After dinner, the children climb all over you, and upset your coffee, and burn themselves on your cigarette. Then Mother asks the rumple-haired baby, eight years old, to recite to the guest, and she declines. So Mother goes to the piano, and insists that she shall sing. To this she consents, so long as she may turn her back on her audience. So she stands, her little legs looking so pathetic in socks, by her mother, and sings, very prettily, "Sweet and Low" and that delicate thing of Thomas Dekker's—"Golden Slumbers"—with its lovely seventeenth-century melody, full of the graceful sad-gaiety of past things, and of a pathos the more piercing because at first unsuspected; beauty and sorrow crystallized in a few simple chords.
Then baby goes in care of the maid to bed, and Mother and Father and Helen, who is twelve years old, go to the pictures at the Palladium near Balham Station. There, for sixpence, they have an entertainment which is quite satisfying to their modest temperaments and one, withal, which is quite suitable to Miss Twelve Years Old; for Father and Mother are Proper People, and would not like to take their treasure to the sullying atmosphere of even a suburban music-hall.
So they spend a couple of hours with the pictures, listening to an orchestra of a piano, a violin, and a 'cello, which plays even indifferent music really well. And they roar over the facial extravagances of Ford Sterling and his friends Fatty and Mabel; they applaud, and Miss Twelve Years Old secretly admires the airy adventures of the debonair Max Linder—she thinks he is a dear, only she daren't tell Mother and Father so, or they would be startled. And then there is Mr. C. Chaplin—always there is Mr. C. Chaplin. Personally, I loathe the cinematograph. It is, I think, the most tedious, the most banal form of entertainment that was ever flung at a foolish public. The Punch and Judy show is sweetness and light by comparison. It is the mechanical nature of the affair that so depresses me. It may be clever; I have no doubt it is. But I would rather see the worst music-hall show that was ever put up than the best picture-play that was ever filmed. The darkness, the silence, the buzz of the machine, and the insignificant processions of shadows on a sheet are about the last thing I should ever describe by the word Entertainment. I would as soon sit for two hours in a Baptist Chapel. Still, Mr. C. Chaplin has made it endurable.
After the pictures, they go home, and Miss Twelve goes to bed, while Mother and Father sit up awhile. Father has a nightcap, perhaps, and Mother gives him a little music. She doesn't pretend to play, she will tell her guests; she just amuses herself. Often they have a friend or two in for dinner and a little music, or music and a little dinner. Or sometimes they visit other friends in an exchange of hospitalities, or book seats for a theatre, or for the Coliseum, and perhaps dine in town at Gatti's or Maxim's, and feel very gay. Mother seizes the opportunity to air her evening frock, and father dresses, too, and they have a taxi to town and a taxi home.
Then, one by one, the lights in their Avenue disappear; the warm windows close their tired eyes; and in the soft silence of the London night they ascend, hand in hand, to their comfortable little bedroom; and it is all very sweet and sacramental....