MOTIVES

[Enclosure]

Once upon a time there was a King who had never done anything except make laws and draw his salary, and when he was getting well on in years he began to wonder if his people really loved him. He might never have discovered the answer had not a neighbouring country declared war against him and threatened to invade his territory; for “Now,” said the old King, “we will probe at last into this question of devotion.”

He immediately issued a proclamation that the country was in danger and that all who wished to fight could do so but there would be no compulsion.

So the war began and all the men of the country flocked to the colours and there was great excitement.

At the end of a year the army of the old King had conquered and peace was proclaimed.

The day that the troops returned was a great holiday. The streets were gay with flags and banners, and every one came out to welcome the victors. That night the old King, dressed as a plain citizen, slipped through his palace gates and mingled with the crowd. He saw the illuminations and heard with emotion the joyous songs and cries of exultation.

Overcome by the noise and rejoicing he turned down a quiet street and presently he came on a woman weeping in a doorway. He asked the cause of her grief and she told him that her husband had been slain in battle.

“Ah,” said the old King, “I am truly sorry to hear that, but, after all, there is a consolation in knowing that he died fighting for his King.”

“I am not so sure,” replied the sorrowing widow. “We had a quarrel and he went and joined the army to spite me.”

Farther on the King met a poor old man bowed with grief and sighing deeply as he leaned on his staff.

“How is this, old man?” cried the King. “Why do you sorrow when so many are gay?”

“Alas,” groaned the other, “I have just heard that my son was killed in this horrible war.”

“You have cause for sorrow, my friend,” said the old King sympathetically, “but remember he fell in a good cause. He died for his King.”

“Perhaps he did,” replied the poor old man. “But he didn’t say anything about that when he marched off. He didn’t want to go, as a matter of fact. Not a bit. But every one else was going and he was afraid of being thought a coward.”

At the next corner the old King saw a soldier, one of the victors. He was lame and haggard and worn and was leaning against a wall to rest.

“Ah!” cried the old King. “You have been wounded, my young hero?”

The soldier nodded and looked bored.

“Never mind, my lad,” said the old King, patting him on the shoulder. “We are all proud of you—and remember, you risked your life in honour of your King!”

The soldier turned his tired eyes on him and a stiff smile made his mouth crooked. “I suppose that was it,” he said wearily. “I had thought that I joined up to see a bit of life and have the girls look at me, but possibly you are right. I expect it was the King’s honour I was thinking of.”

So the King returned thoughtfully to his palace, and as he entered the great hall the musicians began playing “God keep the King.” Then all the courtiers who were to receive their share of the indemnity claimed from the defeated enemy, and all the commanders who were to receive titles and honours and large estates, cried out with one voice “God keep the King!” so that the people out in the streets heard it and joined in the shout as if they meant it.

And then the old King went to bed.

XXVIII
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby

My Dear Aunt,—I am surprised to hear from Nesta Rossiter that my invention does not strike you more favourably. I felt sure that you would like to invest a little in it and at the same time encourage me. But at the moment I am so busy with a bigger and vastly more attractive project that I am not so disappointed as I might have been. This new project is the kind of thing which I am sure will interest you too, for it involves the pleasure of a vast number of people. Briefly, I want to open a Picture Palace in the heart of the City. As you probably know, the part of London which is called the City is given up exclusively to business and eating-houses. But there are thousands—almost millions—of men and youths and girls who would rather eat their lunch in a Picture Palace than in a restaurant, and see at the same time a drama which might entertain, instruct, amuse, or quicken their emotions. This means crowded houses from say 12.15 to 2.30, the audience constantly changing as their time was up. Then there are also the employers—the stock-brokers and merchants—who might like to break the monotony of routine by seeing the pictures for an hour at any time, and then there are also errand boys who ought to be elsewhere. And we can add to these the number of strangers calling in the City who have nothing to do when their business is done. I think you will agree with me that this is a really good scheme.

Land is of course expensive, but I am writing to three or four of the most suitably situated churches suggesting the possibility of acquiring their sites and rebuilding them where they are more needed. The proposal may sound very revolutionary to you, but my experience is that the more revolutionary a thing is the more likely it is to happen. Besides, it is not so revolutionary as it appears, for these churches are practically obsolete and I have no doubt whatever that the vicars would welcome a change.

I hope you are steadily improving. As a good name for the City Man’s Cinema will be an advantage, perhaps you would like to be thinking of one.—Yours sincerely,

Horace Mun-Brown

XXIX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

Dear Verena, I am finding, to my horror, that the poets when at their briefest are usually concerned with mortality: and not necessarily because the space on a tombstone is restricted and they are writing for the stone-cutter, although that may have been an influence, but from choice. Yet as it is my belief that we ought to familiarize ourselves with the idea of death (and indeed the War forced us overmuch to do so) you mustn’t mind an epitaph or two now and then, particularly when they are beautiful. Or shall we get them all over at once—and illustrate my discovery too? The most famous of all, the epitaph on the Countess Dowager of Pembroke, every one knows:—

Underneath this sable Hearse

Lies the subject of all verse:

Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother:

Death, ere thou hast slain another

Fair, and Learn’d, and Good as she,

Time shall throw a dart at thee.

But I like hardly less the elegy on Elizabeth L. H. It is longer—longer indeed than the eight-line limit that we have set ourselves—but I have cut off the end, which is inferior:—

Wouldst thou hear what Man can say

In a little? Reader, stay.

Underneath this stone doth lie

As much Beauty as could die:

Which in life did harbour give

To more Virtue than doth live.

If at all she had a fault,

Leave it buried in this vault.

Then there is Herrick’s “Upon a Child that Died”—another inspiration:—

Here she lies, a pretty bud,

Lately made of flesh and blood:

Who as soon fell fast asleep

As her little eyes did peep.

Give her strewings but not stir

The earth that lightly covers her.

