when you
came.  The Little Mother and I would steal at night into the nursery.
‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ the Little Mother would whisper, ‘to think it all
lies hidden there: the little tiresome child, the sweetheart they will
one day take away from us, the wife, the mother?’  ‘I am glad it is a
girl,’ I would whisper; ‘I shall be able to watch her grow into
womanhood.  Most of the girls one comes across in books strike one as not
perhaps quite true to life.  It will give me such an advantage having a
girl of my own.  I shall keep a note-book, with a lock and key, devoted
to her.’”

“Did you?” asked Robina.

“I put it away,” I answered; “there were but a few pages written on.  It
came to me quite early in your life that you were not going to be the
model heroine.  I was looking for the picture baby, the clean, thoughtful
baby, with its magical, mystical smile.  I wrote poetry about you,
Robina, but you would slobber and howl.  Your little nose was always
having to be wiped, and somehow the poetry did not seem to fit you.  You
were at your best when you were asleep, but you would not even sleep when
it was expected of you.  I think, Robina, that the fellows who draw the
pictures for the comic journals of the man in his night-shirt with the
squalling baby in his arms must all be single men.  The married man sees
only sadness in the design.  It is not the mere discomfort.  If the
little creature were ill or in pain we should not think of that.  It is
the reflection that we, who meant so well, have brought into the world
just an ordinary fretful human creature with a nasty temper of its own:
that is the tragedy, Robina.  And then you grew into a little girl.  I
wanted the soulful little girl with the fathomless eyes, who would steal
to me at twilight and question me concerning life’s conundrums.

“But I used to ask you questions,” grumbled Robina, “and you would tell
me not to be silly.”

“Don’t you understand, Robina?” I answered.  “I am not blaming you, I am
blaming myself.  We are like children who plant seeds in a garden, and
then are angry with the flowers because they are not what we expected.
You were a dear little girl; I see that now, looking back.  But not the
little girl I had in my mind.  So I missed you, thinking of the little
girl you were not.  We do that all our lives, Robina.  We are always
looking for the flowers that do not grow, passing by, trampling
underfoot, the blossoms round about us.  It was the same with Dick.  I
wanted a naughty boy.  Well, Dick was naughty, no one can say that he was
not.  But it was not my naughtiness.  I was prepared for his robbing
orchards.  I rather hoped he would rob orchards.  All the high-spirited
boys in books rob orchards, and become great men.  But there were not any
orchards handy.  We happened to be living in Chelsea at the time he ought
to have been robbing orchards: that, of course, was my fault.  I did not
think of that.  He stole a bicycle that a lady had left outside the
tea-room in Battersea Park, he and another boy, the son of a common
barber, who shaved people for three-halfpence.  I am a Republican in
theory, but it grieved me that a son of mine could be drawn to such
companionship.  They contrived to keep it for a week—till the police
found it one night, artfully hidden behind bushes.  Logically, I do not
see why stealing apples should be noble and stealing bicycles should be
mean, but it struck me that way at the time.  It was not the particular
steal I had been hoping for.

“I wanted him wild; the hero of the book was ever in his college days a
wild young man.  Well, he was wild.  It cost me three hundred pounds to
keep that breach of promise case out of Court; I had never imagined a
breach of promise case.  Then he got drunk, and bonneted a bishop in
mistake for a ‘bull-dog.’  I didn’t mind the bishop.  That by itself
would have been wholesome fun.  But to think that a son of mine should
have been drunk!”

“He has never been drunk since,” pleaded Robina.  “He had only three
glasses of champagne and a liqueur: it was the liqueur—he was not used to
it.  He got into the wrong set.  You cannot in college belong to the wild
set without getting drunk occasionally.”

