egg, he apparently considered it becoming to drop the tone of
half-patronising pity he had previously adopted. "Come," said he,
smiling, with a dash of raillery, over his coffee-cup; "admit you are a
humbug, you whitened sepulchre of an anticipated chick! Until you
found a congenial soul and overwhelmed me with your confidence, what a
career of deception--not mean, of course, but cynical--ironical--you
have been leading. What a jest it must have been to you to be sold as
new laid! How you laughed in your quiet way at the mockery of life.
Surely it was a worthy pair to Swift in cassock and bands conducting a
marriage service. I can well fancy your silent scorn of the hand that
put you in the bag. New laid! But now I have the full humour of you.
You must pardon my dulness of apprehension. I grasp your meaning now;
your quiet insistent teaching that all life is decay and all decay is
life. No forcing the accent, no crudity, but a pervading persuasion.
A noble gospel!"
He paused impressively, placed the egg respectfully upon his bureau,
and presently went off at a tangent to something else.
"Shall I throw this away?" said the girl.
"Good heavens! Throw it away? Certainly not. Put it in the library."
(The library used to be the corner of the room by the window.)
She stared at me with a certain attempt at confidence. She is a
callous, impertinent kind of girl, and I fear inclined to be bold. "It
_do_ smell, sir," she said to him.
"That's the merit of it. It's irony. Go and put it on the fourth
shelf near the window. There are some yellow-covered books there, and
Swift, some comedies by a gentleman named Ibsen, and a couple of novels
by two gentlemen named George ------. But there! you don't know one
book from another! The fourth shelf from the top on the right-hand
side."
As the girl did so she looked over her hand at me, and lifted her
eyebrows very slightly.
THE GREAT CHANGE
My uncle had been hectic all day. I knew and dreaded what was coming,
and said nothing that by any chance could lead up to it.
He absent-mindedly tipped the emu sixpence. Then we came to the wart
hog.
"A bachelor," he said, meditatively, scratching the brute's back.
I hastily felt for a saving topic in the apprehensive darkness of my
mind, and could find none.
"I expect I shall be married in October," said my uncle. Then,
sighing: "The idyll of my engagement was short-lived."
It was out. Now, the day--my last idle day with my poor uncle--was a
hideous wreck. All the topics he had fluttered round vanished, and,
cold and awful, there loomed over us the one great topic.
"What do you _think_ of marriage, George?" said my uncle, after a
pause, prodding the wart hog suddenly.
"That's your privilege," said I. "Married men don't dare to think of
it. Bigamy."
"Privilege! Is it such a headlong wreck of one's ideals as they say?"
said my uncle. "Is that dreamland furniture really so unstable in use?"
"Of course," said I, "it's different from what one expects. But it
seems to be worse for the other party. At least to judge from the
novels they engender in their agony."
"So far as I can see," he proceeded, "what happens is very similar to a
thing a scientific chap was explaining to me the other day. There are
some little beasts in the sea called ascidians, and they begin life as
cheerful little tadpole things, with waggling tails and big expressive
eyes. They move freely about hither and thither, and often travel vast
distances in an adventurous way. Then what he called metamorphosis
begins. The little tadpole waggles his way to a rock and fixes himself
head downward. Then he undergoes the oddest changes, becomes indeed a
mere vegetative excrescence on the stone, secretes a lot of tough muck
round himself, and is altogether lost to free oceanic society. He
loses the cheerful tail, loses most of his brain, loses his bright
expressive eye."
"The bother of it," said I, "is that very often the wandering
expressive eye is not lost in the human metamorphosis."
"Putting it in another way, one might say that the kind of story that
Ovid is so fond of describing, the affairs of Daphne and Io, for
instance, are fables of the same thing: an interlude of sentiment and
then a change into something new and domesticated, rooted, fixed, and
bounded in."
"It is certainly always a settling down," said I.
"I don't like this idea of settling down, George." He shuddered. "It
must be a dreadful thing to go about always with a house on your mind."
"You get used to it. And, besides, you don't go about so much."
He gave the bachelor wart hog a parting dig, and we walked slowly and
silently through the zebra-house towards the elephants. "Of course we
do not intend to settle down," he said presently, with a clumsy effort
to render his previous remarks impersonal.
"A marriage invalidates all promises," I explained. "The law
recognises this in the case of wills."
