OUR architect arrived on Friday afternoon, or rather, his assistant.
I felt from the first I was going to like him. He is shy, and that, of
course, makes him appear awkward. But, as I explained to Robina, it is
the shy young men who, generally speaking, turn out best: few men could
have been more painfully shy up to twenty-five than myself.
Robina said that was different: in the case of an author it did not
matter. Robina’s attitude towards the literary profession would not
annoy me so much were it not typical. To be a literary man is, in
Robina’s opinion, to be a licensed idiot. It was only a week or two ago
that I overheard from my study window a conversation between Veronica and
Robina upon this very point. Veronica’s eye had caught something lying
on the grass. I could not myself see what it was, in consequence of an
intervening laurel bush. Veronica stooped down and examined it with
care. The next instant, uttering a piercing whoop, she leapt into the
air; then, clapping her hands, began to dance. Her face was radiant with
a holy joy. Robina, passing near, stopped and demanded explanation.
“Pa’s tennis racket!” shouted Veronica—Veronica never sees the use of
talking in an ordinary tone of voice when shouting will do just as well.
She continued clapping her hands and taking little bounds into the air.
“Well, what are you going on like that for?” asked Robina. “It hasn’t
bit you, has it?”
“It’s been out all night in the wet,” shouted Veronica. “He forgot to
bring it in.”
“You wicked child!” said Robina severely. “It’s nothing to be pleased
about.”
“Yes, it is,” explained Veronica. “I thought at first it was mine. Oh,
wouldn’t there have been a talk about it, if it had been! Oh my!
wouldn’t there have been a row!” She settled down to a steady rhythmic
dance, suggestive of a Greek chorus expressing satisfaction with the
gods.
Robina seized her by the shoulders and shook her back into herself. “If
it had been yours,” said Robina, “you would deserve to have been sent to
bed.”
“Well, then, why don’t he go to bed?” argued Veronica.
Robina took her by the arm and walked her up and down just underneath my
window. I listened, because the conversation interested me.
“Pa, as I am always explaining to you,” said Robina, “is a literary man.
He cannot help forgetting things.”
“Well, I can’t help forgetting things,” insisted Veronica.
“You find it hard,” explained Robina kindly; “but if you keep on trying
you will succeed. You will get more thoughtful. I used to be forgetful
and do foolish things once, when I was a little girl.”
“Good thing for us if we was all literary,” suggested Veronica.
“If we ‘were’ all literary,” Robina corrected her. “But you see we are
not. You and I and Dick, we are just ordinary mortals. We must try and
think, and be sensible. In the same way, when Pa gets excited and
raves—I mean, seems to rave—it’s the literary temperament. He can’t help
it.”
“Can’t you help doing anything when you are literary?” asked Veronica.
“There’s a good deal you can’t help,” answered Robina. “It isn’t fair to
judge them by the ordinary standard.”
They drifted towards the kitchen garden—it was the time of
strawberries—and the remainder of the talk I lost. I noticed that for
some days afterwards Veronica displayed a tendency to shutting herself up
in the schoolroom with a copybook, and that lead pencils had a way of
disappearing from my desk. One in particular that had suited me I
determined if possible to recover. A subtle instinct guided me to
Veronica’s sanctum. I found her thoughtfully sucking it. She explained
to me that she was writing a little play.
“You get things from your father, don’t you?” she enquired of me.
“You do,” I admitted; “but you ought not to take them without asking. I
am always telling you of it. That pencil is the only one I can write
with.”
“I didn’t mean the pencil,” explained Veronica. “I was wondering if I
had got your literary temper.”
It is puzzling, when you come to think of it, this estimate accorded by
the general public to the _littérateur_. It stands to reason that the
man who writes books, explaining everything and putting everybody right,
must be himself an exceptionally clever man; else how could he do it!
The thing is pure logic. Yet to listen to Robina and her like you might
think we had not sense enough to run ourselves, as the saying is—let
alone running the universe. If I would let her, Robina would sit and
give me information by the hour.
