JOKING APART

BY THE

HON. MRS. DOWDALL

AUTHOR OF “THE BOOK OF MARTHA”

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE AUTHOR

LONDON

DUCKWORTH & CO.

HENRIETTA ST. COVENT GARDEN

All rights reserved

Published 1914

TO

LUCIE RALEIGH

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I: “JOKING APART”

Just to show the sort of thing one has to put up with in life, take the writing of this book as an instance. It was getting along splendidly. Chapter after chapter was piled up; the commonplaces of everyday life lay delicately unclothed upon the pages. All the neighbours—everybody’s neighbours—were there, pinned down like butterflies; their beauties and their bulgy eyes and their great number of legs ready for the inspection of the public. It is not every one who is quick enough to get a good look at butterflies and moths when they are flitting about, so it is best to keep them somewhere where we can get at them any time we like.

But there was no difficulty in all this. The trouble was with that section of the public which wants a magnifying glass and a dissecting implement before it can enjoy a pinned-out butterfly. Aunt Mary, who takes a view altogether different from mine on almost every subject, but who is really a very sound woman and a good judge of what people think, read through my manuscript and said:

“But, my dear Martha, it is by no means clear what it is all about.”

This put me in a fever. If there is one thing I dislike more than another it is to be told that something I am interested in is “not clear.”

“Well, it is certainly not thick,” I replied, my poor mind harking back, as it nearly always does, to some such homely matter as the soup.

“Now that is an excellent example of what I mean!” Aunt Mary complained. “I say that many things in your book are not clear, and your mind at once flies off on the word ‘clear,’ and you imagine yourself at table, with a greasy waiter leaning over your shoulder holding a plate of kidney purée in one hand and bouillon in the other. You forget that you don’t carry your audience with you.”

“You are not clear now, yourself,” I said with a certain pleasure. “Would you please strain your criticism once more and add a little bit more beef.”

“Well, for instance, you never explain where Millport is,” she began. “You don’t say how you came there, nor what sort of place it is.”

“But everybody understands that,” I argued. “We all come to live in a place in the same way; by train, with furniture and linen, and a list of things to be done when we get there. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred we come because our husbands have got a job in the place. Very few people go to live anywhere for pleasure.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” my aunt admitted, “except that it is usual to give some explanation. Writers generally begin by describing the sun setting behind the suburbs, or rising over the heart of the city. They give the general lie of the streets and the surrounding country. And if they are talking about the provinces they usually create an atmosphere of depression, and domestic smells, and balked desires, just to start off with.”

“Will you write a description of my home?” I suggested. “Tell them that it is a solid enough house, stucco in front and bricks at the back; a cat-run and some laurel bushes facing the road, and a gardener and another cat-run behind the house. In the middle of the back cat-run there is a tennis net and three seedy deck-chairs, one of which supports a blonde authoress with ill-defined features, the other an aunt with a high forehead and ideals about literature; the third will shortly contain a husband who will come home in about half an hour with a pink evening paper. What is there in all that to cheer a reader who is in the same unfortunate position herself?”

“Still, they like to know,” said Aunt Mary. The gentle persistence of these mild women is what wrecks many homes, and was, I suppose, at the bottom of a good deal of martyrdom in the times of the Inquisition. We were silent. I was a little ruffled and bored, and Aunt Mary was planning a new attack in nearly the same place.

“You don’t describe your people, either,” she began again presently, boring away. It was like that bad moment when the dentist, having fitted a new spike on to his steam gimlet, says, “Now please, shall we go on? A little wider——”

“You don’t describe your people,” averred Aunt Mary. “You talk of Mrs. Beehive, and Reginald, and Polly, and the Henrys, and the Spicers, but you don’t give their heights or their features or circumstances, nor even tell us what rooms they are in when the conversations take place.”

“But don’t you see, dear,” I explained, “that if I did that the Henrys would probably get a job in Edinburgh or Sheffield. Or Reginald and Polly might die, and their places be filled by a similar couple whose names were Tom and Katie. Then Reginald instead of having a fair moustache would have a dark beard, and so on, and make all the description wrong. It is much better to leave them quite free to look different in different towns. I believe if you think of all the great names you know in literature you will find that the make-up of most of them has been left to the imagination of the public. Take Noah—we all know the look of him, but there is no description of him anywhere. And there are many more of the same kind whom I could mention.”

“Well, well,” said Aunt Mary, “have it your own way, though I think you are wrong. But there is another thing. I don’t like your putting in Miss Brown’s letters. They are not in the spirit of the book, and they are a little vulgar in places, I think, if you will excuse my saying so. Those absurd names she gives to people do not deceive anybody, and the letters are calculated to do a great deal of harm. Louise made a great mistake in letting you have them.”

“Anyhow I asked Miss Brown,” I replied, “and she said I might do as I liked. She will never come back here, and the reason I wanted them is that my own view of Millport is one-sided. I have a filial sentiment for it, and I couldn’t describe it with the kind of photographic falsity which is sometimes a help when such an unstable person as myself is trying to set down emotional truths.”

“Still, I think it is a mistake,” said Aunt Mary. “I don’t like descriptions which, as you say, are like photographs. I never thought that Miss Brown showed much insight or tried to enter into the spirit of Millport society. But—joking apart—couldn’t you, Martha dear, write a nice little chapter, just giving a bird’s-eye view of the town, and explaining who all the people are who come into the book?”

I made several beginnings to please her, but it was no good. If I ever write a novel it will have no scenery, and no furniture, and very little gesture in it. People will speak as they do in nightmares, crowding round and peering into the sufferer’s face, and the reader will gasp as he turns over to the other page, “Oh! There’s Fred! stop him! He’s going over the cliff!” But every reader must bring his own cliff. All that I supply is the dream people who have every one of them got faces which we have seen at one time or another.

CHAPTER II: CHINESE TORTURE

The civilization of the Chinese is admittedly very old, and their forms of torture are supposed to be extremely subtle. Perhaps with great age has come the knowledge that the tortures which have occurred naturally to man since he first existed are not likely to be improved upon by those who wish to inconvenience their fellow-creatures. It is probable that the first human owner of a cave, gnawing his bone at the end of the family table, gnawed it in such a manner as to make some peculiar grating, slooping or gnashing sound which aroused the indignation of his hairy partner. It may almost be taken for granted that he forgot to help the stuffing. The rude physicians of that epoch would, in all likelihood, have testified that the cave ladies as a class were evasive and unruly, and that they would insist upon sitting round the fire capturing the parasites in one another’s tresses instead of coming to bed at the proper time. There can be no doubt that the children speedily acquired the habit of saying “What?” every few minutes, that the slaves hid things, that the dweller in the next cave was the earliest inventor of a musical instrument, and that the first door which the first man put to his cave in self-defence banged the first time it was left ajar.

It may therefore be, for all we know, that the subtle devices called Chinese tortures are quite modern arrangements adapted to a frailer generation, and that the real old, original Chinaman just left his victims to suffer unprotected in an ordinary household. The prevaricating, garrulous female prisoners were, perhaps, shut up for years with a gentleman who slooped at his meals, thus killing two birds with one stone. The children who asked “Wha-at?” when their questions were answered for the first time were immured with parents who said “Waddear?” at the end of an animated description of a day’s adventure. Prisoners of both sexes who left their clothes on the bathroom floor and never destroyed envelopes were served exclusively by maids who threw everything portable into the dustbin, except clothes, which they hung up in the wrong side of the wardrobe. People who laughed incessantly while they spoke kept house for those who grumphed and blew air through their cheeks at breakfast. They were a merry party in the prisons one way and another if you come to think of it!

And there was another very dreadful thing that I can hardly speak of. Taking one hundred as the maximum that anyone can understand of what is possible in human thought, the most loving hearts whose comprehension equalled, say, four, were given a love potion and immediately introduced to some lady or gentleman, equally tender and sincere, whose comprehension ran up sometimes as far as nine. This is not the same thing as being misunderstood. That is a grievance which no one really minds unless they are very hard at work altering their natural character; as, for instance, when the born miser who has forked out three-and-sixpence instead of two shillings, after heart-breaking struggles with himself, says bitterly, “It is so horrid of you to suggest that I don’t like giving money away. It hurts me far more than if you had accused me of something that I really do.” But to return to the ninepence and fourpence. It is not misunderstanding; it is what an earnest lady was heard saying at a party when the music stopped, “Of course I was never able to go quite all the way with John Stuart Mill.”

If that lady had been John Stuart Mill’s bosom friend he would have felt the remark as an awful blow. Can anything be more painful than for some one to refer to, let us say, the resemblance of the human skeleton to that of a pig and for his companion to reply with tears springing up from an injured, loving heart, “Oh, please don’t talk like that! I hate it when you say such things. As if there could be any resemblance!” Of course it doesn’t matter now and then, but if it is to go on all the time you can’t do much better with a thumb-screw. One need not go far to see tortured men and women with their dear ones simply dancing on their vitals. The sharp intake of Reginald’s breath is audible when Polly says at dinner, “My husband never can keep a toothbrush more than a fortnight, can you, Reggie? It gets in a perfectly impossible state. I have to——” etc. If Reggie tells a funny little story all about a spade—a story with a good point to it and quite impersonal—she will most probably blame him for vulgarity, yet his little story about the spade was as detached as a robin’s song in December. It is the personal touch in speech which only the unimaginative can hear unmoved. Men have complained that they were obliged to say indecent things themselves as a protection against hearing some one else say something less indecent in an indecent way. By their method they shut the others up.

“What does he mean?” a woman asked on one of these occasions.

“Well, Polly gets so gross when she begins to talk about ordinary things,” said Reginald, “that I have to shout out all I know about more difficult subjects for fear she should begin to attempt them.”

“What did I say that was gross?” asked Polly, opening her large eyes.

“I don’t want ever to remember what you said about the baby,” Reginald answered with haste. “Let us talk about something else quickly; rape, sacrilege, anything you like, but don’t mention the child’s toes again.”

“But Reginald——” protested his wife.