“Perhaps not,” I admitted.  “In the book the wild young man drinks
without ever getting drunk.  Maybe there is a difference between life and
the book.  In the book you enjoy your fun, but contrive somehow to escape
the licking: in life the licking is the only thing sure.  It was the wild
young man of fiction I was looking for, who, a fortnight before the
exam., ties a wet towel round his head, drinks strong tea, and passes
easily with honours.  He tried the wet towel, he tells me.  It never
would keep in its place.  Added to which it gave him neuralgia; while the
strong tea gave him indigestion.  I used to picture myself the proud,
indulgent father lecturing him for his wildness—turning away at some
point in the middle of my tirade to hide a smile.  There was never any
smile to hide.  I feel that he has behaved disgracefully, wasting his
time and my money.”

“He is going to turn over a new leaf;” said Robina: “I am sure he will
make an excellent farmer.”

“I did not want a farmer,” I explained; “I wanted a Prime Minister.
Children, Robina, are very disappointing.  Veronica is all wrong.  I like
a mischievous child.  I like reading stories of mischievous children:
they amuse me.  But not the child who puts a pound of gunpowder into a
red-hot fire, and escapes with her life by a miracle.”

“And yet, I daresay,” suggested Robina, “that if one put it into a book—I
mean that if you put it into a book, it would read amusingly.”

“Likely enough,” I agreed.  “Other people’s troubles can always be
amusing.  As it is, I shall be in a state of anxiety for the next six
months, wondering, every moment that she is out of my sight, what new
devilment she is up to.  The Little Mother will be worried out of her
life, unless we can keep it from her.”

“Children will be children,” murmured Robina, meaning to be comforting.

“That is what I am complaining of, Robina.  We are always hoping that
ours won’t be.  She is full of faults, Veronica, and they are not always
nice faults.  She is lazy—lazy is not the word for it.”

“She is lazy,” Robina was compelled to admit.

“There are other faults she might have had and welcome,” I pointed out;
“faults I could have taken an interest in and liked her all the better
for.  You children are so obstinate.  You will choose your own faults.
Veronica is not truthful always.  I wanted a family of little George
Washingtons, who could not tell a lie.  Veronica can.  To get herself out
of trouble—and provided there is any hope of anybody believing her—she
does.”

“We all of us used to when we were young,” Robina maintained; “Dick used
to, I used to.  It is a common fault with children.”

“I know it is,” I answered.  “I did not want a child with common faults.
I wanted something all my own.  I wanted you, Robina, to be my ideal
daughter.  I had a girl in my mind that I am sure would have been
charming.  You are not a bit like her.  I don’t say she was perfect, she
had her failings, but they were such delightful failings—much better than
yours, Robina.  She had a temper—a woman without a temper is insipid; but
it was that kind of temper that made you love her all the more.  Yours
doesn’t, Robina.  I wish you had not been in such a hurry, and had left
me to arrange your temper for you.  We should all of us have preferred
mine.  It had all the attractions of temper without the drawbacks of the
ordinary temper.”

“Couldn’t use it up, I suppose, for yourself, Pa?” suggested Robina.

“It was a lady’s temper,” I explained.  “Besides,” as I asked her, “what
is wrong with the one I have?”

“Nothing,” answered Robina.  Yet her tone conveyed doubt.  “It seems to
me sometimes that an older temper would suit you better, that was all.”

“You have hinted as much before, Robina,” I remarked, “not only with
reference to my temper, but with reference to things generally.  One
would think that you were dissatisfied with me because I am too young.”

“Not in years perhaps,” replied Robina, “but—well, you know what I mean.
One wants one’s father to be always great and dignified.”

“We cannot change our ego,” I explained to her.  “Some daughters would
appreciate a father youthful enough in temperament to sympathise with and
to indulge them.  The solemn old fogey you have in your mind would have
brought you up very differently.  Let me tell you that, my girl.  You
would not have liked him, if you had had him.”

“Perhaps not,” Robina agreed.  “You are awfully good in some ways.”

