HOW MRS. FRANK TRIED HER INNOCENT GAMES ON ONE OF THE GREAT ONES OF
THE EARTH
There is a most amusing article in this week's _Balance_ on the Scold
and her place in mediæval life. The writer had seen a ducking-chair
somewhere, and had been led by it to a series of reflections on the
Scold and, what is perhaps more interesting, the Scold's husband.
It is a topic on which we are very ill informed, and the fancy has a
free field. What, he asked, was the husband doing while his wife was
being corrected? Was he a spectator or an absentee? Was he proud--a
kind of inverted hero--or was he ashamed? Had he not more probably a
very lively sense of what was in store for him at night and was he
not nerving himself for the fray in the inn parlour?
The writer then went on to consider the homecoming of the Scold: wet
through certainly, but was she penitent? Did she scold no more? Is
any one ever cured? The home-coming of the husband, he suggested,
would be later. And so forth.
Meeting Mr. Dabney on the stairs, I mentioned the article and asked
him who wrote it. He said it was written by a young fellow named
Wynne--Frank Wynne. Isn't that odd? I knew Frank for an amusing
embroiderer, but I never thought of him having so much humour as that.
He and his wife being at Queen Anne's Gate to dinner, I congratulated
him.
"How did you know I wrote it?" he asked; and I told him about Mr.
Dabney. "By the way," I added to Naomi, "that proves my prophecy.
Don't you remember my saying that Mr. Dabney and I would find we had
a common friend; and it turns out to be Frank."
Frank, however, denied that he knew him: his connection with the
paper was the result of correspondence, and so I said I would bring
Mr. Dabney to Barton Street to tea and they should then meet.
"But isn't he very fierce?" asked Mrs. Frank, thinking, I am sure, of
the twins.
"You must tame him," I said.
She certainly tried.
Never was there such a tea. Mrs. Frank must have lain awake half the
night meditating upon the attack, for this was her first editor, and
was she not a young journalist's wife? (Such a chance.) In her
original scheme were hot cakes and cold, muffins and crumpets, brown
bread and white, jam and marmalade; but she had a doubt and put it to
Frank.
"Isn't there a danger," she said, "that he may think we're too well
off already?"
Frank thought there might. So the muffins went and the other hot
cakes and the marmalade.
"And what about my dress?" she said. "I should like to wear the red
one, but it does look a little bit expensive."
"It's very beautiful," said Frank.
"Don't you like the purple one, then?" she asked anxiously.
"Of course I do: they're both beautiful."
"Well, which shall it be?"
"Why not the red dress and leave off all your rings but the wedding
ring?"
And so did these Machiavellian babes arrange it.
They might have saved themselves their trouble, for Mr. Dabney is one
of those persons who carry their environment with them. He ate his
tea nobly, but he could not have said afterwards what he consumed: it
was all cake to him, or all bread-and-butter, such is the activity of
his mind.
Mrs. Frank was adorable: she talked her best talk and, her fears
allayed, sent for the twins, whom Mr. Dabney inspected with a most
admirable show of interest, although at any moment I felt he might
remark that one or the other was too long and would be better with
twenty lines cut out.
He arranged for some articles with Frank, and then left. Mrs. Frank
was very happy, but I doubt if her innocent and loyal strategy had
anything to do with it. Still, it is very pretty to see a young wife
working for her husband.
"Frank is a dear," Mrs. Frank said to me later, "but really he is a
little too casual about refusing work. _The Balance_ only takes two
articles a week, which doesn't pay for more than nurse and our
dinners, but nothing will induce him to write for other papers unless
he likes them."
"_O si sic omnes!_" I said.
"What does that mean?" she asked coldly. "I have an uncle who talks
like that."
"I'm very sorry," I said, "I won't do it again. It means that I wish
all the other journalists were like Frank. Then we should have some
decent honest papers."
"Oh yes," she said, "but really one can be too nice and fastidious.
What about the twins? I wanted them to go to Eton. And he won't
write a play either," she continued. "That's the way to make money,
and it's so easy. We go to the theatre pretty often, and I never see
anything that Frank couldn't have done better. All you have to do is
to make people say foolish things in nice clothes. But Frank says he
couldn't. He says it's a special gift, and he hates the stage. He
won't even try."
"Frank's all right," I said; "he's finding himself. You mustn't
hurry him."
"There are so many things we want," she replied. "You don't know."
"I'm afraid you're a bad woman," I said. "You should believe more in
the ravens. Young journalists and young journalists' wives ought not
to be rich. If you talk like this I shall begin to think you have
made a mistake and ought really to have married a stockbroker."
As a matter of fact, Frank is doing quite well enough. His name is
getting to be known for delicate work, and he is in the way of making
four or five hundred a year already. That is plenty. But you might
as well pour Chateau Yquem into the Thames as tell a young wife that
she would be less happy with more money.
Frank, however, does not let it worry him, but goes smiling through
the world, elaborating his little humorous fancies, building up
little literary lyrics, and writing reviews and so forth; and there
is probably no great danger in Mrs. Frank's covetousness. But I wish
she wouldn't.
I don't know that I blame her, for the air is so full of cupidity
nowadays that it is taken in through the pores unless you watch
yourself very carefully. She is otherwise a rational little woman,
of no great force of character but plenty of cheerfulness and
loyalty, who has in reality one of the serenest of lives, for the
twins are no more trouble than they ought to be to supply their
mother with congenial topics of conversation and that leaven of
anxiety that keeps mothers happy, and Mrs. Frank's mother and Frank's
mother vie with each other in showering little presents on the
household, and Naomi is continually looking in with her dear sunny
face.