“Silence, woman!” commanded Reginald, and when he had gone out of the room Polly said that she was quite coming round to the idea that women ought to vote. Men cared nothing whatever about children and lots of other things. They were so utterly material, and political life ought to have an element of delicacy and refinement to keep it on the highest level. As a child Reginald had, of course, suffered the usual forms of infant torture. He used, as we all did, to come into the drawing-room to see visitors. His sisters became inured to this, although it bored them. They got a certain interest out of the visitor’s appearance and tricks of manner, which were all reproduced with merciless accuracy in the schoolroom afterwards; not ill-naturedly, but because they had been stored as sounds are stored on the phonograph. Reginald was more than bored; he suffered from the personal attentions of his mother and her guests. Personal remarks always hit his comfort like unpleasant sounds hit the sense of music. “Where have you been?” his mother would ask, which she would not have done if they had been alone, because she knew that there was practically nowhere to go except the park. Then began the old, old rigmarole: how he had grown, whom he was like, what form of exercise he took—there is no need to go into details, because we are all familiar with the stupid, tactless business. We have all sat and simmered while the little creatures stand kicking one foot against the other until we release them from our impertinence. Then his mother either repeated something he had told her in confidence the day before, or she made affected use of his schoolboy slang as if it were her own, or she blew his nose with her handkerchief, and showed off generally, and made him show off, and it was all beastly. He suffered incessantly from this showing off on everybody’s part. In his public-school days his sisters showed off when he came home. They borrowed his forms of speech. These were not his own to begin with, but they were the language of his tribe, and what was his by capture was theirs by theft, which is quite different and creates a false situation. He never got at these facts by himself, but he felt uneasy and strained. Later on he much preferred strangers to his own family, because they kept out of his bathroom and he was free to present his own idea of himself without the risk of some one remarking across the table, “Why, Reggie! You loathe poetry! How can you! You always said it was such humbug!” We can never alter or enlarge our tastes in the family circle. A strict record is kept of all our utterances, and they are brought up against us as if we had crossed the floor of the House of Commons. Strangers take all for gospel and do not know what we said last year.

But apart from Reggie’s little troubles, we all have our own. For instance, there is the torture by question. This is suitable for both men and women, and it is most effective, perhaps, when administered by women, because they have the pertinacity of insects and cannot be got rid of; slapping doesn’t destroy them. You may even burn sulphur, it doesn’t keep them off a bit. Remember, it was a poor, lorn widow who defeated the unjust judge. If her husband had been there he would have blushed and said, “Come away, Maria—it’s no good—he won’t listen.” But Maria lit once more upon the bald head of the judge and set up her interminable buzz, and lo! the thing was done.

The following scene illustrates how the torture by question is administered:

Scene. A cosy apartment (the only one in which there is a fire after breakfast) provided with a telephone. The meals are ordered for the day. You have seen about the children’s spring hats, you have telephoned for a man to see about the knife machine. “Seeing” stands for opening it to get out the knife which cook dropped in without thinking, and that means ten shillings, “for man’s time—rep. kn. mach.” There does not seem to be anything else to see about just at present, and you settle down to a bit of crochet or, perhaps, to some occupation which takes your whole thought, such as writing a story for the magazines.

Cook slides round the door and looks at you. At the sight of her, all your ideas get up and say they are afraid they must be going. Ideas don’t like cook, because she doesn’t like them. She has a heavy hand with them and they won’t settle.

“Yes, cook, what is it?” you ask.

“If you please’m, the butcher hasn’t veal to-day.”

“Hasn’t he?” you say patiently, “then tell him to raise some animal that he has got.”

You wait, pencil in hand, for her to go.

“What shall I order, m’m?” she insists. “The boy is waiting.”

You quickly review last week’s meals. The household has had cutlets, fish, fowl, steak and a good many other things. Some people dislike the insides of animals so we will not complete the list. Anyhow, they seem to have eaten everything that there is in the world, except veal. Your horizon is all veal. There doesn’t, in fact, seem to be anything but veal to eat, “without,” as cook says, you have just what you had yesterday. The sudden passionate anger of the interrupted flies to your head.

“I don’t care if it’s stewed missionary,” you stammer; “but I will have something new. Go away quickly and think of something.”

Cook, like the fly, takes wing as far as the kitchen dresser and returns; stands once more, as it were, washing her front legs in the doorway.

“May I telephone, please, m’m?” she inquires.

You sharpen your pencil meanwhile, and there is a faint rustle in the air as of lost ideas peeping round to see whether every one has gone.

“H’m, h’m (a little cough from the direction of the telephone). If you please’m, Jones says that the haddock isn’t very nice to-day; he has some nice turbot at two-and-sixpence.”

“Ask the silly idiot if he sends up turbot for his own nursery breakfast, will you,” is the only reply your indignation will afford. Goodness knows what all the haddock are about in these days; they always used to be “nice” at any time of year.

“Shall I tell him not to trouble about it, m’m?” she says, holding the receiver away from her ear.

“Oh, yes, don’t let him break up his health over it,” you say, and once more resume your work. Your quiet room is now, in your imagination, a seething, noisy mass of food, all of it quarrelling as to who shall climb on to the table at dinner.

“What shall I order for breakfast instead of the fish?” demands cook, lightly poised for flight beside the writing-table.

“Bacon,” you say, “bacon, bacon, bacon,” and you look up hoping to see a mess of squashed cook on the blotting-paper. But not at all. She is round the other side, tickling your left ear.

“The bacon’s finished to-day, m’m. Did you remember to order any more?”

“Are the hens all dead?” you inquire.

“Oh, no, m’m, I don’t think so.”

“Very well then, squeeze them and go away.”

And then when the same old scrambled eggs, too heavily salted, come up next morning for breakfast she will have the effrontery to say that you ordered them!

What does the perfect woman do in these circumstances? Does she put down her occupation and say, “Dear me, cook, what a pity, isn’t it! What shall we do?” and does cook reply, “It is a pity, isn’t it, m’m! I don’t know what to suggest, I’m sure. Would you like a nice egg?” and then does the perfect woman say, “Well, you know we had eggs yesterday, cook, but I don’t see what else we are to do. It’s very awkward. But you can’t have anything nicer than eggs, can you? Suppose you get some eggs, and if you tell me when they arrive I will come down and look at them.” I believe it is this quality that makes women easier to rear than men. You can’t kill them by ordinary methods.

There is one more form of torture which no quiet home ought to be without if there is a contemplative enemy to be destroyed. It is called the torture by vivacity. The sort of thing you get in this book, only worse. The victim is put down in any ordinary chair, rather too near the fire if possible, and then the torturer begins. “What plays did you see when you were up in town? Can’t remember! Well you are! You ought to have seen Such-and-such. Do you know the story? There’s a man who’s tremendously in love with a girl and she won’t have him. Eileen Protheroe takes the part—don’t you admire her? of course you do—what nonsense! Don’t try to be clever—that’s your way. Well, she’s absolutely splendid in this. She comes on in a wonderful dress of pale champagne with heliotrope, most beautifully draped, and her hair done wonderfully under a small hat. Well, she won’t have him, but she tries for Tom—let me see—what is his name? What was the name of that friend of yours whom you used to see sometimes in Buxton? Awfully smart, in a brown suit—oh, you must remember—Well, this man reminded me of him—you must know whom I mean—don’t be silly. Anyhow this man is just like him——”

My pen has fallen off the table in a fit and is panting on the mat, protesting that it cannot run another inch.

CHAPTER III: THE MARRIAGE OF HENRY

It must be funny to have the partner of one’s life say, “You are quite beyond me, Henry dear, altogether.” It must give one such a shock, although of course it is true. Henry is so far removed from Mrs. Henry that if they manage to keep within calling distance of one another all their lives they are said to be “quite an idyllic couple.” We all know that if two people are knocking about idly in a field, one of them looking for golf balls or beetles or a lost trifle from the pocket, the other sewing or aimlessly preoccupied with thoughts about moth in the cupboards or the drawing in of the days, their conversation is not likely to be either profound or meaty; nor can it be even that interchange of feather-weight looks and intonations which are the pollen of mutual understanding. Mr. and Mrs. Henry’s life is very like this sort of knocking about together in a field. Sometimes Henry wanders off and says something with a little more ginger to it, and then Mrs. Henry is exceedingly offended, and complains that he is quite beyond her altogether.

The Henrys have not drifted apart lately; they are as near together now as ever they were. In fact, they are far less likely to drift apart now than they were at first. They are kept together by the strong tie of habit, and, some say, by public opinion. Others maintain that although public opinion prevents Henry from ever thinking of bolting, if he did entertain the thought public opinion would have less hold upon him than would his deep-rooted habit of staying with his wife. Thirty years ago they were kept together by a different tie, which might easily have been broken had either of them thought to break it. The tie was a sort of chemical affinity fortified by conscience. Love in all its expressions is more like something chemical than anything else, and the chemical experiment of Mr. and Mrs. Henry’s marriage was, at one time, a very touch-and-go business. Chemical affinity caught them as they meandered at a garden-party; it kept them together at several subsequent entertainments, just because neither of them were the sort of atoms that are so—I don’t know the right expression; it may be volatile, I call it impulsive—as ever to unglue themselves from the atom they chance to unite with, unless under great provocation from some other very masterful atom.

Henry was not such a gluey, adhesive atom as Mrs. Henry, but he had a conscience, and a dash of imagination or poetry or something. He saw much that was invisible to Mrs. Henry, and he saw it better when there was a female figure in the foreground of what he saw, giving just the human touch to the picture. When he became attached to Mrs. Henry he kept his attention riveted on her without an idea of the dangers by which their union was beset. There were hundreds of brilliant and powerful atoms whirling past under his very nose, but their chemical attraction was neutralized for him by the fact that he never lifted his eyes from Mrs. Henry and his dreams. This instinct of keeping the eye of love fixed on the beloved object is implanted in the heart of man by the god of populations, who knows that marriages must be kept going—the Henry kind of marriages anyhow. It is impossible to stop and consider each case separately.

“You must get on, Mr. Cupid; move quickly, please. Pair them off—(we can see the testy old gentleman in the spectacles)—yes, yes, just like the frogs, certainly; we must get on. There’s this batch of babies to be got off at once to keep up the numbers. So—Harper, Harthorn; Jones, Johnson; Smith, Smithson. Couple them up, please, anyhow. Light and dark alternately if you can; don’t put two tall ones together, nor two dwarfs if you can help it; mix the temperaments as much as possible——” Cupid strikes; stops dead. “I refuse, sir. I am very sorry, but there are two here whom you must let me consider, please. The very foundations of your throne will be shaken if these are ill-assorted. Very dangerous elements to combine, these two, sir. Very little known about their action——”

My metaphors are getting so mixed that it will soon be impossible to disentangle them. What I meant was that although it is said to be in the nature of atoms to stick together until one or other leaves for some more powerful attraction, in the case of the human atom a protective quality has been given which enables them to resist other attractions so long as they do not look about and consider. This saves a lot of time for the testy old gentleman in spectacles. In fact, the work would never get done otherwise; there would be a dozen changes of plan before any marriage came off.

