In the drinking well,Which the plumber built her,Aunt Eliza fell—We must buy a filter.
In the drinking well,Which the plumber built her,Aunt Eliza fell—We must buy a filter.
How can aunts possibly survive such subtle attacks as that? And again:—
I had written to Aunt Maud,Who was travelling abroad,When I heard she'd died from cramp:Just too late to save the stamp.
I had written to Aunt Maud,Who was travelling abroad,When I heard she'd died from cramp:Just too late to save the stamp.
Supposing that the verse had begun
I had written Cousin Maud
I had written Cousin Maud
it would have lost enormously. There must be something comic in aunts after all.
No child ever quite gets over the feeling of strangeness at hearing his mother called aunt by his cousins. A mother is so completely his own possession, and she so obviously exists for no other purpose than to be his mother, that for her also to be an aunt is preposterous. And then there is the shock of hearing her name, for most children never realise their mother's name at all, their father, the only person in the house who knows it intimately and has the right to use it, usually preferring "Hi" or any loud cry. To Hamlet the situation must have been peculiarly strange, for his mother, after the little trouble with his father's ear, became his aunt too. If it were not that, since our aunts are of an older generation than ourselves, proper respect compels us to address them as aunts, they would not be comic. The prefix aunt does it. If we could call Aunt Eliza, Eliza, without ceremony, as if she were a contemporary, she would be no more joke to us than to her contemporaries, even though she did fall in the well and necessitate that sanitary outlay. Just plain Eliza falling in a well is nothing; but for Aunt Eliza to do so is a scream. It is having to say Aunt Eliza that causes the trouble, for it takes her from the realms of fact and deposits her in those of humour. If aunts really want to acquire a new character they must forbid the prefix.
Although none of us know what, when the time comes, we can do, to what unsuspected heights we can rise, we are fairly well acquainted with what we cannot do. We may not know, for example, what kind of figure we should cut in a burning house, and even less in a burning ship: to what extent the suddenness and dreadfulness of the danger would paralyse our best impulses, or even so bring out our worst as to make us wild beasts for self-protection. Terrible emotional emergencies are rare, and, since rehearsals are of no use, all that is possible is to hope that one would behave rightly in them. But most of us know with certainty what our limitations are. I, for instance, know that I cannot recite in public and that no circumstances could make me. There is no peril I would not more cheerfully face than an audience, even of friends, met together to hear me, and, worse, see me, on such an occasion. And by recite I do not mean the placid repetition of an epigram, but the downright translation of dramatic verse into gesture and grimace. Thebare idea of such a performance fills me with creeping terror.
The spectacle of any real reciter, however self-possessed and decent, at his work, suffuses me with shame. I myself have in my brief experience of them blushed more for reciters than the whole army of them could ever have blushed for themselves. Even the great humane Brandram when he adopted the falsetto which he deemed appropriate to Shakespeare's women sent the hot tide of misery to my face, while over his squeaking in "Boots at the Holly Tree Inn" I had to close my eyes. Brandram, however, was not strictly a reciter in the way that I mean: rather was he an actor who chose to do a whole play by himself without costumes or scenery. The reciters that I mean are addicted to single pieces, and are often amateurs (undeterred and undismayed by the grape-shot of Mr. Anstey's "Burglar Bill") who oblige at parties or smoking concerts. Their leading poet when I was younger was the versatile Dagonet, who had a humble but terribly effective derivative in the late Mr. Eaton, the author of "The Fireman's Wedding," and their leading humourist was the writer of a book called "T Leaves." Then came "Kissing Cup's Race" (which Mr. Lewis Sydney on the stage and "Q" in literature toiled so manfully to render impossible), and now I haveno notion what the favourite recitations are, for I have heard none for a long time.
But from those old days when escape was more difficult comes the memory of the worst and the best that I ever heard. The worst was "Papa's Letter," a popular poem of sickly and irresistible sentimentality, which used to call out the handkerchiefs in battalions. The nominal narrator is a young widow whose golden-haired boy wishes to join her in writing a letter to his father. This was at a time before Sir Oliver Lodge had established wireless telephony between heaven and earth. Since the child cannot write she turns him into a letter himself by fancifully sticking a stamp on his forehead. He then (as I remember it) runs out to play, is knocked down by a runaway horse, and—
"Papa's letter is with God."
"Papa's letter is with God."
Who wrote this saccharine tragedy I cannot say, but I once found the name of W. S. Gilbert against it on a programme. Could he possibly have been the author? The psychology of humour is so curious....