With these, which are Tudor or early Stuart, I would associate the Scotch epitaph on Miss Lewars:—

Say, sages, what’s the charm on earth

Can turn Death’s dart aside?

It is not purity and worth,

Else Jessie had not died.

And Stevenson’s best known poem is an epitaph too:—

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie:

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he long’d to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

But enough of mortality! Let me tell you a little thing that happened yesterday. An Italian I used to know, a clerk, who has been in England for three or four years, came in to say goodbye. He is going home.

“You’ll be glad to be seeing your wife again after all this long while,” I said.

He pondered. “My wife, I don’t know,” he replied at last: “but my leetler boy, Oh, yais!”—Good night, my dear.

R. H.

XXX
Septimus Tribe to Verena Raby

My Dear Sister,—I hasten to thank you for the timely case of champagne which you have sent for Letitia. It will, I am sure, revive her, even though the vintage is a little immature. I consider 1911 to be still too young, which reminds me that it is in the correction of errors such as this, trifling but easily evitable, that I could be of so much use to you on the kind of periodical supervising visit to your establishment (now necessarily neglected through your most regrettable accident) which I have before suggested, and which, even at great personal inconvenience, I am still ready at any time to pay. At the present moment, however, it seems to me that a visit from Letitia would be even more desirable, for when one is sick and surrounded by comparative strangers, who should be a more welcome guest than a sister? And it is long since you two have met. Apart from the pleasure of reunion, the little change would do Letitia good. Save for myself, who am not, I am aware, too vivacious a companion, the poor dear sees almost no one. With a slightly augmented income she could take a place in society here far more appropriate to her birth; but when one has not the means to return hospitality one is a little sensitive about accepting it. Awaiting your reply, I am, your affectionate brother-in-law,

Septimus Tribe

XXXI
Verena Raby to Richard Haven

My Dear Richard,—This is my first letter in my own hand and it must be short. I am very grateful to you. Would not that be a nice epitaph—“He never disappointed”? Well, it is true of you.

Your idea of the short poems is perfect and I have already learned some.

Nesta is excellent company, but I fear she is giving me more time than it is fair to take. Every now and then, when she is apparently looking at me, I can see that her glance is really fixed on her children, many miles off. The far-away nursery look.

It is almost worth being ill to discover how kind people can be. If it is true (and of course it is) that to give pleasure to others is the greatest happiness, then I can comfort myself, as I lie here apparently useless, that I have my uses after all, since I am the cause of that happiness in so many of my friends.—Yours,

V.

XXXII
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

Dearest Verena, your testimonial gave me extraordinary pleasure, and I wish it was true.

I don’t say, in spite of your charming piece of altruistic reasoning, that you are lucky to be in bed, but to have to remain in a remote rural spot while England is getting herself into order again is not a bad thing. For it is a slow and rather unlovely process. Just at the moment War seems, as one remembers it (and of course I speak only of England, not of the Front), a more desirable condition than Peace. There is no doubt that the country is a fit place for Profiteeroes to live in.

I felt sure that you knew Clifford’s excellent nonsense for the young. As you don’t know it, you shall; but not yet! A surprise is brewing.

With the steady assistance of my invaluable Miss Faith and her little Corona (which is not, alas! a cigar, but a typewriter) I have amassed already a collection of brief poems such as may gently occupy your thoughts in the wakeful sessions of the night. These I shall dole out to you, one by one, for you to take or leave as you feel “dispoged.” I have not gone beyond my own shelves, but if ever I find myself with the run of somebody else’s no doubt I shall find many more, probably equally good or even better. We might call it the Tabloid Treasury when it is ready?

Having sent you the other day all those elegiac efforts, I am now copying out three or four short poems where the poets take stock and prepare to put up the shutters, and here again the quality is high. The most famous example is, of course, Landor’s:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;

I warmed both hands before the fire of life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

But Landor had a predecessor who said much the same in a homelier manner:—

My muse and I, ere youth and spirits fled,

Sat up together many a night, no doubt:

But now I’ve sent the poor old lass to bed,

Simply because my fire is going out.

Stevenson must have had Landor’s lines in mind when he made this summary of his own career:—

I have trod the upward and the downward slope;

I have endured and done in days before;

I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope;

And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.

A final example, from the French of the Abbé Regnier:—

Gaily I lived as ease and nature taught,

And spent my little life without a thought,

And am amazed that Death, that tyrant grim,

Should think of me, who never thought of him.

Don’t be afraid; in future I shall send you only one poem at a time.

R. H.

XXXIII
Horace Mun-brown to Verena Raby

Dear Aunt,—If I have from time to time bothered you with my financial schemes I am very sorry. But I have an active brain, and too few briefs. Also I want to be in a sound financial position, and, under more favourable circumstances, most of my projects would, I am sure, succeed. But you are the only capitalist that I know, and just at the moment you are, I now realize, not in a position to take any deep interest in monetary ventures. I ought to have thought of this before, and I apologise.

I write to you to-day for a very different purpose and that is, to enlist not your bank balance but your sympathy and, I hope, active help. In a nutshell, I want to marry Hazel. I have laid my case before her more than once, but she refuses to take me seriously. I am aware that I am not so superficially gay and insouciant as the majority of the young men of to-day; I know only too well that I cannot jazz and that I prefer dances where an intervening atmospheric space divides the partners. But, though I may be old-fashioned, surely I have compensating qualities of value in married life. What I feel is that if only Hazel could be persuaded that I am in deadly earnest, and that marriage is not one of—what she calls—my “wild-cat schemes,” she would begin to look upon me with a new eye. I am very human au fond, dear Aunt, and, in my own way, I adore Hazel. Would you not try to persuade her to be more kind and understanding?—I am, your affectionate nephew,

Horace Mun-Brown

P.S.—On reading this letter through, I find that I have made what looks rather like a pun—that passage about Hazel and a nutshell. I assure you, my dear Aunt, it was unintentional. I should never joke about love.

