“Mistake? Bless you, no ma’am, there ain’t no mistake! Why it were stuck up at the office by Mr. Smith hisself, just gone quarter to the hour. I was a-coming along with my husband’s second breakfast, for he’s working now for Mr. Bellew at the Mills. So as I was passing close to the office ‘Whatever is all this about,’ thinks I, for there was eight or ten people a-standin’ there, and a-readin’ somethink. And with that I sees——”
I too had seen something! A flag—unmistakably a Union Jack—hanging near the Church, I had overlooked it in my hurry. At sight of that, excitement, combined with the fear of missing my train, overcame my politeness, and I flew down the lane in the direction of the station.
The train was caught, but only by the narrowest margin. I sprang into a carriage, all but shaking hands as I did so with an absolutely unknown old gentleman, who was its only other occupant. Everyone knows the shrinking, the more than maidenly dread of the solitary travelling he, for the unknown travelling she, however harmless the latter may look. On this occasion public interest overcame even that terror. As a river bursts through its banks, so my old gentleman burst into a torrent of repressed information. He had just come from London; he had witnessed the scene at the Mansion House; he described to me the Lord Mayor coming to the window with a telegram in his hands; he dilated upon the crowds, the cheering, the flags, the block in the streets; above all upon the central fact of the situation, which was that he had himself been thereby made twenty minutes late at his board, or meeting, whatever it was. “For the first time in twenty-five years!—the very first time! They couldn’t make out what had happened to me; thought I must have been run over!” he assured me several times between Guildford and Godalming.
Well, well, it has come at last! All is right, all is well, and we may go back to our own little concerns; our housekeepings, and our marketings, our weedings, and our seed-sowing, with lighter; let us hope, perhaps also, with a trifle gratefuller hearts?
March 3, 1900
OUR good old Cuttle is leaving us; will be gone by this time next week, and I feel more sorry than seems quite reasonable! To-day, when we began talking the matter over together, a suspicious huskiness in my voice warned me that I should do well to get away from the subject before my character for propriety was quite lost!
It is better I know for many reasons that he should leave. He cannot, indeed will not, undertake sole charge of both flower and kitchen garden, and to have anyone over him in either department is not to be dreamed of. Moreover his own home is four miles away, all up and down a long crooked lane, and a walk like that after a hard day’s work would be enough to try anyone half his age. Under ordinary circumstances the departure of a man who, though he has been with us now nearly three years, came at first as a mere jobber, would be a small affair on either side. Our poor old Cuttle is however so identified with the very existence of this little possession of ours that to lose him seems like losing a piece, and moreover a considerable piece of it. If the pegs and the marking-tapes have been our contributions, all the solid work, the earth turning and delving, the trenching, the grass-sowing, the cutting down of trees, above all the interminable pitchfork operations, have been his, and his satellite’s. Surely then he has a right to regard himself as its creator? Our good, old, kindly, argumentative Cuttle! The familiar little nooks and corners, cultivated, wild, half wild, will hardly seem so entirely themselves; hardly so intimately familiar, without your friendly face!
March 5, 1900
ALLAH be praised for a leisurely life! I have been visiting A. R. D., whose days are filled with large and various activities; whose responsibilities are great; whose hours of work are long; of leisure few and scanty. I admire such indomitable workers, with an admiration which increases with every year I live, but I envy them, Oh ye gods, not at all!
“Cling to the peace of obscurity; they shall be happy that love thee.” Where, I wonder, have I acquired that rather ignominious injunction? There is a seventeenth-century flavour about it which makes it sound respectable, yet at bottom I suppose it is merely a counsel of laziness. Work, far from the curse, is the alleviation of the curse; of that I am as convinced as anybody. At the same time a good deal of the work that goes on around one seems to be rather the product of the unasked volition of the worker, than of any violent external necessity. Obscurity and laziness moreover are far from interchangeable terms, seeing that the majority of the hard-workers of the world are, and as a necessity always will be, obscure. It is only in our little fussy artistic or literary coteries that the two ideas have attained to a sort of accidental connection. Personally I have a relish, I might almost say a passion for obscurity. The retort is of course easy, and I am able to reply to myself that the alternative has never been pressed upon my attention with any very urgent insistence. That is true, but does not really affect the matter. Honestly, I do regard obscurity as a blessing, apart from such satisfactions it may provide for laziness. For what does it mean? It means that you belong to yourself; that you have your years, your days, hours, and minutes undisposed of, unbargained for, unwatched, and unwished for by anybody. It means that you are free to go in and out without witnesses; free as the grass, free rather as the birds of the air. Further, I am inclined to think that only Obscurity can properly and heartily enjoy his sunsets, moon-rises, spring mornings, running streams, first flowers, and all the rest of the good cheap joys that lie about his path. The known and admired person is expected to make capital out of such matters, and he probably does so too, poor fellow! Yet upon the untrammelled enjoyment of such things how much, not only of the satisfaction, but of the peace of life depends? As was said by one—who, by the way, was very far himself from being an Obscurity—“Nothing startles me beyond the moment. A setting sun will always set me to rights, and if a sparrow comes hopping to my window, I can take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel.”