“Perhaps that’s it,” she answered, thoughtfully. “But it don’t
smell—leastways, I’ve never smelt nothin’ from it.”
I stood aside as the judges came up. When he saw the plant, standing so
bravely and so healthily, and so beautifully in its bright red pot, the
curate laughed out loud.
“Look here,” said he to one of the other judges, who came up and
laughed as well.
“Do you know what you’ve got here, my good woman?” asked the curate.
She shook her head.
“Well, we can’t give you anything for this—it’s only a common nettle—a
red dead nettle.”
“But it’s a beautiful colour—ain’t it?” said she, with a flame of red
in her face.
“Oh—it’s a beautiful colour, no doubt,” replied the curate easily—“so,
I hope, is every plant that grows in the highways and the byways.”
“Well, then, why shouldn’t it get a prize?” she demanded.
“Because it’s only a common dead nettle,” said the curate, very softly,
turning away wrath.
“But it’s ’ealthier and stronger and finer than any o’ them other
flowers,” said she.
“Quite so—no doubt—you might expect that. These others are cultivated
flowers, you see. This is only a common dead nettle.”
I saw the editor when I returned.
“No stuff worth having,” said I—disconsolately, for I was thinking of
my few short lines.
“Nothing funny at all?” he asked.
“Nothing,” said I, and I told him about the red dead nettle.
“But I think that’s dammed funny,” he said.
“Do you?” I said.
XII
THE FEMININE APPRECIATION OF MATHEMATICS
XII
THE FEMININE APPRECIATION OF MATHEMATICS
If I could approach mathematics with the same spirit as do ninety-eight
women out of a hundred, I might be rather good at them. As it is, my
power of will in face of algebraical figures, in face even of numbers
that exceed the functions of the simplest forms of arithmetic, my power
of will stands aghast. I can do nothing.
Now, ninety-eight women out of a hundred are far more ignorant of the
mere rudiments of mathematics than am I; yet with an instinct which
I would give my soul to possess they can solve problems and carry on
the ordinary business of life with an ability that is little short of
marvellous.
Truly, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and most especially
when that learning is of mathematics. If once you have tried to weigh
hydrogen on an agate-balanced scale, you are for ever unfitted for the
common-or-garden mathematical exigencies of life. Now this is where a
woman has all the pull. The most that she has ever had to calculate the
weight of is a pound of flour or seven and a half pounds of sirloin
already weighed and attested by the butcher. When, then, it comes to
weighing the baby on the scale-pans in the kitchen, she will fling on
the weights with such a degree of confidence that the result is bound
to be correct. You and I, on the other hand, would approach the matter
with such delicacy of touch—believing, and quite rightly, that a baby
was of far more importance than all the immeasurable quantities of
hydrogen in the world—with such delicacy and care should we approach
it that the poor infant would have caught its death of cold and be
in a comatose condition of exhaustion before we had decided that the
scale-pan was clean or the weights were in proper condition to be used.
This smattering of general education is a fatal business. It unfits men
for all the real and useful demands of life.
Only the other day, my friend Cruikshank broke a brass candlestick and
looked up helplessly from the wreck.
“Where on earth can I get any solder from?” said he.
“What’s solder?” asked Bellwattle, his wife.
The question was so direct that, for the moment, it confused him.
“Solder?” he repeated. “Solder? Oh, it’s stuff to mend metal with.”
“I’ll do it with sealing-wax,” said Bellwattle.
Cruikshank laughed and, as he said to me afterwards—
“I gave it to her to do. It’s best to let women learn by experience.
Sealing-wax!” And he laughed knowingly at me. I knew he meant it
kindly, so I laughed with him; but the next day I made inquiries about
the candlestick.
“How did she get on?” I asked.
“By Jove, she’s done it,” said he. “It won’t bear much knocking about,
of course, but it stands as firm as a rock. It’s only a woman,” he
added, “who’d think of mending a brass candlestick with sealing-wax.”
“It’s only a woman who’d succeed,” said I.
But this has nothing to do with mathematics, and it is of mathematics
that I want to speak.
