Petunia Again
SKETCHES
BY
S. ELIZABETH JACKSON
A book is very like a kite, being made of paper and
sent out at a venture.
_G. K. Chesterton._
ADELAIDE
G. HASSELL & SON
1920
TO
MY GRANDFATHER
J.T.C.
_The little girl that was me_: “I’ve nothing to read in the train.”
_My grandfather_: “And you won’t need anything. There will be things to
see and people to listen to.”
PREFACE.
“At Petunia” was received so kindly that I venture to offer these
final sketches. The little township on the plains is now for me only a
happy memory. Unlike their predecessors, most of the present sketches
and essays have appeared before, either in _Orion_, _The Adelaide
University Magazine_, _The Red Cross Record_, or _The Woman’s Record_,
which I have to thank for allowing me to re-publish.
S.E.J.
Woodside,
10th November, 1920.
CONTENTS
Petunia Again
Page
Welcome 1
The Backblocks 3
The Aeroplane 5
From the Chinese 8
Adopting Emily 10
Twocott 13
A Country Writer 14
The Hypnotist 23
Tin Lizzie 24
The Show 26
The Haircut 28
Scipio 29
Bill Boundy 31
An Angry Man 33
Alcibiades 36
News 37
Amusing Daisy 39
Obiit 41
The Drought 41
The Works of Simple Simon, LL.D.,
D.Litt., Ph.D., M.B., B.S.
An Emendation 44
A Protest 46
A “Lancet” Article 48
An Application of Psychology to Medicine 50
Our National Bulletin 52
Nigger 60
Miscellaneous
The Queen City of the South 62
A Literature in the Making 68
Petunia Again
Welcome
Such a week as we have had in the country! You talk about the stopping
of the cars giving people a welcome rest in the evenings. Well, we have
no cars to stop, and only three trains a week, and still we can manage
eleven social engagements in six days! Three of them were welcomes to
soldiers. Seventy-eight went away from this district, and every time
one returns (and that is very often now, thank God!) all the houses
along the route from the railway station are decorated with flags. I
expect that sometimes he wonders why people who take the trouble to
decorate in his honour do not come out to wave. When he gets to the
Institute he knows, because we are all there waiting to cheer and make
speeches. Nothing about our boys has been finer than the courtesy with
which they take our cheers and let us say “Thank you.” It relieves
us, but oh, how it embarrasses them! They redden, but they smile,
and are far from looking foolish when they “get up to reply.” The
speeches aren’t always very easy to reply to, either, because what
we call courage and duty-doing they think just a matter of course.
Perhaps nothing more to the point has ever been said to them than this
spontaneous outburst in one speech:—“By Jo, we are glad to see you.”
It was worth all the rest about gallantry, and endurance, and honour,
and so on. We thought all that, too, but just then what was delighting
us was to see them. We had missed them, and now they were back and
we would meet them in our daily lives again. And next morning their
mothers would wake up happy because George and Clem were safe back,
actually in the house in their own room at that moment!
Well, besides these official (and yet quite informal) welcomes there
was also a large private party where another soldier, welcomed some
time before, was to dance and talk with his friends, and there was also
a Butterfly Fair, because now the war is over we simply must have a
piano for the Sunday School Kindergarten. And there was the Red Cross
meeting, and a Home Mission meeting, and the literary society, and
choir practice, and a Band of Hope concert, and, of course, football on
Saturday, for most of our players are coming back again now, though
there are some we shall never see.
The Backblocks
Too many town people are prepared to talk as though “the outbacks” were
anywhere beyond a 20-mile radius of the G.P.O. When you are really in
the backblocks you turn the washing machine for your hostess, make
complicated arrangements for keeping the ants out of the sugar, help
“separate,” cut out some jumpers for the children on the newest town
pattern, and take your afternoon ride on the poison-cart attending to
bunny. Once or twice a week you go into the township for the mail. You
bath frugally because all the water is caught off the roof or in the
dam, and you empty the tub on to what garden there is, for none can be
wasted.
I pity all healthy women who never have a chance to go sometimes where
life, though not easy, is simple and self-contained and wholesome,
where the work cannot be delegated to the baker or the small goods
man or the dressmaker just because the weather is hot or you don’t
feel up to the mark. Without this you cannot feel all the joy of being
thoroughly essential to your family—nor its occasional terror. Only
very fine women can live such a life properly, though. You have to
find your happiness and your amusement in the life itself, not in some
artificial amusement patched on for the moment. You have to find it in
permanent and ultimate things, in love and work and effort and hope and
helpfulness, not in “The Pictures” or a variety show.
I don’t pretend not to enjoy a variety show myself when I’m in town,
and I don’t pretend that Petunia is in the backblocks, but it is in
the country, and I am quite sure that country life is as enjoyable as
a town one, though not every one feels it. Anyone can take a pill, but
not all can make one, nor even pick out the ingredients from a lot of
herbs and drugs presented to them.
I suppose that is the trouble with Joyce Wickhams. She has gone to work
in town so that she can go to the Pav. and Henley Beach on band nights
as often as she likes. I hope she will miss feeding the swill to the
grunting, shoving, greedy pigs, miss the leisurely cows, miss the glow
of health that you feel—without thinking about it—as you canter out for
them. And Saturday’s tennis is never quite so nice in town as it is in
the country, where you know everyone on the courts very well, are going
to sing with most of them at the concert in March, and went with them
to the working bee at the school last week. We shall miss Joyce. She
was the best housemaid we’ve ever had in our dialogues, and the most
popular waitress at tea meetings. Of course she will laugh a great deal
at Charlie Chaplin, and the town entertainments will be very clever,
but the fun that is made for you doesn’t make so much of your mind and
heart laugh as the fun that you help make yourself.