So much for the worst recitations. The best that I can recall I heard twenty-five years ago, and have only just succeeded in tracking to print. It was recited at a Bohemian gathering of which I made one in a Fleet Street tavern,the reciter being a huge Scottish painter with a Falstaffian head. His face was red and truculently jovial, his hair and beard were white and vigorous. I had never seen him before, nor did I see him after; but I can see him now, through much tobacco smoke, and hear him too. Called upon to oblige the company, this giant unfolded himself and said he would give us James Boswell's real opinion of Dr. Johnson. A thrill of expectation ran through the room, for it appeared that the artist was famous for this effort. For me, who knew nothing, the title was good enough. With profundities of humour, such as it is almost necessary to cross the border to find, he performed the piece; sitting tipsily on the side of an imaginary bed as he did so. Every word told, and at the end the greatness of the Great Cham was a myth. For years I tried to find this poem; but no one could tell me anything about it. Here and there was a man who had heard it, but as to authorship he knew nothing. The Scotsman was no more, I discovered. Then last year appeared one who actually knew the author's name: Godfrey Turner, a famous Fleet Street figure in the 'sixties and 'seventies, and in time I met his son, and through him was piloted to certain humorous anthologies, in one of which, H. S. Leigh's "Jeux d'Esprit," I found the poem. Like many of thebest recitations, it does not read famously in cold blood, but as delivered by my Scottish painter it carried big guns. Here it is; but there seems to be an error in the beginning of the third stanza, unless Bozzy's muzziness is being indicated:—
"Bid the ruddy nectar flow!"I say, old fellow, don't you go.You know me—Boswell—and you knowI wrote a life of Johnson.Punch they've here, a splendid brew;Let's order up a bowl for two,And then I'll tell you something newConcerning Doctor Johnson.A great man that, and no mistake,To ev'ry subject wide awake;A toughish job you'd have, to makeA fool of Doctor Johnson;But everybody worth a strawHas got some little kind of flaw(My own's a tendency to jawAbout my poor friend Johnson).And even that immortal man,When he to speechify began,No greater nuisance could be thanThe late lamented Johnson.Enough he was to drive you mad,Such endless length of tongue he had,Which caused in me a habit badOf cursing Doctor Johnson.We once were at the famous "Gate"In Clerkenwell; 'twas getting late;Between ourselves I ought to stateThat Doctor Samuel JohnsonHad stowed away six pints of port,The strong, full-bodied, fruity sort,And I had had my whack—in shortAs much as Doctor Johnson.Just as I'd made a brilliant jokeThe doctor gave a grunt and woke;He looked all round, and then he spokeThese words, did Doctor Johnson:"The man who'd make a pun," said he,"Would perpetrate a larceny,And punished equally should be,Or my name isn't Johnson!"I on the instant did replyTo that old humbug (by the bye,You'll understand, of course, that IRefer to Doctor Johnson),"You've made the same remark before.It's perfect bosh; and, what is more,I look on you, sir, as a bore!"Says I to Doctor Johnson.My much-respected friend, alas!Was only flesh, and flesh is grass.At certain times the greatest assAlive was Doctor Johnson.I shan't go home until I choose,Let's all lie down and take a snooze.I always sleep best in my shoes,All right! I'm—Doctor Johnson.
"Bid the ruddy nectar flow!"I say, old fellow, don't you go.You know me—Boswell—and you knowI wrote a life of Johnson.
Punch they've here, a splendid brew;Let's order up a bowl for two,And then I'll tell you something newConcerning Doctor Johnson.
A great man that, and no mistake,To ev'ry subject wide awake;A toughish job you'd have, to makeA fool of Doctor Johnson;But everybody worth a strawHas got some little kind of flaw(My own's a tendency to jawAbout my poor friend Johnson).
And even that immortal man,When he to speechify began,No greater nuisance could be thanThe late lamented Johnson.Enough he was to drive you mad,Such endless length of tongue he had,Which caused in me a habit badOf cursing Doctor Johnson.
We once were at the famous "Gate"In Clerkenwell; 'twas getting late;Between ourselves I ought to stateThat Doctor Samuel JohnsonHad stowed away six pints of port,The strong, full-bodied, fruity sort,And I had had my whack—in shortAs much as Doctor Johnson.
Just as I'd made a brilliant jokeThe doctor gave a grunt and woke;He looked all round, and then he spokeThese words, did Doctor Johnson:"The man who'd make a pun," said he,"Would perpetrate a larceny,And punished equally should be,Or my name isn't Johnson!"
I on the instant did replyTo that old humbug (by the bye,You'll understand, of course, that IRefer to Doctor Johnson),"You've made the same remark before.It's perfect bosh; and, what is more,I look on you, sir, as a bore!"Says I to Doctor Johnson.
My much-respected friend, alas!Was only flesh, and flesh is grass.At certain times the greatest assAlive was Doctor Johnson.I shan't go home until I choose,Let's all lie down and take a snooze.I always sleep best in my shoes,All right! I'm—Doctor Johnson.
Good as that piece was as done by the Scotch artist, I should not care to hear it again. Nor, indeed, do I want to hear any recitation again, unless it is given in mimicry of some one else. Under those conditions I could listen to anything, so powerful is the attraction of the mimic's art. Possibly part of this fascination may be due to one's own inability to imitate too; be that as it may, no mimic who is at all capable ever bores me, and all fill me with wonder. Of course I am conscious that many of the imitators who throng the stage are nothing but pickpockets: too lazy and too mean to acquire novelties of their own, they annex snatches of the best songs of the moment under the plea of burlesquing the original singers. But even so, I often find myself immorally glad that they figure in the programme.
Not the least remarkable thing about good mimics is their capacity not only to reproduce the tones of a voice but the actual style of conversation. I remember hearing someone thus qualified giving a spontaneous impression of a famous scholar whom he had just met, and the curious part of it was that the imitator, though a man of little education, for the moment, under the influence of the concentration which possessed him, employed words proper to his victim which I am certain he had no knowledge of incold blood and had never used before. It was almost as if, for a brief interval, the mimic was the scholar, though always with the drop of ridicule or mischief added. It would be interesting to know if, when anyone is being impersonated as intensely as this, any virtue departs from him—whether he is, for the moment, by so much the less himself.
My hostess and her daughter met me at the station in the little pony-cart and we set off at a gentle trot, conversing as we went. That is to say, they asked questions about London and the great wicked world, and I endeavoured to answer them.
It was high if premature summer; the sky was blue, the hedges and the grass were growing almost audibly, the birds sang, the sun blazed, and, to lighten the burden, I walked up two or three hills without the faintest enthusiasm.
Just after the top of the last hill, when I had again resumed my seat (at the risk once more of lifting the pony into the zenith), the ladies simultaneously uttered a shrill cry of dismay.
"Look!" they exclaimed; "there's Bunty!"
I looked, and beheld in the road before us a small West Highland terrier, as white as a recent ratting foray in a wet ditch would allow.
"Bunty! Bunty! you wicked dog!" they cried; "how dare you go hunting?"
To this question Bunty made no other reply than to subside under the hedge, where a littleshade was to be had, in an attitude of exhaustion tempered by wariness.