But it was touch-and-go many a time with Henry had he but known. Atoms came near his path, which, had they drawn him to themselves, might have brought about a richer fact than that which is called the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Henry.

For although they have lived together so long, he is still altogether beyond her, and she is (though he does not mention this) altogether beyond him. They hear each other saying things all day, but, in so far as speech is a meeting ground for thought, they have never spoken to one another. If Henry were a lop-eared rabbit he could not expect less from each day as it dawns. He expects breakfast (dear thing), but then so does Bunny, and he expects other meals throughout the day. He expects his house to be made clean, and Mrs. Henry on the one hand and the gardener on the other very kindly see to that. He expects changes in the weather, in the seasons, in the dawn and fading of day; but he expects no other change. How surprised Henry or the rabbit would be at anything unusual in the behaviour of Mrs. Henry or the gardener. Suppose Mrs. Henry were to say with sincerity, “I think so-and-so,” instead of “I always say so-and-so.” Suppose that she showed by a sudden look of life behind her eyes that for one moment her thought had stood beside his thought and had seen what he saw. Nothing in the papers would, I believe, surprise poor Henry more than if this happened, for in these thirty years it has never occurred once.

At first in his humility he thought that it was because her thoughts were above the range of his coarse words; that when she said, “Yes, dear, quite so,” it meant that she was reaching down to grasp his idea, and that when she had pulled it up beside hers he would see to a distance he had never seen before. But, instead, he found that he never reached her mind at all; he called to her and she answered as people answer on a golf-course, or in the street, or in the hall of an hotel, with lookers-on within hearing, careful of the prejudices of society. But just where she stood he never knew, of what she saw he had no idea. He sometimes thought that her dwelling must be under a green canvas umbrella behind a molehill. Then Henry became more and more exclusively male. The chemical tie between him and her had been strengthened by conscience and habit until there was very little fear of the busy old gentleman’s plans being upset by any untoward volatility on the part of atom Henry. But perhaps if Henry had heard some of the things his wife said when she was driven to involuntary candour by the weight of many years’ disgust with the male sex, he might have—oh no, hardly that! She must have a home and so on. And then the fuss! fancy inquiries and no real reason to give! Besides, she was a very good sort of woman. Women would not be such faithful mothers, perhaps, if they were not rather limited in their desires: no man could stand the strain of what they have to put up with. So Henry would surely reflect, and as he reflected he would put his hand in his pocket with the ease of habit, and pay the tax-collector, and the doctor, and the gardener, and the schoolmaster and all of them.

“Of course, my ideal,” says Mrs. Henry in confidence to Mrs. James, “is to have a nice house quite in town; close to the trams, so that there is no difficulty in getting about in the evening. If you dine out two or three times a week, and pay a cab each time, it runs up so—but men never think of these things!” Henry does think of them a good deal, but paying the cab bill is a mild and peaceful occupation compared to getting into evening clothes half an hour after he comes home, in order to sit through a long evening between two women, one of whom looks like a muffin which has fallen, wet, into a box of cheap jewellery, and the other looks like a cormorant who has just been converted to some rather faddy new religion. He has to turn from one to the other for two hours, as sweetbread succeeds fish; and when the women have gone, and the pleasant smile has left his face, he is obliged to follow them almost immediately (for, after all, what is half an hour’s rest?), and stand about suffering all sorts of torture, music perhaps, or more rot from a pair of lacy old idiots. And then to be driven home too late to do anything; for you can’t sit up at night if you have to be off early next day. It is all very well now and then, for a change, and to go to people whom you like——

Let us now hear some more of what Mrs. Henry really, really thinks.

“You know,” she says, “children are a great tie.” I wish that some one would explain exactly what they mean by this remark. Suppose that children are a tie to bind Mrs. Henry down from those wild flights of adventure and the freedom of the buccaneer to which she is naturally prone, well, what a pity! However, we all admit that they are a great tie. Their childish thoughts are such a dull field in which to confine the brilliancy of mamma’s reflections on Hall Caine or the ladies whom she knows, or our spiritual nature in general. Of course they are not nearly so great a tie to a man.

Now Henry has got so used to looking at things in one way that he would agree to this proposition, because he knows quite well that he never in his life sat up with baby, no matter what was wrong, while Mrs. Henry never left the children at all if they were ill; and she never got away for a whole morning like he did. Why, he could fritter away the whole day at the office and never be called off for anything! But then, if the chemical attraction that brought him and her together had contained a spark of anything like laughter, he would have made his own ribs ache and hers too when she said that children were no tie to a man. If they tie her to the house what else, in heaven’s name, ties him to the office? Isn’t he bound to his stool by cords woven of school bills, doctor’s and dentist’s bills, rent for larger, airier premises, the elaborate “summer out” in seaside lodgings instead of the cheap holidays in god-painted solitudes before the nursery days?

But then, as Mrs. Henry so justly says, a man never thinks of these things. Perhaps it is as well that he doesn’t or we might none of us be here, either to write or read this captious book.

Such analytical thoughts do not amuse the Henrys, and quite rightly. He sometimes had freakish moments, and gay imaginings flew high through his head thirty years ago. There were all sorts of merry firework stuff ready to burst into Catherine-wheels and “God Bless our Home,” if anyone had brought a little living spark of fire to set it off. But Mrs. Henry does not think in that way. There never seems to be anything to laugh at that she can see, although she enjoys a joke as much as anybody.

But what is so amusing about the whole thing is that under the canvas umbrella behind the molehill where Mrs. Henry lives, there is a strange life that is quite beyond Henry altogether. There are large qualities like unselfishness, innocence, courage. In case of fire or flood Mrs. Henry would save all the children, or even Henry himself, at the cost of her life, without a thought beyond annoyance at the incompetence of men who build houses that catch fire like flannelette.

Virtues like those would be brilliant objects if they were taken into the air and allowed to mix freely with vices, so that we could have a good look at both and decide which we prefer, honestly and without prejudice on either side. If, instead of stuffing all the vices into a box where they get mouldy and breed maggots, and instead of keeping all the virtues folded up with a string round them and a macintosh over the top, they were both taken out and used as occasion offered, Mr. and Mrs. Henry might find it necessary to approach one another enough to hand things backwards and forwards. And so they might eventually get talking, and neither be quite beyond the other any more.

CHAPTER IV: THE SECOND SISTER’S HUSBAND

Going into town one day I met two people on the road. One was a gloomy-looking elderly woman in a bonnet and the kind of things that go with bonnets; the other was a young, probably married, girl, who walked by her side, and on whom the burden of conversation seemed to lie. The burden was heavy, but, if it had not been, neither of the women could have handled it. I used to wonder why the commercial travellers who called at our door never had any needles smaller than a small sausage-skewer. Then one day a quite nice woman with whom I was sewing remarked, “It’s no use giving me a needle like that, my dear, I should be dropping it all the time; I should never know I had it in me hand.” The same thing happens in conversation. Many people do not know it is there unless you cut it a bit thick “so as they can get a hold of it.” And not only must they be able to grasp it, but it must stay quietly where it is for some time. It must be a sort of parcel that you can carry in your arms and then hand to some one else. None of that juggling with balls, which some author speaks of as a desirable form of conversation.

“And your second sister’s husband, Mrs.—er—, is he still alive?” said the younger woman to the elder as I passed them. It is funny, now you come to think of it, how we never can remember our friends’ names “without we think,” as they say in Millport. “Mrs.—er—” is the usual form of address, I find, and we repeat it constantly; perhaps in the hope that by and by the name will come back to us.

“And your second sister’s husband, Mrs.—er—, is he still alive?” I nearly said it to the ticket man at the booking office. Instead I leaned over the little opening and said, “Third return Southfield, Mr.—er—, thank you—pleasant change after the rain, isn’t it? It is indeed, thank you. You haven’t got two halfpennies for a penny, have you? Oh, never mind, don’t trouble; but it’s handy to have about you; saves waiting for the change sometimes if you’re in a hurry.” Then I dropped a shilling on the ground and fell over the man behind me.

In the train I found myself in imagination again pursuing the second sister’s husband. Was he still alive or not? He had married into the family of those strange, flat sisters, who looked like vegetables. He and the first sister’s husband were, probably, very much alike; only one was called Tom and the other Willie, and one did well and the other didn’t. Unfortunately the first sister’s husband had been conversationally disposed of before I met the elder and the younger lady, so it was impossible to decide whether he were still alive or not. Perhaps he had been carted away in a hearse, followed by six or seven cabs full of black people, all minding their own business, but glad to get a nice drive and a bit of rest; pleased also to see Annie and her husband, who had come over from Manchester for it, and Willie’s nephew, who had got a day off from the works. It was all very nice, but a pity about poor Willie—ah, dear me, yes, to be sure—a nice bit of country you pass through on the way to the cemetery—yes, indeed; and how they are building out in that direction too! I went all the way to Willie’s funeral with that lugubrious lady in the bonnet, and thoroughly enjoyed the trip. But still the problem vexed me—her second sister’s husband; was he still alive? Probably not so well in his health, anyhow, as he used to be, poor fellow! But the three sisters would most likely go on for some time. Sisters are easier to rear as babies and they last longer, for they don’t trouble their heads so much. It is worry kills people, and a hen does not worry much. It squawks and flutters if anything comes on it, sudden-like, but it’ll soon settle down again and pick its food and lay another egg if you give it time—eh, dearie me, yes, to be sure!

I finished up the afternoon at a tea-party, and sat next to a lady whom I had met before but did not really know. I think that I must have fallen asleep for a moment, because I suddenly found myself looking at her with a glassy eye and asking, “And your second sister’s husband, Mrs.—er—, is he still alive?”

No—nothing happened. It was at a time of year when the days are closing in—we had all just remarked on the fact—and my lucky star was twinkling through a gap in the curtains.