“What we have got to do in this world, Robina,” I said, “is to take
people as they are, and make the best of them.  We cannot expect
everybody to be just as we would have them, and maybe we should not like
them any better if they were.  Don’t bother yourself about how much nicer
they might be; think how nice they are.”

Robina said she would try.  I have hopes of making Robina a sensible
woman.




CHAPTER VII


DICK and Veronica returned laden with parcels.  They explained that
“Daddy Slee,” as it appeared he was generally called, a local builder of
renown, was following in his pony-cart, and was kindly bringing the
bulkier things with him.

“I tried to hustle him,” said Dick, “but coming up after he had washed
himself and had his tea seemed to be his idea of hustling.  He has got
the reputation of being an honest old Johnny, slow but sure; the others,
they tell me, are slower.  I thought you might care, later on, to talk to
him about the house.”

Veronica took off her things and put them away, each one in its proper
place.  She said, if no one wanted her, she would read a chapter of “The
Vicar of Wakefield,” and retired upstairs.  Robina and I had an egg with
our tea; Mr. Slee arrived as we had finished, and I took him straight
into the kitchen.  He was a large man, with a dreamy expression and a
habit of sighing.  He sighed when he saw our kitchen.

“There’s four days’ work for three men here,” he said, “and you’ll want a
new stove.  Lord! what trouble children can be!”

Robina agreed with him.

“Meanwhile,” she demanded, “how am I to cook?”

“Myself, missie,” sighed Mr. Slee, “I don’t see how you are going to
cook.”

“We’ll all have to tramp home again,” thought Dick.

“And tell Little Mother the reason, and frighten her out of her life!”
retorted Robina indignantly.

Robina had other ideas.  Mr. Slee departed, promising that work should be
commenced at seven o’clock on Monday morning.  Robina, the door closed,
began to talk.

“Let Pa have a sandwich,” said Robina, “and catch the six-fifteen.”

“We might all have a sandwich,” suggested Dick; “I could do with one
myself.”

“Pa can explain,” said Robina, “that he has been called back to town on
business.  That will account for everything, and Little Mother will not
be alarmed.”

“She won’t believe that business has brought him back at nine o’clock on
a Saturday night,” argued Dick; “you think that Little Mother hasn’t any
sense.  She’ll see there’s something up, and ask a hundred questions.
You know what she is.”

“Pa,” said Robina, “will have time while in the train to think out
something plausible; that’s where Pa is clever.  With Pa off my hands I
sha’n’t mind.  We three can live on cold ham and things like that.  By
Thursday we will be all right, and then he can come down again.”

I pointed out to Robina, kindly but firmly, the utter absurdity of her
idea.  How could I leave them, three helpless children, with no one to
look after them?  What would the Little Mother say?  What might not
Veronica be up to in my absence?  There were other things to be
considered.  The donkey might arrive at any moment—no responsible person
there to receive him—to see to it that his simple wants would be provided
for.  I should have to interview Mr. St. Leonard again to fix up final
details as regarded Dick.  Who was going to look after the cow, about to
be separated from us?  Young Bute would be down again with plans.  Who
was going to take him over the house, explain things to him intelligibly?
The new boy might turn up—this simple son of the soil Miss Janie had
promised to dig out and send along.  He would talk Berkshire.  Who would
there be to understand him—to reply to him in dialect?  What was the use
of her being impetuous and talking nonsense?

She went on cutting sandwiches.  She said they were not helpless
children.  She said if she and Dick at forty-two hadn’t grit enough to
run a six-roomed cottage it was time they learned.

“Who’s forty-two?” I demanded.

“We are,” explained Robina, “Dick and I—between us.  We shall be
forty-two next birthday.  Nearly your own age.”