"That's a new view," he said, evidently uncomfortable about something.
"It follows from your doctrine of metamorphosis. A marries B. Then
the great change begins. A gradually alters into a new fixed form, C,
while B flattens and broadens out as D. It is a different couple, and
they cannot reasonably be held responsible for the vagaries of A and B."
"That ought to be better understood."
"It would perhaps be as well. Before marriage Edwin vows to devote his
life to Angelina, and Angelina vows she will devote her life to Edwin.
After marriage this leads to confusion if they continue to believe such
promises. Marriage certainly has that odd effect on the memory. You
remember Angelina's promises and forget your own, and _vice versa_."
"There is no apparition more distressing than the ghost of a dead
promise," said my uncle. "Especially when it is raised in the house of
your friends."
We passed through the elephant house in silence.
"I wonder what kind of man I shall be after the change, George. It's
all a toss-up," he continued, after an interval. "I have seen some men
improved by it. You, for instance. You were a mere useless, indecent
aspirant to genius before the thing came upon you. Now you are a
respectable journalist and gracefully anxious to give satisfaction to
your editor. But my own impression is that a man has to be a bit of an
ass before he can be improved by marriage. Most men get so mercenary,
they simply work and do nothing a rational creature should. They are
like the male ants that shed their wings after the nuptial flight. And
their wives go round talking fashion articles, and calling them dear
old stupids, and flirting over teacups with the unmarried men, or
writing novelettes about the child-man, and living their own lives.
I've been an unmarried man and I know all about it. Every intelligent
woman now seems to want to live her own life when she is not engaged in
taking the child-man out into polite society, and trying to wean him
from alcohol and tobacco. However, this scarcely applies to me."
"Not now," I said. And he winced.
"I wonder how it feels. Most men go into this without knowing of the
change that hangs over them. But I am older. It would not be nice for
a caterpillar if he knew he was going to rip up all along his back in a
minute or so. Yet I could sympathise with such a caterpillar now.
Anyhow, George, I hope the change will be complete. I would not like
to undergo only a partial metamorphosis, and become a queer speckled
monster all spotted with bachelor habits. Yet I sometimes think I am
beyond the adolescent stage, and my habits rather deeply rooted.
Hitherto, I have always damned a little at braces and collars and
things like that. I wish I knew where one could pick up a few
admissible expletives. And I loaf about London all day sometimes
without any very clear idea of what I am after, telling chaps in
studios how to paint, and talking to leisurely barristers, and all that
kind of thing."
"_She_," I said, "will probably help you to conquer habits of that
sort."
"Yes, I dare say she will," said my uncle. "I forgot that for the
minute."
THE PAINS OF MARRIAGE
My uncle came to a stop outside a stationer's shop in Oxford-street.
When I saw what had caught his attention I reproached myself for my
thoughtlessness.
"Come," said I, "tell me what you think of--of representative
government."
"It's no good, George. You did the same thing at the cake shop. Do
you think I never saw the cake shop? Since this affair was settled I
think every shop I pass reminds me of it--even the gunsmith's. I never
suspected before how entirely retail trade turned on marriage--except,
perhaps, the second-hand book shops. The whole world seems a-marrying.
"It's queer," said he, "that a little while ago the thing that worried
me to the exclusion of everything else was the idea of being married,
and now it is so near it's entirely the getting married that upsets me.
I have forgotten the horrid consequences in the horror of the
operation."
"It's much the same," said I, "at an execution."
"Look at those cards." He waved his hand towards a neat array of
silver and white pasteboard. "'Jemima Smith,' with an arrow through
the Smith, and 'Podger' written above it, and on the opposite side 'Mr
and Mrs John Podger.' That is where it has me, George."
We went on past a display of electroplate with a card about presents in
the window, past a window full of white flowers, past a
carriage-builder's and a glove shop. "It's like death," said my uncle;
"it turns up everywhere and is just the same for everybody. In that
cake shop there were piles and piles of cakes, from little cakes ten
inches across up to cakes of three hundredweight or so; all just the
same rich, uneatable, greasy stuff, and with just the same white sugar
on the top of them. I suppose every day they pack off scores. It
makes one think of marrying in swarms, like the gnats. I catch myself
wondering sometimes if the run of people really are separate
individuals, or only a kind of replicas, without any tastes of their
own. There are people who would rather not marry than marry without
one of those cakes, George. To me it seems to be almost the most
asinine position a couple of adults can be in, to have to buy a stone
or so of that concentrated biliousness and cut it up, or procure other
people to cut it up, and send it round to other adults who would almost
as soon eat arsenic. And why cake--infantile cake? Why not biscuits,
or cigarettes, or chocolate? It seems to me to be playing the fool
with a solemn occasion."