“The ordinary girl . . . ” Robina will begin, with the air of a
University Extension Lecturer.
It is so exasperating. As if I did not know all there is to be known
about girls! Why, it is my business. I point this out to Robina.
“Yes, I know,” Robina will answer sweetly. “But I was meaning the real
girl.”
It would make not the slightest difference were I even quite a high-class
literary man—Robina thinks I am: she is a dear child. Were I Shakespeare
himself, and could I in consequence say to her: “Methinks, child, the
creator of Ophelia and Juliet, and Rosamund and Beatrice, must surely
know something about girls,” Robina would still make answer:
“Of course, Pa dear. Everybody knows how clever you are. But I was
thinking for the moment of real girls.”
I wonder to myself sometimes, Is literature to the general reader ever
anything more than a fairy-tale? We write with our heart’s blood, as we
put it. We ask our conscience, Is it right thus to lay bare the secrets
of our souls? The general reader does not grasp that we are writing with
our heart’s blood: to him it is just ink. He does not believe we are
laying bare the secrets of our souls: he takes it we are just pretending.
“Once upon a time there lived a girl named Angelina who loved a party by
the name of Edwin.” He imagines—he, the general reader—when we tell him
all the wonderful thoughts that were inside Angelina, that it was we who
put them there. He does not know, he will not try to understand, that
Angelina is in reality more real than is Miss Jones, who rides up every
morning in the ’bus with him, and has a pretty knack of rendering
conversation about the weather novel and suggestive. As a boy I won some
popularity among my schoolmates as a teller of stories. One afternoon,
to a small collection with whom I was homing across Regent’s Park, I told
the story of a beautiful Princess. But she was not the ordinary
Princess. She would not behave as a Princess should. I could not help
it. The others heard only my voice, but I was listening to the wind.
She thought she loved the Prince—until he had wounded the Dragon unto
death and had carried her away into the wood. Then, while the Prince lay
sleeping, she heard the Dragon calling to her in its pain, and crept back
to where it lay bleeding, and put her arms about its scaly neck and
kissed it; and that healed it. I was hoping myself that at this point it
would turn into a prince itself, but it didn’t; it just remained a
dragon—so the wind said. Yet the Princess loved it: it wasn’t half a bad
dragon, when you knew it. I could not tell them what became of the
Prince: the wind didn’t seem to care a hang about the Prince.
Myself, I liked the story, but Hocker, who was a Fifth Form boy, voicing
our little public, said it was rot, so far, and that I had got to hurry
up and finish things rightly.
“But that is all,” I told them.
“No, it isn’t,” said Hocker. “She’s got to marry the Prince in the end.
He’ll have to kill the Dragon again; and mind he does it properly this
time. Whoever heard of a Princess leaving a Prince for a Dragon!”
“But she wasn’t the ordinary sort of Princess,” I argued.
“Then she’s got to be,” criticised Hocker. “Don’t you give yourself so
many airs. You make her marry the Prince, and be slippy about it. I’ve
got to catch the four-fifteen from Chalk Farm station.”
“But she didn’t,” I persisted obstinately. “She married the Dragon and
lived happy ever afterwards.”
Hocker adopted sterner measures. He seized my arm and twisted it behind
me.
“She married who?” demanded Hocker: grammar was not Hocker’s strong
point.
“The Dragon,” I growled.
“She married who?” repeated Hocker.
“The Dragon,” I whined.
“She married who?” for the third time urged Hocker.
Hocker was strong, and the tears were forcing themselves into my eyes in
spite of me. So the Princess in return for healing the Dragon made it
promise to reform. It went back with her to the Prince, and made itself
generally useful to both of them for the rest of the tour. And the
Prince took the Princess home with him and married her; and the Dragon
died and was buried. The others liked the story better, but I hated it;
and the wind sighed and died away.
