“DO you mean, Governor, that you have actually bought the house?”
demanded Dick, “or are we only talking about it?”
“This time, Dick,” I answered, “I have done it.”
Dick looked serious. “Is it what you wanted?” he asked.
“No, Dick,” I replied, “it is not what I wanted. I wanted an
old-fashioned, picturesque, rambling sort of a place, all gables and ivy
and oriel windows.”
“You are mixing things up,” Dick interrupted, “gables and oriel windows
don’t go together.”
“I beg your pardon, Dick,” I corrected him, “in the house I wanted, they
do. It is the style of house you find in the Christmas number. I have
never seen it anywhere else, but I took a fancy to it from the first. It
is not too far from the church, and it lights up well at night. ‘One of
these days,’ I used to say to myself when a boy, ‘I’ll be a clever man
and live in a house just like that.’ It was my dream.”
“And what is this place like?” demanded Robin, “this place you have
bought.”
“The agent,” I explained, “claims for it that it is capable of
improvement. I asked him to what school of architecture he would say it
belonged; he said he thought that it must have been a local school, and
pointed out—what seems to be the truth—that nowadays they do not build
such houses.”
“Near to the river?” demanded Dick.
“Well, by the road,” I answered, “I daresay it may be a couple of miles.”
“And by the shortest way?” questioned Dick.
“That is the shortest way,” I explained; “there’s a prettier way through
the woods, but that is about three miles and a half.”
“But we had decided it was to be near the river,” said Robin.
“We also decided,” I replied, “that it was to be on sandy soil, with a
south-west aspect. Only one thing in this house has a south-west aspect,
and that’s the back door. I asked the agent about the sand. He advised
me, if I wanted it in any quantity, to get an estimate from the Railway
Company. I wanted it on a hill. It is on a hill, with a bigger hill in
front of it. I didn’t want that other hill. I wanted an uninterrupted
view of the southern half of England. I wanted to take people out on the
step, and cram them with stories about our being able on clear days to
see the Bristol Channel. They might not have believed me, but without
that hill I could have stuck to it, and they could not have been
certain—not dead certain—I was lying.
“Personally, I should have liked a house where something had happened. I
should have liked, myself, a blood-stain—not a fussy blood-stain, a neat
unobtrusive blood-stain that would have been content, most of its time,
to remain hidden under the mat, shown only occasionally as a treat to
visitors. I had hopes even of a ghost. I don’t mean one of those noisy
ghosts that doesn’t seem to know it is dead. A lady ghost would have
been my fancy, a gentle ghost with quiet, pretty ways. This house—well,
it is such a sensible-looking house, that is my chief objection to it.
It has got an echo. If you go to the end of the garden and shout at it
very loudly, it answers you back. This is the only bit of fun you can
have with it. Even then it answers you in such a tone you feel it thinks
the whole thing silly—is doing it merely to humour you. It is one of
those houses that always seems to be thinking of its rates and taxes.”
“Any reason at all for your having bought it?” asked Dick.
“Yes, Dick,” I answered. “We are all of us tired of this suburb. We
want to live in the country and be good. To live in the country with any
comfort it is necessary to have a house there. This being admitted, it
follows we must either build a house or buy one. I would rather not
build a house. Talboys built himself a house. You know Talboys. When I
first met him, before he started building, he was a cheerful soul with a
kindly word for everyone. The builder assures him that in another twenty
years, when the colour has had time to tone down, his house will be a
picture. At present it makes him bilious, the mere sight of it. Year by
year, they tell him, as the dampness wears itself away, he will suffer
less and less from rheumatism, ague, and lumbago. He has a hedge round
the garden; it is eighteen inches high. To keep the boys out he has put
up barbed-wire fencing. But wire fencing affords no real privacy. When
the Talboys are taking coffee on the lawn, there is generally a crowd
from the village watching them. There are trees in the garden; you know
they are trees—there is a label tied to each one telling you what sort of
tree it is. For the moment there is a similarity about them. Thirty
years hence, Talboys estimates, they will afford him shade and comfort;
but by that time he hopes to be dead. I want a house that has got over
all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a
young and inexperienced house.”
“But why this particular house?” urged Robin, “if, as you say, it is not
the house you wanted.”
“Because, my dear girl,” I answered, “it is less unlike the house I
wanted than other houses I have seen. When we are young we make up our
minds to try and get what we want; when we have arrived at years of
discretion we decide to try and want what we can get. It saves time.