If you have any interest in photography, you know how tricksy a matter
is the exposure of a plate. It is tricksy to you and I will tell you
why. It is because your academic study of the process has taught you
that the two-thousandth part of a second is sufficient exposure in
order to get cloud effects. Conceive, then, how your brain whirls with
figures when you come to take a photograph of an interior or a portrait
of some one sitting in a room. I will not remind you of the tortures
which your mind must suffer, nor the result of such torture when at
last you develop the plate in the dark-room—both are too painful to
speak about. Now, a woman knows nothing about this two-thousandth
part of a second. She would not believe there were such a measurable
fraction of time if you told her. She just exposes the plate; that is
all.
One day I had to get a photograph taken in a hurry. I marched into
a photographer’s in the Strand. There was first a narrow passage,
hung with frames filled with photos of young men and young women
looking their worst in their best. Then I was confronted by a flight
of stairs which I mounted, to find myself in a great big room hung
also with photographs—photographs of family groups, of babies in their
characteristic attitudes as their mothers had given them to the world.
Every conceivable sort of photograph was there, but the room, except
for an American roll-topped desk near the window, was empty.
I coughed, and the head of a young girl—not more than twenty years of
age—popped up above the desk.
“Can Mr. Robinson take my photograph this morning?” I asked.
“Mr. Robinson is not in at present,” she replied.
“I rather wanted my photograph taken in a hurry,” said I.
“Oh, you can have it taken,” said she. “Would you like it done at once?”
“At once, if you please,” I answered.
She rose from her seat behind the roll-topped desk and she walked to
the door.
“Then will you step into the waiting-room?” she asked.
I obeyed. The waiting-room had a mirror and a pair of brushes. When I
thought of the families whose portraits I had seen within—I refrained.
“I shall do,” said I, “as I am.”
After a few moments’ delay there was a knock on the door. I opened it.
There again was the little lady waiting for me.
“Will you step up to the studio, please?” she said, and I received
the impression from her voice of anxious assistants waiting in rows
to receive me, ready to take my features and record them upon a
photographic plate for the benefit of posterity.
Up into the studio, then, I went; a gaunt, great place with
white-blinded windows that stared up to the dull, grey sky. But it was
empty. I looked in vain for the assistants—there were none. And when
she began to wheel the camera into place I stood amazed.
“Are you the whole business of Robinson and Co.?” I asked.
She smiled encouragingly.
“Mr. Robinson is out,” said she.
“I don’t believe there is a Mr. Robinson,” I replied.
She laughed gleefully at that and repeated that there was such a
person, but he was out.
“And does he leave you to the responsibility of the entire premises?” I
asked.
“Yes,” said she.
“What do you do if any one comes into the portrait gallery downstairs
while you’re up here?”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she replied confidently; “they don’t often
come.”
I let her fix that abominable instrument of torture at the back of
my neck. Her fingers tickled me as she did it, but I said nothing. I
was trying in my mind to assess the value of this business of Mr.
Robinson. It was no easy job. I had not got beyond single figures when
she walked back to the camera.
I glanced up at the leaden sky.
“It’s rather dull,” said I; “what exposure are you going to give?”
“Oh, I think once will be enough.”
“Once what?” I asked.
“Just once,” said she.
“But, good heavens!” I exclaimed, and I thought of the two-thousandth
part of a second—“it must be one of something. Is it seconds or minutes
or half-hours or what?”
She burst out laughing.
“I don’t know what it is,” she replied, as if it were the simplest
matter in the world, “only Mr. Robinson says my once is as good as his
twice.”
“Is it?” said I. “As good as his twice? What a splendid once it must
be!”
Now that is what I mean. That is the feminine appreciation of
mathematics. I wish I had it. It may not be of much service on the
office stool, but in a world of men and women it is invaluable.
XIII
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
XIII
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
Some things there are which you may count upon for ever. The fittest
will always survive, despite the million charities to aid the
incompetent; the maternal instinct will always be the deepest human
incentive, no matter who may gibe at the sentiment which clings about
little children.
Now, if it be true that Art is the voice of the Age in which we live;
that the painter paints what the eye of the Age has seen, the singer
sings the songs which the Age has heard, the man of letters writes the
thoughts which have passed through the mind of the Age—if all this is
true, then how strange and unreal an Age this must be.
