There was the bust of a dog in the front yard of the school of poetry
and the door was pink.
“You ask,” said Harold Withersq to Selia his love. “For this is a bit
of a treat for you,” so she rang the brass bell and got her mouth
ready to pop the question to the serving maids. A grand old woman in a
white pinny came and opened.
“Pray conduct us to your owner,” said Selia in a wonderful chic voice.
“We have come to join the school.”
The woman showed them into a white hall with two rows of littel
coloured pictures painted on glass of chinamen and tigers very bright
and instructing hung all down the sides. Mr. Withersq now puffed
himself out ready for the encounter. The old lady bobbed on before
them down the white hall to a large chamber like a chapel with
gold-edged pictures, some of Nude in galore, and twenty grown up young
people sat in desks in this hall, scribbling on slates under the
watching eye of a bald man mounted up on a littel platform at the top.
All the bottom on his face was beard and his mouth made you laugh when
he talked like looking at a person’s mouth talking upside down. And he
had glasses with brown rims and ear-bits very costly and wise looking.
The twenty pupils raised their heads and stared.
Mr. Withersq stept boldly up to the teacher and laid a pound note on
his desk.
“I have been insulted,” he cried waving his arms a little though not
much out of respect, “my unckle Burt is dead and has left me a good
bit. This is my girl Selia.”
Selia gave a bow and muttered pleased to meet you.
“We are seeing life,” Mr. Withersq went on after this little
interruption. “We have been to a party and danced and slept with the
very creme of London, baronnesses and what not, and yet not an hour
ago I was insulted. The creture that is called Boon gave me the bird
and my Selia too, because he is so proud to be a poet. Make me a poet,
make my lady a poet too if you can, and I will pay you well and pay
them out.”
“That will do,” said the teacher. “You arent allowed to have quarrels
before you’ve been printed so you both sit down and see what you can
do.”
So they sat down both and had a stare at the others. They were again
mostly like the beings at the party, but more younger men very
drooping in figgur and unshorn heads, some of whom munched drugs out
of boxes while they worked, to keep their spirits up.
“They look a bit half-baked,” Selia remarked to Mr. Withersq and drew
a frown from the teacher.
“Write me now a good poem to the bakers horse” shouted he from his
littel platform tossing slates to Selia and Mr. Withersq and all
present began to scribble and squeek on the slates at which the good
teacher pluckt hairs from his beard and smiled in a nodding sort of
way like a grandma. Selia and Harold gave a sorry look at each other
not knowing how to put bakers horses into poetry and thinking up till
then that poetry was all rich like creamy cakes with love and nobel
roman deaths for the schools they had went to taught nothing else. So
they dotted down a few words hoping to pass in the crush.