The Aeroplane
The excitement continues. We’ve had rain and we’ve seen the aeroplane!
In fact they came together. On Sunday it was given out in the churches
that between 10 and 11 on Monday, Capt. Butler would fly over Petunia
and drop Peace Loan literature. Farmers immediately decided that one
morning off couldn’t make much difference to a bad season, and mothers
and daughters exchanged glances in which the washing was postponed.
When the school mistress had it announced in the Twocott chapel that
there would be no lessons next morning, the children’s flushed faces
were as good as cheers. Even the Hobbledehoy, who had seen the great
sight in town, of course, was not so blasé as he pretended.
On Monday motors and traps and waggons poured into Petunia through
driving wind and rain. Pedestrians with umbrellas struggled against
the blast. I don’t quite know what we expected. Perhaps we thought
the aeroplane would only be visible from the main street, or that it
would land there, or that the literature would, and in any case, we
all wanted to take our excitement in company. We lined up for shelter
in the lee of shops and houses. Opinions differed. Some thought the
Institute the best site, some the post-office, and some plumped for
the vicinity of the Recreation Ground, as affording a clear view and a
suitable place for an airman to descend (or drop out) after a spiral or
a nose-dive.
The Postmaster suggested that the weather might be too ... but we shut
him up for a croaker, and poddled about exchanging anticipations and
chaffing young Jones, who was “look-out” to report the arrival to the
expectant school. A stockman drifted in with a herd of yearlings, and
we watched him zig-zag them resignedly past the groups of traps and
people. Wet ruts gleamed in some fitful sunshine along the straight
road stretching between green paddocks into the moist distance. There
came an unexpected sound overhead, and the school children burst along
the street with decorous hilarity. Something we had seen in pictures
emerged from the grey and glided overhead, and into the distant grey
again, “like a spoggy in the sky,” as young Allen poetically observed.
It was in sight for quite four minutes.
Half an hour later we were fairly certain that there were to be no
nose-dives, no spirals, not even any literature. We snubbed the
Postmaster, and closed in on the Institute, where the chairman of the
district tried to focus our attention on the Peace Loan, and make us
feel we had not come out for nothing. Then laughing people turned their
collars up round their ears, climbed into buggies, and shook the reins.
“Gid-dup.”
From the Chinese
A few people despise poetry; many more speak respectfully of it only
because they think they ought to, not because they, personally,
understand it or even appreciate it. Of course, it is quite easy to
enjoy a poem without understanding its technique, its rhyme, rhythm,
and so on, or without being able to say in what, apart from the form,
it differs from prose. “Can’t you _feel_ it?” is often the sufficient
answer, in the words of a certain professor of classics.
The following fragment from the Chinese makes us feel that it is
poetry, though the translator cannot convey to us the poetic form of
the original.
PO CHU-I STARTS ON A JOURNEY EARLY IN THE MORNING.
Washed by the rain, dust and grime are laid;
Skirting the river, the road’s course is flat.
The moon has risen on the last remnants of night;
The traveller’s speed profits by the early cold.
In the great silence I whisper a faint song;
In the black darkness are bred sombre thoughts.
On the lotus-banks hovers a dewy breeze;
Through the rice furrows trickles a singing stream.
At the noise of our bells a sleeping dog stirs;
At the sight of our torches a roosting bird wakes.
Dawn glimmers through the shapes of misty trees....
For ten miles, till day at last breaks.
“More than a thousand years have elapsed since that journey,” says the
_Times_ reviewer, “and nobody knows the words of that ‘faint song,’ or
the nature of those ‘sombre thoughts,’ but we are just as intimately
acquainted with Po Chu-I as if he had enlarged by the page on his
emotional complexities.... Chinese poetry aims to induce a mood rather
than to state a thought.... Po Chu-I’s sorrows and joys and placid
reveries hover in the mind after the book is closed, and that—and not
the number of startling remarks made—is the test of a poem’s value.”
To-day or a thousand years ago, China or Australia, it is all the same.
You and I have made journeys like that, and can share the poet’s mood.
We have arisen early and crept about by lantern-light, we have let
ourselves out on to a road that lies white under a cold moon, and have
thrilled and hasted in the chill air. The first solemn joy gave place
to gloom as the heralding darkness enveloped the world. And then we
felt the dawn-breeze among the gum trees, and heard the creek rustle
through the water-cress. A dog barked, a bird peeped, and the first
pink cloud floated in the brightening sky. And then the world woke up,
the magpies and the farmyards and the pumping engine, and we were glad
that we were afoot and off, and a little proud about it.
And a thousand years ago an old, old Chinaman sang our mood for us,
and lo! it was poetry. And because we have felt it all for ourselves,
though we did not know how to tell about it, what he says plays on our
minds like music, and we live the mood again.
Adopting Emily
“Seen that fine tabby in the woodhouse?” enquired Joshua.
“She’s got a beautiful white chest,” agreed Hob, “and that loose skin
and soft fur like old M’Glusky.”
“And a pink nose,” said Daisy.
“And her eyes are amber. Do let’s adopt her,” said I.