“He’s very well, thank you, Mrs.—er—,” replied my neighbour with a pleased smile. “He’s doing very well now. You knew he’d been ill, of course—so good of you to ask—but they think he’s quite turned the corner now.”

I wonder if she saw my blushes. Perhaps she put them down to the tea; and there was a good fire going too. Some of us, I remember, preferred to sit a little away from it, thank you; there’s always a risk in going out afterwards. I had been so successful that I ventured again and asked, “Has your sister many children?” “Oh, just the three she’s always had,” was the alarming reply I got. “Did something prick you, Mrs.—er—?” she asked kindly. “Oh, that’s all right. I thought you seemed to give a jump. No, just the same three. The eldest, you know, are at school, and there’s the baby. He’s just two now; such a nice age!”

“Do you think so?” I said, I couldn’t resist it; it was what the young lady in the shop had said to me that morning when I told her I would rather have a boot that fitted me. Of course, two is a nice age, but if you only knew how often I have heard the same thing said about every child, from an infant a day old to a great dolloping creature of fifteen, with spots——!

“Oh, I think so, don’t you?” said the poor thing, a little surprised. “They’re just beginning to pick up everything, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” I answered bitterly, “measles and pins, and all sorts of things. It’s wonderful how they do it, isn’t it?”

Some one began to sing just then so we had to be quiet. Everybody hushed, except two old ladies who looked up in surprise at the sudden silence, and I caught the concluding sentence of one of them, “Windermere, did you say? Oh, very nice indeed, for those that like foliage.”

After the song my neighbour left me and went to our hostess. The business of good-byes had begun. “Oh, it isn’t late, Mrs. Deane, you mustn’t think of going.” “I am afraid I must be going, thank you. Mind you come and see us some day soon—yes, any day, just look us up. No, I’ve given up my Thursdays now. I found it cut up the week so, and one day doesn’t suit everybody—no, of course not—and if you’ve another engagement it’s awkward to break it, isn’t it? Well, you won’t forget? That’s right—and bring baby. She’d love to play with Sammy and Edna. We’ve the new nursery now, you know. A great improvement. Oh yes, the other wasn’t half large enough. No, it doesn’t do not to have enough room. You’re well off here, aren’t you? Such a lovely outlook! and the bushes quite cut you from the houses——”

They were both standing all this time with the front door open behind them. Our hostess had rung the bell, and the parlour-maid was waiting in a thorough draught (she had come up in the middle of her tea, I believe, as she looked a little crumby about the apron and not very pleased). “Well, Mrs.—er—, I mustn’t keep you. Don’t come out, please, you’ll take cold. Is this your hall? How well the prints look! You must get your husband to come round and have a look at ours——” Our hostess came back at the end of twenty minutes and went straight to the fire to warm herself. But some one else was ready to go then, and the same ceremony had to be repeated.

The second sister’s husband must be a plucky man the way he clings to life; but, after all, he’s not much in the house. When I married I was told by an authority on provincial etiquette that it was not looked upon with favour if any female guest were found in the house after the man’s hour for coming home. Being fresh from the schoolroom, and not having noticed during my excursions downstairs any arbitrary distinction of sex in the matter of visitors, I found this rule a little difficult to understand. But in a year or two it became not only an excusable breach of hospitality, but an obvious necessity if the breadwinner’s life was to be prolonged. My own second sister’s husband, who is extraordinarily patient and fairly inattentive, would, I am sure, have jibbed if he had ever been asked whether he did not find his work a great strain, his children a great relaxation, his hobby a great expense and his politics a great mistake. Besides, he loathes standing in a draught with his hat off, and not one of the kind of women who call on me would sit on his chair and twiddle his whiskers, which my sister Maud says is what he really likes. So, when anyone asks me whether my second sister’s husband is still alive, I shall tell them that he is, and why. Perhaps it will be a warning to them to take more care of poor Tom and Willie.

CHAPTER V: WHY NOT REST?

If you say you can’t go to bed, the doctor says “Boo! Let somebody else do the work. What are your servants for?” You try to explain that you can’t leave a baby with a cook. He replies that it won’t hurt your husband to have a cold dinner for once. You explain with infinite patience, slowly and as grammatically as possible, that it is not a question of dinner, but that cook doesn’t understand what baby wants. Then the doctor crams on his hat and says that inexperienced people make the best nurses, and will you be in bed, please, in half an hour from now, and don’t get up until he sees you again the day after to-morrow.

At first it is rather nice, having a fire lit in your bedroom, ordering tea to be brought up, beginning a new novel, drawing the blinds, and lighting a little silver lamp. Cook says that she can manage Master Tommy splendidly until nurse comes back. It is a pity Maggie has to count the laundry to-day, but it can’t be helped.

The bed is soft and warm; the hot-bottle is almost as good as a visit to the Riviera; you turn the pages of your novel.

A piercing shriek rends the air—and another—and another—hot and damp with terror, your heart galloping like a fire engine, you are in the nursery—no time for a dressing-gown. It is impossible to say which is making the most noise, the baby or the cook. “Yeow, yeow, yeow, yeow,—hush, hush—yeow, yeow, yeow—there, there, there: there’s a pretty boy—upsy-daisy! peek-a-boo! yeow, yeow——” “Exactly what I told that vile doctor would happen,” you mutter, stopping your ears. “Don’t rock him like that!” you bawl. “Beg pardon, m’m?” inquires cook, with a smile and cocking one ear at you while the baby’s head swings now to the lamp above his head, now down to the ground, missing the coal-scuttle by a hair’s breadth. “Beg pardon, m’m? I’m sorry he’s disturbed you. Upsy-daisy! We’ve been getting on capitally.”

Struggling between politeness and gratitude, fear of offending the cook (it is the great dread that hangs over us all), and the murderous instinct of the parent whose young has been annoyed, you take your offspring on your knee and offer him your humble apologies, while cook runs off “just a moment to see to the kettle.”

Ten minutes elapse. You are getting very cold in your little cambric nightgown. The baby is inclined to be exacting, like one who brings a petition for heavy damages for a small injury. He is rather jumpy in the nerves, and inclined to be suspicious and contradictory.

“Why don’t you want me to break that cup?” is the kind of question that he asks, “Why don’t you? Why”—increasing to a wail—“why don’t you? Will you tell me why you don’t want that cup broken——” “Oh hang!” you say, “because I don’t. What on earth is cook doing?” You are hot now instead of cold. “Do play with your soldiers, Tommy.” “Why do you look like that?” says Tommy, beginning to cry. “What’s that on your cheek?” he demands suddenly, fingering your pet mole with a sticky finger. It is now twenty minutes since cook left the room. You ring the bell violently.

“Why do you ring the bell?” asks Tommy, now weeping unrestrainedly. “I don’t want you to ring the bell—I want my tea—I want Nanny—I don’t want medicine—I don’t want you to ring the bell—my tooth is sore—I want Nanny——”

Cook comes rushing up. “Sorry to have kept you, m’m,” she says, “but I had to chop a few sticks for the kettle; the fire had gone that low. Now, master, come to me and we’ll ride-a-cock-horse.”

There is nothing for it. Tommy’s interest is on one side, a long life of seclusion in the asylum on the other. Tommy must go to the wall.

“I think I wouldn’t move him about, Jane,” you say. “If you will read to him and give him his tea he will be quite happy.” Then you escape with a heart of lead and ears of granite, and lay you down once more. You get hot and cold alternately as occasional faint screams reach you from the nursery. The coals fall, one by one, lower in the grate. The fire is nearly out. You see the cold, grey trees waving outside the window. The hot-bottle got chilled while you were in the nursery. The only warm thing in the room is your pillow which is boiling——

Pop-op-op-op-bang!

That is how Maggie always announces her presence. She staggers into the cold twilight, bearing an immense tray with tea sufficient for a school feast, and all the other items on her long menu are stale and tasteless. The butter is so shivering with cold that it is only able to clutch a few crumbs out of the bread, and these lie petrified on its chilly flakes. The sandwiches are too small, dry besides, and the jam inside them is an old enemy. The cake is last week’s: one of Jane’s failures, which, as she says, “seems to hang on a long time.” Maggie sweeps your book, your lamp, and everything you are likely to want off the table, and plants her horrid collection of uneatables in their place, lights a flaring gas immediately in front of your eyes and prepares to depart. “Maggie,” you say (how hatefully irksome it is to ask for the obvious when one is ill), “would you please draw the blinds, and make up the fire, and put out that gas, and bring me back my lamp and books.”

Oh, why did you ever let her go near the grate? It would have been chilly work making up the fire yourself, but next time—a thousand times Yes.

Banger, banger, banger, racker, racker, racker, PONG! racker, racker, racker, rack, rack, rack, PONG! PONG!! PONG!!! Your spinal cord splits in sympathy with the brave lump of coal which has held out so long against Maggie’s invincible poker, and which now retreats in a million fragments to the other end of the room. Shovel, ovel, ovel, ovel—shovel, ovel, ov—— “Surely that is enough, Maggie; you will make it so black,” you venture at last.

Down come the blinds with a sickening rattle, and you are left to take what comfort you can from the cold, strong tea (she has forgotten the hot water and the bell is at the other end of the room), the shivering butter, and the stern, unpopular cake. These sit on like unwelcome guests, hour after hour. There is no room for anything else on the table, and there they remain; that horrible cake staring into the fire, just like the kind of person who sits on and on after tea, and breaks your marked silence by asking, “Have you heard anything from Annie lately?” and futilities of that sort. The butter, perhaps, is prepared to leave, and says, “Well, we ought to be getting home, I suppose; we’ve paid you quite a visitation.” But the cake takes no notice whatever, and the sandwiches stand about on the tray, fingering things and asking, “That’s new, isn’t it? Who gave it you?” and so on. If Maggie had had the intuition of a louse she would have announced their cab—I mean she would have carried them away—ages and ages ago.

It is impossible to read with the cake looking like that. You doze—a feverish, thirsty doze. Dinner will have to be very tactfully presented. You wonder whether Jane will have thought of sweetbread or what. The bed is very crumby. Can that odious cake having been leaning over us to see whether we were asleep, whispering, perhaps, “Well, good-bye then, I won’t disturb you?” Probably the sandwiches giggled and said, “Don’t get up, we can let ourselves out.” The sandwiches’ names are Catherine and Agnes, and one is thirty-seven and the other thirty-one; both are unmarried and very fond of us.

