grass were growing almost audibly, the birds sang, the sun blazed, and,
to lighten the burden, I walked up two or three hills without the
faintest enthusiasm.
Just after the top of the last hill, when I had again resumed my seat
(at the risk once more of lifting the pony into the zenith), the ladies
simultaneously uttered a shrill cry of dismay.
"Look!" they exclaimed; "there's Bunty!"
I looked, and beheld in the road before us a small West Highland
terrier, as white as a recent ratting foray in a wet ditch would allow.
"Bunty! Bunty! you wicked dog!" they cried; "how dare you go hunting?"
To this question Bunty made no other reply than to subside under the
hedge, where a little shade was to be had, in an attitude of exhaustion
tempered by wariness.
"How very naughty!" said my hostess. "I left her in the house."
"Yes," said the daughter, "and if she's going to go off hunting like
this what on earth shall we do? There'll be complaints from every one.
She's never done it before."
"Come, Bunty!" said my hostess, in the wheedling tones of dog-owners
whose dogs notoriously obey their slightest word. But Bunty sat tight.
"If we drive on perhaps she'll follow," said the daughter, and we drove
on a few yards; but Bunty did not move.
We stopped again, while coaxing noises were made, calculated to soften
the hearts of rocks; but Bunty refused to stir.
"She'll come on later," I suggested.
"Oh, no," said her elderly mistress, "we couldn't risk leaving her here,
when she's never gone off alone before. Bunty! Bunty! don't be so
naughty. Come along, there's a dear little Bunty."
But Bunty merely glittered at us through her white-hair entanglement and
remained perfectly still.
Strange dogs are not much in my line; but since my hostess was no longer
very active, and the daughter was driving, and no one else was present,
there seemed to be a certain inevitableness about the proposition which
I then made that I should get out and bring the miscreant in.
"Oh, would you mind?" my hostess said. "She won't bite, I promise you.
She's a perfect dear."
Trying hard to forget how painful to legs or hands can be the smart
closing of the snappy jaws of dogs that won't bite, I advanced
stealthily towards Bunty, murmuring ingratiating words.
When I was quite close she turned over on her back, lifted her paws, and
obviously commended her soul to Heaven; and I had therefore no
difficulty in lifting her up and carrying her to the trap.
Her mistresses received her with rapture, disguised, but by no means
successfully, by reproach and reproof, and we were beginning to drive on
again when an excited voice called upon us to stop, and a strange lady,
of the formidable unmarried kind, with a very red face beneath a purple
parasol, confronted us.
"What," she panted, "is the meaning of this outrage? How dare you steal
my dog?"
"Your dog, madam?" I began.
"It's no use denying it," she burst in, "I saw you do it. I saw you pick
it up and carry it to the trap. It's--it's monstrous. I shall go to the
police about it."
Meanwhile, it cannot be denied, the dog was showing signs of delight and
recognition such as had previously been lacking.
"But----" began my hostess, who is anything but quarrelsome.
"We ought to know our own dog when we see it," said the daughter, who
does not disdain a fight.
"Certainly," said the angry lady, "if you _have_ a dog of your own."
"Of course we have," said the daughter; "we have a West Highland named
Bunty."
"This happens to be my West Highland, named Wendy," said the lady, "as
you will see if you look on the collar. My name is there too--Miss
Morrison, 14 Park Terrace, W. I am staying at Well House Farm."
And it was so.
It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that collars, being easily
exchangeable, are not evidence; but I thought it better that any such
suggestion should come from elsewhere.
"It is certainly very curious," said the daughter, submitting the
features of the dog to the minutest scrutiny; "if it is not Bunty it is
her absolute double."
"It is not Bunty, but Wendy," said Miss Morrison coldly; "and I shall
be glad if you will give her to me."
"But----" the daughter began.
"Yes, give the lady the dog," said the mother.
In the regrettable absence of Solomon, who would, of course, have cut
the little devil in two, there was nothing for it but to surrender; and
the couple went off together, the dog exhibiting every sign of pleasure.
Meanwhile the daughter whipped up the pony, and we soon entered the
gates.
