‘Who’s that shouting to you, Sheila?’
‘The gentleman’s a hopper, dear. Go to sleep again, like a good girl.’
‘I don’t like him,’ said Rosemary. ‘Tell Mr. Hopper to go away.’
Sheila shut the window; and after a while the visitor withdrew, leaving behind him a dirty cloth cap and the germ of a new mythology.
In the morning Rosemary found inscrutable but sufficient cause to reverse her condemnation of Mr. Hopper. She spent the odd moments of the next day embellishing the ideal portrait that her surprising young fancy had drawn. At breakfast Mr. Hopper was a nice large gentleman; by lunchtime he was wearing blue spectacles, had developed a taste for sponge fingers, and was clad in a velvet jacket, like Edward’s, with cavernous pockets containing a clockwork train and a woolly-pated black doll. The next day he mysteriously acquired a brown beard and a pair of spotty trousers similar to those of a certain harlequin prominent among Rosemary’s cherished memories, and before the week was out he was provided with a Botticelli halo that added sanctity to an already distinguished appearance. Stories of his wonderful doings began to circulate: how he had travelled in a train to the City to buy feeding-bottles for Rosemary’s children; how his several mothers (a generic term that included wives) had had to physic his cough; and how bravely he could ride elephants. Mr. Hopper had various secondary designations: sometimes he was known as the man with a lot of mothers (a distinction he perhaps derived from Bluebeard); sometimes, more tersely, as ‘my friend’; and sometimes as Poker Morgan’s father. In short Mr. Hopper was canonized; Mr. Hopper became a legend. He went triumphantly upon his swaggering, nonsensical, polygamous, but none the less kindly way in Rosemary’s mind, a figure of flaming glory and infinite adaptability; until abruptly, and without pity, she tired of him and turned to other joys.
On Sunday morning she was taken, for the first time, to church; whence she returned consumingly curious. To Sheila, who had hoped for no more than a vague æsthetic enjoyment, the ceremony had been disappointing. She felt unequal to explaining why Rosemary must on no account bestow the big pockets and spotty trousers of her generous imagination upon members of the Holy Trinity, whose names the little girl had fatally remembered. But blasphemy being so clearly imminent, Sheila addressed herself with a sigh to the task of averting it.
‘Jesus, dear, was the name of a real person, someone who really lived. Not like Mr. Hopper.’
Rosemary’s intense dark eyes grew profoundly reproachful. This lapse from poetic faith on the part of so skilled a fellow-artist as Sheila was terrible. It was as though the whole beautiful city of pretence was threatened with hostile invasion.
‘But Mr. Hopper is real too,’ Rosemary said, with quivering lip.