"How very naughty!" said my hostess. "I left her in the house."
"Yes," said the daughter, "and if she's going to go off hunting like this what on earth shall we do? There'll be complaints from every one. She's never done it before."
"Come, Bunty!" said my hostess, in the wheedling tones of dog-owners whose dogs notoriously obey their slightest word. But Bunty sat tight.
"If we drive on perhaps she'll follow," said the daughter, and we drove on a few yards; but Bunty did not move.
We stopped again, while coaxing noises were made, calculated to soften the hearts of rocks; but Bunty refused to stir.
"She'll come on later," I suggested.
"Oh, no," said her elderly mistress, "we couldn't risk leaving her here, when she's never gone off alone before. Bunty! Bunty! don't be so naughty. Come along, there's a dear little Bunty."
But Bunty merely glittered at us through her white-hair entanglement and remained perfectly still.
Strange dogs are not much in my line; but since my hostess was no longer very active, andthe daughter was driving, and no one else was present, there seemed to be a certain inevitableness about the proposition which I then made that I should get out and bring the miscreant in.
"Oh, would you mind?" my hostess said. "She won't bite, I promise you. She's a perfect dear."
Trying hard to forget how painful to legs or hands can be the smart closing of the snappy jaws of dogs that won't bite, I advanced stealthily towards Bunty, murmuring ingratiating words.
When I was quite close she turned over on her back, lifted her paws, and obviously commended her soul to Heaven; and I had therefore no difficulty in lifting her up and carrying her to the trap.
Her mistresses received her with rapture, disguised, but by no means successfully, by reproach and reproof, and we were beginning to drive on again when an excited voice called upon us to stop, and a strange lady, of the formidable unmarried kind, with a very red face beneath a purple parasol, confronted us.
"What," she panted, "is the meaning of this outrage? How dare you steal my dog?"
"Your dog, madam?" I began.
"It's no use denying it," she burst in, "I saw you do it. I saw you pick it up and carry it tothe trap. It's—it's monstrous. I shall go to the police about it."
Meanwhile, it cannot be denied, the dog was showing signs of delight and recognition such as had previously been lacking.
"But——" began my hostess, who is anything but quarrelsome.
"We ought to know our own dog when we see it," said the daughter, who does not disdain a fight.
"Certainly," said the angry lady, "if youhavea dog of your own."
"Of course we have," said the daughter; "we have a West Highland named Bunty."
"This happens to be my West Highland, named Wendy," said the lady, "as you will see if you look on the collar. My name is there too—Miss Morrison, 14 Park Terrace, W. I am staying at Well House Farm."
And it was so.
It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that collars, being easily exchangeable, are not evidence; but I thought it better that any such suggestion should come from elsewhere.
"It is certainly very curious," said the daughter, submitting the features of the dog to the minutest scrutiny; "if it is not Bunty it is her absolute double."
"It is not Bunty, but Wendy," said MissMorrison coldly; "and I shall be glad if you will give her to me."
"But——" the daughter began.
"Yes, give the lady the dog," said the mother.
In the regrettable absence of Solomon, who would, of course, have cut the little devil in two, there was nothing for it but to surrender; and the couple went off together, the dog exhibiting every sign of pleasure.
Meanwhile the daughter whipped up the pony, and we soon entered the gates.
In the drive, awaiting us, was a West Highland terrier named Bunty.
"There!" cried the ladies, as they scrambled out and flung themselves on her.
"Of course she's not a bit like that Wendy thing really," said the mother.
"Now that I come to look at her I can see heaps of difference," said the daughter.
"None the less," I interjected, "you turned a very honest man into a thief, and a dog-thief at that; and he insists on reparation."
"Yes, indeed," said the mother, "it is really too bad. What reparation can we make?"
I don't pretend that my feelings are completely soothed, but the Clicquot 1904 which took the place of claret at dinner that evening was certainly very good.
LAURA DANCES TO HER MOTHER'S MUSIC. See "The Innocent's Progress"—Plate 10LAURA DANCES TO HER MOTHER'S MUSIC.See "The Innocent's Progress"—Plate 10
Having engaged a sleeping-berth I naturally hurried, coin in hand, to the conductor, as all wise travellers do (usually to their discomfiture) to see if I could be accommodated with a compartment to myself and be guaranteed against invasion.
I couldn't.
I then sought my compartment, to learn the worst as to my position, whether above or below the necessarily offensive person who was to be my companion.
He was already there, and we exchanged the hard implacable glare that is reserved among the English for the other fellow in a wagon-lit.
When I discovered that to him had fallen the dreaded upper berth I relaxed a little, and later we were full of courtesies to each other—renunciations of hatpegs, racks, and so forth, and charming mutual concessions as to the light, which I controlled from below—so that by morning we were so friendly that he deemed me a fit recipient of his Great Paris Grievance.
This grievance, which he considered that every one should know about, bore upon the prevalence of spurious coins in the so-called GayCity and the tendency of Parisians to work them off on foreigners. As he said, a more inhospitable course one cannot conceive. Foreigners in Paris should be treated as guests, the English especially. But it is the English who are the first victims of the possessor of francs that are out of date, five-franc pieces guiltless of their country's silver, and ten-franc pieces into whose composition no gold has entered.
He had been in Paris but an hour or so when—but let me tell the story as my travelling companion told it to me.
"I don't know what your experience in Paris has been," he said, "but I have been victimised right and left."
He was now getting up, while I lay at comparative ease in my berth and watched his difficulties in the congested room and disliked his under vest.
"I had been in Paris but a few hours," he continued, "when it was necessary to pay a cabman. I handed him a franc. He examined it, laughed and returned it. I handed him another. He went through the same performance. Having found some good money to get rid of him, I sat down outside a café to try and remember where I had received the change in which these useless coins had been inserted. During a week in Paris much of my time was spent in that way."
