[Illustration: flower]
The really artistic member of the _famiglia_ is Juvenal. He settles all
the flowers; and for that alone—for the pleasure he gets from it and the
pleasure he gives—he is worth his weight in gold. The little gold and
mother-of-pearl tinted Italian drawing-room is always a bower.
Yesterday, on the silver table which stands beneath a silver and gold
Ikon, he set a vase of white and yellow Roses. It was a touch of genius!
We are quite sick of reading how beautiful Primroses look in Benares
brass bowls. Personally, we dislike brass bowls for flowers. Glass!
Glass! There is nothing as good as glass, especially when you have the
luck to possess, as we did, a case of old Dutch moulded bottles. They
were made in all kinds of delicious angles—three-cornered, square,
hexagonal—with Tulips stamped in the glass: in such as these a couple of
long-stemmed Roses or Irises, and especially Tulips and Daffodils, are
at their very best.
We have said “they were.” Alas for those Dutch bottles, and for our
folly, improvident wretches as we are, in setting them about for our own
pleasure, instead of shutting them up in a cabinet! Of what were once
eleven perfect irreplaceable treasures ‹the twelfth had a large chip off
its neck from the beginning›, there are only five left! Tittums, the
splendid savage “smoke Persian,” swept the biggest and best off a
chimney-piece with taps of a deliberately evil paw.... And the rest have
gone the way of vases!
“Very sorry, Miss” ‹it’s generally to the Signorina they come: she takes
the edge off the Padrona’s fury›. “I don’t know how it happened, I’m
sure. It came to pieces——”
‹Oh, let us stay our pen! Every owner of precious bric-à-brac knows the
awful sound of those words, and the futility of resentment.›
The Master of the Villino had a teapot. Of yellow Cantagalli pottery it
was, with quaint adornments like caterpillars all over it; it had a
snake handle and a long curving spout. He loved it. He never wanted to
have his tea out of any other vessel. One morning a stranger sat in its
place. He rang the bell severely. One of the nomad footmen, who appear,
and camp, and go away, answered it.
“My teapot.”
‹Yes, it was broken.›
“It came to pieces in your hand, I suppose?” said the master
sarcastically.
The injured expression of the misjudged became painted on John’s face:
“No, sir,” he said with much dignity, “it shut itself in the door!”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: MORE PEKINESE WAYS]
[Illustration: dog lying down]
Loki has had a bath, out of due season, because his own artist has come
down from London to limn his imperial splendours for his own book. We
tried to make him understand that it is only smug _nouveaux riches_ who
imagine they can patronize art; that, on the contrary, it is Art which
condescends to us. He put on his most Chinese face and became a
crocodile on the spot. On such occasions his Grandpa calls him a
“Crocowog.” ‹This page is only for the pet dog-lover: superior people,
please pass on!› He is very nice to kiss after his bath, a process
attended on his side by subterranean growls of protest and an alarming
curling of the lip. But—dear little gentle creature as he is at heart—it
is not in him to bite even the most persistent tormentor.
When his Grandfather amuses himself by what he calls “Squeezing the
growls out” every morning, Loki tries vainly to keep up a show of
displeasure, but always ends on his back with a windmill waving of
pretty prayerful paws.
[Illustration: dog facing away]
Loki has his own very marked ideas on the subject of jokes; at least he
has one—in fact, an only joke! It took his Grandfather some time to
apprehend it; but constant repetition of the incident ‹after the
consecrated fashion of the British farce› is beginning to make him see
the point of it. The joke is this: at the top, or the bottom, of the
garden, as the case may be, coming in from, or going out for, a walk,
Loki stands stock still, generally unperceived till you are midway. No
coaxing, whistling, or screaming will budge him. He will stand there a
quarter of an hour, it may be. And the point of the joke is that you
must get behind him and stamp your feet, and say “Naughty Dog!” Then
Loki careers up or down in paroxysms of merriment. This may not appeal
to some people’s special bump of hilarity; and as it is useless to try
to explain a jest, we will leave those to enjoy the spinach story.
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