In the drive, awaiting us, was a West Highland terrier named Bunty.
"There!" cried the ladies, as they scrambled out and flung themselves on
her.
"Of course she's not a bit like that Wendy thing really," said the
mother.
"Now that I come to look at her I can see heaps of difference," said the
daughter.
"None the less," I interjected, "you turned a very honest man into a
thief, and a dog-thief at that; and he insists on reparation."
"Yes, indeed," said the mother, "it is really too bad. What reparation
can we make?"
I don't pretend that my feelings are completely soothed, but the
Clicquot 1904 which took the place of claret at dinner that evening was
certainly very good.
[Illustration: LAURA DANCES TO HER MOTHER'S MUSIC. _See "The Innocent's
Progress"--Plate 10_]
THE SUFFERER
Having engaged a sleeping-berth I naturally hurried, coin in hand, to
the conductor, as all wise travellers do (usually to their discomfiture)
to see if I could be accommodated with a compartment to myself and be
guaranteed against invasion.
I couldn't.
I then sought my compartment, to learn the worst as to my position,
whether above or below the necessarily offensive person who was to be my
companion.
He was already there, and we exchanged the hard implacable glare that is
reserved among the English for the other fellow in a wagon-lit.
When I discovered that to him had fallen the dreaded upper berth I
relaxed a little, and later we were full of courtesies to each
other--renunciations of hatpegs, racks, and so forth, and charming
mutual concessions as to the light, which I controlled from below--so
that by morning we were so friendly that he deemed me a fit recipient of
his Great Paris Grievance.
This grievance, which he considered that every one should know about,
bore upon the prevalence of spurious coins in the so-called Gay City
and the tendency of Parisians to work them off on foreigners. As he
said, a more inhospitable course one cannot conceive. Foreigners in
Paris should be treated as guests, the English especially. But it is the
English who are the first victims of the possessor of francs that are
out of date, five-franc pieces guiltless of their country's silver, and
ten-franc pieces into whose composition no gold has entered.
He had been in Paris but an hour or so when--but let me tell the story
as my travelling companion told it to me.
"I don't know what your experience in Paris has been," he said, "but I
have been victimised right and left."
He was now getting up, while I lay at comparative ease in my berth and
watched his difficulties in the congested room and disliked his under
vest.
"I had been in Paris but a few hours," he continued, "when it was
necessary to pay a cabman. I handed him a franc. He examined it, laughed
and returned it. I handed him another. He went through the same
performance. Having found some good money to get rid of him, I sat down
outside a cafe to try and remember where I had received the change in
which these useless coins had been inserted. During a week in Paris much
of my time was spent in that way."
He sighed and drew on his trousers. His braces were red.
"I showed the bad francs to a waiter," he went on, "and he, like the
cabman, laughed. In fact, next to nudity, there is no theme so certain
to provoke Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of every one
to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened
with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want
of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said,
"denotes to what a point of cynicism the Parisians have attained."
I agreed with him.
"The waiter," he continued, "went through my money and pointed out what
was good and what either bad or out of currency. He called other waiters
to enjoy the joke. It seemed that in about four hours I had acquired
three bad francs, one bad two-franc piece and two bad five-franc pieces.
I put them away in another pocket and got fresh change from him, which,
as I subsequently discovered, contained one obsolete five-franc piece
and two discredited francs. And so it went on. I was a continual target
for them."
Here he began to wash, and the story was interrupted.
When he re-emerged I asked him why he didn't always examine his change.
"It's very difficult to remember to do so," he said, "and, besides, I am
not an expert. Anyway, it got worse and worse, and when a bad gold piece
came along I realised that I must do something; so I wrote to the Chief
of the Police."
"In French?" I asked.
"No, in English--the language of honesty. I told him my own experiences.
I said that other English people whom I had met had testified to similar
trouble; and I put it to him that as a matter of civic pride--_esprit de
pays_--he should do his utmost to cleanse Paris of this evil. I added
that in my opinion the waiters were the worst offenders."
"Have you had a reply?" I asked.
