They and I Part 7

"It's been out all night in the wet," shouted Veronica. "He forgot to bring it in."

"You wicked child!" said Robina severely. "It's nothing to be pleased about."

"Yes, it is," explained Veronica. "I thought at first it was mine. Oh, wouldn't there have been a talk about it, if it had been! Oh my!

wouldn't there have been a row!" She settled down to a steady rhythmic dance, suggestive of a Greek chorus expressing satisfaction with the G.o.ds.

Robina seized her by the shoulders and shook her back into herself. "If it had been yours," said Robina, "you would deserve to have been sent to bed."

"Well, then, why don't he go to bed?" argued Veronica.

Robina took her by the arm and walked her up and down just underneath my window. I listened, because the conversation interested me.

"Pa, as I am always explaining to you," said Robina, "is a literary man.

He cannot help forgetting things."

"Well, I can't help forgetting things," insisted Veronica.

"You find it hard," explained Robina kindly; "but if you keep on trying you will succeed. You will get more thoughtful. I used to be forgetful and do foolish things once, when I was a little girl."

"Good thing for us if we was all literary," suggested Veronica.

"If we 'were' all literary," Robina corrected her. "But you see we are not. You and I and d.i.c.k, we are just ordinary mortals. We must try and think, and be sensible. In the same way, when Pa gets excited and raves-I mean, seems to rave-it's the literary temperament. He can't help it."

"Can't you help doing anything when you are literary?" asked Veronica.

"There's a good deal you can't help," answered Robina. "It isn't fair to judge them by the ordinary standard."

They drifted towards the kitchen garden-it was the time of strawberries-and the remainder of the talk I lost. I noticed that for some days afterwards Veronica displayed a tendency to shutting herself up in the schoolroom with a copybook, and that lead pencils had a way of disappearing from my desk. One in particular that had suited me I determined if possible to recover. A subtle instinct guided me to Veronica's sanctum. I found her thoughtfully sucking it. She explained to me that she was writing a little play.

"You get things from your father, don't you?" she enquired of me.

"You do," I admitted; "but you ought not to take them without asking. I am always telling you of it. That pencil is the only one I can write with."

"I didn't mean the pencil," explained Veronica. "I was wondering if I had got your literary temper."

It is puzzling, when you come to think of it, this estimate accorded by the general public to the _litterateur_. It stands to reason that the man who writes books, explaining everything and putting everybody right, must be himself an exceptionally clever man; else how could he do it!

The thing is pure logic. Yet to listen to Robina and her like you might think we had not sense enough to run ourselves, as the saying is-let alone running the universe. If I would let her, Robina would sit and give me information by the hour.

"The ordinary girl . . . " Robina will begin, with the air of a University Extension Lecturer.

It is so exasperating. As if I did not know all there is to be known about girls! Why, it is my business. I point this out to Robina.

"Yes, I know," Robina will answer sweetly. "But I was meaning the real girl."

It would make not the slightest difference were I even quite a high-cla.s.s literary man-Robina thinks I am: she is a dear child. Were I Shakespeare himself, and could I in consequence say to her: "Methinks, child, the creator of Ophelia and Juliet, and Rosamund and Beatrice, must surely know something about girls," Robina would still make answer:

"Of course, Pa dear. Everybody knows how clever you are. But I was thinking for the moment of real girls."

I wonder to myself sometimes, Is literature to the general reader ever anything more than a fairy-tale? We write with our heart's blood, as we put it. We ask our conscience, Is it right thus to lay bare the secrets of our souls? The general reader does not grasp that we are writing with our heart's blood: to him it is just ink. He does not believe we are laying bare the secrets of our souls: he takes it we are just pretending.

"Once upon a time there lived a girl named Angelina who loved a party by the name of Edwin." He imagines-he, the general reader-when we tell him all the wonderful thoughts that were inside Angelina, that it was we who put them there. He does not know, he will not try to understand, that Angelina is in reality more real than is Miss Jones, who rides up every morning in the 'bus with him, and has a pretty knack of rendering conversation about the weather novel and suggestive. As a boy I won some popularity among my schoolmates as a teller of stories. One afternoon, to a small collection with whom I was homing across Regent's Park, I told the story of a beautiful Princess. But she was not the ordinary Princess. She would not behave as a Princess should. I could not help it. The others heard only my voice, but I was listening to the wind.

She thought she loved the Prince-until he had wounded the Dragon unto death and had carried her away into the wood. Then, while the Prince lay sleeping, she heard the Dragon calling to her in its pain, and crept back to where it lay bleeding, and put her arms about its scaly neck and kissed it; and that healed it. I was hoping myself that at this point it would turn into a prince itself, but it didn't; it just remained a dragon-so the wind said. Yet the Princess loved it: it wasn't half a bad dragon, when you knew it. I could not tell them what became of the Prince: the wind didn't seem to care a hang about the Prince.

Myself, I liked the story, but Hocker, who was a Fifth Form boy, voicing our little public, said it was rot, so far, and that I had got to hurry up and finish things rightly.

"But that is all," I told them.

"No, it isn't," said Hocker. "She's got to marry the Prince in the end.

He'll have to kill the Dragon again; and mind he does it properly this time. Whoever heard of a Princess leaving a Prince for a Dragon!"

"But she wasn't the ordinary sort of Princess," I argued.

"Then she's got to be," criticised Hocker. "Don't you give yourself so many airs. You make her marry the Prince, and be slippy about it. I've got to catch the four-fifteen from Chalk Farm station."