XXXIV
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

My Dear, I have found you a Reader, but I hate to part with her. It would not, however, do for anyone so young and comely to sit at the bedside of a hale man of my years, and so you shall have her. But O her voice! Irish, and south-west Irish at that. In point of fact, Kerry, with hints of the Gulf Stream in it, all warm and caressing.

Miss Clemency Power—that is her pretty name—is not, I take it, in any kind of need, but she worked all through the War and wants to continue to be independent. And quite right too, say I. And Robbie Burns said it before me, in one of his English efforts:—

the glorious privilege

of being independent,

he called it.

Miss Power is going to you on Thursday on a month’s probation, and she is my gift to you, remember: I have arranged it all. It is very Sultanic to be distributing young women like this, and you must be properly grateful. I was never Sultanic before.

Here’s a nice thing my sister Violet’s charwoman said yesterday. Violet seems to have been looking rather more wistful than usual, but for no particular reason. The charwoman, however, noticed it and commented upon it.

“You look very sad this morning,” she said. “But then,” she added, “ladies generally do.”

“Why is that?” Violet asked.

“They have such difficult lives,” she said. “It’s their husbands, I think.”

“But you have a husband.”

“Yes, but we don’t notice our husbands as much as you do. They come in and they’re cross and they swear, and we let them. We’ve got our work to get on with. But with ladies it’s different; they take notice.”

Your daily poem:—

He who bends to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

If you trap the moment before it’s ripe

The tears of repentance you’ll certainly wipe;

But if once you let the ripe moment go,

You can never wipe off the tears of woe.

A lot of wisdom there, but for most of us, who are so far from being children, rather a counsel of perfection.—Good night.

R. H.

P.S.—A travelling friend tells me that outside the gate of the Misericordia, in Osaka, Japan, is this notice, the meaning of which is clear after a moment’s examination: “The sisters of the Misericordia harbour every kind of disease and have no respect for religion.”

XXXV
Clemency Power to the Hon. Mrs. Power

Dearest Mother,—I have got a job at last—the least like a War job that you could imagine. I have been engaged to read for an hour or so every day to a Miss Raby, a lady who owing to an accident has to lie still for months and months. After all my adventures in France this is a great change.

Miss Raby lives near Kington in Herefordshire, a long way from London and indeed a long way from anywhere, but it is fine country and there are splendid hills to walk on, Hargest Ridge in particular, where the air is the most bracing I ever knew, and you look over to the Welsh mountains. She has an old spacious house in its own grounds, but I am lodging with one of the villagers; which I greatly prefer. Miss Raby has a nurse, and one of her nieces, a Mrs. Rossiter, who is charming, is with her. I am a sort of extra help and am gradually being allowed to do more and more and now have had the picking of the flowers entrusted to me.

Miss Raby herself is the sweetest creature, a kind of ideal aunt. She is somewhere in the forties, I suppose, and had a very full life, in a quiet way, before she was ill, and she is very brave in bearing her inactivity, which must be terribly irksome at times and especially in very fine weather. I am here nominally to read, but we talk most of the time, and she is never tired of hearing about the War and all my experiences. She knows the part of the garden that every flower comes from, and I think her greatest joy every day is her interview with the gardener.

One thing I have discovered is how very few books bear reading aloud. The authors don’t think of that when they are writing and so the words are wrongly placed. Another thing is that books that are silly anyway are heaps sillier when read aloud.

I ought to say that although I am in Miss Raby’s service (don’t wince) she is not my employer—I was engaged by a Mr. Haven, her oldest friend, who has presented me to her!—Your loving

C.

XXXVI
Verena Raby to Richard Haven

Dearest Richard,—I like the woman thou gavest me very much and rejoice in her brogue, and I am very grateful to you, always. Tell me more about the state of things. I can bear it.—Yours,

V.

XXXVII
Verena Raby to Hazel Barrance

Dearest Hazel,—I have had a rather pathetic letter from poor Horace, who, after long wooing you in vain, comes to me (I hope this isn’t betraying his confidence: I don’t think it is really) as a new legal Miles Standish. Young men at the Bar are not usually so ready to seek other mouthpieces, are they? Not those, at any rate, next to whom I used to sit at dinner parties in the days when I was well and now and then came to London.

Of course, my dear child, I am not going to interfere. To be quite candid, I don’t want you to marry Horace. I think you would condemn yourself to a very stuffy kind of existence if you did, and I am against first-cousins marrying in any case. But his appeal gives me an opportunity of saying what I have more than once wished, and that is that you would revise your general attitude to marriage. Again and again in your letters to me I have detected a bitterness about it, the suggestion that because some couples have fallen out, all must sooner or later do so. This isn’t true. But even if it were, it ought not to deter us, for all of us must live our own lives, and make our own experiments, and all of us ought to believe that we are the great splendid triumphant exceptions! It is that belief—I might almost call it religion—which I miss in you and which seems to be now so generally lacking. Put on low grounds it might be called the gambling spirit, but it is a form of gambling in which there is no harm, but rather virtue. I often wish that I had had more of it, but I was unfortunate in having my affections so enchained by one who too little knew his mind, nor sufficiently valued his captive, that I was never free to consider offers.

Marriage may always be a lottery and often turn out disastrously, and even more often be a dreary curtailment of two persons’ liberty, but it is a natural proceeding and, unless one utterly denies any purpose in life, a necessary one; and I am all in favour of young people believing in it. I wish that you were braver and healthier about it, but I don’t want you to become Mrs. Horace Mun-Brown, and I am telling him so.

This is the longest letter I have written since I took to my bed; indeed I believe it is the longest I ever wrote.—Your loving

Aunt V.

