IN WHICH I AM FORBIDDEN TO BE IDLE AND THEREFORE FIND CONGENIAL
EMPLOYMENT
Naomi was very firm about my finding an occupation. Men must do
something, she said. As for herself, she intended to retain her
various poor protégés, and to continue to visit her mother in Queen
Anne's Gate every day, and probably lunch there; which made it the
more important that I should have something to engage me.
"A man who has no employment is like a ship without a rudder," she
said.
I replied that perhaps it was employment enough to be married to an
epigrammatist. This being received without enthusiasm, I pointed out
that I was executor to no fewer than three persons.
"All of whom are alive and extremely healthy," said Naomi.
"True," I answered, "but think how insecure is one's hold upon life.
At any moment one of them may be crushed by a falling aeroplane and
plunge me into affairs."
"'It's ill waiting for dead men's shoes,'" Naomi quoted, and at the
totally new light which the proverb threw upon the attitude of the
ordinary executor I broke down.
"How do you know," I asked, "that I am not writing a really valuable
work on the Zoo? A philosophical treatise on apes?"
"You're not, are you?" she asked. Naomi for all her shrewdness has a
childlike belief in certain things that she hears. A child could
pull her leg.
"No," I said; "I am not. But I had thoughts of playing a little at
writing. Wouldn't that satisfy you?"
She did not thoroughly kindle to it. "I hope you will write, dear,"
she said; "but that is only play anyway. And what would you write?"
"Well," I said, "supposing I was to write a book about you?"
Naomi was indignant. "About me? How could I make a book?"
"Very well then," I replied; "about us."
"But we are so uninteresting," she said. "We're so ordinary.
Besides, I don't think, dear, you have--have you?--quite the
novelist's gifts."
"Perhaps not," I said, "but you mustn't be a reviewer before I've
begun. Anyway, mightn't I play a little at being a novelist, just
for fun? I asked advice from quite a good man the other day and he
said: 'When in doubt, to describe your neighbours is perhaps the
second-best piece of counsel that one can give.' And that's not so
very difficult. Mightn't I try that?"
"I'd love you to," she said, "only I want you to do something."
Then I made use of a cowardly argument: "When one has worked and then
can afford to retire, one ought not to keep others out of a job."
Naomi, bless her, has no patience with this kind of talk. "If work
is good for the soul," she said, "as I believe, one must work and let
the work of others be their own affair. A pretty pass we should come
to if the good men abstained from work because by so doing they were
giving the loafers a better chance of taking it if they felt so
inclined! But I don't want you to make any money," she added.
"Something honorary and useful."
"Such as?" I asked.
"We'll find it," she said.
Chance, as so often happens, took the matter into its hands and
settled it; for an evening or so later we met at a party a gentleman
who had given his life to the search for, and reproduction of, old
English songs and dances, several of which were rendered by a troop
of London girls that he brought with him, and these melodies were so
simple and fresh and charming that, although no musician, I was
completely captured. In conversation with him afterwards, we learned
that he was in need of assistance in forming and managing a society
for the systematic encouragement and performance of these things, and
at Naomi's suggestion I offered my services. So I am now an honorary
secretary, one of those bustling diplomatic persons whom reporters
always describe as courteous and indefatigable.
The duties connected with the launching of this Society, together
with such desultory private desk-work as it amuses me to do, ought to
satisfy anyone. They convince me at any rate that no one is in such
danger of overwork as that man of more or less amiable disposition
who gives it out that he has retired.
I don't pretend to understand the full value of folk-music or to be
able to distinguish between the mixolydian and the dorian mode, and
so forth; but I do know this, that there are no sweeter songs for
young voices, or merrier and more innocent measures for young feet,
and that the more we can catch of the spirit of the early days when
English music had these pure and happy characteristics the better for
all of us.
A very little music is ordinarily enough for me; and though I do not
say that an evening at the Opera, especially when the Russians are
dancing, or an afternoon at Queen's Hall now and then, is not very
welcome, I would not too often be found at either. Sophisticated
self-conscious music makes me too old, and the world too old, and its
enigmas too difficult, and all that is best too fugitive. But these
ancient English songs of an unthinking peasantry do not trouble the
waters; they make for joy.