"Not yet," he said, and having completed his toilet he made room for me.
Later, meeting him in the restaurant-car, I asked him to show me his
store of bad money. I wanted to see for myself what these coins were
like.
"I haven't got them," he said.
"You sent them to the Chief of the Police with your letter, I suppose?"
I said.
"No, I didn't," he replied. "The fact is--well--as a matter of fact I
managed to work them all off again."
A SOUTH SEA BUBBLE
"I want you," said my hostess, "to take in Mrs. Blank. She is charming.
All through the War she has been with her husband in the South Seas.
London is a new place to her."
Mrs. Blank did not look too promising. She was pretty in her
way--"elegant" an American would have called her--but she lacked
animation. However, the South Seas...! Any one fresh from the Pacific
must have enough to tell to see soup, fish, and _entree_ safely through.
I began by remarking that she must find London a very complete change
after the sun and serenity that she had come from.
"It's certainly noisier," she said; "but we had our share of rain."
"I thought it was always fine there," I remarked; but she laughed a
denial and relapsed into silence.
She was one of those women who don't take soup, and this made the
economy of her utterances the more unfair.
Racking my brain for a new start, I fell back on those useful fellows,
the authors. Presuming that any one who had lived in that fascinating
region--the promised land of so many of us who are weary of English
climatic treacheries--would be familiar with the literature of it, I
went boldy to work.
"The first book about the South Seas that I ever read," I said, "was
Ballantyne's 'Coral Island'."
"Indeed!" she replied.
I asked her if she too had not been brought up on Ballantyne, and she
said no. She did not even know his name.
"He wrote for boys," I explained, rather lamely.
"I read poetry chiefly as a girl," she said.
"But surely you know Stevenson's 'Island Nights' Entertainments'?" I
said.
No, she did not. Was it nice?
"It's extraordinary," I said. "It gives you more of the atmosphere of
the South Seas than any other work. And Louis Becke--you must have read
him?" I continued.
No, she had not. She read very little. The last book she had read was on
spiritualism.
"Not even Conrad?" I pursued. "No one has so described the calms and
storms of the Pacific."
No, she remembered no story called Conrad.
I was about to explain that Conrad was the writer, not the written; but
it seemed a waste of words, and we fell into a stillness broken only by
the sound of knife and fork.
"I wonder," I ventured next, "if you came across anyone who had met
Ganguin."
"Go--what?" she asked.
"That amazing Peruvian-Frenchman," I went on, with a certain foolish
desperation. "Ganguin. He Lived in Tahiti."
"How comically geographical you are!" was all she replied, and again a
silence brooded over our plates.
"Hang it! you shall talk," I said to myself; and then aloud, "Tell me
all about copra. I have longed to know what copra is; how it grows, what
it looks like, what it is for."
"You have come to the wrong person," she replied, with very wide eyes.
"I never heard of it. Or did you say 'cobra'? Of course I know what a
cobra is--it's a snake. I've seen them at the Zoo."
I put her right. "Copra, the stuff that the traders in the South Seas
deal in."
"I never heard of it," she said, "but then why should I? I know nothing
about the South Seas."
My stock fell thirty points and I crumbled bread nervously, hoping for
something sensible to say; but at this moment "half-time" mercifully set
in. My partner on the other side turned to me suavely and asked if I
thought the verses in "Abraham Lincoln" were a beauty or a blemish; and
with the assistance of the Russian ballet, some new novels, and the
universal unrest I sailed serenely into port. She was as easy and
agreeable a woman as that other was difficult, and before she left for
the drawing-room she had invited me to lunch and I had accepted.
As I said good night to my hostess I asked why she had told me that my
first partner had been in the South Seas. She said that she had said
nothing of the sort; what she had said was that during the War she had
been stationed with her husband, Colonel Blank, at Southsea.
ON FINDING THINGS
After the passage of several years since I had picked up anything, last
week I found successively a carriage key (in Royal Hospital Road), a
brooch (in Church Street, Kensington), and sixpence in a third-class
compartment. It was as I stooped to pick up the sixpence, which had
suddenly gleamed at me under the seat of the now empty carriage, that I
said to myself that finding things is one of the purest of earthly joys.
