A solitary little path ran across the fields not far from the house.
It lay deep among tall grasses and the withered brittle stalks of
last autumn's goldenrod, and here Gissing rambled in the green hush of
twilight, after the puppies were in bed. In less responsible days
he would have lain down on his back, with all four legs upward, and
cheerily shrugged and rolled to and fro, as the crisp ground-stubble was
very pleasing to the spine. But now he paced soberly, the smoke from his
pipe eddying just above the top of the grasses. He had much to meditate.
The dogwood tree by the house was now in flower. The blossoms, with
their four curved petals, seemed to spin like tiny white propellers
in the bright air. When he saw them fluttering Gissing had a happy
sensation of movement. The business of those tremulous petals seemed to
be thrusting his whole world forward and forward, through the viewless
ocean of space. He felt as though he were on a ship--as, indeed, we are.
He had never been down to the open sea, but he had imagined it. There,
he thought, there must be the satisfaction of a real horizon.
Horizons had been a great disappointment to him. In earlier days he had
often slipped out of the house not long after sunrise, and had marvelled
at the blue that lies upon the skyline. Here, about him, were the clear
familiar colours of the world he knew; but yonder, on the hills, were
trees and spaces of another more heavenly tint. That soft blue light, if
he could reach it, must be the beginning of what his mind required.
He envied Mr. Poodle, whose cottage was on that very hillslope that rose
so imperceptibly into sky. One morning he ran and ran, in the lifting
day, but always the blue receded. Hot and unbuttoned, he came by the
curate's house, just as the latter emerged to pick up the morning paper.
“Where does the blue begin?” Gissing panted, trying hard to keep his
tongue from sliding out so wetly.
The curate looked a trifle disturbed. He feared that something
unpleasant had happened, and that his assistance might be required
before breakfast.
“It is going to be a warm day,” he said politely, and stooped for the
newspaper, as a delicate hint.
“Where does--?” began Gissing, quivering; but at that moment, looking
round, he saw that it had hoaxed him again. Far away, on his own hill
the other side of the village, shone the evasive colour. As usual,
he had been too impetuous. He had not watched it while he ran; it had
circled round behind him. He resolved to be more methodical.
The curate gave him a blank to fill in, relative to baptizing the
children, and was relieved to see him hasten away.
But all this was some time ago. As he walked the meadow path, Gissing
suddenly realized that lately he had had little opportunity for pursuing
blue horizons. Since Fuji's departure every moment, from dawn to dusk,
was occupied. In three weeks he had had three different servants, but
none of them would stay. The place was too lonely, they said, and with
three puppies the work was too hard. The washing, particularly was a
horrid problem. Inexperienced as a parent, Gissing was probably too
proud: he wanted the children always to look clean and soigne. The last
cook had advertised herself as a General Houseworker, afraid of
nothing; but as soon as she saw the week's wash in the hamper (including
twenty-one grimy rompers), she telephoned to the station for a taxi.
Gissing wondered why it was that the working classes were not willing
to do one-half as much as he, who had been reared to indolent ease. Even
more, he was irritated by a suspicion of the ice-wagon driver. He could
not prove it, but he had an idea that this uncouth fellow obtained a
commission from the Airedales and Collies, who had large mansions in the
neighbourhood, for luring maids from the smaller homes. Of course Mrs.
Airedale and Mrs. Collie could afford to pay any wages at all. So now
the best he could do was to have Mrs. Spaniel, the charwoman, come up
from the village to do the washing and ironing, two days a week. The
rest of the work he undertook himself. On a clear afternoon, when the
neighbours were not looking, he would take his own shirts and things
down to the pond--putting them neatly in the bottom of the red
express-wagon, with the puppies sitting on the linen, so no one would
see. While the puppies played about and hunted for tadpoles, he would
wash his shirts himself.
His legs ached as he took his evening stroll--keeping within earshot of
the house, so as to hear any possible outcry from the nursery. He
had been on his feet all day. But he reflected that there was a real
satisfaction in his family tasks, however gruelling. Now, at last (he
said to himself), I am really a citizen, not a mere dilettante. Of
course it is arduous. No one who is not a parent realizes, for example,
the extraordinary amount of buttoning and unbuttoning necessary in
rearing children. I calculate that 50,000 buttonings are required for
each one before it reaches the age of even rudimentary independence.
With the energy so expended one might write a great novel or chisel a
statue. Never mind: these urchins must be my Works of Art. If one
were writing a novel, he could not delegate to a hired servant the
composition of laborious chapters.
So he took his responsibility gravely. This was partly due to the
christening service, perhaps, which had gone off very charmingly. It
had not been without its embarrassments. None of the neighbouring ladies
would stand as godmother, for they were secretly dubious as to the
children's origin; so he had asked good Mrs. Spaniel to act in that
capacity. She, a simple kindly creature, was much flattered, though
certainly she can have understood very little of the symbolical rite.
Gissing, filling out the form that Mr. Poodle had given him, had put
down the names of an entirely imaginary brother and sister-in-law of
his, “deceased,” whom he asserted as the parents. He had been so busy
with preparations that he did not find time, before the ceremony,
to study the text of the service; and when he and Mrs. Spaniel stood
beneath the font with an armful of ribboned infancy, he was frankly
startled by the magnitude of the promises exacted from him. He found
that, on behalf of the children, he must “renounce the devil and all his
work, the vain pomp and glory of the world;” that he must pledge himself
to see that these infants would “crucify the old man and utterly abolish
the whole body of sin.” It was rather doubtful whether they would do so,
he reflected, as he felt them squirming in his arms while Mrs. Spaniel
was busy trying to keep their socks on. When the curate exhorted him “to
follow the innocency” of these little ones, it was disconcerting to have
one of them burst into a piercing yammer, and wriggle so forcibly that
it slipped quite out of its little embroidered shift and flannel band.