XXXVIII
Septimus Tribe to Verena Raby

My Dear Sister,—I was grieved to learn from a third party that you are no better; indeed rather worse. Letitia and I were hoping that every day showed improvement. In the possibility that one deterrent cause may be too much thought, it has occurred to us that the presence in the house, to be called upon whenever needed, of a soothing voice, might be a great solace and aid. Such a voice transmitting the words of the poets, the philosophers or even the romancers, could not but distract the mind of the listener from her own anxieties and gradually induce repose. Letitia, to whom I have been reading for some years, will tell you—with more propriety than I can—how melodious and sonorous an organ is mine. You have but to say the word and it is at your service.—I am, your affectionate brother-in-law,

Septimus Tribe

XXXIX
Antoinette Rossiter to her Mother

Dearest Mummy,—When you come home you will find another baby here, only it isn’t a real baby, it’s a puppy. A spaniel. Mr. Hawkes gave it to us and he says we are to own it together so that each of us has a bit. He says I am to have its stomach and mouth, which means I have got to feed it, and Cyril is to have its front legs and ears, and Lobbie its hind legs and tail, and its tongue is to belong to us all. I have told Cyril that you and Daddy ought to have an ear each but he won’t give them up. The ears of a spaniel are the nicest part, next to the lips. It is a girl and Mr. Hawkes says that this means that when it grows up it will be fondest of Cyril. We have named it Topsy because it is a girl and black. Do come home soon and see it.—Your everlastingly loving

Tony

x x x x x x
x x x x

XL
Nesta Rossiter to Septimus Tribe

Dear Uncle Septimus,—Aunt Verena asks me to thank you for your kind offer, but to say that a trained reader has already been secured. With love to Aunt Letitia,—I am, yours sincerely,

Nesta Rossiter

XLI
Hazel Barrance to Verena Raby

Dear Aunt,—You were the kindest thing to write to me like that. Such a long letter too! I hope you weren’t too tired after it. But, alas! the pity is it has not converted me. Marriage for every one else if you like, but not for me. I have seen too much of it, nor do I seem to want any of the things it gives except escape from home. But it would be escaping only to another form of bondage. Every one is not made for domesticity and I am sure I am not. I hate everything to do with the preparation of meals. I even rather hate meals themselves and would much prefer to eat only when I felt hungry, a little at a time and fairly often and alone. The idea of munching for evermore punctually and periodically opposite the same man both repels and infuriates me. I wonder if you can understand this. The thought of Horace under these conditions is too revolting.

Since I wrote to you Horace has actually been to father, behind my back; but father is much too pleased with my likeness to himself to be unsporting, and Horace was sent away with the warning that he hadn’t an earthly—but if he cared to persist he must come to me direct and to no one else. He would have gone to mother for a cert if she had not been so wholly occupied with the affairs of the next world.

Father was really funny about it. “What does Horace want to marry for, anyway?” he said: “he knows how to speak French”—this referring to his old theory that what men most want in wives is a gift of tongues when travelling abroad.

But apart from not wanting to marry, marriage frightens me. It means losing the fine edge of courtesy and kindness and tenderness. I see so many married people—girls I knew when they were engaged—one or two to whom I was bridesmaid and they are all so coarsened by it and take things so for granted. I don’t think anything is sadder than the way in which little pretty indulged sillinesses when a girl is engaged, become detestable in her husband’s eyes after they are married. Losing umbrellas, for example.

That’s the end of my grumbling about marriage. This correspondence, as the editors say, must now cease, and henceforth I will write only when I have something cheerful and amusing to tell you. I have been selfishly using you far too long.—Your loving

Hazel

XLII
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

My Dear, I am delighted to hear about my Irish girl. Some day I should like to be ill myself—nicely, languidly ill, without pain—just for the pleasure of having her read to me.

I hope you aren’t letting the papers prey on your mind. Far better not read them, or, rather, not hear them read; but I expect that is to suggest too much. After a great war there must always be a period of ferment and unrest, and that is what we are undergoing now. I don’t in the least despair of cosmos emerging, but nothing will ever be the same again and it will be a very expensive chaos for years to come.

What chiefly worries me is the impaired standard of efficiency, the scamping, the cheating and the general cynicism. I seem to discern a universal decrease of pride. The best, the genuine, has gone, and substitutes reign. Tradespeople no longer keep their word and are impenitent when taxed with it. A certain amount of dishonesty must, I suppose, be bred of a war. Officers, for example, had to be fed and couldn’t be expected to inquire too closely of their batmen where the chickens came from, and no doubt a good deal of this bivouacking morality persists. But I wish it hadn’t affected life so generally. I rather fancy that what this old England of ours is most in need of is a gentleman at the helm. A nobleman would not be bad, but a gentleman would be better. No harm if he were rich and could win the Derby. But where to find him? He is a gift of the gods, to be proffered or withheld according to their whim or their interest in old England. If they are tired of us (as now and then one can almost fear), then we may never get him.—Yours,

R. H.

And here is to-day’s poem, a very brief one but a very striking one too:—

Reason has moons, but moons not hers

Lie mirror’d on the sea,

Confounding her astronomers,

But, O! delighting me.

XLIII
Verena Raby to Hazel Barrance

My Dear Hazel,—My last letter too, on this subject, but you must answer it. There is much in yours with which I sympathize and I think I understand all of it. There is a vein of almost fierce fastidiousness in our family (your grandfather had too much of it) which is discernible in you, but I don’t despair of seeing a deal of it broken down when you meet the right man. So much of what you say about things seems to me to be due to your manlessness. I don’t believe that any wholly right view of life is possible to celibates or those who have never loved. They must see it piecemeal. I don’t despair of you at all, but you must get out of the habit of expecting perfection. And where would the fun of marriage be if it was not partly warfare—give and take?—Your truly loving and solicitous

Aunt V.

P.S.—Don’t stop writing about yourself if you have any prompting to. What is an old bed-ridden woman for but to try and help others?