And how rare!
I have, in a lifetime that now and then appals me by its length, found
almost nothing. These three things this week; a brown-paper packet when
I was about seven, containing eight pennies and one halfpenny; on the
grass in the New Forest, when I was about twenty, a half-dollar piece;
and at Brighton, not long after, a gold brooch of just sufficient value
to make it decent to take it to the police station, from which, a year
later, no one having claimed it, it was returned to me: these constitute
nearly half a century's haul. I might add--now and then, perhaps, a
safety-pin, pencil, some other trifle, which, however well supplied with
such articles one may be, cannot be acquired from a clear sky without a
thrill. Even Mr. Rockefeller, I take it, would not have been unmoved had
he, instead of myself, stumbled on that treasure between Stony Cross and
Boldrewood.
To be given such things is not a comparable experience. With a
gift--intention, consciousness, preparation, come in; to say nothing of
obligation later. The event is also complicated (and therefore shorn of
its glory) by the second person, since the gift must be given. But,
suddenly dropping one's eyes, to be aware of a coin--that is sheer
rapture. Other things can be exciting too, but a coin is best, because a
coin is rarely identifiable by a previous owner; and I am naturally
confining myself to those things the ownership of which could not
possibly be traced. To find things which have to be surrendered is as
impure a joy as the world contains, and no theme for this pen.
The special quality of the act of finding something, with its consequent
exhilaration, is half unexpectedness and half separateness. There being
no warning, and the article coming to you by chance, no one is to be
thanked, no one to be owed anything. In short, you have achieved the
greatest human triumph--you have got something for nothing. That is the
true idea: the "nothing" must be absolute; one must never have looked,
never have had any finding intention, or even hope. To look for things
is to change the whole theory--to rob it of its divine suddenness; to
become anxious, even avaricious; to partake of the nature of the
rag-picker, the _chiffonier_, or those strange men that one notices
walking, with bent heads, along the shore after a storm. (None the less
that was a great moment, once, in the island of Coll, when after two
hours' systematic searching I found the plover's nest.)
Finding things is at once so rare and pure a joy that to trifle with it
is peculiarly heartless. Yet are there people so wantonly in need of
sport as to do so. Every one knows of the purse laid on the path or
pavement beside a fence, which, as the excited passer-by stoops to pick
it up, is twitched through the palings by its adherent string. There is
also the coin attached to a thread which can be dropped in the street
and instantly pulled up again, setting every eye at a pavement scrutiny.
Could there be lower tricks? I fear so, because some years ago, in the
great days of a rendezvous of Bohemians in the Strand known as the
Marble Halls, a wicked wag (I have been told) once nailed a bad but
plausible sovereign to the floor and waited events. In the case of the
purse and string the butts are few and far between and there is usually
only a small audience to rejoice in their discomfiture, but the
_denouement_ of the cruel comedy of which acquisitiveness and cunning
were the warp and woof at the Marble Halls was only too bitterly public.
I am told, such is human resourcefulness in guile, that very few of
those who saw the coin and marked it down as their own went for it right
away, because had they done so the action might have been noticed and
the booty claimed. Instead, the discoverer would look swiftly and
stealthily round, and then gradually and with every affectation of
nonchalance (which to those in the secret, watching from the corners of
their wicked eyes, was so funny as to be an agony) he would get nearer
and nearer until he was able at last to place one foot on it.
This accomplished, he would relax into something like real naturalness,
and, practically certain of his prey, take things easily for a moment or
so. Often, I am told, the poor dupe would, at this point, whistle the
latest tune. Even now, however, he dared not abandon subterfuge, or his
prize, were he seen to pick it up, might have to be surrendered or
shared; so the next move was to drop his handkerchief, the idea being to
pick up both it and the sovereign together. Such explosions of laughter
as followed upon his failure to do so can (I am informed) rarely have
been heard.
--Such was the conspiracy of the nailed sovereign, which, now and then,
the victim, shaking the chagrin from him, would without shame himself
join, and become a delighted spectator of his successor's humiliation.