He sighed and drew on his trousers. His braces were red.
"I showed the bad francs to a waiter," he went on, "and he, like the cabman, laughed. In fact, next to nudity, there is no theme so certain to provoke Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of every one to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of cynicism the Parisians have attained."
I agreed with him.
"The waiter," he continued, "went through my money and pointed out what was good and what either bad or out of currency. He called other waiters to enjoy the joke. It seemed that in about four hours I had acquired three bad francs, one bad two-franc piece and two bad five-franc pieces. I put them away in another pocket and got fresh change from him, which, as I subsequently discovered, contained one obsolete five-franc piece and two discredited francs. And so it went on. I was a continual target for them."
Here he began to wash, and the story was interrupted.
When he re-emerged I asked him why he didn't always examine his change.
"It's very difficult to remember to do so," he said, "and, besides, I am not an expert. Anyway, it got worse and worse, and when a bad gold piece came along I realised that I must do something; so I wrote to the Chief of the Police."
"In French?" I asked.
"No, in English—the language of honesty. I told him my own experiences. I said that other English people whom I had met had testified to similar trouble; and I put it to him that as a matter of civic pride—esprit de pays—he should do his utmost to cleanse Paris of this evil. I added that in my opinion the waiters were the worst offenders."
"Have you had a reply?" I asked.
"Not yet," he said, and having completed his toilet he made room for me.
Later, meeting him in the restaurant-car, I asked him to show me his store of bad money. I wanted to see for myself what these coins were like.
"I haven't got them," he said.
"You sent them to the Chief of the Police with your letter, I suppose?" I said.
"No, I didn't," he replied. "The fact is—well—as a matter of fact I managed to work them all off again."
"I want you," said my hostess, "to take in Mrs. Blank. She is charming. All through the War she has been with her husband in the South Seas. London is a new place to her."
Mrs. Blank did not look too promising. She was pretty in her way—"elegant" an American would have called her—but she lacked animation. However, the South Seas...! Any one fresh from the Pacific must have enough to tell to see soup, fish, andentréesafely through.
I began by remarking that she must find London a very complete change after the sun and serenity that she had come from.
"It's certainly noisier," she said; "but we had our share of rain."
"I thought it was always fine there," I remarked; but she laughed a denial and relapsed into silence.
She was one of those women who don't take soup, and this made the economy of her utterances the more unfair.
Racking my brain for a new start, I fell back on those useful fellows, the authors. Presuming that any one who had lived in that fascinatingregion—the promised land of so many of us who are weary of English climatic treacheries—would be familiar with the literature of it, I went boldy to work.
"The first book about the South Seas that I ever read," I said, "was Ballantyne's 'Coral Island'."
"Indeed!" she replied.
I asked her if she too had not been brought up on Ballantyne, and she said no. She did not even know his name.
"He wrote for boys," I explained, rather lamely.
"I read poetry chiefly as a girl," she said.
"But surely you know Stevenson's 'Island Nights' Entertainments'?" I said.
No, she did not. Was it nice?
"It's extraordinary," I said. "It gives you more of the atmosphere of the South Seas than any other work. And Louis Becke—you must have read him?" I continued.
No, she had not. She read very little. The last book she had read was on spiritualism.
"Not even Conrad?" I pursued. "No one has so described the calms and storms of the Pacific."
No, she remembered no story called Conrad.
I was about to explain that Conrad was the writer, not the written; but it seemed a wasteof words, and we fell into a stillness broken only by the sound of knife and fork.
"I wonder," I ventured next, "if you came across anyone who had met Ganguin."
"Go—what?" she asked.
"That amazing Peruvian-Frenchman," I went on, with a certain foolish desperation. "Ganguin. He Lived in Tahiti."
"How comically geographical you are!" was all she replied, and again a silence brooded over our plates.
"Hang it! you shall talk," I said to myself; and then aloud, "Tell me all about copra. I have longed to know what copra is; how it grows, what it looks like, what it is for."
"You have come to the wrong person," she replied, with very wide eyes. "I never heard of it. Or did you say 'cobra'? Of course I know what a cobra is—it's a snake. I've seen them at the Zoo."
I put her right. "Copra, the stuff that the traders in the South Seas deal in."
"I never heard of it," she said, "but then why should I? I know nothing about the South Seas."
My stock fell thirty points and I crumbled bread nervously, hoping for something sensible to say; but at this moment "half-time" mercifully set in. My partner on the other sideturned to me suavely and asked if I thought the verses in "Abraham Lincoln" were a beauty or a blemish; and with the assistance of the Russian ballet, some new novels, and the universal unrest I sailed serenely into port. She was as easy and agreeable a woman as that other was difficult, and before she left for the drawing-room she had invited me to lunch and I had accepted.
As I said good night to my hostess I asked why she had told me that my first partner had been in the South Seas. She said that she had said nothing of the sort; what she had said was that during the War she had been stationed with her husband, Colonel Blank, at Southsea.
After the passage of several years since I had picked up anything, last week I found successively a carriage key (in Royal Hospital Road), a brooch (in Church Street, Kensington), and sixpence in a third-class compartment. It was as I stooped to pick up the sixpence, which had suddenly gleamed at me under the seat of the now empty carriage, that I said to myself that finding things is one of the purest of earthly joys.
And how rare!
I have, in a lifetime that now and then appals me by its length, found almost nothing. These three things this week; a brown-paper packet when I was about seven, containing eight pennies and one halfpenny; on the grass in the New Forest, when I was about twenty, a half-dollar piece; and at Brighton, not long after, a gold brooch of just sufficient value to make it decent to take it to the police station, from which, a year later, no one having claimed it, it was returned to me: these constitute nearly half a century's haul. I might add—now andthen, perhaps, a safety-pin, pencil, some other trifle, which, however well supplied with such articles one may be, cannot be acquired from a clear sky without a thrill. Even Mr. Rockefeller, I take it, would not have been unmoved had he, instead of myself, stumbled on that treasure between Stony Cross and Boldrewood.