XLIV
Patricia Power to Clemency Power

You Dear Lucky Clem,—I am so glad you are fixed up all comfy and I wish I could do the same, but Herself won’t hear of it. She says that one mad daughter out in the world when there is no need for it is enough. I can’t make her see that it isn’t the money that matters, but the importance of doing something for the sake of one’s own dignity. All the same, some one must of course stay with her. I’m sure that if I were to go, Adela wouldn’t stick it another minute. But remember me if you ever hear of an opening or if this Mr. Haven of yours is proposing to distribute any more damsels among his friends.

Herself has been very fit lately and we’ve got two more Dexters—such pets. One is named Dilly and the other Dally, but that’s not their nature. We liked the names for them, that’s all. So far from being their nature, they give quarts of milk.

We went over to the Pattern at Kilmakilloge last week in the motor-boat, but Tim wouldn’t let us stay long because the boys were out with their shillelaghs and he was fearful of a fight. But it was great fun. Dr. O’Connor was there with his new wife, very massive and handsome, and he was so comically proud of her, and Mr. Sheehan was as mischievous as ever and even invited us to play lawn tennis at Derreen by moonlight. It would have been funny if we had and Lord Lansdowne had turned up. We walked round the lake once, with the cripples, and gave shillings to I don’t know how many beggars, and then Tim forced us away. Every one was jigging then, except those who were singing in the inn. Good night, lucky one.—Your only

Pat

P.S.—This did not get off last night and now I re-open it to say that I am enclosing a letter which arrived this morning and has all the appearance of being the handiwork of a beau. I like the writing, so decisive and distinct.

P.

XLV
Brian Field to Clemency Power

[Enclosure]

Dear Miss Power,—I promised I would let you know when I was returning to England. Well, I am due next week, for the hospital is closing. I suppose you don’t know of a nice snug little practice in a good sporting neighbourhood with several wealthy malades imaginaires of both sexes dotted conveniently about? That’s what I want, a kind of sinecure. Forgive the low ambition. Indeed I am punished already for indulging it, for see how double-edged the word “sinecure” is, and what a sarcasm on my profession!

Having had one or two letters to you returned as “gone away” I have sent this to your home address to be forwarded. I hope you did not think that I should let you go, having once found you! The skies are not so lavish with their blessings as that! No, begob! I shall be very unhappy until an answer comes to this.—Yours sincerely,

Bryan Field

XLVI
Hazel Barrance to Verena Raby

My Dear Aunt,—Just one more word, then!—but only to say it’s no good, I can’t agree with you. The idea of marriage being necessarily warfare is utterly repugnant to me, and unless a miracle happens I shall continue to go on doing my best to be happy though single. I see no reason whatever for people to scrap, and those who like it always fill me with a kind of disgust. Married life should be all friendliness and niceness. I feel so strongly about married happiness that I believe if I were asked to name my favorite poem in all poetry I should give the old epitaph on the husband who so quickly followed his wife to the grave:

She first deceased; he for a little tried

To live without her, liked it not, and died.

No news of Horace for quite a long time. I suspect him of searching London for an apothecary of the Romeo and Juliet type who can provide love-philtres and I shall look at my drink very narrowly the next time he dines here or I meet him out. It would be like him to put a love-philtre on the market.—Your loving

H.

XLVII
Clemency Power To Bryan Field

Dear Doctor,—It was very nice of you to write and I am sorry that I missed those other letters. If you kept them, please send them on. I am now in a very different employment from that which I had when we used to meet. I am reader to an invalid lady—not, I hope, a permanent invalid, and most emphatically not one of your desired malades imaginaires—who lives in a beautiful house in Herefordshire. My duties are not confined to reading aloud but comprise a hundred other things and I am very happy. I don’t say that I don’t often regret those rough jolly boys, but one could not wish the War to last longer just for one’s own entertainment. I wonder how some of our old friends are—that poor Madame La Touche, does she still carry round the bill of damage done and horses taken which the Germans some day are to pay? And old Gaston, are his repentances and good resolutions any more binding? How long ago it all seems, and, though so real, how like a dream! I hope you will find a practice to your mind, but I am sure you don’t really want an idle one. I know too much about your zealous way with sick and wounded men ever to believe that.—I am, yours sincerely,

Clemency Power

P.S.—What does “begob” mean? I don’t understand foreign languages.

XLVIII
Louisa Parrish to Verena Raby

My Dear Verena,—I was glad to have your niece’s letter saying that you are progressing nicely. I am so afraid of those falls, and you never know even when you feel well again whether there may not be some underlying trouble to break out again at any moment. We shall all pray that nothing of the kind will happen to you. I can’t help wishing that you had the advantage of being attended by our dear Dr. Courage. He is so clever and kind and thoughtful.

My rheumatism has been troubling me again lately and nothing seems to do it any good. I deny myself sugar and potatoes and everything that is said to foster it, but to no purpose. I fear it is so deep-seated that I shall be a martyr to it all my life, but there is this consolation that they say that people who have rheumatism seldom have anything else. In this world we can’t expect to be too happy.

We have been in great trouble lately through want of maids. I don’t know what has come over the servant class, but they don’t seem to value a good place at all any more. Maid after maid has been here and has left. Whether it is that we haven’t a cinema near, or what, I don’t know, but they won’t stay. And the wages they ask are terrible. It seems to me that the world has gone mad. The wonderful thing is that they can always find some one to carry their boxes, and they get away so quickly. Not that we have ever missed anything, but they seem to decide to go all of a sudden, and no kind of consideration for us, and me with my rheumatism, ever stops them. How different from my young days when old Martha our cook went on for ever at I am sure not more than twenty pounds a year, and Arthur the butler never dreamed of leaving or asking for a rise. But since the War everybody is wild for excitement and change. I must stop now as the Doctor is waiting downstairs.—Your sincerely loving friend,

Louisa

P.S.—I re-open this, later, to say that I have just heard that my poor cousin Lady Smythe is to undergo an operation.