"You see, it is the custom to have cake."
"Well, anyhow, I intend to break the custom."
"So did I, but I had it all the same."
My uncle looked at me.
"You see," said I, "when a woman says you must do this or that--must
have cake at a wedding, for instance--you must do it. It is not a case
for argument. It is a kind of privilege they have--the categorical
imperative. You will soon learn that."
Evidently the question was open. "But _why_ do they say you must?"
"Other women tell them to. They would despise any one dreadfully who
did not have a really big cake--from that shop."
"But why?"
"My dear uncle," said I, "you are going into matrimony. You do not
show a proper spirit."
"The cake," said my uncle, "is only a type. There is this trousseau
business again. Why should a woman who is going to marry require a
complete outfit of that sort? It seems to suggest--well, pre-nuptial
rags at least, George. Then the costume. Why should a sane healthy
woman be covered up in white gauze like the confectionery in a shop
window when the flies are about? And why----?"
He was going on in quite an aggressive tone. "There isn't a _why_," I
said, "for any of it." This sort of talk always irritates a married
man because it revives his own troubles. "It's just the rule. Surely,
if a wife is worth having she is worth being ridiculous for? You ought
to be jolly glad you don't have to wear a fool's cap and paint your
nose red. 'More precious than rubies'----"
"Don't," he said.
"It must be these tradesmen," he began bitterly after an interval.
"Some one must be responsible, and it's just their way. Do you know,
George, I sometimes fancy that they have hypnotised womankind into the
belief that all these uncomfortable things are absolutely necessary to
a valid marriage--just as they have persuaded the landlady class that
no house is complete without a big mirror over the fireplace and a
bulgy sideboard. There is a very strong flavour of mesmeric suggestion
about a woman's attitude towards these matters, considered in the light
of her customary common sense. Do you know, George, I really believe
there is a secret society of tradesmen, a kind of priesthood, who get
hold of our womenkind and muddle them up with all these fancies. It's
a sort of white magic. Have you ever been in a draper's shop, George?"
"Never," I said: "I always wait outside--among the dogs."
"Have you ever read a ladies' newspaper?"
"I didn't know," said I, "that there was any part to read. It's all
advertisements; all the articles are advertisements, all the
paragraphs, the stories, the answers to correspondents--everything."
"That's exactly what makes me think the tradesmen have hypnotised the
sex. It may be they do it in those drapers' dens. A man spots that
kind of thing at once and drops the paper. Women go on year after
year, simply worshipping a paper hoarding of that kind, and doing
patiently everything they are told to do therein. Anyhow, it is only
in this way that I can account for all these expensive miseries of
matrimony. I can't understand a woman in full possession of her
faculties deliberately exasperating the man she has to live with--I
suppose all men submit to it under protest--for these stale and
stereotyped antics. She _must_ be magnetised."
"They are not stale to her," I said.
"Mrs Harborough----" he began.
"Of course, a widow!--I forgot," I said. "But she seems so young, you
know."
"And putting aside the details," said my uncle, with a transient dash
of cheerfulness at my mistake; "I object to the publicity of the whole
thing. It's not nice. To bring the street arab into the affair, to
subject yourself to the impertinent congratulations and presents of
every aspirant to your intimacy, to be patted on the back in the local
newspapers as though you were going to do something clever. Confound
them! It's not their affair. And I'm too old to be a blushing
bridegroom. Then think, what am I to do, George, if that cad Hagshot
sends me a present?"
"It would be like him if he did," I said. "I fancy he will."
"I can't go and kick him," said my uncle.
"Declined with thanks," I suggested, "owing to pressure of other
matter."
"You are getting shoppy, George," said my uncle, in as near an approach
to a querulous tone as I have heard from him.
"You are getting married," I replied, with the complacency of one whose
troubles are over. "But it's a horrible nuisance, anyhow. Still, the
world grows wiser, and the burden is not quite so bad as it used to be.