The little crowd becomes the reading public, and Hocker grows into an
editor; he twists my arm in other ways. Some are brave, so the crowd
kicks them and scurries off to catch the four-fifteen. But most of us, I
fear, are slaves to Hocker. Then, after awhile, the wind grows sulky and
will not tell us stories any more, and we have to make them up out of our
own heads. Perhaps it is just as well. What were doors and windows made
for but to keep out the wind.
He is a dangerous fellow, this wandering Wind; he leads me astray. I was
talking about our architect.
He made a bad start, so far as Robina was concerned, by coming in at the
back-door. Robina, in a big apron, was washing up. He apologised for
having blundered into the kitchen, and offered to go out again and work
round to the front. Robina replied, with unnecessary severity as I
thought, that an architect, if anyone, might have known the difference
between the right side of a house and the wrong; but presumed that youth
and inexperience could always be pleaded as excuse for stupidity. I
cannot myself see why Robina should have been so much annoyed. Labour,
as Robina had been explaining to Veronica only a few hours before, exalts
a woman. In olden days, ladies—the highest in the land—were proud, not
ashamed, of their ability to perform domestic duties. This, later on, I
pointed out to Robina. Her answer was that in olden days you didn’t have
chits of boys going about, calling themselves architects, and opening
back-doors without knocking; or if they did knock, knocking so that
nobody on earth could hear them.
Robina wiped her hands on the towel behind the door, and brought him into
the front-room, where she announced him, coldly, as “The young man from
the architect’s office.” He explained—but quite modestly—that he was not
exactly Messrs. Spreight’s young man, but an architect himself, a junior
member of the firm. To make it clear he produced his card, which was
that of Mr. Archibald T. Bute, F.R.I.B.A. Practically speaking, all this
was unnecessary. Through the open door I had, of course, heard every
word; and old Spreight had told me of his intention to send me one of his
most promising assistants, who would be able to devote himself entirely
to my work. I put matters right by introducing him formally to Robina.
They bowed to one another rather stiffly. Robina said that if he would
excuse her she would return to her work; and he answered “Charmed,” and
also that he didn’t mean it. As I have tried to get it into Robina’s
head, the young fellow was confused. He had meant—it was
self-evident—that he was charmed at being introduced to her, not at her
desire to return to the kitchen. But Robina appears to have taken a
dislike to him.
I gave him a cigar, and we started for the house. It lies just a mile
from this cottage, the other side of the wood. One excellent trait in
him I soon discovered—he is intelligent without knowing everything.
I confess it to my shame, but the young man who knows everything has come
to pall upon me. According to Emerson, this is a proof of my own
intellectual feebleness. The strong man, intellectually, cultivates the
society of his superiors. He wants to get on, he wants to learn things.
If I loved knowledge as one should, I would have no one but young men
about me. There was a friend of Dick’s, a gentleman from Rugby. At one
time he had hopes of me; I felt he had. But he was too impatient. He
tried to bring me on too quickly. You must take into consideration
natural capacity. After listening to him for an hour or two my mind
would wander. I could not help it. The careless laughter of uninformed
middle-aged gentlemen and ladies would creep to me from the croquet lawn
or from the billiard-room. I longed to be among them. Sometimes I would
battle with my lower nature. What did they know? What could they tell
me? More often I would succumb. There were occasions when I used to get
up and go away from him, quite suddenly.