During the last two years I have seen about sixty houses, and out of the
lot there was only one that was really the house I wanted. Hitherto I
have kept the story to myself. Even now, thinking about it irritates me.
It was not an agent who told me of it. I met a man by chance in a
railway carriage. He had a black eye. If ever I meet him again I’ll
give him another. He accounted for it by explaining that he had had
trouble with a golf ball, and at the time I believed him. I mentioned to
him in conversation I was looking for a house. He described this place
to me, and it seemed to me hours before the train stopped at a station.
When it did I got out and took the next train back. I did not even wait
for lunch. I had my bicycle with me, and I went straight there. It
was—well, it was the house I wanted. If it had vanished suddenly, and I
had found myself in bed, the whole thing would have seemed more
reasonable. The proprietor opened the door to me himself. He had the
bearing of a retired military man. It was afterwards I learnt he was the
proprietor.
“I said, ‘Good afternoon; if it is not troubling you, I would like to
look over the house.’ We were standing in the oak-panelled hall. I
noticed the carved staircase about which the man in the train had told
me, also the Tudor fireplaces. That is all I had time to notice. The
next moment I was lying on my back in the middle of the gravel with the
door shut. I looked up. I saw the old maniac’s head sticking out of a
little window. It was an evil face. He had a gun in his hand.
“‘I’m going to count twenty,’ he said. ‘If you are not the other side of
the gate by then, I shoot.’
“I ran over the figures myself on my way to the gate. I made it
eighteen.
“I had an hour to wait for the train. I talked the matter over with the
station-master.
“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’ll be trouble up there one of these days.’
“I said, ‘It seems to me to have begun.’
“He said, ‘It’s the Indian sun. It gets into their heads. We have one
or two in the neighbourhood. They are quiet enough till something
happens.’
“‘If I’d been two seconds longer,’ I said, ‘I believe he’d have done it.’
“‘It’s a taking house,’ said the station-master; ‘not too big and not too
little. It’s the sort of house people seem to be looking for.’
“‘I don’t envy,’ I said, ‘the next person that finds it.’
“‘He settled himself down here,’ said the station-master, ‘about ten
years ago. Since then, if one person has offered to take the house off
his hands, I suppose a thousand have. At first he would laugh at them
good-temperedly—explain to them that his idea was to live there himself,
in peace and quietness, till he died. Two out of every three of them
would express their willingness to wait for that, and suggest some
arrangement by which they might enter into possession, say, a week after
the funeral. The last few months it has been worse than ever. I reckon
you’re about the eighth that has been up there this week, and to-day only
Thursday. There’s something to be said, you know, for the old man.’”
“And did he,” asked Dick—“did he shoot the next party that came along?”
“Don’t be so silly, Dick,” said Robin; “it’s a story. Tell us another,
Pa.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Robina, by a story,” I said. “If you mean
to imply—”
Robina said she didn’t; but I know quite well she did. Because I am an
author, and have to tell stories for my living, people think I don’t know
any truth. It is vexing enough to be doubted when one is exaggerating;
to have sneers flung at one by one’s own kith and kin when one is
struggling to confine oneself to bald, bare narrative—well, where is the
inducement to be truthful? There are times when I almost say to myself
that I will never tell the truth again.
“As it happens,” I said, “the story is true, in many places. I pass over
your indifference to the risk I ran; though a nice girl at the point
where the gun was mentioned would have expressed alarm. Anyhow, at the
end you might have said something more sympathetic than merely, ‘Tell us
another.’ He did not shoot the next party that arrived, for the reason
that the very next day his wife, alarmed at what had happened, went up to
London and consulted an expert—none too soon, as it turned out. The poor
old fellow died six months later in a private lunatic asylum; I had it
from the station-master on passing through the junction again this
spring. The house fell into the possession of his nephew, who is living
in it now. He is a youngish man with a large family, and people have
learnt that the place is not for sale. It seems to me rather a sad
story. The Indian sun, as the station-master thinks, may have started
the trouble; but the end was undoubtedly hastened by the annoyance to
which the unfortunate gentleman had been subjected; and I myself might
have been shot. The only thing that comforts me is thinking of that
fool’s black eye—the fool that sent me there.”
“And none of the other houses,” suggested Dick, “were any good at all?”