“Yes, let’s,” chorused the others—all except Marjorie, who prefers
mousetraps, and says that where one or two cats are gathered together,
or something, there is always an awful noise. However, we determined to
have that tabby.
Have you ever tried to adopt a duchess? A duchess in reduced
circumstances? Then you don’t know what we have been through with
Emily. (We call her Emily after Miss Fox-Seton, the “large, placid
creature, kind rather than intelligent,” who became Marchioness in one
of Mrs. Hodgson Burnett’s books.) Emily is a cat of character. She
didn’t want to be adopted. She didn’t mind renting our woodheap, but
preferred not to have to meet the family. She would keep herself to
herself, thank you. She used to sit, serene and dignified, blinking in
a sunbeam among the roots, lifting her white bosom and gently kneading
the ground. If you offered her food she seemed to put up her lorgnettes
at you, and it wasn’t any good leaving the saucer and going round the
corner. When you came back Emily was gone, and the food wasn’t.
She certainly impressed us. We built up all sorts of legends around
her. Her disdain for food and her calm refusal either to accept
our advances, to withdraw from her place, or to be seen hurrying
at any time, seemed so very aristocratic. And then how she kept up
appearances! Marjorie scarcely took the same view as the rest of us,
especially after Emily so haughtily snubbed the milk she had offered
herself. She said she didn’t believe she was a duchess at all; more of
a peroxide barmaid about Emily, if you asked her, a minx with a bust
who put on airs. And a few nights later she said she wouldn’t have cats
encouraged about the place. She said she believed Emily was the cause
of that jazz party on the lawn in the moonlight.
Emily jazz! Never!
“Adopting Emily” became the favourite diversion of our leisure. In the
end it was very mortifying, very mortifying indeed. We were all sitting
on our heels round the woodheap coaxing Emily, and Emily as usual
was barely tolerating our presence, too proud to withdraw, when Mr.
Wickhams came across the paddocks to borrow another axe.
“Well, I’m blowed!” said he; “so this is where our old cat goes. She’s
only been home for meals since the wife turned her out of the hat-box.”
Yes, what we took for dignity was sulks, and her aristocratic
superiority to food was due, to put it bluntly, to a full stomach. Mr.
Wickhams handsomely forgave us for trying to abduct his best mouser as
he stretched a long arm into the wood and hauled her off by the scruff
of the neck. Such an indignity for Emily.
Twocott
Driving out to Buxton on Wednesday afternoon, I picked up little Jennie
Elliott walking home from Twocott.
“Do you go to school already?” I exclaimed.
“Oh, I’ve been going a long time—ever since Christmas. We got a nice
teacher. She is always good to us—unless she can’t help it; and we are
always good to her, unless _we_ can’t help it.” Dear understanding
little mite. “All of us are in the second grade nearly.” “All of us”
have now learnt to sing, and Jennie is always out early—unless she is
kept in.
She held on tightly to the side of the dog-cart and looked about the
country while she prattled out the gossip of the school from the point
of view of a six-year-old, and I felt a swelling of gratitude to the
wonderful teacher who keeps eight grades busy and happy and proud of
themselves, and convinced that she is proud of them, too! “All of us”
have a very nice time at Twocott, and are learning to be considerate
and tolerant and self-controlled, as well as the more formal lessons,
and all taught by a mere woman who understands the art of discipline
without a stick.
A Country Writer
A writer in _The Times Literary Supplement_ complains of the dearth
of good novels of country life. The modern author, he asserts, claps
the story on to any county, irrespective of the spirit of the place.
He takes a tourist’s trip to Cornwall or Yorkshire, and makes a book
out of it, though his dialogue was never heard on land or sea, flowers
bloom together whose seasons never met, and his pitiful town thinness
of mind is visible alike in what he sees and in what he fails to see.
Against these degenerate moderns the letter sets Richard Doddridge
Blackmore, and regrets that all his novels but one are neglected by an
undiscriminating or too hasty generation.
Now it is the virtue of country libraries that, though only the
feeblest of modern novels may find a way there, the best of the old
linger on their shelves long after they have been ejected from more
pretentious places. And so, while this letter was still fresh in my
mind, in our Institute at Petunia, rubbing sides with volumes by Mrs.
Gaskell and Miss Braddon, I came across “Cripps the Carrier,” whose
title page proclaimed it to be “by the author of Lorna Doone.” I took
it home, despite my doubt, as I eyed its yellow pages and heavy print,
that I should pay with yawns for my virtuosity.
And then on the very first page I met Dobbin, “the best harse as ever
looked through a bridle.”
“Every ‘talented’ man must think, whenever he walks beside a horse,
of the superior talents of the horse ... the power of blowing (which
no man hath in a comely and decorous form); and last, not least, the
final blessing of terminating decorously in a tail.... Scarcely any man
stops to think of the many cares that weigh upon the back of an honest
horse. Dobbin knew all this, but was too much of a horse to dwell
on it. He kept his tongue well under his bit, his eyes in sagacious
blinkers, and sturdily up the hill he stepped, while Cripps, his
master, trudged beside him.”
At the second page I was smiling outright, and knew that not a word of
this book would I knowingly skip.