I talked with young Bute during our walk about domestic architecture in
general. He said he should describe the present tendency in domestic
architecture as towards corners. The desire of the British public was to
go into a corner and live. A lady for whose husband his firm had lately
built a house in Surrey had propounded to him a problem in connection
with this point. She agreed it was a charming house; no house in Surrey
had more corners, and that was saying much. But she could not see how
for the future she was going to bring up her children. She was a
humanely minded lady. Hitherto she had punished them, when needful, by
putting them in the corner; the shame of it had always exercised upon
them a salutary effect. But in the new house corners are reckoned the
prime parts of every room. It is the honoured guest who is sent into the
corner. The father has a corner sacred to himself, with high up above
his head a complicated cupboard, wherein with the help of a step-ladder,
he may keep his pipes and his tobacco, and thus by slow degrees cure
himself of the habit of smoking. The mother likewise has her corner,
where stands her spinning-wheel, in case the idea comes to her to weave
sheets and underclothing. It also has a book-shelf supporting thirteen
volumes, arranged in a sloping position to look natural; the last one
maintained at its angle of forty-five degrees by a ginger-jar in old blue
Nankin. You are not supposed to touch them, because that would
disarrange them. Besides which, fooling about, you might upset the
ginger-jar. The consequence of all this is the corner is no longer
disgraceful. The parent can no more say to the erring child:
“You wicked boy! Go into the cosy corner this very minute!”
In the house of the future the place of punishment will have to be the
middle of the room. The angry mother will exclaim:
“Don’t you answer me, you saucy minx! You go straight into the middle of
the room, and don’t you dare to come out of it till I tell you!”
The difficulty with the artistic house is finding the right people to put
into it. In the picture the artistic room never has anybody in it.
There is a strip of art embroidery upon the table, together with a bowl
of roses. Upon the ancient high-backed settee lies an item of fancy
work, unfinished—just as she left it. In the “study” an open book, face
downwards, has been left on a chair. It is the last book he was
reading—it has never been disturbed. A pipe of quaint design is cold
upon the lintel of the lattice window. No one will ever smoke that pipe
again: it must have been difficult to smoke at any time. The sight of
the artistic room, as depicted in the furniture catalogue, always brings
tears to my eyes. People once inhabited these rooms, read there those
old volumes bound in vellum, smoked—or tried to smoke—these impracticable
pipes; white hands, that someone maybe had loved to kiss, once fluttered
among the folds of these unfinished antimacassars, or Berlin wool-work
slippers, and went away, leaving the things about.
One takes it that the people who once occupied these artistic rooms are
now all dead. This was their “Dining-Room.” They sat on those artistic
chairs. They could hardly have used the dinner service set out upon the
Elizabethan dresser, because that would have left the dresser bare: one
assumes they had an extra service for use, or else that they took their
meals in the kitchen. The “Entrance Hall” is a singularly chaste
apartment. There is no necessity for a door-mat: people with muddy
boots, it is to be presumed, were sent round to the back. A
riding-cloak, the relic apparently of a highwayman, hangs behind the
door. It is the sort of cloak you would expect to find there—a
decorative cloak. An umbrella or a waterproof cape would be fatal to the
whole effect.
Now and again the illustrator of the artistic room will permit a young
girl to come and sit there. But she has to be a very carefully selected
girl. To begin with, she has got to look and dress as though she had
been born at least three hundred years ago. She has got to have that
sort of clothes, and she has got to have her hair done just that way.
She has got to look sad; a cheerful girl in the artistic room would jar
one’s artistic sense. One imagines the artist consulting with the proud
possessor of the house.
“You haven’t got such a thing as a miserable daughter, have you? Some
fairly good-looking girl who has been crossed in love, or is
misunderstood. Because if so, you might dress her up in something out of
the local museum and send her along. A little thing like that gives
verisimilitude to a design.”
She must not touch anything. All she may do is to read a book—not really
read it, that would suggest too much life and movement: she sits with the
book in her lap and gazes into the fire, if it happens to be the
dining-room: or out of the window if it happens to be a morning-room, and
the architect wishes to call attention to the window-seat. Nothing of
the male species, as far as I have been able to ascertain, has ever
entered these rooms. I once thought I had found a man who had been
allowed into his own “Smoking-Den,” but on closer examination it turned
out he was only a portrait.