“There were drawbacks, Dick,” I explained. “There was a house in Essex;
it was one of the first your mother and I inspected. I nearly shed tears
of joy when I read the advertisement. It had once been a priory. Queen
Elizabeth had slept there on her way to Greenwich. A photograph of the
house accompanied the advertisement. I should not have believed the
thing had it been a picture. It was under twelve miles from Charing
Cross. The owner, it was stated, was open to offers.”
“All humbug, I suppose,” suggested Dick.
“The advertisement, if anything,” I replied, “had under-estimated the
attractiveness of that house. All I blame the advertisement for is that
it did not mention other things. It did not mention, for instance, that
since Queen Elizabeth’s time the neighbourhood had changed. It did not
mention that the entrance was between a public-house one side of the gate
and a fried-fish shop on the other; that the Great Eastern
Railway-Company had established a goods depot at the bottom of the
garden; that the drawing-room windows looked out on extensive chemical
works, and the dining-room windows, which were round the corner, on a
stonemason’s yard. The house itself was a dream.”
“But what is the sense of it?” demanded Dick. “What do house agents
think is the good of it? Do they think people likely to take a house
after reading the advertisement without ever going to see it?”
“I asked an agent once that very question,” I replied. “He said they did
it first and foremost to keep up the spirits of the owner—the man who
wanted to sell the house. He said that when a man was trying to part
with a house he had to listen to so much abuse of it from people who came
to see it that if somebody did not stick up for the house—say all that
could be said for it, and gloss over its defects—he would end by becoming
so ashamed of it he would want to give it away, or blow it up with
dynamite. He said that reading the advertisement in the agent’s
catalogue was the only thing that reconciled him to being the owner of
the house. He said one client of his had been trying to sell his house
for years—until one day in the office he read by chance the agent’s
description of it. Upon which he went straight home, took down the
board, and has lived there contentedly ever since. From that point of
view there is reason in the system; but for the house-hunter it works
badly.
“One agent sent me a day’s journey to see a house standing in the middle
of a brickfield, with a view of the Grand Junction Canal. I asked him
where was the river he had mentioned. He explained it was the other side
of the canal, but on a lower level; that was the only reason why from the
house you couldn’t see it. I asked him for his picturesque scenery. He
explained it was farther on, round the bend. He seemed to think me
unreasonable, expecting to find everything I wanted just outside the
front-door. He suggested my shutting out the brickfield—if I didn’t like
the brickfield—with trees. He suggested the eucalyptus-tree. He said it
was a rapid grower. He also told me that it yielded gum.
“Another house I travelled down into Dorsetshire to see. It contained,
according to the advertisement, ‘perhaps the most perfect specimen of
Norman arch extant in Southern England.’ It was to be found mentioned in
Dugdale, and dated from the thirteenth century. I don’t quite know what
I expected. I argued to myself that there must have been ruffians of
only moderate means even in those days. Here and there some robber baron
who had struck a poor line of country would have had to be content with a
homely little castle. A few such, hidden away in unfrequented districts,
had escaped destruction. More civilised descendants had adapted them to
later requirements. I had in my mind, before the train reached
Dorchester, something between a miniature Tower of London and a mediæval
edition of Ann Hathaway’s cottage at Stratford. I pictured dungeons and
a drawbridge, perhaps a secret passage. Lamchick has a secret passage,
leading from behind a sort of portrait in the dining-room to the back of
the kitchen chimney. They use it for a linen closet. It seems to me a
pity. Of course originally it went on farther. The vicar, who is a bit
of an antiquarian, believes it comes out somewhere in the churchyard. I
tell Lamchick he ought to have it opened up, but his wife doesn’t want it
touched. She seems to think it just right as it is. I have always had a
fancy for a secret passage. I decided I would have the drawbridge
repaired and made practicable. Flanked on each side with flowers in
tubs, it would have been a novel and picturesque approach.”
“Was there a drawbridge?” asked Dick.
“There was no drawbridge,” I explained. “The entrance to the house was
through what the caretaker called the conservatory. It was not the sort
of house that goes with a drawbridge.”
“Then what about the Norman arches?” argued Dick.
“Not arches,” I corrected him; “Arch. The Norman arch was downstairs in
the kitchen. It was the kitchen, that had been built in the thirteenth
century—and had not had much done to it since, apparently. Originally, I
should say, it had been the torture chamber; it gave you that idea. I
think your mother would have raised objections to the kitchen—anyhow,
when she came to think of the cook. It would have been necessary to put
it to the woman before engaging her:—
“‘You don’t mind cooking in a dungeon in the dark, do you?’