It seems to me that essential melody never reached a more exquisite
purity than in "Mowing the Barley," and I often wonder what Society
would say if, without any warning, when they were all securely in
their seats at the Opera, in their best clothes, and had finished
ascertaining who their immediate neighbours were, and who occupied
the boxes, the curtain rose, not upon the voluptuous passion of _La
Bohème_, or the civilized ache of _Louise_, or the barbaric excesses
of _Scheherazade_, but upon a company of youths and children and
maidens singing this lovely song. After the first shock of surprise,
anxious searching of influential countenances and bewildered
references to the programme, might they not settle down to the
profoundest content? And as song gave way to dance, and dance to
song--"Blow away the Morning Dew" to "Laudnum Bunches," and
"Dargason" to "The Keys of Heaven," and "I'm Seventeen come Sunday"
to "Lord Rendal"--might they not experience a feeling wholly new in
that building and wholly pleasurable? For there is nothing like a
plunge into the simple life now and then.
And yet--I don't know. It might be dangerous. These songs are too
fascinating: Mayfair would be decimated. There is one of them so
infectious in its melody, so irresistible in its appeal, that it
should be rigidly excluded from the programme. The Italian's _La
Bohème_, which sets so many of our stately dames in a quiver, is
quite safe compared with this concise English treatment of the same
theme. For "The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies" has the very seeds of revolt
and escape in it. Here is the first verse:
[Illustration: Music fragment]
There were three gip-sies a-come to my door, And
down-stairs ran this a la dy, O!
One sang high an an-oth-er sang low And the
oth er sang bon-ny, bon-ny Bis cay, O!
Then she pulled off her silk finished gown
And put on hose of leather, O!
The ragged, ragged rags about our door--
She's gone with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O.
It was late last night, when my lord came home,
Inquiring for his a-lady, O!
The servants said, on every hand:
"She's gone with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O."
There's a new version of _La Bohème_ for you, and no less
provocative! I do not hear Caruso in it; but Caruso is not all.
His lordship at last overtakes the rebel:
"What makes you leave your house and land?
What makes you leave your money, O?
What makes you leave your new wedded lord,
To go with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O?"
And what says she? She has heard the call of the road:
"What care I for my house and my land?
What care I for my money, O?
What care I for my new wedded lord?
I'm off with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O."
For the most part, however, these old English songs which we want to
see popularized are less intoxicating. Their tunes are not those of
the pied piper who would upset the family, but more serene and sweet,
like the music of birds by a running stream. And the words are
emotion remembered in tranquillity. This exquisite "Mowing the
Barley," for example, is as artless a love-ballad as ever was
written, in which the least romantic character in English life is
transfigured into a hero. A lawyer, in short. I wonder that in the
Temple they ever sing anything else, so proud should this ditty make
them. It begins:
[Illustration: Music fragment]
Law-yer he went out one day, A for to take his plea-sure, And
who should he spy but some fair pret-ty maid,
So hand-some and so clev er? Where
[Illustration: Music fragment]
are you go-ing to, my pret-ty maid,
Where are you go-ing my hon ney? Go-ing
o-ver the hills, kind sir, she said,
To my fa-ther a-mow-ing the bar ley
Rhymes, you see, don't matter much in our kind of song. We hate
pedantry; and we hate everything that sets up the slightest obstacle
between the singer and the listener.
The lawyer said no more that day, but the next he rode forth again,
and though at first she gave him the slip (for she thought him like
all lawyers, true to type) he
Caught her round the middle so small,
And on his horse he placed her.
The legal courting then began
"Hold up your cheeks, my fair pretty maid,
Hold up your cheeks, my honey,
That I may give you a fair pretty kiss,
And a handful of golden money."
The fair pretty maid at first refused, for she suspected the honesty
of his intentions; but after he had talked a little more, and more
ardently,
She quite forgot the barley field,
And left her father a-mowing.
And now--the end is perfect--
And now she is the Lawyer's wife,
And dearly the Lawyer loves her;
They live in a happy content of life,
And well in the station above her.
No one who has ever heard a company of fresh young voices lilting out
this beautiful piece of rural idealism--for I take it that it is no
small thing for a country girl to catch a lawyer, that terrible
person who knows everyone's business and arranges for distraints and
evictions as well as the making of wills and the lending of
money--has ever known music at its very spring.
Such is "Mowing the Barley," which I always think our best song, but
there is not one of the many hundreds which our indefatigable
Director has collected and scored that has not a certain charm. And
you can understand that I am proud to be able to help him in his
organized effort to find still more, with new dances too, wherever
they are still remembered, and to get enthusiasts to sing and dance
them.