Hang the cake! Why couldn’t it go when it saw we were asleep, without spilling those wretched crumbs. One is just in the small of our back and another is under our left leg. How hot the bed is!

Pop-op-op-bang! Crash!

The door-handle all but went through the looking-glass that time. Maggie pushes the door gently after her with her leg as she comes in.

“Shall I put it on the bed, m’m?”

You start up in a fright. The cake has not gone after all; it is still there, looking very hard and seedy and disapproving. And there are those silly sandwiches looking with disdain on the new tray with the new batch of arrivals. But their disdain is nothing to your disgust. Sweetbread, did you say? “It’s stewed steak, m’m,” says Maggie, “won’t you have any?”

Stewed steak! Grey, heavy, steaming, thick, nutritious, and garnished with two potatoes, very blue about the lips, and an ample supply of cabbage! “Take it away at once, please,” you say in trembling tones, “and that horrible tea too. I don’t want anything,” you add, deeply injured.

“There’s roly-poly pudding, m’m, and macaroni cheese,” says Maggie; “will you have both?”

You are very hot by the time she quite understands. The crumbs in the bed are like living coals, and Maggie was in such a hurry to get away that she did not notice the fire. You get up and remake the bed, fetch hot water, wash, and return to bed shivering. Then a kind and anxious husband, with a peculiarly pungent cigar, comes up and reports that the macaroni cheese is excellent, won’t you have some?

You drop into a sound sleep at about ten, which is the hour Maggie selects to “do” the washstand and tidy the room. If any one has not the experience or the imagination to supply details of the subdued clatter of soap-dishes and glasses, varied by heavy falls of coal and hair-brushes, or of the piercing squeak of each drawer as it opens and shuts, neither will they realize the significance of a basin-cloth left on the floor just where it catches the eye. At about eleven you probably rise, seize its clammy edge between your finger and thumb, and fling it into the passage. After this you return to the cold bottle and the hot crumbs that were not all brushed out when you remade the bed.

Morning dawns brightly with the prospect of a pleasant day of peace and leisure. You make your own bed, and perform an elaborate toilet between early tea and breakfast, so that by eight o’clock you are sitting up, good and happy, waiting for a lightly boiled egg. At eight-fifteen an agitated husband enters, looking at his watch, and says he will just go down and hurry them up. Punctuality is your especial fad, and unpunctuality is Maggie’s, so by eight-thirty you are already warm with the heat of battle. You rehearse your displeasure beforehand. Biting sarcasms, haunting home truths, pungent, pathetic appeals to humanity and reason are prepared by your active brain, already aglow with the necessity for being “after” every dratted person in the house if any hanged thing is to get done.

At half-past eight the door is flung open with the inevitable crash, and reason and eloquence give place to the stronger spirits of fear and gratitude. You mentally apologize to Maggie for all the things you were going to say. Your heart is wrung when you see her staggering under a load of silver jugs and entrée dishes, two loaves, a ham, and five plates with knives and forks to match.

“I am sorry the master was obliged to complain about breakfast being late, m’m,” says Maggie, looking like a thunderstorm with heart disease. She disposes the feast all over your room, plates on the top of your clothes, two entrée dishes at your feet (just where you can’t reach them without spilling the tea), and the ham on the washstand. “I had to get the extra dishes out of the plate chest,” pursues Maggie reproachfully, “and they were all to polish before I could take them down to the kitchen.”

To explain just then the ideal breakfast in bed would involve “suiting yourself” in a month, or, more probably, recantation, explanations, tears, emotions, and all sorts of luxuries in which you are unwilling to indulge Maggie at the moment, so you decide to wait for more settled weather. At ten o’clock the entrée dishes are still weighing heavily on your toes, you have heard tradesmen’s boys come and go (repeated falls of plaster from the ceiling and sudden shocks to your frame have betrayed their several applications to the bell), but cook has had no orders and it is certain that she will not act without them. This means that nothing will arrive in time for anything throughout the day, and the master will consult his watch, and your temperature will rise from nervous apprehension before every meal. Also, you would like your room tidied. Where have all those miserable women gone? They seem to disappear like worms into the sand and all is silent as the grave. You tumble out of bed again and go to the bell. If the tradesmen’s boys can raise the dead and restore the deaf to hearing, shall our efforts not be equally blessed? At last you get hold of the cook. She had not come up for fear of disturbing you. She has no ideas at all about food. “Would you fancy some stewed steak for lunch? There doesn’t seem to be much else to have, without you have the hot-pot—oh yes, of course there is the fish if you care for that; would it be substantial enough for the master? Oh, beg pardon, she understood for lunch and dinner both—quite so. Would master fancy roly-poly pudding and macaroni cheese? Yes, he had them last night, but she thought he liked them better than anything else—and there didn’t seem to be much else at this time of year, without you went to the expense of fruit——”

“Now I suppose,” you reflect afterwards, “that that ass of a doctor would say, why don’t I order what I like for myself. Could Cleopatra have had the energy to order anything but an asp for herself after she had ‘seen about’ the figs for the rest of the household?”

Clara has now been up and dusted under the bed. Does any happy, hearty, healthy person know what this means? If not, let him take the next time when he is tired and in a temper, and let him lie on two chairs and get a child to joggle all the legs of them in turn.

You doze.

Pop-op-op-op-BANG!

“If you please’m, Mrs. Jameson has rung up to say, could you lunch with her to-day at one-thirty?”

“I suppose you didn’t think of telling her I was in bed?” you suggest.

“No, m’m, I thought you might wish to speak to her yourself.”

You doze.

Pop——pop (very gently). Jane enters.

“Please’m, did you telephone for the fish?”

Any amateur can supply the answer to this question.

You sleep.

Pop-op-op-op-BANG!

You were so sound asleep that you could only catch the concluding words of Maggie’s sentence: “... and she thought, m’m, perhaps you’d like to look at the pipe where it’s burst.”

(A few minutes later) “... nor you don’t wish to see the man?”

“I think not, thank you. I could draw him with my eyes shut.”

“Would you wish me to telephone or will you?”

“!!!!—and while you are about it, Maggie, you might bring some coal.”

She brings it in three-quarters of an hour, when you have got nicely off to sleep again, and before a fresh piece of coal can be put on the fire the grate has to be raked completely to pieces and resolved into its original elements of several bars and some other pieces of very resonant iron.

Naturally lunch was late. You knew it would be, and Jane was very sorry but she had forgotten to order the cream. After lunch there was an awful row with the baby. He was left alone while nurse went down to get some drinking water, and he fell off his chair—there has to be some one always on the spot with children. You can’t turn your back a minute, etc.

Probably the doctor called at tea-time and asked why you were up, and it is improbable in the extreme that he took in one word of your lucid explanation of the facts. He would tell you, if you asked him, that women make difficulties, and that he himself once had a week in bed and that everything went on just as usual. But then doctors don’t mind the room not being “done,” and their daily work doesn’t behave like a sucking-kid after its mother. It stays where it is until its master comes to fetch it, and if it isn’t done, well then, it just isn’t, and that’s all about it.

CHAPTER VI: THE “WHAT THE DEVIL?” CLUB

“It wouldn’t be a bad plan, dear,” Mrs. Henry once said sarcastically to her husband, “if you were to start a ‘What the devil?’ club; you use the expression so frequently.” The club was never founded, of course, but it wouldn’t have been at all a bad plan. It would tend to clear the mind. For instance, say that at breakfast the eggs were a little underdone. If instead of exclaiming, “What the devil has cook been about?” you reflect, “What the devil does it matter whether these eggs stick together in the shell or pour over the edge? The fact that the eggs are there, and are more or less edible is enough for me,” just think of the different complexion it would put on the whole affair. But in fact it wouldn’t do, because different people have such different ideas about what they describe as “the things that matter.” The last time I called on Mrs. Henry she seemed very pleased about having had this idea of the club, and was quite excited at having used the word “devil.” She had a brother staying with her at the time, and I think it was partly his robust influence that made her break out and be so racy.

“Henry’s perfectly right, Maria, though he doesn’t know it,” said this brother. “There must be at least fifty occasions a day for saying ‘What the devil?’ in your house.”

“Whatever do you mean, William?” said Mrs. Henry indulgently. He is her favourite brother.

“I’ll show you as we go along,” he answered, “I dare say the opportunities will turn up.”

“I can’t believe that France will go to war,” observed Mrs. Henry a little later.

“What the devil does that matter?” replied William. “I beg your pardon, Maria, but it was your own idea. You see it is really of no consequence whether you believe it or not; it won’t alter the fact.”

“Oh, of course, if you look at it like that, William,” said Mrs. Henry a little huffily, “it doesn’t matter what you believe. You might apply your theory to anything.”

William said calmly, “It doesn’t matter, except that your beliefs affect your character; they don’t affect facts.”

“In that case, I suppose you wouldn’t have sided with Mr. Sprigger who used to be curate here. He left the Church of England because he couldn’t bring himself to believe the story of John the Baptist and the locusts. He had had a medical training to begin with, as he thought of being a doctor, and he was convinced that some particular part of the locust—I forget which it was exactly—would have been absolutely impossible to digest.”

“There you are!” said William. “Either John digested those locusts or he didn’t. You can’t possibly alter the fact anyhow, and thinking about them was bad for Mr. Sprigger, because it got him into the habit of taking a lawyer’s view of life; arguing for the argument’s sake.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Mrs. Henry coldly.

“Well, a lawyer will argue that a man is guilty or not guilty, whichever way he is paid to, won’t he?” said William. “He doesn’t want to get at the facts; indeed, he refuses to be told sometimes for fear the knowledge should bias his mind. Now Sprigger can’t get at his facts, which is the same as if he wouldn’t, and so he can only be arguing for argument’s sake, and he will never develop his soul in that way.”

“Mr. William,” I was moved to suggest later, “if I put my foot through that picture you have been working at this morning, would you say, ‘what the devil did it matter?’”

“No, certainly not, because it would matter.”

“Of course it would be very annoying,” said Mrs. Henry, “but I can’t see, myself, that it would matter more than that Mr. Sprigger’s beliefs should be undermined. You talk about facts, but Henry said only the other day, that your pictures were misrepresentations of fact.”