Sometimes one is given “Vistas.” Doors stand open, and you can see right
away through “The Nook” into the garden. There is never a living soul
about the place. The whole family has been sent out for a walk or locked
up in the cellars. This strikes you as odd until you come to think the
matter out. The modern man and woman is not artistic. I am not
artistic—not what I call really artistic. I don’t go well with Gobelin
tapestry and warming-pans. I feel I don’t. Robina is not artistic, not
in that sense. I tried her once with a harpsichord I picked up cheap in
Wardour Street, and a reproduction of a Roman stool. The thing was an
utter failure. A cottage piano, with a photo-frame and a fern upon, it
is what the soul cries out for in connection with Robina. Dick is not
artistic. Dick does not go with peacocks’ feathers and guitars. I can
see Dick with a single peacock’s feather at St. Giles’s Fair, when the
bulldogs are not looking; but the decorative panel of peacock’s feathers
is too much for him. I can imagine him with a banjo—but a guitar
decorated with pink ribbons! To begin with he is not dressed for it.
Unless a family be prepared to make themselves up as troubadours or
cavaliers and to talk blank verse, I don’t see how they can expect to be
happy living in these fifteenth-century houses. The modern family—the
old man in baggy trousers and a frock-coat he could not button if he
tried to; the mother of figure distinctly Victorian; the boys in flannel
suits and collars up to their ears; the girls in motor caps—are as
incongruous in these mediæval dwellings as a party of Cook’s tourists
drinking bottled beer in the streets of Pompeii.
The designer of “The Artistic Home” is right in keeping to still life.
In the artistic home—to paraphrase Dr. Watts—every prospect pleases and
only man is inartistic. In the picture, the artistic bedroom, “in apple
green, the bedstead of cherry-wood, with a touch of turkey-red throughout
the draperies,” is charming. It need hardly be said the bed is empty.
Put a man or woman in that cherry-wood bed—I don’t care how artistic they
may think themselves—the charm would be gone. The really artistic party,
one supposes, has a little room behind, where he sleeps and dresses
himself. He peeps in at the door of this artistic bedroom, maybe
occasionally enters to change the roses.
Imagine the artistic nursery five minutes after the real child had been
let loose in it. I know a lady who once spent hundreds of pounds on an
artistic nursery. She showed it to her friends with pride. The children
were allowed in there on Sunday afternoons. I did an equally silly thing
myself not long ago. Lured by a furniture catalogue, I started Robina in
a boudoir. I gave it to her as a birthday-present. We have both
regretted it ever since. Robina reckons she could have had a bicycle, a
diamond bracelet, and a mandoline, and I should have saved money. I did
the thing well. I told the furniture people I wanted it just as it stood
in the picture: “Design for bedroom and boudoir combined, suitable for
young girl, in teak, with sparrow blue hangings.” We had everything: the
antique fire arrangements that a vestal virgin might possibly have
understood; the candlesticks, that were pictures in themselves, until we
tried to put candles in them; the book-case and writing-desk combined,
that wasn’t big enough to write on, and out of which it was impossible to
get a book until you had abandoned the idea of writing and had closed the
cover; the enclosed washstand, that shut down and looked like an old
bureau, with the inevitable bowl of flowers upon it that had to be taken
off and put on the floor whenever you wanted to use the thing as a
washstand; the toilet-table, with its cunning little glass, just big
enough to see your nose in; the bedstead, hidden away behind the
“thinking corner,” where the girl couldn’t get at it to make it. A
prettier room you could not have imagined, till Robina started sleeping
in it. I think she tried. Girl friends of hers, to whom she had bragged
about it, would drop in and ask to be allowed to see it. Robina would
say, “Wait a minute,” and would run up and slam the door; and we would
hear her for the next half-hour or so rushing round opening and shutting
drawers and dragging things about. By the time it was a boudoir again
she was exhausted and irritable. She wants now to give it up to
Veronica, but Veronica objects to the position, which is between the
bathroom and my study. Her idea is a room more removed, where she would
be able to shut herself in and do her work, as she explains, without fear
of interruption.