Such is the quality of the writing that not only do we learn to know
Zacchary Cripps and his brother Tickus (christened after the third
book of the “Pentachook,” as they called his sixth brother), his horse
Dobbin, and Mary Hookham, “as he was a tarnin’ over in his mind,”
together with Squire Oglander, Lawyer—or “Liar”—Sharp, as Zac addressed
him, “wishing to put all things legal,” Miranda his wife, and Kit his
son, as well as or better than we know our neighbours, but we are all
the time falling in love with that sly rogue, that mellow scholar, that
lover of a horse and a pretty girl, Richard Doddridge Blackmore. Here
is a man who knows and loves and smiles over the rustic mind and life,
as he knows and loves the trees, the hedges, the ruts, the sunlight,
and the frosts, and all the ways of Nature. He is leisurely, and you
must be leisurely with him. You must stop to see what he sees, and
accompany all his friends on their goings out and comings in, smiling
and enjoying with him. He cares more for the telling than for the
story; he knows, like Louis Stevenson, that “to travel hopefully is
better than to arrive.”
Oxford and Oxfordshire are the scenes of the story, and we hear more
of town than gown, and more of Beckley than either. If the precise
critic ask whether it be a novel of character or of place or of plot,
the precise critic is a fool. There is the country, with its lanes and
hedges and changing seasons, and there are the people who carried and
delved and gossiped and wondered, sympathized with the trials of their
“betters,” and did their duty by parish church and parish “public,”
“same as Christians ought to.” And if you put it squarely to Squire (or
Parson?) Blackmore: “Come, now, you don’t expect me to believe that
Lawyer Sharp actually ... eh?” he will vouchsafe such a Philistine not
so much as a wink in reply, though you may catch a quizzical twinkle at
a generation too bald-minded to enjoy a hop field because the blossom
must be held up on poles.
Blackmore, like Shakespeare, knows every turn of the bucolic’s slow,
sturdy, tortuous mind; he loved his pauses, the dawning of perception,
his easy missing of the point, his superstitions, and his common sense.
Read this (it comes in that passage where the escaping Grace Oglander
appeals to the Carrier to shelter her from pursuit in his van):
“But missy, poor missy,” Cripps stammered out, drawing on his heart for
every word, “you was buried on the seventh day of January, in the year
of our Lord 1838; three pickaxes was broken over digging your grave
by reason of the frosty weather, and all of us come to your funeral!
Do ’ee go back, miss, that’s a dear! The churchyard to Beckley is a
comfortable place, and this here wood no place for a Christian.”
And he can paint the brisk homely maids as well as the gaping
tongue-tied men.
“Now, sir, if you please. You must—you must,” cried Mary Hookham, his
best maid, trotting in with her thumbs turned back from a right hot
dish, and her lips up as if she were longing to kiss him, to let out
her feelings.... “Sir, if you please, you must ate a bit.... ‘Take
on,’ as my mother has often said, ‘take on as you must, if your heart
is right, when the hand of the Lord is upon you; but never take off
with your victuals.’... All of us has our own troubles,” said Mary,
“but these here pickles is wonderful.”
In the affectionate malice of the misadventures into which is plunged
Hardenow, that earnest, scholarly Tractarian, there is all the fun of
a man who is teasing a beloved and misguided friend. The muscles he is
so proud of shall be laughed at, into brambles he shall plunge, and
lose his hat and tear his neckcloth into ribbons; in a pig-net shall
he be caught, and his athletic legs having struck terror into the mind
of Rabbit John, bound with thongs shall he be, and left in an empty
pig-stye, the very parlour of pig-styes (“on the floor, where he had
the best of it, for odour ever rises”), there to continue his fast for
many hours. Pity him not overmuch; “his accustomed stomach but thinks
it Friday come again!”
Aye, Blackmore knew man, and maid, and beast—even pig. Lying in this
plight, Hardenow sees:
“... a loose board, lifted every now and then by the unringed snout
of a very good old sow. Pure curiosity was her motive, and no evil
appetite, as her eyes might tell. She had never seen a fellow and a
tutor of a college rolling, as she herself longed to do; and yet in
a comparatively clumsy way. She grunted deep disapprovement of his
movements, and was vexed that her instructions were so entirely thrown
away.”
Here is a picture of a little child, seen through his hole by the
distracted tutor:
“A little child toddled to the wicket gate and laid fat arms against
it, and laboured, with impatient grunts, to push it open.... He gazed
with his whole might at this little peg of a body, in the distance
toppling forward, and throwing out behind the whole weight of its great
efforts.... This little peg, now in battle with the gate, was a solid
Peg in earnest; a fine little Cripps, about five years old, as firm as
if just turned out of a churn. She was backward in speech, as all the
little Crippses are; and she rather stared forth her ideas than spoke
them. But still, let her once get a settlement concerning a thing that
must be done to carry out her own ideas, and in her face it might be
seen, once for all, that stop she never would till her own self had
done it....
“Taught by adversity (the gate had banged her chubby knees, etc.)
she did thus: Against the gatepost she settled her most substantial
availability, and exerted it, and spared not. Therewith she raised one
solid leg, and spread the naked foot thereof, while her lips were firm
as any toe of all the lot, against the vile thing that had knocked
her about, and the power that was contradicting her. Nothing could
withstand this fixed resolution of one of the far more resolute moiety
of humanity. With a creak of surrender the gate gave back; and out came
little Peggy Cripps, with a broad face glowing with triumph.”
