“Just wait till I get this for the vicar,” he answered, hunting in his pocket. I asked what it was and he held it up.
“But you can’t have that!” I said, “I want it. It is the very thing for Caroline; and the vicar won’t read it. Here! this is much better for him.” I took up a book with a beautiful picture on the cover. A masked bishop digging up a corpse from the hearthstone, under the very nose of an expiring cook.
“The vicar is such a darling,” I said, “you must give him something nice. He loves excitement, and told me himself that the lending libraries are so stupid; they send him nothing but shop, and he does not know what to ask for.”
James gave in, and, as it turned out, made the success of the year with his present. Caroline wrote me the warmest letter of thanks for the book from which I had rescued the vicar. It was a serious, blue cloth work called “In Tune with the Indefinite.” She is a thoroughly bad woman, as worldly as Lot’s wife, and without a spark of generosity in her composition. She said she simply loved mysticism, and had been wanting this particular book ever since it came out.
I forgave Mr. Jones on Christmas Day and tried to think well of Mullins and the others. I also gave the boy half a crown on the second of January, explaining that I was sorry for the delay; there had been a slight mistake as to the time for which it was ordered. I hoped he would not be inconvenienced by receiving it in the following year instead.
CHAPTER XIII: THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
If I had been clairvoyant enough to foresee the arrival of the Buttons in the house next door, I should have looked for another dumping-ground for my domestic burdens, and, quite likely, have found myself side by side with other and worse Buttons; so I dare say it was for the best—or the least bad anyhow. When we took our house the adjoining Bijou was empty. I had forgotten (being, as the efficient female says, a little excitable) that it might some day be filled.
We were very happy for two years; then Satan began to find occupation for our landlord, at whose bidding the Buttons sprang up like fungus on the lawn of the empty house. I came home after a short holiday to find them thriving upon their evil juices. There were then two parent Buttons and three young ones. Six years later there were eight young ones, “and all by the same father,” as a friend who was staying with us remarked with surprise. In the mission field, where I understand that human life is often fostered for table purposes, the Buttons would be invaluable, but for a civilised country there were too many of them, added to which (as it they wanted adding to!) they kept animals and birds and every kind of creature with a voice whom they could lay hands on.
What deaf idiot can have floated the idea of there being dumb animals in the world to claim our affection and respect? When I find a dumb animal I shall love it with all my heart and soul. As for those animals that already exist, it would be as reasonable to speak with tears in our eyes about dumb foreigners because they make life intolerable with vociferations we do not understand.
I used to read books about the Great African Silence, dreaming about it as a Mussulman dreams of Paradise. If there is a certain hour known as cock-crow why may not other hours be apportioned in the same way and devoted to a particular animal? If this were done I could arrange my day. I would not go to bed until after cock-crow, I would do my shopping at dog-bark, and arrange to dine with a friend during caterwaul. As it is there is no method about the nuisance; it is all adrift and mixed up. And in the case of the Buttons there were the children, who welded single aggravations into one vast outrage.