“Veronica,” she continued, “for the next few days won’t be a child at
all.  She knows nothing of the happy medium.  She is either herself or
she goes to the opposite extreme, and tries to be an angel.  Till about
the end of the week it will be like living with a vision.  As for the
donkey, we’ll try and make him feel as much at home as if you were here.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, Pa,” Robina explained, “but from the way you
put it you evidently regard yourself as the only one among us capable of
interesting him.  I take it he won’t mind for a night or two sharing the
shed with the cow.  If he looks shocked at the suggestion, Dick can knock
up a partition.  I’d rather for the present, till you come down again,
the cow stopped where she was.  She helps to wake me in the morning.  You
may reckon you have settled everything as far as Dick is concerned.  If
you talk to St. Leonard again for an hour it will be about the future of
the Yellow Races or the possibility of life in Jupiter.  If you mention
terms he will be insulted, and if he won’t let you then you will be
insulted, and the whole thing will be off.  Let me talk to Janie.  We’ve
both of us got sense.  As for Mr. Bute, I know all your ideas about the
house, and I sha’n’t listen to any of his silly arguments.  What that
young man wants is someone to tell him what he’s got to do, and then let
there be an end of it.  And the sooner that handy boy turns up the
better.  I don’t mind what he talks.  All I want him to do is to clean
knives and fetch water and chop wood.  At the worst I’ll get that home to
him by pantomime.  For conversation he can wait till you come down.”

That is the gist of what she said.  It didn’t run exactly as I have put
it down.  There were points at which I interrupted, but Robina never
listens; she just talks on, and at the end she assumes that, as a matter
of course, you have come round to her point of view, and persuading her
that you haven’t means beginning the whole thing over again.

She said I hadn’t time to talk, and that she would write and tell me
everything.  Dick also said he would write and tell me everything; and
that if I felt moved to send them down a hamper—the sort of thing that,
left to themselves, Fortnum & Mason would put together for a good-class
picnic, say, for six persons—I might rely upon it that nothing would be
wasted.

Veronica, by my desire, walked with me to the end of the lane.  I talked
to her very seriously.  Her difficulty was that she had not been blown
up.  Had she been blown up, then she would have known herself she had
done wrong.  In the book it is the disobedient child that is tossed by
the bull.  The child that has been sent with the little basket to visit
the sick aunt may be right in the bull’s way.  That is a bit of bad luck
for the bull.  The poor bull is compelled to waste valuable time working
round carefully, so as not to upset the basket.  If the wicked child had
sense (which in the book does not happen), it would, while the bull was
dodging to get past the good child, seize the opportunity to move itself
quickly.  The wicked child never looks round, but pegs along steadily;
and when the bull arrives it is sure to be in the most convenient
position for receiving moral lessons.  The good child, whatever its
weight, crosses the ice in safety.  The bad child may turn the scale at
two stone lighter; the ice will have none of him.  “Don’t you talk to me
about relative pressure to the square inch,” says the indignant ice.
“You were unkind to your little baby brother the week before last: in you
go.”  Veronica’s argument, temperately and courteously expressed, I
admit, came practically to this:

“I may have acted without sufficient knowledge to guide me.  My education
has not, perhaps, on the whole, been ordered wisely.  Subjects that I
feel will never be of the slightest interest or consequence to me have
been insisted upon with almost tiresome reiteration.  Matters that should
be useful and helpful to me—gunpowder, to take but one example—I have
been left in ignorance concerning.  About all that I say nothing; people
have done their best according to their lights, no doubt.  When, however,
we come to purity of motives, singleness of intention, then, I maintain,
I am above reproach.  The proof of this is that Providence has bestowed
upon me the seal of its approval: I was not blown up.  Had my conduct
been open to censure—as in certain quarters has been suggested—should I
be walking besides you now, undamaged—not a hair turned, as the saying
is?  No.  Discriminating Fate—that is, if any reliance at all is to be
placed on literature for the young—would have made it her business that
at least I was included in the _débris_.  Instead, what do we notice!—a
shattered chimney, a ruined stove, broken windows, a wreckage of
household utensils; I, alone of all things, miraculously preserved.  I do
not wish to press the point offensively, but really it wo

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2437