To be given such things is not a comparable experience. With a gift—intention, consciousness, preparation, come in; to say nothing of obligation later. The event is also complicated (and therefore shorn of its glory) by the second person, since the gift must be given. But, suddenly dropping one's eyes, to be aware of a coin—that is sheer rapture. Other things can be exciting too, but a coin is best, because a coin is rarely identifiable by a previous owner; and I am naturally confining myself to those things the ownership of which could not possibly be traced. To find things which have to be surrendered is as impure a joy as the world contains, and no theme for this pen.
The special quality of the act of finding something, with its consequent exhilaration, is half unexpectedness and half separateness. There being no warning, and the article coming to you by chance, no one is to be thanked, no one to be owed anything. In short, you have achieved the greatest human triumph—you havegot something for nothing. That is the true idea: the "nothing" must be absolute; one must never have looked, never have had any finding intention, or even hope. To look for things is to change the whole theory—to rob it of its divine suddenness; to become anxious, even avaricious; to partake of the nature of the rag-picker, thechiffonier, or those strange men that one notices walking, with bent heads, along the shore after a storm. (None the less that was a great moment, once, in the island of Coll, when after two hours' systematic searching I found the plover's nest.)
Finding things is at once so rare and pure a joy that to trifle with it is peculiarly heartless. Yet are there people so wantonly in need of sport as to do so. Every one knows of the purse laid on the path or pavement beside a fence, which, as the excited passer-by stoops to pick it up, is twitched through the palings by its adherent string. There is also the coin attached to a thread which can be dropped in the street and instantly pulled up again, setting every eye at a pavement scrutiny. Could there be lower tricks? I fear so, because some years ago, in the great days of a rendezvous of Bohemians in the Strand known as the Marble Halls, a wicked wag (I have been told) once nailed a bad but plausible sovereign to the floorand waited events. In the case of the purse and string the butts are few and far between and there is usually only a small audience to rejoice in their discomfiture, but thedénouementof the cruel comedy of which acquisitiveness and cunning were the warp and woof at the Marble Halls was only too bitterly public. I am told, such is human resourcefulness in guile, that very few of those who saw the coin and marked it down as their own went for it right away, because had they done so the action might have been noticed and the booty claimed. Instead, the discoverer would look swiftly and stealthily round, and then gradually and with every affectation of nonchalance (which to those in the secret, watching from the corners of their wicked eyes, was so funny as to be an agony) he would get nearer and nearer until he was able at last to place one foot on it.
This accomplished, he would relax into something like real naturalness, and, practically certain of his prey, take things easily for a moment or so. Often, I am told, the poor dupe would, at this point, whistle the latest tune. Even now, however, he dared not abandon subterfuge, or his prize, were he seen to pick it up, might have to be surrendered or shared; so the next move was to drop his handkerchief, the idea being to pick up both it and thesovereign together. Such explosions of laughter as followed upon his failure to do so can (I am informed) rarely have been heard.
—Such was the conspiracy of the nailed sovereign, which, now and then, the victim, shaking the chagrin from him, would without shame himself join, and become a delighted spectator of his successor's humiliation.
Can you conceive of a more impish hoax? But I should like to have witnessed it.
Among my good resolutions for the New Year I very nearly included the determination never to be punctual again. I held my hand, just in time; but it was a near thing.
For a long while it had been, with me, a point of honour to be on time, and, possibly, I had become a little self-righteous on the matter, rebuking too caustically those with a laxer standard. But towards the close of 1919 doubts began to creep in. For one thing, modern conditions were making it very hard to keep engagements to the letter; taxis were scarce and trains and omnibuses crowded, so that in order to be punctual one had to walk and thus lose many precious minutes; for another, I had such a number of appointments which were not kept by the other parties that I had to take the matter into serious consideration, for they all meant disorganisation of a rather exacting time-table at a period when I was unusually busy. Moreover, while waiting for a late friend, it is impossible to do anything—one is too impatient or unsettled.
Why, I began to ask myself, should I doall the waiting and get hungry and cross, and why should they do all the arriving-when-everything-is-ready? Why should not the rôles be reversed?
When conscription came in and martial habits became the rule, I had hoped and believed that punctuality was really likely to be established. I thought this because one had always heard so much about Army precision, and also because my most punctual friend for many years had been a soldier and we had engaged in a rivalry in the matter. But I was wrong. During the War the soldiers home on leave took every advantage of one's gratitude to them, while the first demobilised one whom I entertained kept me waiting forty minutes for dinner.
The pity of it is that this particular tarrying guest is a man of eminence and capacity. Were he a failure, as according to our own Samuel Smiles or the author of that famous American book "From Princeton College to Colonel House," he ought to be, all would be well; but he is not; he has never been punctual in his life and he has had an exceptionally successful career. The books tell us that the unpunctual man is disqualified in the race for fortune; that no one will employ him, no one will trust him. They say that the keeping of appointments is a test both of character and quality. Businessmen interviewing applicants for posts, they tell us, will engage no one, no matter what his attainments, who does not arrive promptly. But these hard and fast schemes of appraisement can, as I have shown, be all wrong. Wisdom, after all, is an element in business success; and what wise man would ever be punctual at his dentist's? What kind of respect a dentist has for his first appointment of the day, I cannot tell. I have avoided these early séances; but every one knows that he is never ready for a patient at the covenanted hour after that. Editors usually keep their visitors waiting. No theatrical manager has ever been on time; but then time does not exist for the stage, because, apart from their profession, actors have nothing to do. Rehearsals are one immense distracting outrage upon the routine of an ordered existence; and yet actors are a very happy folk.