Young Bute told me that a friend of his, a well-to-do young fellow, who
lived in Piccadilly, had had the whim to make his flat the reproduction
of a Roman villa. There were of course no fires, the rooms were warmed
by hot air from the kitchen. They had a cheerless aspect on a November
afternoon, and nobody knew exactly where to sit. Light was obtained in
the evening from Grecian lamps, which made it easy to understand why the
ancient Athenians, as a rule, went to bed early. You dined sprawling on
a couch. This was no doubt practicable when you took your plate into
your hand and fed yourself with your fingers; but with a knife and fork
the meal had all the advantages of a hot picnic. You did not feel
luxurious or even wicked: you only felt nervous about your clothes. The
thing lacked completeness. He could not expect his friends to come to
him in Roman togas, and even his own man declined firmly to wear the
costume of a Roman slave. The compromise was unsatisfactory, even from
the purely pictorial point of view. You cannot be a Roman patrician of
the time of Antoninus when you happen to live in Piccadilly at the
opening of the twentieth century. All you can do is to make your friends
uncomfortable and spoil their dinner for them. Young Bute said that, so
far as he was concerned, he would always rather have spent the evening
with his little nephews and nieces, playing at horses; it seemed to him a
more sensible game.
Young Bute said that, speaking as an architect, he of course admired the
ancient masterpieces of his art. He admired the Erechtheum at Athens;
but Spurgeon’s Tabernacle in the Old Kent Road built upon the same model
would have irritated him. For a Grecian temple you wanted Grecian skies
and Grecian girls. He said that, even as it was, Westminster Abbey in
the season was an eyesore to him. The Dean and Choir in their white
surplices passed muster, but the congregation in its black frock-coats
and Paris hats gave him the same sense of incongruity as would a banquet
of barefooted friars in the dining-hall of the Cannon Street Hotel.
It struck me there was sense in what he said. I decided not to mention
my idea of carving 1553 above the front-door.
He said he could not understand this passion of the modern house-builder
for playing at being a Crusader or a Canterbury Pilgrim. A retired
Berlin boot-maker of his acquaintance had built himself a miniature Roman
Castle near Heidelberg. They played billiards in the dungeon, and let
off fireworks on the Kaiser’s birthday from the roof of the watch-tower.
Another acquaintance of his, a draper at Holloway, had built himself a
moated grange. The moat was supplied from the water-works under special
arrangement, and all the electric lights were imitation candles. He had
done the thing thoroughly. He had even designed a haunted chamber in
blue, and a miniature chapel, which he used as a telephone closet. Young
Bute had been invited down there for the shooting in the autumn. He said
he could not be sure whether he was doing right or wrong, but his
intention was to provide himself with a bow and arrows.
A change was coming over this young man. We had talked on other subjects
and he had been shy and deferential. On this matter of bricks and mortar
he spoke as one explaining things.
I ventured to say a few words in favour of the Tudor house. The Tudor
house, he argued, was a fit and proper residence for the Tudor
citizen—for the man whose wife rode behind him on a pack-saddle, who
conducted his correspondence by the help of a moss-trooper. The Tudor
fireplace was designed for folks to whom coal was unknown, and who left
their smoking to their chimneys. A house that looked ridiculous with a
motor-car before the door, where the electric bell jarred upon one’s
sense of fitness every time one heard it, was out of date, he maintained.
“For you, sir,” he continued, “a twentieth-century writer, to build
yourself a Tudor House would be as absurd as for Ben Jonson to have
planned himself a Norman Castle with a torture-chamber underneath the
wine-cellar, and the fireplace in the middle of the dining-hall. His
fellow cronies of the Mermaid would have thought him stark, staring mad.”
There was reason in what he was saying. I decided not to mention my idea
of altering the chimneys and fixing up imitation gables, especially as
young Bute seemed pleased with the house, which by this time we had
reached.