Let Mrs. Frank be happy while she can. Some day her husband will be
offered £1000 a year to edit a paper, and a literary peeress will
take them up, and that will be the end.
I find that Frank has been selling his review copies to Mr. Bemerton
for a long time, and they are old friends. I met him there recently
on the search for second-hand copies of the collected poems of one of
the older living poets, having had a commission from an editor to
prepare his obituary notice against the dread summons. I had not
given much thought to this branch of journalistic industry, but of
course now that I think of it I see that the pigeon-holes of Fleet
Street must be full of these anticipatory articles which only need
occasional revision to date to be all ready when the scythe is
finally sharpened. To meet an editor must be for a thoughtful
celebrity as chilling as the spectacle of the mummy at the Egyptian
banquet.
Frank tells me that the practice on one of the papers for which he is
engaged is to withhold payment until the article is used. "This," he
says, "is all very well so long as one is flush. But if one were
broke just think of what one might be tempted to do, for I see Blank
[his poetical victim] at the Museum continually, and could easily
poison his soup at the Vienna Café."
"Poets," Frank said to me one day, "ought to have some common fund
from which they might borrow for sustenance without shame--some
Pactolian spring into which to dip their cups. You know those
ingenious contribution boxes invented by Mr. Sidney Holland, which
invite you to drop in a penny and by so doing maintain the London
Hospital for one second--a dial indicating the passage of your own
pennyworth of time as you do so. Well, I thought once of adopting
this plan, and calling upon the public to drop in a penny and thus
maintain me. 'A penny keeps a poet for half an hour,' it might have
said."
"Apropos of poets," said I, "come upstairs and I will show you a
book." I need hardly say what the book was.
I delighted Frank immensely by reading him the passage describing the
ruse to which Ch'ēn Tzu-ang the poet resorted in order to
win recognition.
"Proceeding to the capital he purchased a very expensive guitar which
had been for a long time on sale, and then let it be known that on
the following day he would perform upon it in public. This attracted
a large crowd; but when Ch'ēn arrived he informed his
auditors that he had something in his pocket worth much more than the
guitar. Thereupon he dashed the instrument into a thousand pieces,
and forthwith began handing round copies of his own writings."
Like every one else who sees this fascinating volume, Frank was wild
for more, and I read him excerpts from the lives of other poets--not
better than Dr. Samuel Johnson's, but more concise and freakish.
Such as Wang Po, a poet of the seventh century A.D., who began as a
statesman, but on being dismissed from office for satirising the
cock-fighting propensities of the Imperial princes, filled up his
leisure by composing verses.
"He never meditated upon these beforehand, but after having prepared
a quantity of ink ready for use, he would drink himself tipsy and lie
down with his face covered up. On waking, he would seize his pen and
write off verses, not a word of which needed to be changed; whence he
acquired the sobriquet of Belly-draft."
Liu Ling, another poet, and one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo
Grave, was also a hard drinker and a man of infinite humour. It was
he who declared that "'to a drunken man the affairs of this world
appear but as so much duckweed in a river.' He wished to be always
accompanied by a servant with wine, and followed by another with a
spade, so that he might be buried where he fell. On one occasion,
yielding to the entreaties of his wife, he promised to 'swear off,'
and bade her prepare the usual sacrifices of wine and meat. When all
was ready, he prayed, saying, 'O God, who didst give to Liu Ling a
reputation through wine, he being able to consume a gallon at a
sitting and requiring a quart to sober him again, listen not to the
words of his wife, for she speaketh not truth.' Thereupon he drank
up the sacrificial wine, and was soon as drunk as ever."
A tenderer genius was Chēng Ku, of the ninth century A.D.,
who "said that no one should sing his _Song of the Partridge_ in the
presence of Southerners, as it made them think sadly of their far-off
homes."
Li Po, founder of the coterie known as the Eight Immortals of the
Wine Cup (having got his hand in as a club-maker by forming, some
years earlier, the hard-drinking company known as the Six Idlers of
the Bamboo Brook), should certainly be better known in a country
where the sanction of an illustrious wine-bibber--a Burns or an
Omar--is so necessary to literary convivialists. The mother of Li
Po, who roystered and revelled in the eighth century A.D., dreamed
just before his birth of the planet Venus. The boy was therefore a
poet at ten years of age, and a great swordsman very soon after.
About A.D. 742 he reached Ch'ang-an. The Emperor "was charmed with
his verses, prepared a bowl of soup for him with his own hands, and
at once appointed him to the Han-liu College." Later, "with a lady
of the Seraglio to hold his ink-slab, he dashed off some of his most
impassioned lines; at which the Emperor was so overcome that he made
the powerful eunuch Kao Li-shih go down on his knees and pull off the
poet's boots." Kao's desire for revenge made it necessary for Li Po
to leave the court, which he did with seven companions, and they are
now known collectively as the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. He
met his death, characteristically, by drowning, "from leaning one
night over the edge of the boat, in a drunken effort to embrace the
reflection of the moon."
Li Po had no monopoly of such ends. Fu I, another poet and the
originator of epitaphs, was of the same mettle. His own epitaph,
which he composed with accurate foresight, runs thus--
"Fu I loved the green hills and the white clouds,
Alas! he died of drink."
"Very different from our reputed Laureate," Frank remarked, adding,
"I wish you'd lend me that book."
"For why?" I replied. "To write about it?"
He admitted the weakness.
"No," I said with startling decision. "No."