Until late in 1919, as I have said, I had loved Punctualia with a true ardour; but I now found myself sufficiently free from passion to be able to examine her critically and to discern faults. For there is a good deal to be said against her.
To be always correct is a dangerous thing. I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them. Looking deeply into thematter, I realised that Punctualia, for all her complacency and air of rectitude, has lost a great many lives. The logic of the thing is inexorable. If you are late for the train, you miss it; and if you are not in it and it is wrecked, you live on—to miss others. I recalled one very remarkable case in point which happened in my own family circle. A relation of mine, with her daughter, had arranged to spend a holiday in the Channel Islands. A cabman promised and failed, arriving in time only to whip his horse all the way across London and miss the train by a minute. When, the next day, it was learned that the Channel Islands boat had struck the Casquettes and had gone down the ladies were so excited by their escape that they sought the cabman and by way of gratitude adopted one of his numerous children. That is a true story, and it is surely a very eloquent supporter of an anti-punctual policy. Had the ladies caught the train they would have been drowned, and the cabman's bantling would have lacked any but the most elementary education.
Can you wonder, then, that I nearly included a determination never to be punctual again among my New Year resolutions? But I did not go so far. I left it at the decision not to be so particular about punctuality as I used to be.
It is my good or ill fortune to have taken a furnished flat at a dizzy altitude in the neighbourhood of that London terminus which is at once nearest the sea and the Promised Land. Immediately above the flat is a spacious roof, which affords a pleasant retreat in the cool of the evening and commands what the agents call an extensive prospect, and where, at most hours, toy dogs may be met. The flat itself consists of a number of rooms the walls of which are covered with photographs of men, women, and children, almost as thickly as the pages of a schoolboy's album are covered with stamps. There are more men than women, and more women than children. The men have obsolete beards; several of the women seem to be sisters, and have been taken together with their heads inclining towards each other at an affectionate angle, which, although affectionate, does not render the thought impossible that each sister secretly is convinced that she is the handsomer. There are also sets of children graduated like organ pipes. These photographsnot only hang on the walls but they swarm in frames about the mantelpieces and the occasional tables. The occasional tables are so numerous and varied in size that one might imagine this their stud farm.
The beginning of my tenancy was marked by a tragedy. The larder window having been left open by the previous occupants, a large slate-coloured pigeon, with schemes for a family, had made a nest and laid an egg in it, and, at the very moment when I suddenly opened the door, was preparing to lay another. To this achievement I personally should have had no objection; but the porter, who was showing me round, and who has a sense of decorum more proper to such apartments, had other views, and before I could interfere he had removed the egg, brushed away the nest, and closed the window. That ended his share of the drama; but mine was to begin, for ever since that day the pigeon, with a depth of reproachfulness in its eyes that is extremely distressing, has sat on the kitchen window-sill making desperate efforts to get in, so that I creep about feeling like Herod. During Baby Week it was almost unbearable. Even when I am far from the kitchen I can hear its plaintive injured cooing.
The flat is conspicuous in possessing, in addition to numerous other advantages, such as anight porter to work the lift, who is never visible, and a day porter who, having been forbidden by the powers that be to use the lift before two o'clock in the afternoon, scrupulously obeys the new regulation, except when he has to ascend to an upper floor himself: the flat has, in addition to these advantages, windows that refuse to be lifted by any but a Hercules, and doors (ten in all) not one of which will remain open except by artificial means. Whether or not this is a peculiarity of Westminster architecture I cannot say, but all the doors are alike. They each quickly but remorselessly close, yet so gently that the latch does not catch, and every breath of draught (and we by no means stop at breaths) sways them noisily to and fro with a sound that is excessively irritating to the nerves. I have therefore either to go to the door and fasten it or find something with which to fix it open. Normally, I use a chair or a weight from the kitchen scales; but two of the rooms—the drawing-room, where the occasional tables are most fecund, and the dining-room, where I do everything but dine—are supplied with door-stops of their own, consisting each of an elephant's foot mounted with brass. Picture me then, the most Occidental of men and so long a devotee of the study and the shelf as to be less of a big-game hunter thanany one you could imagine, moving about this intensely sophisticated flat carrying from room to room the foot of a mammoth of the Indian jungle or the African forest (I don't know which) in order to prevent a London door from banging. Imperial Cæsar's destiny was not less exalted or more incongruous.
If there were four of these feet I should be more at ease. But there are only two of them, and I have been to the Zoo often enough to know that elephants are quadrupeds. Where then are the other two? That is the question which is wearing me out. I lie awake at night, wondering, and then, falling into an uneasy sleep, hear a heavy stumbling tread on the stairs and wake in terror expecting the door to burst open and the other half of the elephant to advance upon me demanding its lost feet. It is always a dreadful nightmare, but never more so than when the mammoth not only towers up grey and threatening, but coos like an exiled pigeon.
I was hearing the other day of an old house in Sussex where, while doing some repairs, the builders' men chanced on the mouth of an underground passage which they traced for two miles. Why should that discovery be interesting? Why is everything to do with underground passages so interesting? It is, I suppose, because they are usually secret, and the very word secret, no matter how applied (except perhaps to treaties) is alluring: secret drawers, secret cupboards, secret chambers; but the secret passage is best, because it leads from one place to another, and either war or love called it into being: war or love, or, as in the case of priests' hiding holes, religious persecution, which is a branch of war.
Nothing can deprive the secret passage of its glamour: not all the Tubes, or subways, or river tunnelling, through which we pass so naturally day after day. Any private excavation is exciting; to enter a dark cellar, even, carries a certain emotion. How mysterious are crypts! How awesome are the catacombs of Rome! How it brings back the lawless, turbulent past of Florence merely to walk throughthat long passage (not underground but overground, yet no less dramatic for that) which, passing above the Ponte Vecchio, unites the Pitti and the Uffizi and made it possible, unseen by the Florentines, to transfer bodies of armed men from one side of the Arno to the other!