“Now, that is a good house,” said young Bute. “That is a house where a
man in a frock-coat and trousers can sit down and not feel himself a
stranger from another age. It was built for a man who wore a frock-coat
and trousers—on weekdays, maybe, gaiters and a shooting-coat. You can
enjoy a game of billiards in that house without the feeling that comes to
you when playing tennis in the shadow of the Pyramids.”
We entered, and I put before him my notions—such of them as I felt he
would approve. We were some time about the business, and when we looked
at our watches young Bute’s last train to town had gone. There still
remained much to talk about, and I suggested he should return with me to
the cottage and take his luck. I could sleep with Dick and he could have
my room. I told him about the cow, but he said he was a practised
sleeper and would be delighted, if I could lend him a night-shirt, and if
I thought Miss Robina would not be put out. I assured him that it would
be a good thing for Robina; the unexpected guest would be a useful lesson
to her in housekeeping. Besides, as I pointed out to him, it didn’t
really matter even if Robina were put out.
“Not to you, sir, perhaps,” he answered, with a smile. “It is not with
you that she will be indignant.”
“That will be all right, my boy,” I told him; “I take all
responsibility.”
“And I shall get all the blame,” he laughed.
But, as I pointed out to him, it really didn’t matter whom Robina blamed.
We talked about women generally on our way back. I told him—impressing
upon him there was no need for it to go farther—that I personally had
come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with women was to treat
them all as children. He agreed it might be a good method, but wanted to
know what you did when they treated you as a child.
I know a most delightful couple: they have been married nearly twenty
years, and both will assure you that an angry word has never passed
between them. He calls her his “Little One,” although she must be quite
six inches taller than himself, and is never tired of patting her hand or
pinching her ear. They asked her once in the drawing-room—so the Little
Mother tells me—her recipe for domestic bliss. She said the mistake most
women made was taking men too seriously.
“They are just overgrown children, that’s all they are, poor dears,” she
laughed.
There are two kinds of love: there is the love that kneels and looks
upward, and the love that looks down and pats. For durability I am
prepared to back the latter.
The architect had died out of young Bute; he was again a shy young man
during our walk back to the cottage. My hand was on the latch when he
stayed me.
“Isn’t this the back-door again, sir?” he enquired.
It was the back-door; I had not noticed it.
“Hadn’t we better go round to the front, sir, don’t you think?” he said.
“It doesn’t matter—” I began.
But he had disappeared. So I followed him, and we entered by the front.
Robina was standing by the table, peeling potatoes.
“I have brought Mr. Bute back with me,” I explained. “He is going to
stop the night.”
Robina said: “If ever I go to live in a cottage again it will have one
door.” She took her potatoes with her and went upstairs.
“I do hope she isn’t put out,” said young Bute.
“Don’t worry yourself,” I comforted him. “Of course she isn’t put out.
Besides, I don’t care if she is. She’s got to get used to being put out;
it’s part of the lesson of life.”
I took him upstairs, meaning to show him his bedroom and take my own
things out of it. The doors of the two bedrooms were opposite one
another. I made a mistake and opened the wrong door. Robina, still
peeling potatoes, was sitting on the bed.
I explained we had made a mistake. Robina said it was of no consequence
whatever, and, taking the potatoes with her, went downstairs again.
Looking out of the window, I saw her making towards the wood. She was
taking the potatoes with her.
“I do wish we hadn’t opened the door of the wrong room,” groaned young
Bute.
“What a worrying chap you are!” I said to him. “Look at the thing from
the humorous point of view. It’s funny when you come to think of it.
Wherever the poor girl goes, trying to peel her potatoes in peace and
quietness, we burst in upon her. What we ought to do now is to take a
walk in the wood. It is a pretty wood. We might say we had come to pick
wild flowers.”
But I could not persuade him. He said he had letters to write, and, if I
would allow him, would remain in his room till dinner was ready.
