"Do you notice anything particularly queer about this house, Charles," I
asked him, "now that Araminta has been forced to fly from it?"
(Araminta had gone home to visit her parents, not so much, as I
explained to Charles, because she was tired of living with me as because
I had invited him to come on a visit. She was to return on the following
day after a fortnight's absence, and I had promised faithfully to evict
him before she came).
"Except," said Charles, "that it is usual to offer one's guests the most
comfortable arm-chair in the messuage and not to eat all the fattest
strawberries oneself, I can't say that I do;" and he fluffed a second
mashie pitch with his cigar ash well short of the drawing-room fender.
"You don't," I insisted, "remark any unusual hiatus in the household
arrangements--anything that obviously betrays the absence of the
feminine touch? I suppose you know what this is?" and I took from the
mantelpiece a tall slender silver object.
"It seems to be a tin trumpet," replied Charles, "and why on earth you
can't keep my godson's toys in the nursery, instead of littering them
about----"
"Tin trumpet," I said cleverly, "be blowed! It is a vase--variously
pronounced to rhyme with 'parse' or 'pause,' according to one's
pretensions to gentility. It is a flower-vase, Chawles, and, what is
more, there ought to be flowers in it. The whole house, let me tell you,
should be a very garden of fragrant and luscious blooms. Instead of
which it is full of mocking cenotaphs such as this. When Araminta went
away she flung over her shoulder a parasol and a Parthian taunt. She
said, 'I'm certain there'll be no flowers in the house while I'm away,'
and now it seems she was jolly well right."
"Why ever can't the servants attend to the flowers?" said Charles
lazily. "They seem to be fairly competent people. There were four
match-boxes and _The Return of Sherlock Holmes_ in my bedroom."
"There you touch one of the deeper mysteries," I explained to him.
"Probably in the most expensive and luxurious mansions they have a
flower-maid. A kind of Persephone who comes up from the underworld with
her arms full of gerania and calceolarias. 'Housemaid,' she would put it
in the advertisements, 'upper (where manservant kept); tall, of good
appearance; free; several years' experience; understands vawses.' And in
houses such as these the cinerarias would never wither or die. Every
what-not would be a riotous profusion of et-ceteras from week's-end to
week's-end. But with Jane it is different. Jane has her limitations. She
comprehends match-boxes and detective fiction, but Araminta does the
flowers."
"Well, what do you want me to do about it?" said Charles, bunkering his
cigar-stump badly to the right of the coal-scuttle.
"I want you to help me," I told him, "because I shan't have time to
attend to the matter myself. When I go out to-morrow I want you, before
you leave, to fill all the vases all over the house. Pink roses will be
the best, I think, and you can buy them at that little flowermonger's
across the road."
"But there are pink roses in the garden," he objected.
"Only a kind of double dog-rose," I told him. "We never allow the
dog-roses in the house: they haven't been properly trained. Besides you
would certainly pick all the puppies and scratch yourself to death.
There's no dog-rose without its tooth. You want the big ones that are
grown exclusively on short stalks without any roots. And Araminta will
never know that they haven't been there for several days at least."
"All right," said Charles, "I'll tackle the flower-smith for you."
When I came home on the following evening, before going upstairs, I
peeped timidly into the dining-room and found to my delight that Charles
had been as good as his word. All the vases had burst as though by a
miracle into radiant blossom. Taking courage I went up to the
drawing-room, found Araminta and saluted her, and then looked round with
a smirk of conscious self-satisfaction. Charles had chosen pink
carnations for the drawing-room, and the place was as starry as the
final chapter of a _feuilleton_.
"What do you think of the flowers?" I said proudly.
"They're simply _lovely_," she replied. "But----"
"But what?" I asked with a sudden vague qualm. "Don't you like pink
carnations?"
"I adore them," she said. "I was just going to ask how long they'd been
there, that's all."
"These particular ones?" I said airily. "Oh, two or three days, I think,
at most; not more than that."
"I see," she replied with a little smile. "That makes it more wonderful
still."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, there isn't any water, you see, in the vases."
* * * * *
Illustration: COOL STUFF.
THE TABLOID. "YOU CAN MAKE IT AS HOT FOR ME AS YOU LIKE, I SHALL _NOT_
DISSOLVE."
[The above is prospective. No sensible person desires a dissolution
during the present crisis abroad.]
* * * * *
Illustration: THE ETHICS OF THE RING.
[Boxing champions receive almost as much pay for losing as for winning.]
_Manager_ (_to applicant for position of traveller_). "AND WHAT SALARY
WOULD YOU REQUIRE?"
_Applicant._ "£600 A YEAR IF I GIVE SATISFACTION; £400 IF I DON'T."
* * * * *