"Did mother tell you to come in?" he asked the children after nodding to me.
"Yes," said Beppo, thrusting out his chin and working his neck slowly as Bill tied a napkin round it. And he went on in a thin, clear, little voice: "We ha'nt any help in our house, an' Ma she had to go to the stores, so we said we'd like comin' in here to see you till she comes back."
"Well, that's awfully nice of you, old chap. Next time you'll bring mother too, eh?"
They looked at each other at this, and then at their spoons as they leaned over the soup.
"Anyhow, you'll ask her, won't you?" coaxed Bill. "Say, how pleased we shall be if she comes in some evening."
They smiled, and Beppo said, "Sure, we'll ask her," and then we all laughed. I suppose we were a trifle fatuous about them and treated them more as delicious playthings than as human beings. They bore it very well, however, and after dinner, when my friend, in spite of his long tramp and a "job" half done upstairs in the studio, played the piano, and did conjuring tricks with a handkerchief and a glass of water, and then got out a concertina which had often wakened the echoes of King's Road, Chelsea, in the small hours, they were in raptures. The concertina certainly impressed them as "a divine box of sounds." After "Church Bells in the Distance" they jumped and clapped their hands and said "Bully!" A new and appreciative audience is always stimulating to an artist. My friend surpassed himself. He told them about the London costers, how they had hundreds of pearl buttons and velvet collared coats and wide bell-mouthed trousers, how they played the concertina so beautifully that the policemen in the streets wept into their helmets and the King came out of his palace and danced a jig with the Lord Mayor outside the Mansion House. And he told them how it sometimes chanced the coster got drunk on his way home, and this made him play very pathetically indeed like this ... and then the broken strains of "Two Lovely Black Eyes" came forth, but ended abruptly in a squeak. That, they were told, was his wife, Eliza, who had come out and slapped him. Eliza had joined the Salvation Army and sang only hymns. This was the prelude to "Where is My Wandering Boy To-night?" rendered in a way, Bill remarked sotto voce, calculated to keep him wandering. But Beppo and Ben sat on the edge of their chairs, entranced. It was evidently a novel evening for them. We put the concertina away and got a drawing-board with a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, and everybody had to draw a pig blindfold. The usual fragmentary animals appeared, some so embryonic as to be unrecognizable by their designers, some with tails in their ears, others with too many legs. My own efforts were adjudged the best, which led Bill to express surprise that a man who couldn't draw anything at all with his eyes open should be able to draw a pig blindfold. Tired of this, Mac put on a pair of castanets and danced a Spanish fandango. He hung up a sheet in front of his studio lamp and performed an amazing series of shadow-pictures representing the "Hunting of the Snark." When our small visitors saw the Tub-Tub, "that terrible bird," flapping horribly about with his three-cornered eyes glaring at them, they grasped our hands and shouted with the most exquisite mingling of horror and delight. They were consoled with a wrestling match to which my versatile friend challenged himself. Having shaken hands with himself, he then grasped himself in the most approved catch-as-catch-can manner, struggled desperately to throw himself and finally triumphed by flinging himself in the air, turning a somersault and coming down on the carpet with a bump. Getting up and falling exhausted into a chair, he was greeted with loud cries to "do it again."
"No, indeed, you won't," said Bill emphatically. "You must be crazy to do it at all after walking I don't know how many miles. Children, do you want to kill my husband?"
They shook their heads solemnly. At that moment they evidently thought him quite the most wonderful person in the world. I often think so myself and I know his wife holds that view always. So I at once inaugurated a story-telling competition. I told them of an extraordinary affair that had once happened in England, where I was eking out a wretched existence as a hunter of buried treasure. I had received information about a tomato-can full of diamonds hidden in a beef-steak pie which would be served at a certain old inn on the shores of a lake far away towards the North Sea, and I was just packing up my patent can-opener, a box of candy and a packet of gum for refreshment on the way, and a pair of silver-mounted pistols like those in the studio upstairs, when an old woman with bright red hair tapped at the door ... tap-tap! Ben and Beppo both looked at the door, and Bill said in a low voice, "Don't frighten them; you'll make them dream." But they were watching me once more with their round, expectant eyes, and I was racking my brains to discover the purport of the old woman with the bright red hair—for I am always inventing fascinating characters about which I know nothing!—when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim was lifted twice and we heard a real knock on a real door ... tap-tap!
It was Mrs. Carville. She stepped quickly into the room so that the door might be closed on the cold night air, and looked round with an unwonted gaiety in her mien. As her gaze fell upon the two little boys, who stood close to my knee and hampered my rising, I fancied the expression of her fine dark eyes hardened a little. It may have been only fancy, but it made me wonder if the cause of her elation lay beyond the family circle. At first I had a twinge, for when a woman, whose husband is in some Mediterranean port, is elated by something beyond her front door, the world (and I belonged to the world, after all) looks grave. I suppose I myself looked grave as I bowed, for she regarded me—her eyes coming back to my face for a moment—with a certain gallant challenge, as though she read my shadowy thought and defied it. And then, sitting back in my chair again and watching her respond to the charm of my friend's manner, I could not help wishing that Mr. Carville had seen fit to give us a little more of his wife's character in his narrative. It seemed to me that the dry, clear light of his recondite mind would have thrown into admirable gleams and shadows, gleams of humour and shadows of blind fate, the brilliant creature who sat before us. There was nothing material in her manner as she let her glance fall again upon the children. The gaiety super-imposed upon her customary staid gravity seemed to have made her, not younger or less mature, but less domestic, more complex and mystifying. And I found myself recalling Mr. Carville's contemptuous moralizings upon the illusory nature of love. I tried, foolish as it may seem, to place myself intellectually in the place of a woman like Mrs. Carville, to conceive her probable fundamental attitude towards her offspring, trodden smooth and firm by the daily round of chores, an active, vigorous mind in an active, vigorous body.... Well, this was journeyman's work, I suppose, for a novelist; yet for me it had a freshness and spice that led me on until I pulled up sharply and felt the pang of shame. I am continually torn in the conflict between realism and what are called "unworthy thoughts." If it were not for a fear of traducing my own character by an ambiguous phrase, I would confess to many "unworthy thoughts" of many worthy people. I suppress them, of course, as I suppressed these concerning Mrs. Carville's trip to New York and the secular gaiety that now sat like a diadem on Mrs. Carville's forehead; but I have them all the same.
I was roused by Mrs. Carville's rising and saying that the children must go to bed.