I have told you of Dobbin; I suppose I mustn’t detain you to hear
about Lawyer Sharp’s horse? “A better disposed horse was never
foaled; and possibly none—setting Dobbin aside, as the premier and
quite unapproachable type—who took a clearer view of his duties to
the provider of corn, hay, and straw, and was more ready to face and
undergo all proper responsibilities.... He cannot fairly be blamed,
and not a pound should be deducted from his warrantable value, simply
because he did what any other young horse in the world would have
thought to be right. He stared all round to ask what was coming next,
he tugged on the bridle, with his fore feet out, as a leverage against
injustice, and his hind legs spread wide apart, like a merry thought,
ready to hop anywhere.” Later he made for Oxford, “where he thought of
his oat sieve smelling sweetly, and nice little nibbles at his clover
hay, and the comfortable soothing of his creased places by a man who
would sing a tune to him.”
One of the charms of the book is that it will make you a nuisance to
your family; there are so many pictures that you simply must read them,
so many phrases they must taste with you, and everything that you
do quote seems to be capped and improved upon by something a little
further on, and you simply must venture it.
Not a thing does he miss, from ruts (oh, that pæan on ruts! “Everything
here was favourable to the very finest growth of ruts. The road had
once been made, which is a necessary condition of any masterpiece of
rut work; it had then been left to maintain itself, which encourages
wholesome development....”) to the effects of a hard frost, the borings
of the Sirex Gigas, and the tufted undergrad. who tools the “Flying
Dutchman” up the streets of Oxford. And nothing would we have him miss.
How can I let my dear friend Richard Blackmore, with his chuckling
gossip about Worth Oglander and Grace, Cripps, and the rustics of
Oxford and Beckley, fade out of memory on Petunia shelves?
The Hypnotist
The Round of Gaiety continues. We have just lived through a Sunday
School anniversary (with tea meeting), a visit from _the_ hypnotist,
and the Show.
The Hobbledehoy (latterly known as Hob) wrote that his father must go
to the hypnotic entertainment. He had been with some of the boys from
College, and the sight of a respectable schoolmaster under the delusion
that he was assisting at a dogfight left him without words to express
his joy. On hearing that our new man, Fat Bill Boundy, who has the face
of a natural comedian, meant to submit himself for experiment, Joshua
decided that a little amusement would cheer Marjorie up, and of course
he accompanied her.
Admission turned out to be 2s. 4d. and 3s. 6d.
“But the advertisement said ‘Popular Prices,’” protested Joshua.
“That’s right,” agreed the ticket man, smoothly, “popular with the
entertainer.”
Joshua says that this was the only joke of the evening. Bill Boundy
went up on to the platform all right, but the Great Man only made him
twiddle his fingers and roll his eyes. He said that on this occasion
he was “mesmerizing but not hypnotizing.” Joshua sat up half the night
with Jack’s Reference Book and the Encyclopædia Britannica, trying to
find out the difference. It appears that it consists in the size of the
town in which the performance is given.
Tin Lizzie
Our minister bought a “Tin Lizzie”—at least, I’m afraid he passed it
off with the old, old joke, “We’ll have a Ford now, and a motor after
the war.” But Tin Lizzie worked harder than any horse, and our minister
was well satisfied—except when he forgot to water her, or crank her, or
in some way misunderstood her internal organs; and then he called her
“The Pesky Thing,” and even went so far as to say—I mean, of course, to
_think_—“Dash it.”
But a time came when the Pesky Thing had to be cleaned, and
oiled, and crawled over, and squirmed under, and taken to pieces,
and—and—sermonized over. And our minister was a persevering man, and
so were his friends; and they talked and thought and read motors, and
captured the local mechanic and a passing amateur and an expert; and
finally they got her to go—a little way. Wherefore on Saturday night
the minister went to bed happy.
But all the same he had a dream, a nightmare, a hair-raising,
heart-stopping nightmare. He dreamed that he was _walking_ to church
when he noticed his boots—and they were his motor-cleaning boots,
scraped on the heels and worn at the toes and cracked all over. But he
was not dismayed; the pulpit would hide them.
And yet a little way, and lo, he had on his head the cap, the
greasy, poacher’s cap that protected his clerical hairs from the
motor-drippings.
“But I can pocket my cap,” this imperturbable man comforted himself.
And yet a little further, and it was his coat, his shapeless, sagging,
grimy motor-coat.... And now he really was put out, for, as he foresaw,
“I shall have on those trousers in a few minutes!”
And when at last he got to church the sense of doom was upon him, and
when he gave out the hymn the organ was out of order.
And they took it to pieces, and cleaned it, and oiled it, and climbed
over it and crawled under it....
“Now I see that all things work together for good,” dreamed our
minister (he was ever an optimist), “_for I’ve got the right togs on
for the job_.”
The Show
During the strike our railway supported only three trains a week; for
the Show it surpassed itself and ran three on one day, or, rather, two
and a dog-box. But they were all full, and I do think the crowd enjoyed
itself, or at any rate Marjorie’s prize cake and cream puffs, which
were carried off surreptitiously. Joshua says that the judging was
very unsatisfactory. His two-tooth did not get a prize. Marjorie, on
the other hand, considers that in the cooking and dairy sections the
most exemplary fairness was shown.
In the general excitement of meeting Pete Wigglesby, whom we haven’t
seen for years, Joshua gave his order for a milking machine, although
the drought has set in again. Marjorie wishes he would want to show off
to some other old friend, and order a new house. “One without cement
floors, and with no step down into the kitchen,” she says, plaintively.
“And with a bathroom,” puts in Hob.