Dick and Veronica came in a little later. Dick had been to see Mr. St.
Leonard to arrange about lessons in farming. He said he thought I should
like the old man, who wasn’t a bit like a farmer. He had brought
Veronica back in one of her good moods, she having met there and fallen
in love with a donkey. Dick confided to me that, without committing
himself, he had hinted to Veronica that if she would remain good for
quite a long while I might be induced to buy it for her. It was a sturdy
little animal, and could be made useful. Anyhow, it would give Veronica
an object in life—something to strive for—which was just what she wanted.
He is a thoughtful lad at times, is Dick.
The dinner was more successful than I had hoped for. Robina gave us
melon as a _hors d’œuvre_, followed by sardines and a fowl, with potatoes
and vegetable marrow. Her cooking surprised me. I had warned young Bute
that it might be necessary to regard this dinner rather as a joke than as
an evening meal, and was prepared myself to extract amusement from it
rather than nourishment. My disappointment was agreeable. One can
always imagine a comic dinner.
I dined once with a newly married couple who had just returned from their
honeymoon. We ought to have sat down at eight o’clock; we sat down
instead at half-past ten. The cook had started drinking in the morning;
by seven o’clock she was speechless. The wife, giving up hope at a
quarter to eight, had cooked the dinner herself. The other guests were
sympathised with, but all I got was congratulation.
“He’ll write something so funny about this dinner,” they said.
You might have thought the cook had got drunk on purpose to oblige me. I
have never been able to write anything funny about that dinner; it
depresses me to this day, merely thinking of it.
We finished up with a cold trifle and some excellent coffee that Robina
brewed over a lamp on the table while Dick and Veronica cleared away. It
was one of the jolliest little dinners I have ever eaten; and, if
Robina’s figures are to be trusted, cost exactly six-and-fourpence for
the five of us. There being no servants about, we talked freely and
enjoyed ourselves. I began once at a dinner to tell a good story about a
Scotchman, when my host silenced me with a look. He is a kindly man, and
had heard the story before. He explained to me afterwards, over the
walnuts, that his parlourmaid was Scotch and rather touchy. The talk
fell into the discussion of Home Rule, and again our host silenced us.
It seemed his butler was an Irishman and a violent Parnellite. Some
people can talk as though servants were mere machines, but to me they are
human beings, and their presence hampers me. I know my guests have not
heard the story before, and from one’s own flesh and blood one expects a
certain amount of sacrifice. But I feel so sorry for the housemaid who
is waiting; she must have heard it a dozen times. I really cannot
inflict it upon her again.
After dinner we pushed the table into a corner, and Dick extracted a sort
of waltz from Robina’s mandoline. It is years since I danced; but
Veronica said she would rather dance with me any day than with some of
the “lumps” you were given to drag round by the dancing-mistress. I have
half a mind to take it up again. After all, a man is only as old as he
feels.
Young Bute, it turned out, was a capital dancer, and could even reverse,
which in a room fourteen feet square is of advantage. Robina confided to
me after he was gone that while he was dancing she could just tolerate
him. I cannot myself see rhyme or reason in Robina’s objection to him.
He is not handsome, but he is good-looking, as boys go, and has a
pleasant smile. Robina says it is his smile that maddens her. Dick
agrees with me that there is sense in him; and Veronica, not given to
loose praise, considers his performance of a Red Indian, both dead and
alive, the finest piece of acting she has ever encountered. We wound up
the evening with a little singing. The extent of Dick’s repertoire
surprised me; evidently he has not been so idle at Cambridge as it
seemed. Young Bute has a baritone voice of some richness. We remembered
at quarter-past eleven that Veronica ought to have gone to bed at eight.
We were all of us surprised at the lateness of the hour.
“Why can’t we always live in a cottage and do just as we like? I’m sure
it’s much jollier,” Veronica put it to me as I kissed her good night.
“Because we are idiots, most of us, Veronica,” I answered.