For if for one moment you chose to consider it, there are but few
painters, few singers, few writers who express the immutable laws of
life. Among writers most of all, perhaps, this is an age which devotes
itself to the unfittest. The physically unfit, the morally unfit, the
socially unfit—these are the characters which fill the pages of those
who write to-day.
The old hero, the man of great strength, of great honour, of
great courage, he no longer exists in literature. I am told he is
old-fashioned, a copy-book individual, a puppet set in motion with no
subtle movements of character, but with wires too plainly seen, worked
by a hand too obviously visible. There is no Art in him, I am told. I
am glad there is not. He would lose all the qualities of heroship for
me if there were.
In times gone by, though, this old-fashioned hero was just as real
a man as is the hero of to-day. In times gone by this hero was not
unnatural, not wanting in character or humanity when he slept with
the maid of his choice, a naked sword between them guarding the
pricelessness of her virginity. But now—to-day—how wanting in character
do you imagine would he be thought for such a deed as that? How
painfully unreal?
Is this the fault of the Age? Or is it the fault of the writer? Is it
that the Age cannot produce a real hero? Or is it that he is there in
numbers in the midst of us and the man of letters has not the clearness
of vision to see him? For it is not the fittest, but the unfittest who
survives in the pages of literature now.
And thus it is also when you find treatment in fiction of that
immutable law, the maternal instinct. If in the novel of to-day
you meet the character of a woman with a child, you may be fairly
confident that it will be shown to you sooner or later in the ensuing
pages how easily she will desert it for the love of some man other than
her husband, or how, loving that man, her soul will be wracked ere she
bids it farewell. But, tortured or not, she will go. No matter how
skilfully she is shown to repent of it later, still she will go.
Now, is that the fault of the Age, or is it the fault of the writer? In
danger or in love, do women desert their children? It may happen that
they do, but that is a very different matter. All that glitters is not
gold—all that happens is not real. Yet it seems to be the choice of
the modern writer to seize upon these isolated happenings, give them a
coating of reality, and offer them to the public as life.
But life is not a narrow business where things just happen and that
is all. Life is the length and breadth of this great universe
where things are, in relation to the whole system of suns and moons
and stars. Now the maternal instinct is a law without which this
wonderfully regulated system would shatter and crumble into a thousand
little pieces.
But no one extols it in this age of ours. Talk of it and you are dubbed
a sentimentalist at once. Write of it and the cheap irony of critics is
heaped upon you. Yet there seems no greater and no grander struggle to
me than when these inevitable laws march through the invading army of
vermin and of parasites to their inevitable end of victory.
The other day I witnessed a most thrilling spectacle: a mother
defending her child from death—a duel where the odds against victory
were legion.
In the hedge that shields my garden from the road there is a thrush’s
nest. I saw her build it. She was very doubtful about me at first;
played all sorts of tricks to deceive me; decoyed my attention away
while her mate was a-building; sent him to distract my mind while she
was putting those finishing touches to the house of which only a woman
knows the secret—and knows it so well.
I think before it was completed she had lost much of her distrust in
me, for I did nothing to disturb her. It was not in my mind to see what
she would do if things happened. I just wanted everything to be—that
was all. And so, after a time, she would hop about the lawn where I was
sitting, taking me silently thereby into her confidence, making me feel
that I was not such an outcast of Nature as she had supposed me to be
at first.
I tried to live up to that as well as I could. Whenever I passed the
nest and saw her uplifted beak, her two watchful eyes gazing alert over
the rim of it, I assumed ignorance at the expense of her thinking what
an unobservant fool I must be. But there were always moments when she
was away from home and I, stealing to the nest, found opportunity for
discovering how things were going on. Five fine blue eggs were laid
at last. I think she must have guessed that I counted them, for one
morning she caught me with my hand in the nest. I slunk away feeling a
sorry sort of fool for my clumsy interference. She flew at once to see
what I had done. I guess the terror that must have filled her heart.