“Did he?” said William. “I’ll have to talk that over with him when he comes in. Anyhow, I don’t see what the devil it matters what Henry or anybody else thinks about my pictures so long as they don’t put their feet through them. They are definite creations—facts.”

“Henry says not,” she insisted. Henry came in just then and they began all over again.

“Well, now, about babies——” William was still pursuing his argument when we went in to dinner.

“Dear me, William,” said Mrs. Henry tightly. William waved her aside with his knife. “Now I think, for my part,” he said in loud, burly tones, “that it doesn’t matter who the father is——”

“You needn’t wait, Janet, we’ll ring,” said Mrs. Henry.

William paid the girl the graceful compliment of waiting until the door closed behind her, and then added, “So long as the thing is a fact, it doesn’t matter a hang how it became so. The question is, there’s a baby; that’s all that is of interest to us, isn’t it, so long as it is strong and well?”

“Henry, dear, do you care for more beetroot?” said his wife, and then there was silence.

“Then there’s another silly thing you women do to confound issues and obscure points,” continued William. “When some one comes to the place—some poor girl newly married—and you are asked to call on her, the first thing you ask is, ‘And—er—who was she?’ Now what the devil does it matter who she was? Who is she? you might perhaps ask if you want to know, though it is not of much importance. All you want to find out, to my thinking, is just this: is she, or is she not?”

“Is she, or is she not what, William?” his sister asked almost impatiently. “I don’t follow you.”

“Good Lord! is she what! That’s just it. Is she anything, my dear girl; is she anything with human blood, and bones, and a presentable face in front of it, or is she simply a mass of slowly decaying matter, endowed with the gift of moving from one chair to another? That’s the very thing I want to know.”

“What girl in particular were you speaking of, William?” said Mrs. Henry with forced patience. “If I know to whom you refer, perhaps I shall be able to tell you whether she is—what did you say? decaying? or not. Cheese, Henry?”

We were destined to see a good deal of William. He was trying to run some scheme or other in the neighbourhood, and he went into rooms for a time. He was asked out a good deal at first, but not so much later on. To me he became a sort of Eulenspiegel, and I delighted to hear of his progress in the town. But I believe that was not the light in which he regarded himself; he quite intended to be a serious reformer. One good thing he did; he stimulated industry in the neighbourhood. Ladies almost invariably took up a piece of knitting or work of some kind when he came near them, and men would go off to their studies, saying, “I’ll leave you to have a chat with my wife while I just finish a bit of work.” It interested him more than anything to find out what were the various landmarks in their past lives to which other people attached importance. There were some, he discovered, who thought that what they called “sound principles” were of importance, and when he pressed them to describe by what process a principle became sound, they nearly always said that it was sound if the best men held it. It took him many an hour’s hard work running the old ladies of Millport to ground on the point who the best men were. They dodged and doubled, burrowed and soared, fluttering, on to fences, which gave way under them when they sat for a moment to take breath. They took sanctuary in all sorts of funny little temples, which they had built, from time to time, of precepts gathered here and there. I remember seeing Mrs. Beehive flee, breathless, into one of these, and remain for a long time, while William stood, so to speak, baying at the door. It was the temple of “Woman being a good influence over man.”

“Now, seriously,” I heard William say, “do you think that you are a good influence for your husband to have about him? Remember, he is a very shrewd man, and knows what he is about.”

Mrs. Beehive for the moment completely filled the temple, she swelled so much as she replied, “I hope, indeed, that I am, Mr.—er—”

“Why? in what way?” demanded deep-throated William.

“It is not for me to describe in what way,” answered Mrs. Beehive, “but there are many ways. Perhaps you will find out some day for yourself when you are married!” she added, artfully drawing another bolt across the door.

He went round to the back of the temple and shouted through the window, “Isn’t it more likely that the influence of the Almighty keeps your husband friendly with you, rather than that your influence keeps him friendly with the Almighty? Not of course that it matters either way; the result is the same. He is a good honest man. But it is worth getting at the facts.”

“Wait till you are married,” repeated Mrs. Beehive shrilly, and I have no doubt that soon he had her fluttering before him once more, but I was obliged to leave them.

“What the devil do these people think they are doing, leading the moral tone of the town?” he once said to Mrs. Henry. “Women who don’t understand the rudiments of morality.”

“Well, I am sure the men are no better, William,” said poor Mrs. Henry, who, as I have said, really admires her brother, and would like her sex to stand well with him.

“They are better in this way,” observed William, “that they treat their own morals as what they are, manners suitable and appropriate to the society in which they live; they don’t take them seriously as you do, as if they were ordained by Divine inspiration.”

“Do you mean to say that Henry, for instance, is not in earnest in the things which he believes to be right?” said Mrs. Henry, indignant at last. “Really, William, I can’t make you out at all.”

“Henry’s all right,” said William, “leave him out of it. What I mean is that when I see that woman, Beehive, for instance——”

“Oh, William, do be careful. I feel sure they can hear in the pantry——”

“That woman, Beehive, I repeat,” pursued William, “walking about and pretending that she knows for certain that it is wrong for other people to keep later hours and to use more varied language than she herself cares to do, I feel that I must somehow compel her to look at the facts, and to justify the high moral position she has usurped, before I can allow her to remain seated there unchallenged.”

William’s progress through the town was as easily marked as that of a tornado. I could always track him by a glance at the faces of people in the streets. Where he had passed there would inevitably be one or more injured-looking persons, readjusting their expressions and muttering indignantly to themselves. Sometimes a knot of women would be seen gibbering at a street corner, their individual disorders gathering them together by a natural process like that which goes to form an abscess. And when Mrs. Beehive was so far off as to be scarcely visible to the naked eye, I could tell by the angle at which she rolled whether or no she had fallen in with William.

Dear William and his facts were most enjoyable when taken together with Henry’s quiet visions, and when Mrs. Beehive crossed the field of their united activities there was indeed a rare sight. For William, in his relentless pursuit of Mrs. Beehive’s fallacies, had overlooked one most important fact, that so fast as you disperse matter in one direction it gathers together again in another. Henry was a persevering visionary, and no sooner had William scattered Mrs. Beehive to the four winds, than Henry built her up again, so that in the end one was forced to the conclusion that the poor lady had no independent existence at all. When Henry expressed his belief in any of her assertions, she swelled larger than any frog; and when William ran at her in order to get at the facts, she crumbled to pieces like any other act of faith. The marvel is that William himself lived with a vitality independent of facts, and no “getting at the facts” had any destructive power over Henry. But that, as William explained when it was pointed out to him, was just as it should be. “There is better stuff in me,” he assured us, “than the mere fact of my existence, and the fact about Henry is that he is a good man. You can’t do away with that.”

Mrs. Beehive overheard this unintelligible remark, and immediately, I believe, put on more weight.

CHAPTER VII: THE MYSTERIOUS MUNCHERS

Surely there is something in Shakespeare about somebody who “munched and munched and munched.” If so, it is there because Shakespeare had to do with theatres and evidently knew. When you look at all the pansy-faces together, munching, munching, munching, you begin to wonder why it is that persons who normally go for at least two hours at a time without food require so much extra nourishment all of a sudden. Sarah Jane, we know, gets through a morning’s hard work with no other encouragement than a cup of inky tea at eleven. Miss Simmons, the typist, does not, surely, tick away at all that important stuff with her cheeks bulging like a monkey’s over a hidden store of refreshment. In the showroom you never hear such an apology as, “Sorry, Moddum, the young lady’s sweetmeat is unusually sticky for the time of year; she will answer your question in one moment.” Therefore it cannot be that they eat because listening to the play is hard work and they need support. Can it be to cause anæmia of the brain by directing the flow of blood to—etc.? But then why desire to cause anæmia? They do not look as if their brains were in a fatally active condition; in fact, no one in the audience ever looks quite right in the head. But, indeed, I have a theory that people are no longer themselves when they enter a theatre. Otherwise how is it possible to account for the fact that all our friends go constantly to the play and we go there ourselves, and yet we never, never meet one another; at least hardly ever? Isn’t it a bewildering surprise to recognize a friend between the acts? It seems to take at least five minutes peering and goggling before it is possible to believe the glad thing. And then what a waving and commotion! “The Prenderbursts! Just fancy! In the third row but two—yes, quite sure—that’s Effie! just turning round now—behind the lady with the orange scarf.” Personally I go in just any old thing, because I never expect to be recognized; and I hate leaving my seat, because I generally have on an evening top and thick boots, and it looks so bad if you go out and the lights are up.

Being, like all idle people, an intolerable wonderer, I have wondered for years “who the people are who go to the theatre.” One thing is quite certain, and that is that the people who go are not the same as the people who have been. Every day one knocks against the people who have been, but the people who go one has never seen before—except at the theatre—and will never see again until the next time we go. Where they live between the performances is a mystery. My own belief is that they disappear into their holes in the town, and there sleep until the next performance; they eat at the theatre, as we have seen. As soon as you get a hypothesis started the whole thing begins to work out together, and all sorts of details arrange themselves. The only doubtful point now is how far the theatre managers are in the secret as regards the origin of their audiences, or whether they suppose them to be ordinary persons.

According to my hypothesis the munchers are a race of people apart, like the troglodytes, with physiological and social laws of their own, of which we know nothing. They are unknown to the police because they look more or less like human beings and behave quietly. They come to the box-office and book seats like you and I do, and the man in the box is in a hurry and doesn’t notice any difference. But it is owing to their numbers that you and I can never get just the seats we want.

The most curious thing about the whole business is the munchers’ power of turning human beings into fairy changelings. It is owing to this power that we hardly ever meet our friends at the theatre. An instance that absolutely proves this theory occurred the other day, and it at once threw light on what has been an irritating mystery to me for years. The Blots were dining with us, and some one mentioned a play then running at our principal theatre.

“Oh, were you there?” said Amy Blot, “so were we. Where were you sitting? We never saw you.”

“Second row of the dress circle,” I answered, “fourth from the end.”