A hundred years hence----"
"I'd be willing enough to wait," said my uncle; "but I'm not the only
party in this affair."
He was willing enough to wait, perhaps, but time was inexorable. Save
for one hurried interview, I did not see him again for a week, and then
it was before the altar. His garrulity had fallen from him like a
garment. He was preoccupied and a trifle bashful. He fumbled with the
ring. I felt almost as though he was my younger brother.
I stood by him to the end, and at last came the hour of parting. I
grasped his hand in silence: silently he mastered a becoming emotion.
And in silence he went from me unto the New Life.
A MISUNDERSTOOD ARTIST
The gentleman with the Jovian coiffure began to speak as the train
moved. "'Tis the utmost degradation of art," he said. He had
apparently fallen into conversation with his companion upon the
platform.
"I don't see it," said this companion, a prosperous-looking gentleman
with a gold watch-chain. "This art for art's sake--I don't believe in
it, I tell you. Art should have an aim. If it don't do you good, if
it ain't moral, I'd as soon not have it. What good is it? I believe
in Ruskin. I tell you----"
"_Bah_!" said the gentleman in the corner, with almost explosive
violence. He fired it like a big gun across the path of the incipient
argument, and slew the prosperous-looking gentleman at once. He met
our eyes, as we turned to him, with a complacent smile on his large
white, clean-shaven face. He was a corpulent person, dressed in black,
and with something of the quality of a second-hand bishop in his
appearance. The demolished owner of the watch-chain made some
beginnings of a posthumous speech.
"_Bah_!" said the gentleman in the corner, with even more force than
before, and so finished him.
"These people will never understand," he said, after a momentary pause,
addressing the gentleman with the Jovian coiffure, and indicating the
remains of the prosperous gentleman by a wave of a large white hand.
"Why do you argue? Art is ever for the few."
"I did not argue," said the gentleman with the hair. "I was
interrupted."
The owner of the watch-chain, who had been sitting struggling with his
breath, now began to sob out his indignation. "What do you _mean_,
sir? Saying _Bah_! sir, when I am talking----"
The gentleman with the large face held up a soothing hand. "Peace,
peace," he said. "I did not interrupt you. I annihilated you. Why
did you presume to talk to artists about art? Go away, or I shall have
to say Bah! again. Go and have a fit. Leave us--two rare souls who
may not meet again--to our talking."
"Did you ever see such abominable _rudeness_, sir?" said the gentleman
with the watch-chain, appealing to me. There were tears in his eyes.
At the same time the young man with the aureole made some remark to the
corpulent gentleman that I failed to catch.
"These artists," said I, "are unaccountable, irresponsible. You
must----"
"Take it from whence it comes," said the insulted one, very loudly, and
bitterly glaring at his opponent. But the two artists were conversing
serenely. I felt the undignified quality of our conversation. "Have
you seen _Punch_?" said I, thrusting it into his hand.
He looked at the paper for a moment in a puzzled way; then understood,
thanked me, and began to read with a thunderous scowl, every now and
then shooting murderous glances at his antagonist in the opposite
corner, or coughing in an aggressive manner.
"You do your best," the gentleman with the long hair was saying; "and
they say, 'What is it for?' 'It is for itself,' you say. Like the
stars."
"But these people," said the stout gentleman, "think the stars were
made to set their clocks by. They lack the magnanimity to drop the
personal reference. A friend, a _confrere_, saw a party of these
horrible Extension people at Rome before that exquisite Venus of
Titian. 'And now, Mr Something-or-other,' said one of the young
ladies, addressing the pedagogue in command, 'what is _this_ to teach
us?'"
"I have had the same experience," said the young gentleman with the
hair. "A man sent to me only a week ago to ask what my sonnet 'The
Scarlet Thread' _meant_?"
The stout person shook his head as though such things passed all belief.
"Gur-r-r-r," said the gentleman with _Punch_, and scraped with his foot
on the floor of the carriage.
"I gave him answer," said the poet, "'Twas a sonnet; not a symbol."
"Precisely," said the stout gentleman.
"'Tis the fate of all art to be misunderstood. I am always grossly
misunderstood--by every one. They call me fantastic, whereas I am but
inevitably new; indecent, because I am unfettered by mere trivial
personal restrictions; unwholesome."