But when she had counted them herself and found her house in order, she
came out on to the lawn and looked at me as though I were one of those
strange enigmas which life sometimes offers to every one of us.
At length one day, when I called and gently put in my hand—leaving my
card, as you might say—the eggs were there no longer. In place of them
was a soft, warm mass like a heap of swan’s-down, palpitating with life.
I met her later on the lawn, when she perked her head up at me and as
good as said:
“I suppose you know I’ve got other things to do now, besides looking
beautiful.”
But I thought she looked splendid. What is more, I told her so, and
it seemed just for the moment as if she understood, as if there came
back into her eyes that look of grateful vanity which she wore last
spring when her mate was wooing her with his songs from the elm tree
across the way. But the next moment she had put all flattery behind her
and was haggling with a worm, not as to price no doubt, but haggling
nevertheless for possession.
Well, the household went on splendidly, until one day I saw my cat
sitting on the path below the nest staring up into the bushes.
“You little devil!” I shouted, and she went galloping down the garden
with a stone trundling at her heels.
I kept a closer watch after that and, one morning, hearing a great
noise as of the songs of many birds while I was at my breakfast, I just
stepped out to see what was happening.
I was held spellbound by what I saw. For there, on the path again
below the nest, sat the cat and two yards from her—scarcely more—stood
my little mother-thrush, her eyes dilated with terror, her feathers
ruffled and swelling on her throat, singing—singing—singing, as though
her heart would burst.
It can only last a moment, I thought. One spring and the cat will have
her. But, no! Before the greatness of that courage, before the glory
of that song, the cat was silenced and made impotent to move. There,
within a few feet of her was her prey. With one swift rush, with one
fell stroke of her velvet paw, she could have laid it low. But she
was up against a law greater than that which nerves the hunter to his
cunning.
For five minutes, with throat swelling and eyes like little pins of
fire, the mother sang her song of fearless maternity. The glorious
notes rang from her in ceaseless trills and tireless cadences. I have
heard a singer at Covent Garden, when the whole house rose as one
person and applauded her to the very roof, but never have I heard such
a song as this, which put to silence the very laws of God that His
greatest law might triumph.
For five minutes she sang and then, with crouching steps, the cat
turned tail and crawled away into the garden. The thrush ceased her
singing and fluttered exhausted up to the nest.
And they write of women deserting their children!
XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO
XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO
He has just reached his eightieth year. Eighty times—not conscious
perhaps of them all—he has seen the wall-flowers blossom in his old
garden; well-nigh eighty times has he thinned out his lettuces and his
spring onions, pruned his few rose trees, weeded his gravel paths.
Now he is bent with rheumatism; his rounded back and stooping head,
his tremulous knees in their old corduroy breeches, are but sorry
promises of what he was. Yet with what I have been told and what I can
easily imagine, it is plainly that I can see the fine stalwart fellow
he has been. Until the age of seventy-two he was the carrier for our
village. How many journeys he made, fair weather or foul, always up
to the stroke of time, never forgetting the message for this person,
the purchase for that, they will all tell you here in the village. I
know nothing of his life as a carrier. It is of an old man I give you
my picture—an old man awaiting the coming of death with a clear eye and
a sturdy heart, enjoying the last moments of life while he may, and
facing those sorrows and deprivations which come with old age in a way
that many a younger man might learn and profit from.
Only a short time since, his wife departed upon her last journey. The
winter came and snatched her from him just as the first frost nips the
last of the autumn flowers. Her frail white petals drooped and then
they fell. He was left to press them between the leaves of that book of
Life which, with trembling fingers, he still clutched within his hand.
He was too ill to follow her body to its quiet little bed in that
corner of God’s acre where it was made; but I can feel the loneliness
in the heart of him when he turned and turned with wakeful eyes that
night, stretching out his knotted fingers to the empty place beside
him—the place in that bed which had been hers for so many happy years
and was hers no longer.
They thought he would never pull through that winter after his loss;
and indeed he must have fought manfully with that undaunted courage of
a man who clings to life, no matter what misfortune, because it is his
right—his heritage. For imagine the long, sleepless nights which must
have followed the departure of his gentle bed-fellow! Think of those
weary, endless silences which once had been filled by the whisperings
of their voices! For in bed and at night-time, the old people always
whisper. It is as though they were deeply conscious of the invisible
presence of God and His angels. They talk in hushed voices as though
they were in church.