“But so were we,” protested Amy, “at least we were sixth from the end—on the right facing the stage.” That had certainly been our side. “Oh, well, it’s too queer,” Amy decided. She is a very striking-looking woman; you couldn’t mistake her; and her husband is really remarkably fat; you would pick him out at once. I thought it over for a few minutes, and then said quite definitely, “My dear Amy, you must be wrong, because I remember exactly who were in those seats. There was a girl with her hair parted on one side; it looked very well in front, but it was scrabbly at the back, as if it had been eaten by rats. She had on a pink silk blouse of the new shape, but beyond that I couldn’t see. There was an old lady with her, who had loose cheeks and a small cap with a butterfly in it—your husband wasn’t dressed up in any way, was he?”

“How absurd,” said Amy, “of course not. But those were our seats, and we never saw you either. There were two minxes and two pasty-faced young men where you say you were.”

I remember that I wrote to Sir Oliver Lodge about it that evening, but tore up the letter on my husband’s advice, as he thought the matter might get taken up, and we should have men calling with notebooks. It wouldn’t have done. But, all the same, this is probably what poor Shakespeare meant when he wrote about the lady who munched and munched and munched.

Looked at from the point of view of psychical research, munchers are extremely interesting. Any natives with horrible ways are all right if viewed scientifically. Munchers have many offensive habits which one might be inclined to resent were it not that it is nice to know how different we are. For instance, this sort of thing. You may be sitting enraptured, the tears streaming down your face, and the hobgoblin behind you starts her reminiscences:

“Something the same sort of story as Hindle Wakes, isn’t it, Lizzie?”

“Yes, did you see that?”

“My word, yes! A funny sort of story, wasn’t it, didn’t you think?”

“Yes, do you remember where she comes on in the first act? Something the same sort of thing, wasn’t it?”

“Were you ever at Blackpool?”

“Oh yes—hush; look at him—there now—pity he don’t move up a bit sharper—we were at Blackpool a week, and mother, she——” etc.

The munchers have almost nerveless fingers, and drop their possessions a good deal. “I wonder if you’d mind, one moment——?” is the sort of thing they ask just when some climax or other is being reached. “I’ve dropped my hat under your seat.” When the wretch by your side has dropped an umbrella, and the two at the back have dropped a purse and a spectacle case, and have put a muff down your neck, and got some beads entangled in your hair; when eighteen of them have squeezed over you during each interval in order to reach seats that are next the gangway on the other side; when the one who looks like a debilitated porpoise has clapped his hands down your ear for ten minutes, and succeeded in recalling the singer whom you were so glad to get rid of; and when laughter, which is about as harmless and irritating as eggs shot from a cannon, has at last died away into mere sniggering at some homely detail in a tragedy: then, if you still feel cross, you must try to divert yourself with the mystery of the munchers, and remember that one of your dearest friends may be sitting next to you, disguised by the spell. The debilitated porpoise may be your friend De Vere, whose manners are so perfect, whose social sense is so developed that we none of us know what clods we are when we go to tea with him. It is only afterwards that we realize our deficiencies: when the Prenderbursts come to tea and we want to make our party feel like De Vere’s. And he may think he was sitting next to a lemon-coloured lady with an angry face and a box of chocolates.

Now and again, of course, one sees an acquaintance or two, but they are nearly always rather dry and emphatic people, who have evidently escaped the power of the spell. You see them standing up, peering through glasses, and saying how odd it is that there seems to be no one here. When they read this they will say that they have not the least idea what it is all about.

Music seems to have some power of disenchantment, because at a concert, though the munchers fill a good part of the building, there are always dozens and dozens of people whom one knows. It may be that the awful weariness paralyses the hypnotic power of the munchers. They are there just the same, with their vacant faces, and their queer screws of hair, and their unsuitable clothes, but they are almost too weak to chew from their packets of refreshment. In fact, no one chews at a concert, except surreptitiously in a box.

There is a special subdivision of munchers who frequent the boxes both in theatres and at concerts. They are like the queen bees in the hive of theatre-goers. They are monstrously fat, female, and innocently foolish. Instead of having a pinched and wispy appearance, they are like the plump, precocious, affected, happy-looking children who perform on the music-hall stage. It is possible that the inferior munchers rear and keep these immense females to decorate the boxes, feeding them luxuriously at all hours, while they themselves subsist on their timid feasts of chocolate that tastes of hair oil.

The right attitude for the box can, surely, only be acquired by special culture and constant practice. To begin with there must always be a huge white arm with a podgy little hand on the end of it draped along the edge of the box. The gigantic body, squeezed like blancmange into whatever mould the latest fashion dictates, is turned towards the stage. The round, good-natured face, with its natural vulgarity breaking through the assumed air of the Princess of Many Sorrows (imagine a jolly country butcher’s wife in a tableau as “Our Lady of Pain”), is directed down and towards the auditorium at the angle of a turnip about to fall from a shelf. Bless the dears! It is a treat to see anyone so happy. But that is what the munchers are, depend upon it.

CHAPTER VIII: SHEER TEMPER

Justice and Generosity are often supposed to be a pair of excellent friends who have an influence for good on one another’s character. But Generosity has a still closer friend whom she says nothing about, namely Injustice. She cannot always behave as freely as she would like when Justice is there, explaining things and being so absolutely right. But when Injustice has been to tea with her, talking his bad, unscrupulous talk, making everything so gay, and putting the blame on all the wrong people, then Generosity has a free hand and can be as lavish as she likes.

“Come in here for a minute,” said Reginald to Percy one morning in the City, “I want to get this hat ironed.”

There was some delay, and Reginald was both clear and original in what he said. Percy was lost in admiration. The shopman, expert in silence, by long practice, forbore to reply except by deprecating sounds which but served to inspire Reginald to a richer eloquence. At last the hat was brought in, ironed to perfection. Reginald finished his sentence, which glowed with the imaginative splendour of a Turner sunset.

“Oh, we never make any charge, sir, for ironing a hat,” said the expertly silent shopman.

“I don’t agree with you,” said Percy, removing from his coat the little tufts of hair which his friend had flung about in his careless agony. “You had the ball at your toe; then was the time to express a large, generous forgiveness for the unconscionable delay.”

Unless we are unpleasant sort of people we cannot be generous about an injury unless we have first been mollified to some extent; and what more mollifying than to find that the supposed injury has never been done? Percy saw this more clearly than Reginald, who was quite morbid about wanting to be in the right, always.

It is an interesting question what stupid persons find to get in a temper about, because, if you come to think of it, there is nothing in the world except stupidity (our own or other people’s) to make anyone fractious, and, of course, stupid people cannot mind or they wouldn’t be stupid. Good, just people may be angered by the wilful wickedness of some one who is determined not to do the thing required; but anger is not temper. Temper, that horrible itching and pain in one’s social sense, can only be brought on by stupidity, real or imagined, in other people (I count inanimate objects such as shirt studs and hair as people because they can be just as irritating). Consider for a moment the persons who cause temper in a household: husbands, wives, children, and servants. Wives and servants, on an average, probably cause more temper because, on an average, they are stupider than husbands and children. Relations are apt to be very thick-headed—perhaps because blood is thicker than water—almost as bad as tradesmen at the telephone. Friends are practically never stupid, while acquaintances often reach the extreme limit of what it is possible to bear. Compared to relations, who, as we have said, are as bad as tradesmen at the telephone, acquaintances are as bad as the half-witted boy who is usually left in charge of the station-master’s office.

Talking of station-masters, and à propos of wives being stupider than husbands, I feel absolutely certain that no station-master has ever spent such a day as would be inevitable for him if he were a wife, and his staff were nice, hardworking girls.

Imagine a platform full of people waiting for the 9·45 express to Holyhead. “Oh no, m’m,” says the female station-master’s second-in-command, with a silly smile, “the 9·45 hasn’t come up yet. I expect it’ll be just coming now. I’ve sent to tell the engine-driver that you’re waiting, and she says that she was a bit late this morning, as they hadn’t brought the coal.” She observes the infuriated passengers and beams upon them with her mouth open. “It is a pity, isn’t it, keeping them waiting! They do seem upset! Just fancy! What a shame!!” (It will be such a help to everyone connected with this book if all the capable ladies who run their houses to perfection will just begin to skip here, and not say anything more about it; because we know the other side of the question quite well, and the whole thing is hardly serious enough for argument.) When the matter of the 9·45 has been sifted to the bottom, it is found that the coal was only an excuse; the engine-driver really hadn’t an idea of the time. She was just washing out a few handkerchiefs in the waiting-room, where the old lady in charge never noticed her doing it; she thought she had come about the windows.

Or, again, what would happen if a man of business told his clerk to telephone for a hundredweight of grey blotting-paper, and while he wrote at his desk he had to endure this sort of thing (as we do when we ask our maids to send a telephone message): “Is that Hoggins’s? I say, is that Hoggins’s? Hoggins. Aren’t you a stationer? Beppardon?—yes, a stationer—oh, well, we want a hundredweight of blotting-paper at once, please. Beppardon? This is Mr. Beadle’s. Beadle and Sons—J. J. Beadle and Sons—will you send it at once, please. Beppardon? Beadle and Sons—Oh yes, I’m sorry—I thought you knew—44 Dacre Street—Dacre Street—No, not Baker—Dacre. [The man of business growls from his desk, “You didn’t tell him grey blotting-paper.”] What’s that? Beppardon? Yes, Dacre Street. A hundredweight of blotting-paper at once. [The man of business intervenes again, gnashing his teeth, “Grey blotting-paper.”] Beppardon? Pink or white? Oh, either, thank you—yes, please. Good morning. [Rings off.] Beppardon, sir? Did you speak?”

That is the sort of occasion when Generosity does not care to hear what Justice has to say. If an angel came down from heaven and unjustly beat the offending clerk, the man of business would find it easy to say, “Poor fellow, he was doing his best,” and to give him half a crown for a new hat.

If all the efficient females will sit down quite quietly we will add what we were about to say, that men are just as irritating, but they don’t mean so inexcusably well. Take, for instance, the man at an inquiry office; he doesn’t mean well. “I want a ticket to Leamington,” you say. He gives you a first-class ticket, and you remonstrate. “You didn’t say which you wanted,” he retorts, getting impudent at once. “You never asked,” is your very natural reply.

Or, take a conjurer or magic-lantern man. You say, “I want you to be very careful, please, not to do anything to frighten the children. There will be some quite little ones, and they don’t like anything at all alarming.” “Oh, we understand children perfectly, Madam,” he says, “I know exactly the sort of thing you require.”