"It is what they say to me. They are always trying to pull me to
earth. 'Is it wholesome?' they say; 'nutritious?' I say to them, 'I
do not know. I am an artist. I do not care. It is beautiful.'"
"You rhyme?" said the poet.
"No. My work is--more plastic. I cook."
For a moment, perhaps, the poet was disconcerted. "A noble art," he
said, recovering.
"The noblest," said the cook. "But sorely misunderstood; degraded to
utilitarian ends; tested by impossible standards. I have been
seriously asked to render oily food palatable to a delicate patient.
Seriously!"
"He said, 'Bah!' Bah! to _me_!" mumbled the defunct gentleman with
_Punch_, apparently addressing the cartoon. "A cook! Good _Lord_!"
"I resigned. 'Cookery,' I said, 'is an art. I am not a fattener of
human cattle. Think: Is it Art to write a book with an object, to
paint a picture for strategy?' 'Are we,' I said, 'in the sixties or
the nineties? Here, in your kitchen, I am inspired with beautiful
dinners, and I produce them. It is your place to gather together, from
this place one, and from that, one, the few precious souls who can
appreciate that rare and wonderful thing, a dinner, graceful,
harmonious, exquisite, perfect.' And he argued I must study his
guests!"
"No artist is of any worth," said the poet, "who primarily studies what
the public needs."
"As I told him. But the next man was worse--hygienic. While with this
creature I read Poe for the first time, and I was singularly fascinated
by some of his grotesques. I tried--it was an altogether new
development, I believe, in culinary art--the Bizarre. I made some
curious arrangements in pork and strawberries, with a sauce containing
beer. Quite by accident I mentioned my design to him on the evening of
the festival. All the Philistine was aroused in him. 'It will ruin my
digestion.' 'My friend,' I said, 'I am not your doctor; I have nothing
to do with your digestion. Only here is a beautiful Japanese thing, a
quaint, queer, almost eerie dinner, that is in my humble opinion worth
many digestions. You may take it or leave it, but 'tis the last dinner
I cook for you.' ... I knew I was wasted upon him.
"Then I produced some Nocturnes in imitation of Mr Whistler, with
mushrooms, truffles, grilled meat, pickled walnuts, black pudding,
French plums, porter--a dinner in soft velvety black, eaten in a
starlight of small scattered candles. That, too, led to a resignation:
Art will ever demand its martyrs."
The poet made sympathetic noises.
"Always. The awful many will never understand. Their conception of my
skill is altogether on a level with their conceptions of music, of
literature, of painting. For wall decorations they love autotypes; for
literature, harmless volumes of twaddle that leave no vivid impressions
on the mind; for dinners, harmless dishes that are forgotten as they
are eaten. _My_ dinners stick in the memory. I cannot study these
people--my genius is all too imperative. If I needed a flavour of
almonds and had nothing else to hand, I would use prussic acid. Do
right, I say, as your art instinct commands, and take no heed of the
consequences. Our function is to make the beautiful gastronomic thing,
not to pander to gluttony, not to be the Jesuits of hygiene. My
friend, you should see some of my compositions. At home I have books
and books in manuscript, Symphonies, Picnics, Fantasies, _Etudes_..."
The train was now entering Clapham Junction. The gentleman with the
gold watch-chain returned my _Punch_. "A cook," he said in a whisper;
"just a common cook!" He lifted his eyebrows and shook his head at me,
and proceeded to extricate himself and his umbrella from the carriage.
"Out of a situation too!" he said--a little louder--as I prepared to
follow him.
"Mere dripping!" said the artist in cookery, with a regal wave of the
hand.
Had I felt sure I was included, I should of course have resented the
phrase.
THE MAN WITH A NOSE
"I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire, and Dives that lived
in purple, for there he is in his robes, burning, burning."
"My nose has been the curse of my life."
The other man started.
They had not spoken before. They were sitting, one at either end, on
that seat on the stony summit of Primrose Hill which looks towards
Regent's Park. It was night. The paths on the slope below were dotted
out by yellow lamps; the Albert-road was a line of faintly luminous
pale green--the tint of gaslight seen among trees; beyond, the park lay
black and mysterious, and still further, a yellow mist beneath and a
coppery hue in the sky above marked the blaze of the Marylebone
thoroughfares. The nearer houses in the Albert-terrace loomed large
and black, their blackness pierced irregularly by luminous windows.
Above, starlight.