I can hear her saying—
“John.”
“Yes,” I can hear him reply.
“Are you awake?”
“Yes—are you?”
“I am. Isn’t it a windy night?”
“’Tis a fine storm—and I never put in they pea-sticks. I was going to
do ’en to-morrow.”
And then I can hear her little whisper of consolation—
“Maybe they’ll be safe till then. They’re sturdy plants.” At which I
can see him turning over in his bed and passing into one of those short
hours of sleep into which Nature so gently divides the night for the
old people.
Then think of the long and weary silences through which he must have
endured before he grew accustomed to the absence of his bed-fellow.
For there seem to me few things more pathetic yet more beautiful than
two old people who have long passed the passions of youth, sharing
their bed together, with the simplicity and innocence of little
children. I can, too, so readily conceive how dread the terror of the
night becomes when one of them is taken and the other left. I can hear
the sounds at night that frighten, the storms that rattle the tiles on
the old roof making the one who is left behind stretch out his groping
hand for the trembling touch of another hand in vain.
Yet through all this he survived. Cruelly though his heart had been
dealt with, he still retained the whole spirit of courage in his soul.
With all its chill winds and bitter frosts, he braved out that winter
and two years have passed now since his wife died.
I see him nearly every day in his garden, walking up and down the
paths, picking out a weed here, a weed there. Two walking-sticks he
has to help him on his journeys. They are called simply, number one and
number two. And when it is a fine morning, with the sun riding fiercely
in a cloudless sky, his daughter will say to him—
“You need only take number one to-day.”
So he takes number one and a look comes into those child’s eyes of his
as though he would say—
“Ah—you see I’m not done for yet. There’s many an old fellow of eighty
can’t get along without two sticks to help him.”
One day, too, this summer, I found him working with a bill-hook in his
garden. The grass had grown up high under the quick-set hedge on one of
the paths. He was clearing it all away.
“Must keep the little place tidy, sir,” he said, with a bright twinkle
in his eye. “They grasses do grow up so quick there’d be no seeing
the path at all.” Then with little suppressed grunts of his breath
to every swing of the bill-hook, he went on steadily with his work,
leaning heavily upon number one with the other hand.
Rather strenuous labour you would think for an old man of eighty to be
doing. But as he worked, I saw that all the stems of the grass had been
cut for him beforehand with a scythe. He was only sweeping it together
into heaps with the aid of a bill-hook. So long as it was a bill-hook
it seemed man’s labour to him.
I try sometimes to find out what he thinks about life and its swiftly
approaching end. But he is very reticent to speak of it—so unlike our
little serving-maid, who takes her evenings out alone, and when I asked
her why she did not prefer company, replied—
“I like to think, sir.”
“What of?” said I.
“Of life and the night,” said she.
But if he thinks of life and the night, as indeed I am sure he must, he
tells his thoughts to no one. It was only once, when I was praising the
scent and the show of his glorious wall-flowers, that he said to me—
“I like to think they’re the best this year that I’ve ever had. I grow
them all from our own seed, sir. I save it up myself every year. And I
like to think this year that they’re the very best, because you know,
sir, I may not see them again.”
I tried to imagine what would be the state of my own mind, if I thought
I should never see wall-flowers again. I wondered could I say it with
such courage, such resignation as he.
To never see wall-flowers again! It seems in a nonsensical, childish
way to me to sum up the whole tragedy—if tragedy there really be—in
Death. It seems, moreover, to give just that little stroke of the
brush, that little line of the pen in completion of this thumb-nail
portrait of mine. An old man in an old garden that he loves, telling
himself that his wall-flowers are the best that year of all—telling
himself bravely night after night when he goes to bed, morning after
morning when he rises to the new day—which is one more day nearer the
end—telling himself that they are the best this year of all, because he
may not see them any more.
To never see wall-flowers again!
XV
AN OLD STRING BONNET
XV
AN OLD STRING BONNET