Peterborough Show comes next, and I fancy our men will mob it. For one
thing, it is such a good opportunity to get their hair cut. You see, we
are short of barbers in Petunia, and any excursions are eagerly seized.
When the District Schools Picnic was held at Glenelg there were queues
outside the hairdressers there till late in the afternoon, and it was
considered that the managers of our fair made a great _coup_ when they
ran a saloon as a sideshow. By the end of the evening Dicky Conlon
was getting to be quite an expert hair-cutter. There was a little
disturbance when Joe Wickhams saw himself in the glass, but Constable
Merritt knocked the razor out of his hand and pulled him off Dicky.
After that it was all right, because some one had the presence of mind
to take away the mirror.
The Haircut
Joshua couldn’t go to Peterborough Show after all, and his hair was
awful. Marjorie “could not foresee to what lengths it would go,” and
advised him to wear it in curling-pins. Joshua begged her to try what
she could do with a basin, and finally persuaded her to take a comb and
scissors and “put the reaper into the crop.” Of course, the machine had
to go over it several times, but at last only the stubble remained. She
had some difficulty in getting the furrows on one side to meet those on
the other, but finally the terrace effect was complete. Windy corner,
where the roads meet on top, was a difficult point to negotiate, and
Vimy Ridge took some levelling. The razor-work was particularly fine,
and Joshua deserves the V.C. Marjorie was rather dashed by her failure
to sell him a bottle of hair-restorer; she urged that it might help
check the growth.
Scipio
Daisy is still after a pet whose usefulness she can justify as a
potential mouse-catcher, but our disappointment with the Duchess has
made us humbler and more discreet. This time we asked a neighbour for
the gift of his apparently superfluous black kitten.
“’Taint mine,” said he; “it belongs to my old Nosey. She had it in the
haystack, and I have never been able to catch it to drown it. If you
can get it you can have it.”
“We shan’t find any difficulty with Scipio,” exulted the Hobbledehoy,
home for “month out,” “because no one has been feeding him.”
“Scipio?” I asked.
“The black kitten,” he explained. “What they used to call the little
niggers. Good name for a gutter-snipe.”
Well, we certainly have no difficulty in getting Scipio into the
neighbourhood of nourishment. He (and Nosey his mother, and Miss
Perkins his aunt, and the Yellow Peril from up the road) will scud
across two paddocks at the sound of our call. At twenty paces, however,
Scipio becomes coy. He rubs himself ingratiatingly against his mother,
he sniffs towards the food, but won’t be wheedled. He may daringly
sneak up within six feet to snatch a piece of meat, but he runs off
again growling and sticks a paw on it, and turns his eyes towards us,
flattening his ears while he eats. By the exercise of great patience
and by throwing bits of meat at lessening distances he has even learned
to snatch the meat from Daisy’s hand, to eat it without moving far,
to—no, not to be stroked! At the first touch on his fur he darts to
the gate, brings up, turns round, a little ashamed of his fright as
he hears Daisy’s cooing voice—or, perhaps, still a little hungry!—and
stands ready for flight, his tail gallantly up, though, and twitching
his muscles confidingly, so that the fur ripples up and down his back
in the sunlight. He fixes us with his blue eyes, that are already
turning green at the edges, starts forward, checks—and that is as far
as we can get with the adopting of Scipio. Poor little gutter-snipe!
We shall never tame him. He can’t believe in human kindness. The only
love he trusts is the warm touch of his mother, and she will cast him
off soon, and his kittenhood will be over. Scipio will live as he can
on pickings from rubbish heaps and mice in the haystacks and birds in
the hedge. But it is Daisy who will be unhappy about it, not Scipio!
Luckily, cats are not introspective.
Bill Boundy
Have I told you about our Bill Boundy? I have a rooted conviction that
for a good many people music is simply a noise that they hope will soon
stop. The reason why people will hardly ever confess to being unmusical
is probably Shakespeare’s unfortunate remark:
“The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”
To me it seems very hard that people should be under a cloud simply
because of some defect in their organs of Corti, or some other part of
the physical apparatus for hearing the exquisiteness of tune in sound.
However, Bill Boundy is undoubtedly musical. He could lean against the
wall all day listening to Hob practising. “It makes the skin of my head
run tight,” he says, ecstatically and in apology, when Joshua motions
him stablewards.
Bill is a treasure. I hope Joshua will never sack him irrevocably. He
had “a week home to Munta” for Christmas, and is simply bursting with
conversation. Most of his anecdotes turn upon his mother, a salty old
Cornishwoman. She is a pensioner, but quite properly expects as much
courtesy from the officials as if she were any other member of the
public.
“I be waiting, my son,” was her gentle reminder through the post office
window to the negligent back of “some young Jack-a-napes.” The new
clerk took no notice.
“Didn’t ’ee hear, son? I be standing.”
“No son of yours,” snapped the sensitive youth.
“Must be somebody’s son,” urged the old lady, calmly, “unless ’ee come
out of incubator.”
Jack-in-Office is now quite briskly attentive to Bill Boundy’s mother.
Bill is filled with admiration and a little malice because John Thomas
Trellagan’s boy has just qualified as a doctor.
“Fair set up about it, John Tummas be. ‘Rayther young, John,’ says I.
‘Shouldn’t like him monkeying with my innards, ’a believe.’ ‘Aw,’ says
John Tummas, a terrible obliging man, ‘they only practise on quite
young children at first, ’a believe.’”