It was the underground passage idea which gave the Druce Case such possibilities of mystery and romance. That a duke should masquerade as an upholsterer was in itself an engaging idea; but without the underground passage connecting Baker Street with Cavendish Square the story was no more than an ordinary feuilleton. I shall always regret that it was not true; and even now some one ought to take it in hand and make a real romance of it, with the double-lived nobleman leaving his own home so regularly every morning (by the trap door), doffing his coronet and robes and changingen routesomewhere under Wigmore Street, and appearing unseen (by another trap door) in the Bazaar, all smug and punctual and rubbing his hands. It would be not only thrilling, but such a satire on ducal dulness. And then the great Law Court scenes, the rival heirs, the impassioned counsel, the vast sums at stake, the sanction of the judge to open the grave, and finally the discovery that there was no body there after all—nothing but bricks—and the fantastic storyreally was fact! There has been no better plot since "Monte Cristo," and that, you remember, would be nothing had not the Abbé Faria excavated the secret passage from his cell through which Edmond was able to re-enter the world and start upon his career of symmetrical vengeance.
What, of course, gave such likelihood to the Druce allegations was the circumstance that the Duke of Portland spent so much of his life at Welbeck underground. A man who is known to do that must expect to be the subject of romantic exaggerations.
Another reason for wishing the Druce story to be true is that, if it were true, if one aristocrat thus duplicated and enriched his life, others also would do so; for there are no single instances; and this means that London would be honey-combed by secret underground passages constructed to promote these entertaining deceptions, and shopping would become an absorbing pastime, for we should never know with whom we were chaffering. But alas...!
Just as an ordinary desk takes on a new character directly one is told that it has a secret drawer, so does even a whisper of a secret passage transfigure the most commonplace house. Arriving in Gloucester not so very long ago, and needing a resting-place for the night, Iautomatically chose the hotel which claimed, in the advertisement, to date from the fourteenth century and possess an underground passage to the cathedral. The fact that, as the young lady in the office assured me, the passage, if it ever existed, no longer is accessible, made very little difference: the idea of it was the attraction and determined the choice of the inn. The Y. M. C. A. headquarters at Brighton on the Old Steyne ceases to be under the dominion of those initials—four letters which, for all their earnest of usefulness, are as far removed from the suggestion of clandestine intrigue as any could be—and becomes a totally different structure when one is told that when, long before its conversion, Mrs. Fitzherbert lived there, an underground passage existed between it and the Pavilion for the use of the First Gentleman in Europe. Whether it is fact or fancy I cannot say, but that the Pavilion has a hidden staircase and an underground passage to the Dome I happen to know. A hidden staircase has hardly fewer adventurous potentialities than a secret passage. I was told of one at Greenwich Hospital: in the wing built by Charles II. is a secret staircase in the wall leading to the apartments set apart for (need I say?) Mistress Eleanor Gwynne? These rooms, such is the deteriorating effect of modernity, are now offices.
To many people wholly free from superstition, except that, after spilling the salt, they are careful to throw a little over the left shoulder, and do not walk under ladders unless with crossed thumbs, and refuse to sit thirteen at table, and never bring May blossoms into the house—to these people, otherwise so free from superstition, it would perhaps be surprising to know what great numbers of their fellow-creatures resort daily to such a black art as fortune-telling by the cards.
Yet quite respectable, God-fearing, church-going old ladies, and probably old gentlemen too, treasure this practice, to say nothing of younger and therefore naturally more frivolous folk; and many make the consultation of the two-and-fifty oracles a morning habit.
Particularly women. Those well-thumbed packs of cards that we know so well are not wholly dedicated to "Patience," I can assure you.
All want to be told the same thing: what the day will bring forth. But each searcherinto the dim and dangerous future has, of course, individual methods—some shuffling seven times and some ten, and so forth, and all intent upon placating the elfish goddess, Caprice.
There is little Miss Banks, for example.
Nothing would induce little Miss Banks to leave the house in the morning without seeing what the cards promised her, and so open and impressionable are her mind and heart that she is still interested in the colour of the romantic fellow whom the day, if kind, is to fling across her path. The cards, as you know, are great on colours, all men being divided into three groups; dark (which has the preference), fair, and middling. Similarly for you, if you can get little Miss Banks to read your fate (but you must of course shuffle the pack yourself), there are but three kinds of charmers: dark (again the most fascinating and to be desired), fair, and middling.
It is great fun to watch little Miss Banks at her necromancy. She takes it so earnestly, literally wrenching the future's secrets from their lair.
"A letter is coming to you from some one," she says. "An important letter."
And again, "I see a voyage over water."
Or very seriously, "There's a death."
You gasp.
"No, it's not yours. A fair woman's."
You laugh. "Only a fair woman's!" you say. "Go on."
But the cards have not only ambiguities, but strange reticences.
"Oh," little Miss Banks will say, her eyes large with excitement, "there's a payment of money and a dark man."
"Good," you say.
"But I can't tell," she goes on, "whether you pay it to him or he pays it to you."
"That's a nice state of things," you say, becoming indignant. "Surely you can tell."
"No, I can't."
You begin to go over your dark acquaintances who might owe you money, and can think of none.
You then think of your dark acquaintances to whom you owe money and are horrified by their number.
"Oh, well," you say, "the whole thing's rubbish, anyway."
Little Miss Banks's eyes dilate with pained astonishment. "Rubbish!"—and she begins to shuffle again.
Not all of us have the best manners always about us. The fortunate are they whose reaction is instant; but those also are fortunate who, after the first failure—during the conflict between, say, natural and acquired feelings—can recapture their best, too.