“Some cooks would. The rest of the house was what I should describe as
present-day mixed style. The last tenant but one had thrown out a
bathroom in corrugated iron.”
“Then there was a house in Berkshire that I took your mother to see, with
a trout stream running through the grounds. I imagined myself going out
after lunch, catching trout for dinner; inviting swagger friends down to
‘my little place in Berkshire’ for a few days’ trout-fishing. There is a
man I once knew who is now a baronet. He used to be keen on fishing. I
thought maybe I’d get him. It would have looked well in the Literary
Gossip column: ‘Among the other distinguished guests’—you know the sort
of thing. I had the paragraph already in my mind. The wonder is I
didn’t buy a rod.”
“Wasn’t there any trout stream?” questioned Robin.
“There was a stream,” I answered; “if anything, too much stream. The
stream was the first thing your mother noticed. She noticed it a quarter
of an hour before we came to it—before we knew it was the stream. We
drove back to the town, and she bought a smelling-bottle, the larger
size.
“It gave your mother a headache, that stream, and made me mad. The
agent’s office was opposite the station. I allowed myself half an hour
on my way back to tell him what I thought of him, and then I missed the
train. I could have got it in if he had let me talk all the time, but he
would interrupt. He said it was the people at the paper-mill—that he had
spoken to them about it more than once; he seemed to think sympathy was
all I wanted. He assured me, on his word as a house-agent, that it had
once been a trout stream. The fact was historical. Isaac Walton had
fished there—that was prior to the paper-mill. He thought a collection
of trout, male and female, might be bought and placed in it; preference
being given to some hardy breed of trout, accustomed to roughing it. I
told him I wasn’t looking for a place where I could play at being Noah;
and left him, as I explained to him, with the intention of going straight
to my solicitors and instituting proceedings against him for talking like
a fool; and he put on his hat and went across to his solicitors to
commence proceedings against me for libel.
“I suppose that, with myself, he thought better of it in the end. But
I’m tired of having my life turned into one perpetual first of April.
This house that I have bought is not my heart’s desire, but about it
there are possibilities. We will put in lattice windows, and fuss-up the
chimneys. Maybe we will let in a tablet over the front-door, with a
date—always looks well: it is a picturesque figure, the old-fashioned
five. By the time we have done with it—for all practical purposes—it
will be a Tudor manor-house. I have always wanted an old Tudor
manor-house. There is no reason, so far as I can see, why there should
not be stories connected with this house. Why should not we have a room
in which Somebody once slept? We won’t have Queen Elizabeth. I’m tired
of Queen Elizabeth. Besides, I don’t believe she’d have been nice. Why
not Queen Anne? A quiet, gentle old lady, from all accounts, who would
not have given trouble. Or, better still, Shakespeare. He was
constantly to and fro between London and Stratford. It would not have
been so very much out of his way. ‘The room where Shakespeare slept!’
Why, it’s a new idea. Nobody ever seems to have thought of Shakespeare.
There is the four-post bedstead. Your mother never liked it. She will
insist, it harbours things. We might hang the wall with scenes from his
plays, and have a bust of the old gentleman himself over the door. If
I’m left alone and not worried, I’ll probably end by believing that he
really did sleep there.”
“What about cupboards?” suggested Dick. “The Little Mother will clamour
for cupboards.”
It is unexplainable, the average woman’s passion for cupboards. In
heaven, her first request, I am sure, is always, “Can I have a cupboard?”
She would keep her husband and children in cupboards if she had her way:
that would be her idea of the perfect home, everybody wrapped up with a
piece of camphor in his or her own proper cupboard. I knew a woman once
who was happy—for a woman. She lived in a house with twenty-nine
cupboards: I think it must have been built by a woman. They were
spacious cupboards, many of them, with doors in no way different from
other doors. Visitors would wish each other good-night and disappear
with their candles into cupboards, staggering out backwards the next
moment, looking scared. One poor gentleman, this woman’s husband told
me, having to go downstairs again for something he had forgotten, and
unable on his return to strike anything else but cupboards, lost heart
and finished up the night in a cupboard. At breakfast-time guests would
hurry down, and burst open cupboard doors with a cheery “Good-morning.”