The first picture that he puts on the screen is of a child awakened from its sleep by an enormous beetle with coloured eyes and a walking-stick. When the commotion and the screaming are over, the smaller children are brought back and sit sobbing on their nurses’ knees, somewhere near the door. The proceedings are a trifle damped, but the babies promise, with a catch in their voices, to be very good as they know it is funny. The next picture shows a happy family party at breakfast. There enters a policeman, who by carrying papa away to prison leaves the family in tears, and the breakfast spilled on the cloth. The arrest is found to be a humorous mistake, and papa is brought home after a painful scene in the prison, but the story proves beyond a doubt that no one is safe, even in their own nursery with both parents present. Here, however, our argument seems to break down, because it is probable that the man meant well.

But in the upper classes take, for instance, Reginald himself. He is sometimes appallingly dense, and can be very intelligently tiresome. He lived, until quite lately, with three unmarried sisters, and sometimes when he came home it happened that none of them had been out, and all were eagerly sociable.

“Well, dear, what’s the news?” Louisa might ask.

“Oh, nothing,” Reginald would reply.

“I thought that cook said she had seen posters about a railway accident,” said Agnes.

“Possibly,” replied Reginald, “there may have been.”

“Didn’t you see anything about it?” asked Theresa wistfully.

“It was all in the paper I got coming home——[Chorus: “Where, oh, where is it?”] Sorry, I left it in the train,” said Reginald, and then he would go off to dress. Or the same thing might happen the other way round. Louisa had been out to tea on Saturday afternoon, and seen the paper at a friend’s house. Reginald had been playing golf and was lying half asleep in his chair.

“Such an awful thing has happened,” announced Louisa, very properly, the moment she came in.

“Oh,” said Reginald.

“A frightful railway accident; four killed, and sixteen taken to the hospital.”

“Who are the four?” Reginald inquired, putting his bottom leg on the top one and knocking out his pipe.

“Oh, no one we know; but just think!” I actually heard all this one afternoon, and it is perfectly true that Reginald replied in the following way:

“At least four people whom you don’t know die every day, anyhow, so to-day is no worse than yesterday.”

Really, it is impossible to know whether they do it on purpose or not; especially Reginald, who is supposed to be clever. However, it all just shows that it is stupidity that makes one get in a temper. There is often nothing to get angry about, but the whole thing gets on one’s nerves. But there is worse to come. So far we have only touched the fringe of what is bad for the temper. We will now visit a land of torture, parts of which are, I believe, untrodden by the male sex.

Has any man ever had to defend his own self—his ego—call it anything you like, from the pursuing eye of a friend? Has he ever been obliged to draw a veil over the process of his living and say politely, “Excuse me, my ego I think?” It has become the custom for people to go about in society more or less clothed, and we get to know our friends fairly well, even when thus attired; indeed, it is unusual to insist on a complete deshabille before we can enjoy a pleasant chat. But it would be very tiresome if we were obliged to cover up our face and hands with a mask and thick gloves because our friends insisted on examining the pores of our skin through a magnifying glass. Some women habitually treat those whom they love to such a dreadful moral scrutiny. Men don’t do it to each other. Has any man ever gone to his work and been met by a fellow labourer who gazed into his eyes and said in a voice that seemed to lift his spinal cord and search beneath it, “You are looking tired to-day.”

Now that is a remark which, except it be made in the most casual and perfunctory manner, is intolerable from any one but a member of the opposite sex, with whom we are passionately in love. Women seldom understand that it is not enough that they love the person whom they examine in this way. The victim must be deeply in love with his tormentor before he can bear it, and even then it is a risk. For of course the rash loveress, emboldened by silence, goes on to ask, “What’s the matter?” and if it happens that the Beloved is wearing boots of which he is immoderately anxious to be rid, the loveress is almost bound to be the victim of Injustice before she obtains anything from Generosity.

All personal remarks are to imaginative persons a heavy strain on endurance. Their imagination at once conjures up a loathly picture of themselves in the circumstances suggested by the remark. It also mentally fits the remark with an answer, and another offensive picture results. For instance, there is the question, “Are you very tired?” The imagined answer, in a tone to fit the question, is, “Yes, dear, very.” Plop! You immediately see yourself as a great, fat, loose body dropping into an arm-chair. You see a luscious smile spread over your imagined face as the kindly solicitous one unlaces your boots—you feel mushy all over. “Damn!” is probably your ungracious reply as you hurriedly put the mask over your normally apparent fatigue. “What the deuce should I be tired for? You’re tired yourself—I’ll take your boots off.” So you divert attention from the anxious scrutiny of commonplace blemishes which in tactful circles “we don’t notice.” Then you feel a brute, and you get in a temper at having been made to feel a brute when you were not really one at all; and you were already in a temper before, because you had seen an incorrect vision of yourself as a juicy fool. And yet there was nothing in any of it to get in a temper about. There are scores of harmless remarks that have this irritating, personal effect. “Is your head very bad?” is a ticklish question for anybody but one’s old nurse to take upon themselves. It is not often that there are more than three people in the world who may ask it. You see, the only possible answer, “Yes, very,” is so silly. What a thing to be asked to say! The next move on the part of the dear enemy can only be, “Would you like anything for it?” and what on earth could one like for it that one has not already done of one’s own accord? Even if we haven’t put on a wet handkerchief with eau-de-Cologne it is unthinkable to have any but one of the possible three persons fiddling with wet things about our head. Our forehead would, to a certainty, be shiny and the hair pushed the wrong way. The wretch would probably smooth back the curls behind our ears, and we should know what a hideous fright we looked and that they loved us just as well like that—No, three people is too many. No one but our nurse who was there from the very first can be suffered to deface our beauty and not know what they have done.

All sensible people will have abandoned this chapter long ago, so I may as well finish it for the morbid delectation of the neurotic, or for those perfectly sane, yet kind-hearted sufferers, who have not yet dared to speak of their sorrows, even to themselves. Let us collect some other impossible, searching remarks and leave them to soak in without comment. “My darling’s eyes look heavy to-day”—(if you are not very careful the adjective may quite well be “puffy”)—“perhaps you have eaten something that has disagreed with you.” I had to write this in a great hurry for fear I thought about it and began to get furious again.

“You must tell me when you are tired of me, and I’ll go.”

Murder is too good for the inquisitress who subjects one to this last torture; and yet she sins in the name of Love, and we dare not complain for fear of angering the god, who employs the weak-minded as often as not. I never heard one man say to another, “Your beard has lost its pretty colour since you were ill. I wonder if you tried vaseline—” or, “I can’t bear to see you wear those trousers; they are too loose on the hips; they make you look quite stout. You don’t mind my saying so, do you?” This would entail a searching finger through the beard or a playful pinch on the hips. No, men don’t do it. They have to bear it sometimes, but they don’t do it. Decidedly the fringe of aggravation is male and female in fairly equal proportion; but when you get to the very heart of it, you will find a lady sitting there as sure as fate. And it is only after you have been thoroughly unjust that you can begin to lavish affection on her with a generous hand.

CHAPTER IX: THE ROYAL VISIT

It was first rumoured and then announced in the papers. By and by the full programme of events was published, and then invitations to this and that were issued. There was nothing unseemly about the Millport manœuvres before the great battle of Exclusive Rights. No one admitted that there had been, was, or would be any demand for invitations to anything; not even for the big garden-party where the King and Queen were to be present. There was a semi-private luncheon too, but that was a sacramental feast. No one spoke of it beforehand, any more than a duke would rush into his club, shouting, “I say! I’m going to get the Garter—are you?” No. One read about it in the paper next morning; that was all. But there was a wider choice of behaviour with regard to the other invitations. People behaved like the animals in the Ark, each one after his kind. The sort who are at their best early in the morning, and are therefore unpopular with liverish hosts, were in great spirits about the whole thing. They applied early for tickets for everything. The appointed day lay before them as a rosy picnic. But this was not the attitude of quite the best people. They did all their spade-work by moonlight, when the busy revellers were in bed, dreaming happy dreams, with medallions of their Majesties put out with the clean shirts for the morning. But in those dark hours the county families worked for promotion like heroes, appearing next day spruce and unconcerned as usual, with the suggestion, “Shall you be going to the garden-party? We might drive out together—Oh, haven’t you? How extraordinary! These things are frightfully badly managed. I expect they haven’t got half the invitations out yet; ours only came last week.” In the case of those whose midnight labours had been unblessed with cardboard fruit the formula was a little different. There was no pretending that the fruit was unpalatable and had been rejected. Millport is not so crude as all that. The formula was to the effect that invitations were being issued on a purely official basis, and mismanaged at that, and that there would be an awfully queer crowd there. How would they behave?

Reginald was on the committee of the hospital which the King and Queen were to visit, so, of course, Polly would be provided with a good place. One thing was quite clear, that the occasion asked for, if it did not actually demand, a new dress.

“My dearest life,” said Reginald, “to begin with, the Queen is short-sighted, and to go on with, you will be hidden by abler and stouter persons than yourself in the front row.”

Polly argued that there would be the tea afterwards, and, besides, anyhow——Reginald gave her a cheque at once, because when women begin saying, “besides, anyhow,” it is far wiser to give in. Such words never preface the truth, and the business of hearing what follows is generally very long and tedious. Polly had an almost new afternoon dress which, had it been a success, she would have worn; but it was not altogether right, and Mrs. Henry, whose husband was also on the committee, had been in the shop when she bought it, and would remember its age. Also she had since been given a hat which was not quite right with the dress. It would need all a woman’s life as a context to show up trifles like these so that they would figure as reasons before a husband’s mind. Therefore, we invent reasons which look solid, rather than bring forward the nebulous truth which would probably be met with contempt.

“I want a dress for the King’s visit, Miss Price,” said Polly, standing next day in a small room at the top of a dingy little house. Miss Price, very minute, very wizened, very commanding, stood beside a round table on which were a vase of artificial flowers, several photographs of worn, though cheerful, faces, and some fashion papers of remote date.

“I am afraid I shan’t be able to manage it, Mrs.—er—” she said, “I am so rushed already, I can hardly get through the orders I have.” Polly took no notice of this. “Are you making for a lot of people?” she asked with deep interest.

“There’s Mrs. Beehive,” began Miss Price. “She’s ordered a very nice dress.”