At a certain country house where a shooting party was assembled a picture stood on an easel in a corner of the dining-room. It was a noticeable picture by reason of its beauty and also by reason of a gash in the canvas. Coffee was on the table when one of the guests, looking round the walls, observed it for the first time, and, drawing his host's attention to its excellence, asked who was the painter; and the host, who was an impulsive, hearty fellow, full of money, after supplying the information and corroborating the justice of the criticism, remarked to the whole company, "Now here's a sporting offer. You see that cut across the paint in the middle"—pointing it out as he spoke—"well, I'll give any one a thousand pounds who can guess how it was done."
They all rose and clustered before the easel; for a thousand pounds are worth having a try for, even when one is rich—as most of them were.
"It was done only last week," the host continued, "and it was such a queer business that I don't intend to have it repaired. Now then, all of you, a thousand of the best for the correct answer."
He rubbed his hands and chuckled. It was a sure thing for him, and there would be a lot of fun in the suggestions.
The guests having re-examined the cut with minuteness, one by one, seated themselves again, and pencils and paper were provided so that the various possible solutions might be written down. The real business then began—no sound but pencils writing and the host chuckling.
Now it happened that one of the party, a year or so before, had seen somewhere in Yorkshire a picture with a not dissimilar rent, caused, he had been told, by a panic-stricken bird which had blundered into the room and couldn't get out again. Remembering this, and remembering also that history sometimes repeats itself, he wrote on his piece of paper that, according to his guess, the canvas was torn by a bird which had flown into the room and lost its head.
All the suggestions having been written down, the host called on their writers to read them, a jolly, confident smile lighting up his features, which grew more jolly and more confident as one after another incorrect solution was tendered.
And then came the turn of the man who had remembered about the bird, and who happened to be the last of all. "My guess is," he read out, "that the picture was damaged by a bird."
There was a roar of laughter, which gradually subsided when it was observed that the host was very far from joining in it. In fact, his face not only had lost all its good humour, but was white and tense.
When there was silence he said, with a certain biting shortness: "Somebody must have told you."
"Nobody told me," was the reply. "But you don't really mean to say I've guessed right?"
"If you call it a guess—yes," said the host, whose mortification had become painful to witness.
"Well," said the other quickly and pleasantly, "'guess' perhaps isn't the right word, and, of course, I shouldn't therefore claim the reward. You see——," and he then explained how he had remembered the odd experience in Yorkshire, and in default of any inventiveness of hisown had used it. "So, of course," he added, rising and moving towards the window, "the offer is off. Remembering isn't guessing; quite the reverse. What a gorgeous moon!"
The others also rose, only too willingly, for the situation had become trying; the matter dropped, at any rate as a theme of general conversation; and gradually and uncomfortably bed-time was reached.
Several of the party were at breakfast the next morning when their host made his first appearance; and they noticed that he had regained his customary gay serenity. Walking up to the guest whose memory had been so embarrassing, he handed him a slip of paper.
"I'm sorry, old man," he said, "to have been in such a muddle last night, but the accuracy of that shot of yours dazed me. Of course the offer stands. All this cheque needs is for you to fill in the name of whatever hospital or charity you prefer."
"Thanks," said the other as he put it in his pocket-book.
Not long ago I was staying in a village where the shortest cut to the inn lay through the churchyard, and passing and repassing so often I came to know the dead inhabitants of the place almost better than the living. Not with the penetrating knowledge of the author of "Spoon River Anthology"—that very extraordinary and understanding book,—but in a kindly superficial way. Indeed, considering that they were total strangers and their acquaintance not now to be made by any but the followers of those doughty knights of the round (or square) séance table, Sir Oliver and Sir Conan, some of these dead people were absurdly often in my thoughts; but that was because of their names. Such names! Many of course were no longer legible, for Father Time had either obliterated them with his patient finger, dipped now in lichen and now in moss, or upon them his tears had fallen too steadily. But many remained and some of them were wonderful. Has it ever been explained why the dead have more remarkable names than the living? Did any one ever meet "in the form" a LavenderWiseways? Yet there was a Lavender Wiseways lying beneath one of those stones. There was her sister too, lying close beside—Lavinia Wiseways. Neither had married; but then how could they have performed a deed which would have lost them such distinction! And who now exchanges market greetings, with a gaitered gentleman named Paradine Ebb? Yet once there was a Paradine Ebb, farmer, not such a great distance from London, to shake by the hand, and chat to, and buy fat stock from, and, I hope, share a cordial glass with. And who—but if I continue I shall betray the village's name, and that is against good manners. Too many real names get into print in these inquisitive days.
It was not however of strange dead names that I was thinking when I took up my pen, but of the epitaphs on the tombstones, sometimes so brief and simple, sometimes so long and pompous, and almost always withholding everything of real importance about the occupants of the narrow cells beneath and almost always affecting to despise the precious gift of life. Why should not some one, greatly daring, go so far as to bid the mason engrave a tribute to the world that is being left behind? Would that be so impious? There is no indication that any of these dead ever enjoyed a moment.
Something like this, for instance—
Here LiesHENRY ROBINSONWho lived in the belief—and,with many failures, did hisbest to act of to it—that ifyou spend your time in tryingto make things a little easierand merrier in this world, thenext can take care of itself.
The whole insincere suggestion of most churchyards now is that life has been spent in a vale of tears: a long tribulation, merely a preparation for another and better world. But we know that that is not usually the case, and we know that many lives, although unrelated to graveyard ideas of decorum and insurance, are happier than not. There is in the God's Acre of which I am writing more than one appeal to the living to be wary of earthly serenity: surely a very unfair line for the dead to take and not unremindful of the fable of the fox and his tail. An elaborate stone close by the lych gate has a series of dreary couplets warning the passer-by that the next grave to be dug may be his; and on the assumption that he is being too happy he is adjured to a morbid thoughtfulness. The dead might be kinder than that, more generous,more altruistic! I should like a headstone to bear some such motto as