When that woman was out, nobody in that house ever knew where anything
was; and when she came home she herself only knew where it ought to have
been. Yet once, when one of those twenty-nine cupboards had to be
cleared out temporarily for repairs, she never smiled, her husband told
me, for more than three weeks—not till the workmen were out of the house,
and that cupboard in working order again. She said it was so confusing,
having nowhere to put her things.
The average woman does not want a house, in the ordinary sense of the
word. What she wants is something made by a genii. You have found, as
you think, the ideal house. You show her the Adams fireplace in the
drawing-room. You tap the wainscoting of the hall with your umbrella:
“Oak,” you impress upon her, “all oak.” You draw her attention to the
view: you tell her the local legend. By fixing her head against the
window-pane she can see the tree on which the man was hanged. You dwell
upon the sundial; you mention for a second time the Adams fireplace.
“It’s all very nice,” she answers, “but where are the children going to
sleep?”
It is so disheartening.
If it isn’t the children, it’s the water. She wants water—wants to know
where it comes from. You show her where it comes from.
“What, out of that nasty place!” she exclaims.
She is equally dissatisfied whether it be drawn from a well, or whether
it be water that has fallen from heaven and been stored in tanks. She
has no faith in Nature’s water. A woman never believes that water can be
good that does not come from a water-works. Her idea appears to be that
the Company makes it fresh every morning from some old family recipe.
If you do succeed in reconciling her to the water, then she feels sure
that the chimneys smoke; they look as if they smoked. Why—as you tell
her—the chimneys are the best part of the house. You take her outside
and make her look at them. They are genuine sixteenth-century chimneys,
with carving on them. They couldn’t smoke. They wouldn’t do anything so
inartistic. She says she only hopes you are right, and suggests cowls,
if they do.
After that she wants to see the kitchen—where’s the kitchen? You don’t
know where it is. You didn’t bother about the kitchen. There must be a
kitchen, of course. You proceed to search for the kitchen. When you
find it she is worried because it is the opposite end of the house to the
dining-room. You point out to her the advantage of being away from the
smell of the cooking. At that she gets personal: tells you that you are
the first to grumble when the dinner is cold; and in her madness accuses
the whole male sex of being impractical. The mere sight of an empty
house makes a woman fretful.
Of course the stove is wrong. The kitchen stove always is wrong. You
promise she shall have a new one. Six months later she will want the old
one back again: but it would be cruel to tell her this. The promise of
that new stove comforts her. The woman never loses hope that one day it
will come—the all-satisfying kitchen stove, the stove of her girlish
dreams.
The question of the stove settled, you imagine you have silenced all
opposition. At once she begins to talk about things that nobody but a
woman or a sanitary inspector can talk about without blushing.
It calls for tact, getting a woman into a new house. She is nervous,
suspicious.
“I am glad, my dear Dick,” I answered; “that you have mentioned
cupboards. It is with cupboards that I am hoping to lure your mother.
The cupboards, from her point of view, will be the one bright spot; there
are fourteen of them. I am trusting to cupboards to tide me over many
things. I shall want you to come with me, Dick. Whenever your mother
begins a sentence with: ‘But now to be practical, dear,’ I want you to
murmur something about cupboards—not irritatingly as if it had been
prearranged: have a little gumption.”
“Will there be room for a tennis court?” demanded Dick.
“An excellent tennis court already exists,” I informed him. “I have also
purchased the adjoining paddock. We shall be able to keep our own cow.
Maybe we’ll breed horses.”
“We might have a croquet lawn,” suggested Robin.
“We might easily have a croquet lawn,” I agreed. “On a full-sized lawn I
believe Veronica might be taught to play. There are natures that demand
space. On a full-sized lawn, protected by a stout iron border, less time
might be wasted exploring the surrounding scenery for Veronica’s lost
ball.”
“No chance of a golf links anywhere in the neighbourhood?” feared Dick.
“I am not so sure,” I answered. “Barely a mile away there is a pretty
piece of gorse land that appears to be no good to anyone. I daresay for
a reasonable offer—”
“I say, when will this show be ready?” interrupted Dick.
“I propose beginning the alterations at once,” I explained. “By luck
there happens to be a gamekeeper’s cottage vacant and within distance.
The agent is going to get me the use of it for a year—a primitive little
place, but charmingly situate on the edge of a wood. I shall furnish a
couple of rooms; and for part of every week I shall make a point of being
down there, superintending. I have always been considered good at
superintending. My poor father used to say it was the only work I seemed
to take an interest in. By being on the spot to hurry everybody on I
hope to have the ‘show,’ as you term it, ready by the spring.”