XLIX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

Verena, my dear, apropos of the newspapers and your dread of all their alarms and excursions, don’t believe everything you read. Fleet Street has to live, and it can do so only by selling its papers, which have first to be filled. Take, as an example of exaggeration, the outcry against Departmental inefficiency as if it were a new thing. It has always been the same, only the scale was larger during the War and after it. There have always been round pegs in square holes, and disregard of public money, and, as I happen to know, improper destruction of documents.

You say you want a story now and then. Well, here is one from my own experience, gathered as it happens in the very country the violation of which brought us into the struggle, and bearing upon official cynicism too.

Some years ago, I was travelling by a small cross-country railway in Belgium. It was a bad train at all times, but on this occasion it behaved with alarming eccentricity: at one time tearing along by leaps and bounds, and then becoming snailier than the snailiest, until at last, just outside a station, it stopped altogether. We waited and waited; nothing happened; and so first one passenger and then another alighted to see what was the matter, until gradually every one of us was on the line. Why the train did not immediately rush on and leave us all behind I cannot say; but, as you will agree, it might easily have done so, for when we reached the engine it was discovered that both the driver and stoker were gloriously and wildly drunk.

There are never lacking leaders on such occasions as these—and we quickly had several, equally noisy; but by degrees some kind of policy was agreed upon, and we all marched in a foolish procession to the station behind the group of three gentlemen who led us, and who walked (and stumbled over the sleepers) abreast, either sideways or backwards as they thought of new words and new gestures to apply to the outrage. At the station we were met by the station-master, and a battle of explanations and protests and repetitions set in and was waged terrifically, the issue of which was the production of a large sheet of paper on which we all, one by one, signed our names beneath a record of the offence, with the date and place carefully noted. By the time this was done the station-master had managed to find a new and sober driver and stoker, and the train could resume its journey.

I—perhaps because I was English, and there was nothing to gain—happened to be the last to sign, and therefore the last to rejoin the train. As I was getting into it I found that I had left my pipe in the office, and I hurried back to recapture it. I was just in time to see the station-master placing the last of the pieces of the torn-up manifesto on the fire.

After that I feel that you must have something more than usually beautiful in the way of a short poem. Try this:—

Here lies a most beautiful lady,

Light of step and heart was she;

I think she was the most beautiful lady

That ever was in West Country.

But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;

However rare—rare it be;

And when I crumble, who will remember

This lady of the West Country?

Having copied that out it occurs to me that it is almost too personal and memento-mori-ish. Let me hasten to say that the part of the West Country indicated is not Herefordshire but, let us say, Gloucestershire. How careful one always has to be—and isn’t!

R. H.

L
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby

My Dear Aunt,—I had anticipated your objection to the marriage of first-cousins, which is one of your arguments against my courtship of Hazel. An acquaintance of mine who is connected with a statistical laboratory has long been making enquiries into the whole matter of consanguinity, and the results are surprising. The children of first-cousins are by no means doomed to imbecility or decadence. But even if they were that should not necessarily deter me, for the union of Hazel and myself might prove to be childless, although none the less happy for that, and it would be grievous and tragic to permit a superstition to keep us sundered.

But I am letting the whole matter rest for a while and endeavouring to soothe my fever by concentrating once again on financial schemes. For without money I have no home to offer any wife. You will remember my project, in which I still believe implicitly, for establishing a Cinema in the City? Well, it has fallen through. The reply from the only churchwarden who has been polite enough to answer my very courteous letter is unsatisfactory. He displays an antiquated reluctance to come into line with the march of progress. And as the price of ordinary building land in the neighbourhood of Cheapside is prohibitive I must reluctantly abandon the notion either as unripe or as unsuited to my hands. But I am sure I was on the right track.

I now have a new and more practical scheme to unfold. While walking down the Strand yesterday I made a curious discovery in which I am sure you will be interested. I noticed that in the whole street there is no shop devoted to woman’s dress—not even a milliner’s. Considering that the Strand is always too full of people of both sexes and that it is largely a pleasure street—I mean that the people have time to look about and money to spend—this is a very strange thing and I am sure there would be big profits in remedying it. My idea is to find the capital for an emporium to be established somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Beaver Hut, where men and women are passing the whole time; visitors to London—staying at the Savoy and other great hotels—many of them very wealthy Americans;—people arriving at Charing Cross from Kent (one of the richest counties); and so on. How natural for the men to wish to give the women something pretty to wear!—to say nothing of the women’s own constant desire for new clothes and hats.

All that is needed is a certain amount of capital to build and stock with, and the services of a first-class man from one of the big Oxford Street places to act as manager. If you are sufficiently interested in the scheme to invest in it, please let me know the amount.

I hope you are better. I have one of my bad attacks of nasal catarrh.—Yours sincerely,

Horace Mun-Brown

LI
Roy Barrance to Verena Raby

Dear Aunt Verena,—I am broken-hearted and turn first to you for sympathy as you are always so kind and all my pals are out of town. The fact is, Trixie and I have parted for ever. I can’t explain how it happened, because my brain is all in a whirl about it, and really I don’t know, but somehow I offended her and it is all off. My life is a blank and all the plans I had made are mockeries. I had even begun to look in furniture-shop windows. And then it all went wrong, and when I got to the Jazzle Ball a little bit late, which I couldn’t help, I found that she had given every dance away to other men, one of whom is an officer bounder whom I had most carefully warned her against: a regular T.G. (Temporary Gentleman) of the worst type.

I wish you were better so that I might come and talk to you about it all. I could tell you in words so much more than I can write, especially with the mouldy pens at this Club. The only satisfactory part is that I had not bought the engagement ring, not having enough money for it. I don’t mean that I should regret the money but that I should hate to receive the blighted thing back. As it is I had not given her anything but chocolates, and of course we exchanged cigarette cases: but I don’t intend to use hers any more. I could not enjoy a cigarette from a case so fraught with memories.

If I were a little more independent I should try to forget my sorrows in travel, but I can’t. And dancing has ceased to interest me. In fact, I believe it is this dancing that is very largely the matter with England. If we danced less and worked more I am sure we should be “winning the Peace” more thoroughly. If you have any ideas for me of a strenuous kind I should like to hear of them, for I am all for toil now. I have frittered my time away too long.—Your affectionate nephew,

Roy

P.S.—If you are writing to Hazel or any one at home please don’t mention my tragedy as they did not know I was engaged.

LII
Bryan Field to Sir Smithfield Mark

Dear Sir Smithfield,—You have always been so kind in giving me advice, and now and then a hand, that I am following the natural course of gratitude and coming to trouble you again.

The hospital in France is just closing and I shall be on the loose. I shall look out for a practice, but, meanwhile, I wondered if any rural friend of your own might be in need of a locum: I say rural because the desire to be in old England again is very strong, after so many months of this foreign land, which, however beautiful in effects of light and space, never quite catches the right country feeling. I wonder if you know any one in, say, Herefordshire, who wants a change? Of course a Bart’s man.—I am, yours sincerely,

Bryan Field

LIII
Josey Raby to Vincent Frank

Darling Vin,—It is dreadful, but father won’t hear of an engagement. He is so absurdly old-fashioned and does not realize that everything has changed. No doubt when he was your age, long ago in the eighteen-nineties, people could wait for each other; but why should we? I don’t suppose that then they even knew how to kiss. He says the most ridiculous things. He says that a girl ought to know a man at least for a year and that twenty-one is the earliest age at which she should marry. Why, Juliet was only about fourteen when she was betrothed to Romeo, and lots of Indian girls are widows before our hair is up. And what is the sense of love at first sight if you have to wait? Father also says that aviation is not a desirable profession for a son-in-law, entirely forgetting that half the fun of our marriage will be the flying honeymoon.

I think you had better call on father boldly and have it out with him.—Your own

J.

LIV
Theodore Raby to Verena Raby

Dear Old V.,—If Josey writes to you for sympathy in her struggle with a stern and heartless parent, please oblige me and help the little idiot (bless her, all the same!) by supporting me.

These are the cold facts. She is eighteen and has been frivolling far too much, largely because she has no mother and I have been too much occupied to attend to her properly. Also because the War made frivolling too easy by fledging so many infants at lightning speed. Among the acquaintances that she has picked up at this and that thé dansant is a flying boy, and, just because other boys and girls have married in haste, she must needs insist on marrying in haste too. No doubt she thinks herself in love and no doubt also he does, although I shouldn’t be surprised to find that he is more pursued than pursuing, as is so often the case now; but the whole thing is derivative really, and I can’t have my one little Precious thrown away on an experiment in imitation.

The bore is that—to such a pass has the world come!—she might at any moment perform the Gretna Green act. Self-restraint, you see, is a little out of fashion up here: we all live for ourselves now, to the great detriment of the Human Family which peace was to consolidate. To forbid her to see the boy seems to me a mistake. If you were well I should ask you to invite her to the country, but you are not well, my poor dear, and she wouldn’t go even if you were—not so long as her warrior is accessible. And he seems to be always in town, the exceptional perils of the air being, it appears, compensated for by exceptional opportunities of leave.

So far as I can gather he is a decent young fellow and he may be on my side—but he doesn’t come and see me and it seems rather absurd to go to see him. The new soldier, and especially when he flies, is not to be found at home too easily! This one seems to be the usual enfranchised public-school boy—to whom the wonders and mysteries of life are either top-hole or incomprehensible, or both, and an eclipse of the sun would be merely a “solar stunt.”

Even if Josey had her foolish way I don’t suppose that the end of the world would arrive, but it would be sad and disappointing and I am certain that she would very quickly regret her impetuosity.—Yours as ever,

Theo.

P.S.—All this about me and mine and nothing of your trouble. Dear old V. I do so hope that you are mending. I must come and see you and the old home soon. It will be a dreadful thought some day—how one postpones these necessary acts!

LV
Nesta Rossiter to Richard Haven

Dear “Uncle” Richard,—I wonder if you could possibly come down, if only for a night, to see Aunt Verena. She really needs a good talk with some one sensible and frank. We all do our best but we are not sufficient. It is very bad, I am sure, for a naturally active woman such as she is to be forced to lie still in this way. She has even begun to talk about the extent to which complete invalidism should be endured, how fair it is to the community to be a deadweight, and so on. So if you could manage even a flying visit it would be a great relief to us all and a great comfort to her.—I am, yours sincerely,

Nesta

LVI
Richard Haven to Nesta Rossiter

Dear Nesta, it is impossible, I fear, for a week or so. But I will come then, although only for a night.—Yours,

R. H.

LVII
Verena Raby to Richard Haven

Dear Richard,—I am very unhappy. I do not get any better and I am a deadweight. I want to arrange my affairs and I have no adviser but you. I cannot bear to be an imposition on others, even when they assume the burden so smilingly. The kindness of people to people is far more extraordinary than their unkindness, I think. If I were to take an overdose, should I also be “of unsound mind?”—Your very dependent and despondent

V.

LVIII
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

[Telegram]

Coming by 2.35 for night.

R. H.

LIX
Verena Raby to Richard Haven

[By hand]

Dearest Richard—Just a line to say goodbye and to thank you for coming down. It is monstrous to ask you to come so far for such a short time. I feel much more serene and shall now be brave again. I hope you will have an easy journey.

I have been wondering most of the night if it was not very unfair to force so much thinking upon you, when you are, I am sure, busy enough. And I don’t want to be unfair. If I did, I should just leave all my money to you, with an intimation that you were my Grand Almoner, and die in peace. But I can’t do that, partly because you might die too and there is no one in the world but you who is really to be trusted. Do believe I am truly grateful for your daily letters and your persistence in what must often be an irksome task.—Yours always,

V.

LX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

My Poor Dear, “irksome” be d—d! There is nothing irksome in talking to you on paper for a little while every day. Indeed, a lot of it is pure luxurious pleasure, because I can indulge in the rapture of (so to speak) hearing my own platitudinous cocksure voice.

It was a long journey, but I am safely back. It was splendid to find you looking so little pulled down and to see all those nice faces round you. I pride myself on being able to pick a Reader against any man!

While the train was stopping—much too long—just outside some country station, I watched three farm-labourers hoeing, and all three were smoking cigarettes. Now, before the War you never saw a farm-labourer with a cigarette and you rarely saw him smoking during work. I am quite certain also that you can’t smoke a cigarette and hoe without doing injustice either to the tobacco or to the crop. No farmer to-day would, however, I am sure, have the courage to protest.

“But,” I said to a man the other week when he was blaming one of his messengers for an unpardonable delay, “if he behaves like that, it is your business as an employer to sack him.”

“Sack him!” he replied blankly. “Employers don’t give the sack any more; they get it.”

And this is true.

But a change must come, and the interesting thing to see will be how complete that change is. One thing is certain, and that is that Capital and Labour will never resume their old relations; Labour has tasted too much blood. And you can’t put servants into khaki and tell them they are our saviours and then expect them to return to the status of servitude—at any rate not the same ones. The process of grinding the working classes back to their old position of subjection is going to be impossible; and the statesmen will find that reconstruction must be based on foundations which are set on a higher level than the old.

A man in the train gave me a new definition of the extreme of meanness: Saving a rose from Queen Alexandra’s Day for use again next year.

Here is the poem:—

Since all that I can ever do for thee

Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be:

That thou may’st never guess nor ever see

The all-endured this nothing-done costs me.

Good night.

R. H.

LXI
Verena Raby to Her Brother Walter in Texas

My Dear Walter,—It is far too long since I wrote to you, but now I have only too much time for letters, as an accident hurt my back and I have to lie up with too little to do.

I wonder so often how you are, and you never send a line, nor does Sally. You are the only one of our family of whom no one ever hears. Do make a great effort and answer this and tell me all about yourself and your life on the ranch. It must be so very different from ours. If you have a camera, couldn’t you send some photographs? Remember I have never seen Sally. I don’t even know if there are any children.

The garden to-day looks lovely from my window. The old place has not changed much since our childish days, but the trees are higher. I have done very little to it beyond keeping it in repair and installing electric light, which is made by an oil engine, and a few modern things like that. There are more bath-rooms, for instance. One of them has been made out of that funny little bedroom where the rat came down the chimney and you brought up one of your young terriers to kill it and the dog was afraid and it nearly broke your heart. You haven’t forgotten that?

The big playroom at the top I have not touched. It has the same wall-paper. Whenever any of the others—I mean the girls—come to see me and we go up there we always have a good cry. The screen with the Punch drawings, the big doll’s house, the rocking horse: they are still there. Little Lobbie, Nesta’s second child (Nesta is Lucilla’s daughter, who married an artist), plays there now. Nesta is staying here to keep me company while I am ill. I don’t have any pain; I merely have to lie still and give the spine a chance.

Kington has grown very little. There are new houses near the station and we have a municipal park! That is about all. But it isn’t what it was—probably no English town is since the motor car came into being. Some may be better, but I think that Kington has deteriorated and very few of our friends remain. Mr. and Mrs. Grace are still living at the Tower, but alone and very old; all the family has dispersed. One thing that has not changed is the temperature of the church; which is still cold. But there is a long—too long—Roll of Honour in the porch. How you must have regretted that lameness of yours when the War broke out!

I manage to keep in touch with most of us, chiefly through their children. Letitia I never see. I should like to, but she is not strong, and Tunbridge Wells is a long way off, and it is impossible to detach her from her husband, whom we rather avoid. I am afraid she is not happy, but I can do very little to help. Clara’s son and daughter—Roy and Hazel—are very lively correspondents, and Evangeline, their youngest, seems a thoughtful child; but I fear that Hector Barrance can be rather difficult at times. Theodore’s only girl is just eighteen. Anna’s boy Horace is a rather serious young man at the Bar. Lionel is still unmarried; he was made a C.B.E. in the War. Ronald is also unmarried and I hear from him now and then, but his duties keep him very close in Edinburgh. Every one is very kind to me in my illness, Richard Haven—you remember him?—writing every day. He is fixed in London. Nellie Sandley, whom you were so sweet upon that summer at Lyme Regis, died last week, poor girl, of pneumonia.

I wonder if all this interests you in the least, or if your new life in your new country is all-absorbing. It would be delightful to see you again. But at any rate do write and send some photographs if you can. Write directly you get this and then a longer letter later.—Your loving sister,

Verena

P.S.—I often wonder if you would not like the series of hunting scenes by Alken that used to be in the dining-room. Let me know and I will send them.

LXII
Verena Raby to Theodore Raby

My Dear Theo,—How very delightful to hear from you—even though it is such a tale of woe. I don’t want you to have more of such perplexities, but I do want to have another letter. It was odd too because I was just beginning a long one to Walter asking for his news and telling him mine.

If Josey writes to me, you may be sure I will be on your side—but can’t you get her something to do? It is idleness and enough money to buy new frocks that lead to these problems. I should like her to come here, but, as you say, she wouldn’t accept just now.—Your very loving

V.

LXIII
Evangeline Barrance to Verena Raby

Dear Aunt Verena,—I hope you are better. I told you some time ago that we were preparing a great surprise for you to cheer you up on your bed of sickness and pain. Well, it is now ready and I send the first number. If you get well quickly there will never be another. It is called The Beguiler and has been written for you chiefly by the girls here. I am the editor. My great friend Mabel Beresford copied it all out. Doesn’t she write beautifully? I hope you will like it. Roy has read it and he says it ought to deliver the goods.—Your loving

Evangeline

No. 1. May, 1919

THE BEGUILER
OR
THE INVALID’S FRIEND

A Miscellany

COMPILED BY
EVANGELINE BARRANCE

ASSISTED BY A BUNCH OF FLOWERS