Joshua says Bill is “an ingratiating beggar.” Relations were strained
because Bill hadn’t got the milking machine clean in time, but while
they speeded up Bill wheedled Joshua into a good temper. He told him
another story of John Tummas Trellagan’s boy. He has had his first
maternity case. The mother and child are in a bad way, says Bill, but
Clarence still hopes to save the father.
Bill always knows all that goes on in the township. Now that paper and
string cost so much those who forget to take a cloth for their bread
have to pay a halfpenny extra. Bill was there when the butcher took
his revenge by charging the baker’s little messenger for the paper he
wrapped the dog’s meat in. Thank goodness, everyone in Petunia can take
a joke.
An Angry Man
I had chosen “Mary Barton” because Mrs. Gaskell wrote it, and “Joan
and Peter” because no blue stocking with a care for her reputation
can afford to admit ignorance of whatever book happens to be Wells’s
penultimate, (or at any rate ante-penultimate), and I felt that I
deserved some champagne after this solid-looking fare. I looked round
the shelves gloomily, despairing of finding anything frivolous
in the scanty stock from which in Petunia we draw for our week’s
entertainment. “Pickwick Papers”—delightful, but too old a friend.
“Three Men in a Boat”—also past its first youth. “Galahad Jones”—the
very best of its kind, but then we only returned it last week.
“Fatima”—um-m. Well, it had the plain cover of a self-respecting
publisher; good print, plenty of conversation, titled folk, a yacht. It
sounded frivolous enough. I took it.
I do not regret my choice, though my pleasure was scarcely due to
the writer. There is no need to tell you the story. It was about a
French-Arabian young lady dressed in a burnous (yes!) and coins, who
married a tuberculous Scotch peer, and fell out with a deep-dyed
villain (also of the peerage), and loved a doctor, the Bayard of his
profession and the saintliest scientist who ever fell into the devilish
hands of Arabian bandits agitating (apparently) for the eight hour day,
only to be rescued by the lady in the burnous. No, the fun was not in
the story, entertaining as its author’s luxurious enjoyment of herself
undoubtedly was; the fun was entirely due to reading in the wake of an
angry man with a pencil, who took the whole thing seriously.
He began on the first page. “A baronet would not be called ‘Lord,’”
he reproves mildly. You could see his feeling; purely irritation with
the printers. But as the story progressed it became clear that it was
not the compositor who was at fault. “The authoress evidently does not
understand titles,” he snarls. “Earl Harben would not be referred to as
‘Lord Eric.’” He slashes his pencil through “the Lady Eric,” and bang
goes “her grace.” Fury nearly obliterates the “gh” in “straightened
circumstances.” Next he reasons with the misguided person who has been
adjudged worthy of the dignity of print (my own idea is that a doting
husband paid for the whole thing himself). “Not a burgomaster _and_
a maire,” he pleads; “not in the same town. One is German, the other
French.” Other anomalies he passes with a mere flick of the pencil,
an exasperated sniff, as it were. I stuck to the yarn solely for the
pleasure of savouring his hot fury, his cold despair, his pleading, his
rage.
“The Presbyterians”—the infuriated man nearly dug through the page—“do
not pray for the dead.”
And then came the (for me) sad page whereafter comment ceased. He had
pounced on an exotic phrase.
“Pure Yankee!” he exclaims, triumphantly, and all is forgiven. I parted
from him with sorrow.
His conclusion was wrong, of course, as I could prove if I met him. No
one ought to accuse an American woman of not understanding the British
peerage!
Alcibiades
The pet problem is solved! A chum has presented Hob with a small black
pup, and, as Hob found to his disgust that even Prefects can’t keep
dogs at school, he brought him home at the Michaelmas holidays.
“What is his name?” demanded Daisy.
“The Dam Dog,” replied Hob.
“What!” ejaculated Marjorie.
“The Dam Dog. Oh, it’s all right, mother. It means ‘dog that washes in
a dam.’ D.A.M., you know.”
“Thank you, Hob. I know you go to college, but I can spell ‘dam’
myself—both ways. You must find some other name for your dog.”
The little fellow kept us all awake the night Hob left, and Joshua
remarked in the morning that he thought Marjorie might now be more
willing to let the name stand. However, Hob wrote to say that he had
decided upon Alcibiades.
This time it was Joshua who put his foot down. He said that, if ever
the time should come (which he doubted) when the dog was useful
with sheep he was not going to make a fool of himself by shouting
“Alcibiades.”
So now “his name is Alcibiades,” as Daisy explains, “but we call him
Peter.”
Peter is a lovable little chap. He barks, prances, pounces, worries,
with all the energy possible to a little barrel-shaped body that
has only just ceased to wobble when it walks. Yesterday the
police-constable called with news of our missing cow. Peter took the
opportunity to bite his trousers and pull his boot laces, and then
rolled over and over in an ecstacy of self-importance.
News
Don’t apologize for sending “no news, only views, blended with a cold
in the head.” I never can see why letters should be newsy.
“There is nothing to write about; I am not doing anything,” people say.
But if they are not doing they are thinking, and our thoughts are often
more interesting to our friends than events, which very likely have
little connection with ourselves at all. I’ve an idea that the best
correspondents, like the best essay writers, are the egoists.
I am not one of the best letter-writers, however. In fact, I feel
distinctly newsy. There is always something going on in Petunia. For
instance, some more of our boys have returned from the war. We were
pleased! A turkey was dressed in honour of one, and then the date of
arrival was several times postponed. The problem of problems is—how
long will a turkey keep even in (home-made) cold storage this weather?