“I shall never marry,” said Robin.
“Don’t be so easily discouraged,” advised Dick; “you are still young.”
“I don’t ever want to get married,” continued Robin. “I should only
quarrel with my husband, if I did. And Dick will never do anything—not
with his head.”
“Forgive me if I am dull,” I pleaded, “but what is the connection between
this house, your quarrels with your husband if you ever get one, and
Dick’s head?”
By way of explanation, Robin sprang to the ground, and before he could
stop her had flung her arms around Dick’s neck.
“We can’t help it, Dick dear,” she told him. “Clever parents always have
duffing children. But we’ll be of some use in the world after all, you
and I.”
The idea was that Dick, when he had finished failing in examinations,
should go out to Canada and start a farm, taking Robin with him. They
would breed cattle, and gallop over the prairies, and camp out in the
primeval forest, and slide about on snow-shoes, and carry canoes on their
backs, and shoot rapids, and stalk things—so far as I could gather, have
a sort of everlasting Buffalo-Bill’s show all to themselves. How and
when the farm work was to get itself done was not at all clear. The
Little Mother and myself were to end our days with them. We were to sit
about in the sun for a time, and then pass peacefully away. Robin shed a
few tears at this point, but regained her spirits, thinking of Veronica,
who was to be lured out on a visit and married to some true-hearted
yeoman: which is not at present Veronica’s ambition. Veronica’s
conviction is that she would look well in a coronet: her own idea is
something in the ducal line. Robina talked for about ten minutes. By
the time she had done she had persuaded Dick that life in the backwoods
of Canada had been his dream from infancy. She is that sort of girl.
I tried talking reason, but talking to Robin when she has got a notion in
her head is like trying to fix a halter on a two-year-old colt. This
tumble-down, six-roomed cottage was to be the saving of the family. An
ecstatic look transfigured Robina’s face even as she spoke of it. You
might have fancied it a shrine. Robina would do the cooking. Robina
would rise early and milk the cow, and gather the morning egg. We would
lead the simple life, learn to fend for ourselves. It would be so good
for Veronica. The higher education could wait; let the higher ideals
have a chance. Veronica would make the beds, dust the rooms. In the
evening Veronica, her little basket by her side, would sit and sew while
I talked, telling them things, and Robina moved softly to and fro about
her work, the household fairy. The Little Mother, whenever strong
enough, would come to us. We would hover round her, tending her with
loving hands. The English farmer must know something, in spite of all
that is said. Dick could arrange for lessons in practical farming. She
did not say it crudely; but hinted that, surrounded by example, even I
might come to take an interest in honest labour, might end by learning to
do something useful.
Robina talked, I should say, for a quarter of an hour. By the time she
had done, it appeared to me rather a beautiful idea. Dick’s vacation had
just commenced. For the next three months there would be nothing else
for him to do but—to employ his own expressive phrase—“rot round.” In
any event, it would be keeping him out of mischief. Veronica’s governess
was leaving. Veronica’s governess generally does leave at the end of
about a year. I think sometimes of advertising for a lady without a
conscience. At the end of a year, they explain to me that their
conscience will not allow them to remain longer; they do not feel they
are earning their salary. It is not that the child is not a dear child,
it is not that she is stupid. Simply it is—as a German lady to whom Dick
had been giving what he called finishing lessons in English, once put
it—that she does not seem to be “taking any.” Her mother’s idea is that
it is “sinking in.” Perhaps if we allowed Veronica to lie fallow for
awhile, something might show itself. Robina, speaking for herself, held
that a period of quiet usefulness, away from the society of other silly
girls and sillier boys, would result in her becoming a sensible woman.
It is not often that Robina’s yearnings take this direction: to thwart
them, when they did, seemed wrong.
We had some difficulty with the Little Mother. That these three babies
of hers will ever be men and women capable of running a six-roomed
cottage appears to the Little Mother in the light of a fantastic dream.
I explained to her that I should be there, at all events for two or three
days in every week, to give an eye to things. Even that did not content
her. She gave way eventually on Robina’s solemn undertaking that she
should be telegraphed for the first time Veronica coughed.
On Monday we packed a one-horse van with what we deemed essential. Dick
and Robina rode their bicycles. Veronica, supported by assorted bedding,
made herself comfortable upon the tailboard. I followed down by train on
the Wednesday afternoon.