But the actual access to the holy basin was more seemly, perhaps due to
the children imagining they were going to find tadpoles there. When Mr.
Poodle held them up they smiled with a vague almost bashful simplicity;
and Mrs. Spaniel could not help murmuring “The darlings!” The curate,
less experienced with children, had insisted on holding all three at
once, and Gissing feared lest one of them might swarm over the surpliced
shoulder and fall splash into the font. But though they panted a little
with excitement, they did nothing to mar the solemn instant. While Mrs.
Spaniel was picking up the small socks with which the floor was strewn,
Gissing was deeply moved by the poetry of the ceremony. He felt that
something had really been accomplished toward “burying the Old Adam.”
And if Mrs. Spaniel ever grew disheartened at the wash-tubs, he was
careful to remind her of the beautiful phrase about the mystical washing
away of sin.
They had been christened Groups, Bunks, and Yelpers, three traditional
names in his family.
Indeed, he was reflecting as he walked in the dusk, Mrs. Spaniel was
now his sheet anchor. Fortunately she showed signs of becoming
extraordinarily attached to the puppies. On the two days a week when she
came up from the village, it was even possible for him to get a little
relaxation--to run down to the station for tobacco, or to lie in the
hammock briefly with a book. Looking off from his airy porch, he could
see the same blue distances that had always tempted him, but he felt too
passive to wonder about them. He had given up the idea of trying to get
any other servants. If it had been possible, he would have engaged Mrs.
Spaniel to sleep in the house and be there permanently; but she had
children of her own down in the shantytown quarter of the village, and
had to go back to them at night. But certainly he made every effort to
keep her contented. It was a long steep climb up from the hollow, so
he allowed her to come in a taxi and charge it to his account. Then, on
condition that she would come on Saturdays also, to help him clean up
for Sunday, he allowed her, on that day, to bring her own children too,
and all the puppies played riotously together around the place. But this
he presently discontinued, for the clamour became so deafening that the
neighbours complained. Besides, the young Spaniels, who were a little
older, got Groups, Bunks, and Yelpers into noisy and careless habits of
speech.
He was anxious that they should grow up refined, and was distressed by
little Shaggy Spaniel having brought up the Comic Section of a Sunday
paper. With childhood's instinctive taste for primitive effects, the
puppies fell in love with the coloured cartoons, and badgered him
continually for “funny papers.”
There is a great deal more to think about in raising children (he said
to himself) than is intimated in Dr. Holt's book on Care and Feeding.
Even in matters that he had always taken for granted, such as fairy
tales, he found perplexity. After supper--(he now joined the children in
their evening bread and milk, for after cooking them a hearty lunch of
meat and gravy and potatoes and peas and the endless spinach and carrots
that the doctors advise, to say nothing of the prunes, he had no energy
to prepare a special dinner for himself)--after supper it was his habit
to read to them, hoping to give their imaginations a little exercise
before they went to bed. He was startled to find that Grimm and Hans
Andersen, which he had considered as authentic classics for childhood,
were full of very strong stuff--morbid sentiment, bloodshed, horror, and
all manner of painful circumstance. Reading the tales aloud, he edited
as he went along; but he was subject to that curious weakness that
afflicts some people: reading aloud made him helplessly sleepy: after a
page or so he would fall into a doze, from which he would be awakened by
the crash of a lamp or some other furniture. The children, seized with
that furious hilarity that usually begins just about bedtime, would race
madly about the house until some breakage or a burst of tears woke him
from his trance. He would thrash them all and put them to bed howling.
When they were asleep he would be touched with tender compassion, and
steal in to tuck them up, admiring the innocence of each unconscious
muzzle on its pillow. Sometimes, in a crisis of his problems, he thought
of writing to Dr. Holt for advice; but the will-power was lacking.
It is really astonishing how children can exhaust one, he used to think.
Sometimes, after a long day, he was even too weary to correct their
grammar. “You lay down!” Groups would admonish Yelpers, who was capering
in his crib while Bunks was being lashed in with the largest size of
safety pins. And Gissing, doggedly passing from one to another, was
really too fatigued to reprove the verb, picked up from Mrs. Spaniel.
Fairy tales proving a disappointment, he had great hopes of encouraging
them in drawing. He bought innumerable coloured crayons and stacks
of scribbling paper. After supper they would all sit down around the
dining-room table and he drew pictures for them. Tongues depending with
concentrated excitement, the children would try to copy these pictures
and colour them. In spite of having three complete sets of crayons, a
full roster of colours could rarely be found at drawing time. Bunks had
the violet when Groups wanted it, and so on. But still, this was often
the happiest hour of the day. Gissing drew amazing trains, elephants,
ships, and rainbows, with the spectrum of colours correctly arranged
and blended. The children specially loved his landscapes, which were
opulently tinted and magnificent in long perspectives. He found himself
always colouring the far horizons a pale and haunting blue.
He was meditating these things when a shrill yammer recalled him to the
house.