David Blaize and the Blue Door

by E. F. Benson

Then they all looked at each other, frowning, as if they were trying to think of something, and counting syllables on their fingers.

‘Ahem!’ said Miss Rhyme, clearing her throat. ‘This is the nicest of all days, because we welcome David Blaize. Go on, Pa.’

As soon as she had spoken, she opened her book, and began writing in it. The pages were already quite covered up with other writing, but she seemed not to mind that. She wrote with a pen, and put the tip of it into her mouth in order to get blacker marks out of it. Very soon her lips were all covered with ink, which she licked off when she had time. Usually she hadn’t.

Mr. Rhyme began writing and talking.

‘We saw at once that you were not one of the antiquated lot,’ he said. ‘Your turn, Ma.’

Mrs. Rhyme stopped counting on her fingers and frowning on her face, and took up a pencil in one hand and a pen in the other, and began writing with them both in her book. Sometimes she dipped them both in the ink, and then they both wrote ink, and sometimes she put them both in her mouth, and then one wrote pencil, the other nothing at all, because she had sucked the ink off. She seemed to be writing in shorthand, for it consisted of hooks and dashes and strokes and marks like footsteps in the snow.

‘It gives us all the utmost joy,’ she said, ‘to welcome here a human boy. They say your name is David Blaize, but it don’t matter what they says. The great thing is to stick to rhyme’⁠—⁠

‘And make up verses all the time,’ interrupted Master Rhyme, who began writing too. ‘We’re very pleased that you have got here.’

‘I’ve made a blot, and want the blotter,’ said Miss Rhyme. ‘Papa, don’t jog my elbow so, it stops my inspiration’s flow.’

David felt his head going round, and was in a perfect agony lest he should be expected to make poetry too, which he knew he was quite incapable of doing. But by this time the whole of the family were all writing together, and making poetry at the tops of their voices without paying the least attention to him or to each other. Blobs of ink were flying about everywhere, for they all tried to dip their pens and pencils in the ink-bottle together, and they kept stabbing each other’s fingers with their nibs, and wiping off the blots on to each other’s sleeves, or on to David’s white stockings, until he thought he had never seen such a noisy and messy family. Besides, he had come to listen to a concert, which was probably going on all the time, if only he could hear it.