Any little unusual smell was greeted anxiously with, “I hope that isn’t
the turkey!”
Twocott gave a strawberry fête and magic lantern in honour of its
soldiers, only the strawberries didn’t come, and the lantern was
missing. Still, the evening was a great success; there was so much more
time to talk and play.
But the policeman’s wife has had the most excitement. Her husband was
away, and she was awakened by strange noises. At first she thought
it was smothered laughter, and then she thought it was curses (not
smothered); presently there was a crash and a groan. In the shadow of
the lane opposite a writhing mass of men bore something stealthily
into the darkness. Our policeman’s wife is a heroine. She resolved not
to desert the children, and buried her head in the bedclothes. In the
morning Mrs. Odgers, coming over to borrow some dripping, was full of
the kindness of the men who had moved the piano into her new house on
their way home from the political meeting at Buxton.
Amusing Daisy
I do wish all girls took a course of home nursing. I’ve been nursing
Daisy with one hand and reading up the subject with the other, so to
speak. I can now sponge the patient with almost no exertion to her and
without letting her get cold, at least, not very; and I can change the
sheets without moving her from the bed. When Daisy gets better perhaps
Marjorie or Joshua will give me a turn, just so that I can perfect my
art. Daisy liked the cap I wore to protect my hair; it decided her
to be a nurse herself some day. But the best subject for amusing the
restless little soul was Peter—well, then, Alcibiades. I told Joshua
about the beautiful echo that would reverberate “over the downs” if he
called “Alcibiades,” but he said life was too short for elocutionary
exercises while you round up sheep. “You mean your temper is too
short,” observed Marjorie very justly.
Of course, I couldn’t have Peter in the room catching scarlatina and
spreading infection, but Daisy was never tired of hearing about him. We
country people don’t keep our animals in the Zoo and visit them once a
year. They are part of our life, and we talk about them accordingly.
Dobbin, now—but I suppose I mustn’t? Well, well, to return to Peter.
Sometimes he would stand on a bench under the window and put his paws
on the sill, eagerly looking in with his bright black eyes, his ears
pricked, his ecstatic tail hopefully suggesting a walk. And then bones.
He loves bones, nice old gamey ones, disinterred with excitement and
later buried again with earnest care. The ambition of his heart is
to gnaw them inside. He prances in proudly, tail up, head up, bone
on one side, and then at the reprimand, the transparent bubble of
his innocence pricked, he turns round (laughing, doubtless, at his
discomfiture), and makes for his mat—when he doesn’t defy you from
under the table. And to see him tugging at an apron-string, legs set,
eyes bulging!
“What else does he do?” enquires Daisy solemnly. I can’t think of
anything else, and I say lamely:
“Well, once he barked at a beetle.”
Obiit
Peter is dead.
Daisy is inconsolable. He was such an engaging little fellow.
He was the only dog that Marjorie ever allowed inside.
He is buried under the apple tree where he used to forage so busily for
bones.
The Drought
Last birthday Hob got a rather special penknife. This disposed him to
be generous with his third and oldest.
“If I give you this,” he meditated to little Allen from next door, “I
suppose you will cut yourself with it?”
“I wouldn’t,” protested Allen. Hob gave it to him. Last week when Daisy
and I were going to the library Allen came prancing up to us.
“I’ve got a cut finger,” he exclaimed, triumphantly. Then, suddenly
remembering, “But I didn’t do it with Hob’s knife.” He danced backward
on his toes so as to face us as we walked on.
“I’ve been to town,” offered Daisy.
“See the aererplane? See the Cave? See Father Christmas?” he demanded.
“Yes,” bragged Daisy.
“I ain’t,” said Allen, wistfully.
And the harvest is so scanty that Father Christmas will have to be
very frugal if he is to come at all to the homes of some working men.
Petunia looks very sad, bare and brown and dusty. The sparrows hop
about with parched open beaks, waiting their turn when the tap drips,
and on Sundays the dejected draught horses stand about in the trampled
dust while the hot wind soughs through the stunted shrubs, and the sun
blazes on bare paddocks, and shimmers on the iron roofs. In winter it
is different. The light shines clearly on gay green crops and whitens
the curving blades, and the horses mosey companionably along the
roadsides, nibbling the grass, twitching humorous nostrils, gambolling
clumsily and shaking their bell-bottomed pasterns, screaming with
laughter when sportively bitten by a friend. Oh, man and beast love
Petunia in winter! But droughts really ought not to be allowed. It is
moving to think of ill-fed cattle and disheartened workers.
“Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go,”
writes Browning. In the good seasons I find this advice inspiring. When
the rebuff begins it seems less so. And when one thinks of the returned
soldiers who are only getting three bushels to the acre (not even
enough for seed!) one remembers with tears that it is easier to die for
a country than to live for it. “Beginning again” after the years at
the war takes resolution and courage, the willingness to take risks,
and the patience not to take them hastily, that are as true tests of
manhood as any they had abroad.
The Works of Simple Simon, LL.D., D.Litt., Ph.D., M.B., B.S.
An Emendation
Amid the welter of possible misprints in such writers as Shakespeare,
Shelley, and Coleridge, one obvious correction would appear to have
been overlooked.
“Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?
I’ve been to London to look at the Queen.
Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse under her chair.”
So runs one of the earliest-known (to me) and best-loved poems.