Can you conceive of a more impish hoax? But I should like to have
witnessed it.
PUNCTUALITY
Among my good resolutions for the New Year I very nearly included the
determination never to be punctual again. I held my hand, just in time;
but it was a near thing.
For a long while it had been, with me, a point of honour to be on time,
and, possibly, I had become a little self-righteous on the matter,
rebuking too caustically those with a laxer standard. But towards the
close of 1919 doubts began to creep in. For one thing, modern conditions
were making it very hard to keep engagements to the letter; taxis were
scarce and trains and omnibuses crowded, so that in order to be punctual
one had to walk and thus lose many precious minutes; for another, I had
such a number of appointments which were not kept by the other parties
that I had to take the matter into serious consideration, for they all
meant disorganisation of a rather exacting time-table at a period when I
was unusually busy. Moreover, while waiting for a late friend, it is
impossible to do anything--one is too impatient or unsettled.
Why, I began to ask myself, should I do all the waiting and get hungry
and cross, and why should they do all the
arriving-when-everything-is-ready? Why should not the roles be reversed?
When conscription came in and martial habits became the rule, I had
hoped and believed that punctuality was really likely to be established.
I thought this because one had always heard so much about Army
precision, and also because my most punctual friend for many years had
been a soldier and we had engaged in a rivalry in the matter. But I was
wrong. During the War the soldiers home on leave took every advantage of
one's gratitude to them, while the first demobilised one whom I
entertained kept me waiting forty minutes for dinner.
The pity of it is that this particular tarrying guest is a man of
eminence and capacity. Were he a failure, as according to our own Samuel
Smiles or the author of that famous American book "From Princeton
College to Colonel House," he ought to be, all would be well; but he is
not; he has never been punctual in his life and he has had an
exceptionally successful career. The books tell us that the unpunctual
man is disqualified in the race for fortune; that no one will employ
him, no one will trust him. They say that the keeping of appointments is
a test both of character and quality. Business men interviewing
applicants for posts, they tell us, will engage no one, no matter what
his attainments, who does not arrive promptly. But these hard and fast
schemes of appraisement can, as I have shown, be all wrong. Wisdom,
after all, is an element in business success; and what wise man would
ever be punctual at his dentist's? What kind of respect a dentist has
for his first appointment of the day, I cannot tell. I have avoided
these early seances; but every one knows that he is never ready for a
patient at the covenanted hour after that. Editors usually keep their
visitors waiting. No theatrical manager has ever been on time; but then
time does not exist for the stage, because, apart from their profession,
actors have nothing to do. Rehearsals are one immense distracting
outrage upon the routine of an ordered existence; and yet actors are a
very happy folk.
Until late in 1919, as I have said, I had loved Punctualia with a true
ardour; but I now found myself sufficiently free from passion to be able
to examine her critically and to discern faults. For there is a good
deal to be said against her.
To be always correct is a dangerous thing. I have noticed that the
people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have
to wait for them. Looking deeply into the matter, I realised that
Punctualia, for all her complacency and air of rectitude, has lost a
great many lives. The logic of the thing is inexorable. If you are late
for the train, you miss it; and if you are not in it and it is wrecked,
you live on--to miss others. I recalled one very remarkable case in
point which happened in my own family circle. A relation of mine, with
her daughter, had arranged to spend a holiday in the Channel Islands. A
cabman promised and failed, arriving in time only to whip his horse all
the way across London and miss the train by a minute. When, the next
day, it was learned that the Channel Islands boat had struck the
Casquettes and had gone down the ladies were so excited by their escape
that they sought the cabman and by way of gratitude adopted one of his
numerous children. That is a true story, and it is surely a very
eloquent supporter of an anti-punctual policy. Had the ladies caught the
train they would have been drowned, and the cabman's bantling would have
lacked any but the most elementary education.
Can you wonder, then, that I nearly included a determination never to be
punctual again among my New Year resolutions? But I did not go so far. I
left it at the decision not to be so particular about punctuality as I
used to be.
THE OTHER TWO