"But she didn't," I persisted obstinately. "She married the Dragon and lived happy ever afterwards."

Hocker adopted sterner measures. He seized my arm and twisted it behind me.

"She married who?" demanded Hocker: grammar was not Hocker's strong point.

"The Dragon," I growled.

"She married who?" repeated Hocker.

"The Dragon," I whined.

"She married who?" for the third time urged Hocker.

Hocker was strong, and the tears were forcing themselves into my eyes in spite of me. So the Princess in return for healing the Dragon made it promise to reform. It went back with her to the Prince, and made itself generally useful to both of them for the rest of the tour. And the Prince took the Princess home with him and married her; and the Dragon died and was buried. The others liked the story better, but I hated it; and the wind sighed and died away.

The little crowd becomes the reading public, and Hocker grows into an editor; he twists my arm in other ways. Some are brave, so the crowd kicks them and scurries off to catch the four-fifteen. But most of us, I fear, are slaves to Hocker. Then, after awhile, the wind grows sulky and will not tell us stories any more, and we have to make them up out of our own heads. Perhaps it is just as well. What were doors and windows made for but to keep out the wind.

He is a dangerous fellow, this wandering Wind; he leads me astray. I was talking about our architect.

He made a bad start, so far as Robina was concerned, by coming in at the back-door. Robina, in a big ap.r.o.n, was washing up. He apologised for having blundered into the kitchen, and offered to go out again and work round to the front. Robina replied, with unnecessary severity as I thought, that an architect, if anyone, might have known the difference between the right side of a house and the wrong; but presumed that youth and inexperience could always be pleaded as excuse for stupidity. I cannot myself see why Robina should have been so much annoyed. Labour, as Robina had been explaining to Veronica only a few hours before, exalts a woman. In olden days, ladies-the highest in the land-were proud, not ashamed, of their ability to perform domestic duties. This, later on, I pointed out to Robina. Her answer was that in olden days you didn't have chits of boys going about, calling themselves architects, and opening back-doors without knocking; or if they did knock, knocking so that n.o.body on earth could hear them.

Robina wiped her hands on the towel behind the door, and brought him into the front-room, where she announced him, coldly, as "The young man from the architect's office." He explained-but quite modestly-that he was not exactly Messrs. Spreight's young man, but an architect himself, a junior member of the firm. To make it clear he produced his card, which was that of Mr. Archibald T. Bute, F.R.I.B.A. Practically speaking, all this was unnecessary. Through the open door I had, of course, heard every word; and old Spreight had told me of his intention to send me one of his most promising a.s.sistants, who would be able to devote himself entirely to my work. I put matters right by introducing him formally to Robina.

They bowed to one another rather stiffly. Robina said that if he would excuse her she would return to her work; and he answered "Charmed," and also that he didn't mean it. As I have tried to get it into Robina's head, the young fellow was confused. He had meant-it was self-evident-that he was charmed at being introduced to her, not at her desire to return to the kitchen. But Robina appears to have taken a dislike to him.

I gave him a cigar, and we started for the house. It lies just a mile from this cottage, the other side of the wood. One excellent trait in him I soon discovered-he is intelligent without knowing everything.

I confess it to my shame, but the young man who knows everything has come to pall upon me. According to Emerson, this is a proof of my own intellectual feebleness. The strong man, intellectually, cultivates the society of his superiors. He wants to get on, he wants to learn things.

If I loved knowledge as one should, I would have no one but young men about me. There was a friend of d.i.c.k's, a gentleman from Rugby. At one time he had hopes of me; I felt he had. But he was too impatient. He tried to bring me on too quickly. You must take into consideration natural capacity. After listening to him for an hour or two my mind would wander. I could not help it. The careless laughter of uninformed middle-aged gentlemen and ladies would creep to me from the croquet lawn or from the billiard-room. I longed to be among them. Sometimes I would battle with my lower nature. What did they know? What could they tell me? More often I would succ.u.mb. There were occasions when I used to get up and go away from him, quite suddenly.

I talked with young Bute during our walk about domestic architecture in general. He said he should describe the present tendency in domestic architecture as towards corners. The desire of the British public was to go into a corner and live. A lady for whose husband his firm had lately built a house in Surrey had propounded to him a problem in connection with this point. She agreed it was a charming house; no house in Surrey had more corners, and that was saying much. But she could not see how for the future she was going to bring up her children. She was a humanely minded lady. Hitherto she had punished them, when needful, by putting them in the corner; the shame of it had always exercised upon them a salutary effect. But in the new house corners are reckoned the prime parts of every room. It is the honoured guest who is sent into the corner. The father has a corner sacred to himself, with high up above his head a complicated cupboard, wherein with the help of a step-ladder, he may keep his pipes and his tobacco, and thus by slow degrees cure himself of the habit of smoking. The mother likewise has her corner, where stands her spinning-wheel, in case the idea comes to her to weave sheets and underclothing. It also has a book-shelf supporting thirteen volumes, arranged in a sloping position to look natural; the last one maintained at its angle of forty-five degrees by a ginger-jar in old blue Nankin. You are not supposed to touch them, because that would disarrange them. Besides which, fooling about, you might upset the ginger-jar. The consequence of all this is the corner is no longer disgraceful. The parent can no more say to the erring child:

"You wicked boy! Go into the cosy corner this very minute!"

In the house of the future the place of punishment will have to be the middle of the room. The angry mother will exclaim: