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Title: General Impressions
Author: Delafield, E. M.
   [Dashwood, Edme Elizabeth Monica, ne de la Pasture]
   (1890-1943)
Date of first publication: 1933
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Macmillan, 1933
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 11 September 2011
Date last updated: 11 September 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #852

This ebook was produced by:
Barbara Watson, woodie4, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






  GENERAL IMPRESSIONS



  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

  LONDON  BOMBAY  CALCUTTA  MADRAS
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

  NEW YORK  BOSTON  CHICAGO
  DALLAS  ATLANTA  SAN FRANCISCO

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  OF CANADA, LIMITED

  TORONTO



  GENERAL IMPRESSIONS

  BY
  E. M. DELAFIELD


  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

  1933



  COPYRIGHT


  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
  BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH



  THIS BOOK
  IS
  AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
  TO
  JEAN RAVEN-HILL



  My thanks are due to the Editor of _Time and Tide_ for permission to
  reprint these sketches.

  E. M. DELAFIELD



  CONTENTS


                                          PAGE
  GENERAL IMPRESSIONS                        1
  MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN IN FICTION       67
  HOME LIFE RELAYED                        119
  STUDIES IN EVERYDAY LIFE                 141
  LOOKING AT THE CLASSICS                  165
  THE SINCEREST FORM                       177
  WHEN I'M ALLOWED TO BE                   223




                          GENERAL IMPRESSIONS


        GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A COUNTRY-TOWN HOUSE-AGENT'S OFFICE

General Impression, derived from photographs and bills plastering every
wall and window within sight, that most of the houses in the
neighbourhood are to be Sold, and the remainder to be Let, giving rise
to intelligent speculations as to the consequent whereabouts of the
previous tenants.

     AN EARNEST LADY. You see, what we're looking for is a _Home_.
     Something not too _large_, and yet not too _small_, and with a
     good _garden_, but not too much for one man to manage, and of
     course a garage, and my husband would _like_ an orchard.

     THE CLERK. Quite so, madam. Have you inspected "Lauderdale" or
     "Fleet Mount"?

     THE E. L. (consulting an exhausted-looking piece of paper
     covered with pencil notes). Let me see, "Lauderdale" was the
     one with the _gas_ laid on, and we wanted electric light, and
     anyway the bathroom was downstairs. I'm afraid that's no good.
     And isn't "Fleet Mount" a house that faces the wrong way?

     THE CLERK (with an air of astonishment). The _wrong_ way,
     madam? Hardly that, I think. Perhaps it doesn't face exactly
     the way your _present_ residence faces, and that may have
     confused you, if I may say so?

General Impression that he has accurately gauged the extent to which his
client is the victim of a not uncommon feminine inability to Understand
the Points of the Compass, as she murmurs something vague about her
Husband Liking the Windows to Look South or Something, and then changes
the subject.

     AN ASTUTE PERSON (who has insisted upon seeing the Head of the
     Business). Now those houses in Cleveland Road, for instance--I
     suppose I should have to pay a pretty high rent for one of
     _them_?

     H. OF THE B. Well, sir, of course they're extremely difficult
     to get hold of. I assure you that I could let every one of them
     that passes through my hands a dozen times over. You see
     they're new houses, with every labour-saving device and modern
     convenience, standing high on gravel soil, facing south,
     adjoining the golf-course, and in an excellent residential
     neighbourhood.

     THE A. P. Ah. Not much hope then.

     H. OF THE B. I wouldn't say _that_, sir. Of course, there's a
     waiting list for them--especially for rent, unfurnished--but I
     should be pleased to see what we can do for you, if I may have
     the particulars. I can't _promise_ anything, the demand for
     unfurnished houses being what it is, but we could bear your
     requirements in mind.

     THE A. P. Well, I'm very glad to hear what you tell me because,
     as a matter of _fact_, I'm the _owner_ of a house in Cleveland
     Road--No. 20--and from what you say, I imagine that you'll have
     no difficulty whatever in getting me a really good let.

General Impression that the A. P. has scored heavily, which is, however,
dispersed after a few tense moments during which the H. of the B.
recovers from the shock of his client's duplicity.

     H. OF THE B. Of course, you must bear in mind, sir, that I'm
     talking of six months _ago_. Things were _very_ different,
     then. You don't need me to tell you _that_, sir, I feel sure.
     _Very_ different, they were, six months ago. We shall be
     delighted to take down your particulars, and do what we can for
     you, of course. But now let me see--No. 20--that's the _wrong_
     side of the road, isn't it, sir?

General Impression that the H. of the B. has rallied gamely, and may now
be confidently backed to win.

     A DEAR OLD LADY (in the Outer Office). Thank you so much for
     sending that young man to show me over Babberley Castle. _Most_
     interesting, I'm sure, especially the _dungeons_. And I should
     like an order to view The Court, please.

     THE CLERK. The Court is a good deal smaller than Babberley,
     madam, if that's any objection?

     D. OLD L. Oh, not the least, thank you. I don't really want to
     _buy_ a house, you know, but my daughter in India may be coming
     home next spring, and I thought in case she wanted to settle
     anywhere in the country, with the children, you know, it would
     be so nice--though really, I think she likes _London_ best....

General Impression that the Clerk is doomed to hear the whole of her
family history sooner or later, and may just as well make up his mind to
it at once.


                 GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A HOUSE REMOVAL

Unspeakably depressing General Impression of innumerable sheets of
newspaper spread, apparently at random, over carpetless floors and
naked-looking staircases, and pallid walls on which appear sudden
irregular squares and oblongs of un-faded colour hitherto concealed by
pictures and furniture.

Every floor and ceiling liable to shake suddenly and violently beneath
the tread of what appears to be a herd of wild buffaloes, but is in
reality The Men. These, in altogether phenomenal Boots, and green baize
aprons, finally resolve themselves into three: the Foreman, Bill, and
Old Baker, none of whom ever utters a syllable in anything below a
shout.

     THE FOREMAN. Ease her up, Bill--ease her up.

     BILL (with frightful abruptness). Hi! look _out_!

     THE F. Careful, there! Now then--_Up_ she goes!

General Impression that the Grand Piano must somehow have become wedged
on the back stairs.

Subsequent anti-climax when Bill appears, carrying a towel-horse and two
tin candlesticks.

     BILL. _Now_ we shan't be long! What about that Blue Ware in
     Bedroom No. Five?

The less reputable articles of the Blue Ware from Bedroom No. Five are
thereupon escorted down the front stairs, and through the front hall, by
Old Baker, progress being broken not infrequently whilst he exchanges
mysterious and fragmentary shouts with the Foreman upstairs, during
which intervals the Blue Ware reposes conspicuously at his feet.

     OLD BAKER. All through, up there?

     THE F. The Gent's Mahog. isn't down yet.

     OLD B. (thoughtfully). Ar.

     THE LADY OF THE HOUSE (who deals with the situation by keeping
     her hat on, and drinking a Hot Cup of Tea in the Hall instead
     of having lunch in the ordinary way). Directly the Last Van is
     full, I think we'd better _leave_. We can lock up the Back, and
     perhaps you'll see to the Front, and leave the keys at the
     lodge.

     OLD B. We haven't come to _Keys_ yet, mum--not by a very long
     way.

     THE L. OF THE H. I thought this was the last load?

     OLD B. (at the top of his voice). Bill, I say, is this the Last
     Load?

     BILL (also at the top of his voice). Eh?

     OLD B. (surpassing himself in vocal effort). This the LAST
     LOAD, the lady wants to know.

     BILL. Ar, I couldn't hardly say, as to that. That's as it may
     be. Rain's coming down, too.

General Impression that this last catastrophe has probably thrown out
the whole thing, and that although The Beds have Gone, we may have to
Stay On Another Night after all.

     THE COOK (suddenly appearing out of chaos). I'm sorry to say I
     can't find _Pussy_, madam. I'm afraid the Men's Boots may have
     frightened him.

     MORE OR LESS EVERYBODY. Puss ... Puss ... Pussy. Where are you,
     puss?

Answer comes there none. General Impression that Pussy is going to take
his revenge on the Men's Boots by hanging up proceedings as long as
possible.

       *       *       *       *       *

_At the Other End._

General Impression that the unloading of the Vans is being done on a
curious system that leads to the immediate appearance of a
rocking-horse, a quantity of flower-vases, hundreds of Drawers divorced
from their Tables, one broken chair, five Bedside Tables, and the total
inaccessibility of everything else.

     THE FOREMAN. The Ash is coming out now, sir. Where would you
     like it _put_?

     THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE. Is that the Large Wardrobe?

     THE F. The ash _suite_, sir--that has the crack in the panel,
     and the leg of one chair broke.

General Impression that he is wisely introducing the mention of these
calamities at a moment when they will pass comparatively unperceived.

     THE LADY OF THE HOUSE. I don't see the China Cabinet, anywhere.
     If we could get at the China Cabinet, I do believe we should
     have _all_ the Drawing-room things _in_ the Drawing-room.

     OLD BAKER (encouragingly). That's right, mum. All the heavy
     stuff is in the drawing-room. There's only the _carpet_ to come
     now.

     THE COOK. If you please, madam, me and Sarah are very sorry,
     but we think we'd better tell you at once as we don't intend to
     _stay_. We don't feel the house is likely to suit us, either of
     us....

     THE CAT (unexpectedly appearing between the Foreman's feet just
     as he is lifting up a roll of carpet that apparently weighs
     five ton and measures sixty feet long, and which will be
     disposed of on the top of the drawing-room furniture, instead
     of underneath it). MIAOW!


                      GENERAL IMPRESSION OF THE ZOO

General Impression that Whatever we want to look at is a very long way
from where we are now, and if only we could see a keeper, he might
direct us--but when we do, and he does, it's all rather vague and
complicated, and there are so many things on the way to distract our
attention, that we can't remember if he said Past the Monkey-house and
right round to the left of the Smaller Mammals, or Through the Tunnel,
and just behind the Kangaroos.

     AN UNCLE. And now, Peter, here are the lions at last.

     PETER. They're not so _large_ as I thought they'd be.

     THE U. (raising his voice for the benefit of adjacent
     strangers). You'd think them large enough, my boy, if you'd
     been with me in _Africa_, never knowing whether one was going
     to spring up from behind a rock and make a _rush_ for you. I
     remember once, when I was out----

     PETER. But I _know_ that story, Uncle. I wish you'd tell me one
     about _pirates_, instead.

_In the Monkey-house._

     A PERSON WITH A SMATTERING OF SCIENCE. Well, I must say, it
     does make you see what Darwin _meant_, doesn't it?

     HIS COMPANION (austerely). I can't say I care about Darwin,
     myself.

Unescapable General Impression, as the Blue-bottomed Ape dawns upon the
view, that this is a not altogether unreasonable prejudice.

     THE PERSON WITH THE S. OF S. You may not _care_ about it, ole
     man, but what I say is, you can't get away from the Proven
     Facts. You and me may act like civilized beings now, but there
     _was_ a time when we looked exactly like these little fellows
     here, and _behaved_ like them too.

     THE C. (with finality). Not in _my_ case, there wasn't.

       *       *       *       *       *

_In the Parrot-house._

     THE PARROTS (in dissonant chorus). Squawk--wauk--_wauk_!

     A SIGHT-SEER WITH A GRASP OF THE OBVIOUS. Noisy in here, isn't
     it?

       *       *       *       *       *

_On the Mappin Terraces._

     AUNTIE (who is giving a treat to a collection of small nephews
     and nieces). Those are the _Bears_. Stand well back, dear,
     there's nothing to prevent their jumping right over the ditch,
     as far as I can see, to the very spot we're standing on....
     Better take Auntie's hand, Willie, in case you're frightened.
     Joan, I wouldn't go up there, dear, or you may fall over and
     break your neck. Keep together, chicks, and don't lose sight of
     Auntie whatever you do. There's many a poor child got lost in
     the Zoo through lagging behind, and never been heard of again.

     WILLIE (green with alarm). And what _happened_ to them, Auntie?
     Did the lions get them?

     AUNTIE (absentmindedly, but anxious to please the child). I
     expect so, dear.

       *       *       *       *       *

_Outside the Pigmy Hippo's Cage._

     AN ENTHUSIASTIC LADY. Oh, what a little _darling_! Isn't he
     _too_ sweet? But where's his mother? Surely he's too young to
     be taken away from his mother?

     A KEEPER (sardonically). She'll be brought in to say
     _good-night_ to him, madam, a little later on.

       *       *       *       *       *

_In the Aquarium._

     AN EXACTING SIGHT-SEER. Fancy! they haven't got a whale. You'd
     think they'd have a whale, wouldn't you? I always thought they
     had _every_ animal at the Zoo.

     ANOTHER SPECTATOR (in front of the Electric Eel). Did you ever
     see anything _like_ that? It doesn't seem like an animal, does
     it? I mean the way it's made, and that. How they ever think
     _up_ the things, is what beats me.

     HER FRIEND (slightly dazed by staring through glass and water
     at a succession of utterly improbable creatures). I wouldn't
     like to have the job of sorting them all out, I know that.

       *       *       *       *       *

Recrudescence of Auntie and her troop, most of whom are now in tears;
and all of them in an advanced state of exhaustion.

     AUNTIE (more in sorrow than in anger). And all I can say, Joan,
     is that if this is the way you behave when you're taken for
     such a lovely treat, you'd better stay outside while the rest
     of us go and look at the snakes. There's one of them sixteen
     feet long, and one touch of its fang is poison--and deadly
     poison, too....

General Impression that the thought of missing this fascinating sight
will prove only less agonizing than the prospect of beholding it.

     AUNTIE. And what about the buns for the elephants, now?

Answer comes there none.

Painful General Impression gradually gains ground, that the Buns have
been eaten by Willie and Co.

Scene closes in as this distressing discovery dawns upon Auntie, who is
by this time far too worn out by two hours of solid walking to endure it
with equanimity.


                 GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A TENNIS PARTY

First, practically invariable, General Impression that with any Luck the
Rain will Keep off till Later. Second General Impression that It's only
Spitting, third General Impression that This isn't going to be Anything
Much, or, alternatively, that The Harder it comes down at _first_, the
sooner it'll be over.

Dramatic appearance of a young player in a sleeveless frock, with a
green shade over her eyes.

     AN ONLOOKER. My dear, _look_ at Helen Wills!

     A WIT ON THE COURT. Hall_o_, is this Helen Wills?

     A FRIEND OF THE Y. P.'S. My dear, you look exactly like _Helen
     Wills_!

     A NEW ONLOOKER (aside). Do tell me who that is. Does she think
     she's Helen Wills, or what?

General Impression that this highly original comparison will continue to
be made, throughout the afternoon, by more or less everybody present.

As, indeed, happens; varied only by an occasional murmur about Suzanne,
alternatively referred to as Longlong, Lenglenn, and Lang_lan_.


_Just Before a Sett._

     A YOUNG GENTLEMAN IN FLANNELS THAT APPARENTLY REQUIRE PERPETUAL
     HITCHING, TO A YOUNG LADY IN MAUVE STRIPES. I'm afraid I'm
     fearfully rotten.

     THE MAUVE STRIPES. Oh, I'm putrid.

     On the Other Side of the Net, a BANDANNA HANDKERCHIEF is
     remarking to a WHITE WASHING SILK that he is Absolutely the
     World's Rabbit. To which the W. W. S. returns:

     Oh, so'm I, never hit a ball in my _life_, except sometimes
     into the net.

After which encouraging preliminaries they settle down to a perfectly
good game.


_Just After a Sett._

     A HOSTESS. Now let me see--who hasn't played? Will _you_ play,
     and _you_, and--let me see--you haven't played at all yet, have
     you, Margery?

     MARGERY (with two racquets, a bandeau, and all the appearance
     of being a tournament champion). Oh, I'm _quite_ happy looking
     on. In fact, I really would _rather_. What about Mrs. Jones?

     MRS. J. (quite obviously blue with cold from prolonged sitting
     still). Oh no, no, really not. I'm so dreadfully bad--do play
     instead of me. I'll play later, if I may, when everyone else
     has had a turn.

     GENERAL CHORUS. Oh, do play instead of me ... do let me look on
     for a little while ... yes, really, I'd so _much_ rather....
     (Until one longs to know why any of them have troubled to bring
     racquets or shoes at _all_, if the only thing they really want
     to do is to sit still and look on....)

     THE HOSTESS (after seven or eight minutes of this contest in
     unselfishness). Then, Mrs. Brown, if _you'll_ play with Captain
     Jones, and Mrs. Jones with the Rector, I think that ought to be
     _quite_ a good sett.

General Impression that she does not really think this, nor indeed does
anybody else, but has merely selected, in despair, the four people whose
resistance is most nearly worn down.

MRS. BROWN    }
MRS. JONES    } I'm afraid you'll find me _frightfully_
CAPTAIN JONES }  feeble, partner.
THE RECTOR    }

Or words to that effect, as they hasten on to the court, which has been
empty for the last twenty minutes or so.

     A PLAYER WHO LIKES TO WIN. Send that girl as many back-handers
     as possible, partner--she simply hates them. And when you're
     serving to the Rector, I should pitch them rather _short_, if I
     were you--he can't get across the court very quickly.


_At Tea._

     THE MOTHER OF A DAUGHTER.... And as I said to her, it really is
     ridiculous to talk of not having enough to do down here, when
     there's tennis in the summer, and the Girl Guides, and any
     number of garden ftes and Jumble Sales and so on, going on
     practically the _whole_ time, besides the dances and things at
     Christmas....

General Impression that We'd better go out on to the lawn again,
perhaps, as they'll have finished that sett now--a movement encouraged
by the Hostess, who knows that a fresh supply of Plates and another
Kettle are waiting to be rushed on for the second instalment of Tea.

       *       *       *       *       *

Practically every Hostess in the Countryside: My dear, I can't _tell_
you what it's like, trying to get up a tennis party ... there are simply
NO MEN to be had.


           GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A LADIES' COMMITTEE MEETING

Regrettable, and not even original, simile relating to Parrot-house at
the Zoo--but this painful General Impression immediately dispersed when
the hour strikes and the chairwoman takes her seat, giving place to
admiration for such perfect punctuality.

     A MEMBER (rather defiantly, in an undertone). I suppose we can
     _smoke_? _Men_ always do. (Lights up.)

General Impression that this is a perfectly logical attitude. The
Smoking Member is supported by half a dozen others, and the atmosphere
would be even more masculine than it is, if so many of those present did
not produce little blue or pink or purple pocket-combs and make use of
them, carefully placing their hats on the table--where they become
inextricably entangled with Agendas and Memos and Things.

     THE CHAIRWOMAN. I will call upon the Secretary for the Minutes
     of the last meeting.... Oh, I think I'd better read them
     _myself_, if nobody minds, because poor Miss Kay has such a
     cold. Will that be all right?

General Impression that it will.

     A COUNTRY MEMBER (who has a little dog upon a chain concealed
     under the table--suddenly and sharply). Hush!

Tendency on the part of the whole Committee to look under the table and
exchange indulgent smiles.

_After some Discussion._

     AN EMPHATIC MEMBER. You see, what I feel so strongly is, that
     if we do anything of that kind, we're simply bringing discredit
     on the _Whole_ Movement, and _Ruining_ our own Cause. That's
     really all I mean.

General Impression that she could hardly have been expected to mean much
_more_.

     A DIFFIDENT MEMBER. I must say that I do, in a way, see the
     _point_ of what the last speaker has just said, although of
     course one knows so well that there's more than one _side_ to a
     question, so to speak. I mean to say, isn't there?

     THE CHAIR (not unreasonably). Are you speaking _for_ the
     Resolution, or _against_ it?

     THE DIFFIDENT MEMBER. I really don't feel we've fully thrashed
     it _out_ yet, quite, in a way.

     A MEMBER (who has an engagement elsewhere, suddenly and
     strongly). I move that the question be now _put_.

General Impression that this is worthy of the best masculine business
traditions.

     THE CHAIR. We want to consider our Leaflet, too, and especially
     that paragraph on page 2 about propaganda.

     A MEMBER (who, judging by appearances, is almost certainly a
     University Woman). There are no less than two split infinitives
     in that leaflet, and the whole thing ought to be rewritten.

A universal rustle indicates that the Split Infinitives are being
pursued by the other members of the Committee,--some of whom, alas, will
fail to recognize them when they do find them.


_After a Financial Statement._

     THE TREASURER. ... so that our balance in the Bank amounts at
     present to one hundred and six pounds fourteen shillings and
     eightpence.

     Subdued applause, quelled by the usual qualifying clause that
     invariably follows any announcement relating to any balance on
     the credit side.

     ... Out of which we actually have to pay office rent, fifty
     pounds, expenses of the Show, twenty-four pounds three
     shillings and tenpence, and to meet an account for wear and
     tear of office furniture in the past six months, amounting to
     four pounds two shillings and three halfpence.

General Impression that the more ingenious members of the Committee can
work out quite an interesting problem from the question: How, exactly,
is wear and tear to office furniture computed? And what, exactly, was
the three-halfpenny worth of damage?

     THE CHAIR. ... Then, if that meets your point, Mrs. Way, I
     think we can put it to the vote----

     A VOLUBLE MEMBER. Ah, but I think there, again, madam chairman----

A gradual depression descends upon the Meeting as the Voluble Member
goes on and on, and the hour of whatever meal is due draws nearer and
nearer. Even the little dog of the Country Member begins to fidget, and
is not, this time, requested to Hush!

     THE VOLUBLE MEMBER (at the close of a most eloquent speech).
     And that, really, is why I ask you to vote for this resolution.

Resolution voted for with entire unanimity and much pushing back of
chairs. General Impression prevails, however, that this mightn't have
been so, in spite of the Voluble Member's eloquence, if the session
hadn't been quite such a long one, and hadn't taken place on such very
uncomfortable chairs.


              GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A COUNTRY AUCTION-SALE

General Impression--founded on several printed Notices affixed in and
out of doors--that the Sale will begin in Room No. 1 at 2.30 Sharp.
Gradual waning of confidence as time passes and nothing at all happens.
By 3.15 the entrance to Room No. 1 is securely blocked by people.

     A RAUCOUS VOICE. The Auctioneer will now put up for sale the
     first Lots in Bedroom No. 8, _up_ the stairs. Please don't
     push. There isn't any call to _push_, I assure you.

Call or no call, pushing prevails, and presently some hundred people
more than it can reasonably accommodate are wedged into Bedroom No. 8.

The Auctioneer, wearing a tweed suit and a bowler hat, is standing like
a rock on a very high stool, and two men in aprons, with arms bared to
the elbow, are hovering solicitously near, as though to catch him if he
should later on overbalance into the crowd.

     THE A. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we want to get to business,
     and I warn you that I'm not going to 'Ang About. I've some very
     nice little lots here, and I don't intend _them_ to 'Ang About.
     The articles will go to the highest bidder, and once more I
     warn you, there'll be no 'Anging About. Here we have lot No. 1,
     Solid Deal Chest of Drawers, in excellent condition. Just lift
     up Lot No. 1, will you, Albert?

Lot No. 1 is heaved into sight, minus its drawers, by Albert and his
companion.

     A NAVE VOICE. Why, wherever is the drawers?

     THE A. Just lift up them drawers, will you, Albert, I want
     everything perfectly straightforward and above board. Pleasure,
     madam, I assure you.

General Impression that this amiable view is not shared by Albert and
Co.

     THE A. Now, who'll give me a start for this Solid Deal Chest of
     Drawers? This is good, pre-war stuff, this is----

     A VOICE IN THE CROWD. 'S matter of fac', I was with Old
     Williams when he _bought_ that chest, a matter of four and a
     half months since----

     THE A. Now then, gentlemen, please, now then, I shan't 'Ang
     About, what am I bid for this chest of drawers, I'll start
     anywhere you like, what shall I say, shall I say a pound, a
     pound am I bid, we won't 'Ang About, start at ten shillings, if
     you like, shall I say ten shillings....

     A TIMOROUS VOICE. Nine and sixpence.

     THE A. Thank _you_, sir, nine and sixpence, nine and sixpence
     am I bid, shall I make it ten shillings, come, come,
     gentlemen....

The Chest of Drawers gradually climbs up the scale of value till it
stops at three pounds two shillings and sixpence, and is knocked down at
that figure.

     THE A. Lot No. 2, Quantity of Books, one Enamel Slop-pail,
     Milking-stool, and Roll of Linoleum.

General Impression that it would be interesting to know on what system
these particular objects have been inseparably grouped together--which
becomes intensified later on when a further Lot appears, consisting of
Zinc Hip-bath, Framed Engraving of the Late Prince Consort, Quantity of
Felt Strips, and Mahogany Pedestal Cupboard in Good Condition.

_Downstairs._

     THE A. (now completely in the swing of it, and more determined
     than ever that there shall be no 'Anging About). Circular-top
     Marble Table, _as_ described in the catalogue--one pound am I
     bid one pound shall I call it a guinea thank you twenty-four
     and sixpence, thirty shillings, thirty-two and six, thirty-five
     shillings, it's against you at the door madam, thirty-seven
     six, forty am I bid....

And so on, apparently deriving information as to bids from the wink of
an eye or the turn of a head, until a General Impression gets about that
it isn't safe to stir a finger in his direction.

     AN OLD HAND. No use hoping to get anything really _good_ here,
     I don't expect, as the _Dealers_ have been poking about.
     They'll come anywhere on the chance of picking up some really
     _old_ stuff--_any_where.

     A FACETIOUS SPIRIT. Tell 'em to go for the Wool Mattress in Lot
     285, then. _That's_ old enough for anybody.

     A GENTLEMAN WHO HAS BEEN OUTBIDDEN. That fellow must have been
     a _dealer_, you know. That's what they do--they make a _Ring_,
     you know--simply a Ring--no one else has a chance.

General Impression that he doesn't really know what he means by this
mysterious accusation, but that anyway the Dealers are an unpopular
feature of the Sale, and They oughtn't really to be Allowed.

     A LADY WHO HAS RATHER LOST HER HEAD. O Charles, that sweet
     little stool! I really must have that. Couldn't I bid for it,
     Charles?

     THE A. (fixing her with a compelling eye). Oak Jacobean carved
     antique stool, now this is probably a collector's piece, shall
     I start at a pound, one pound, going at one pound, twenty-five
     shillings, thirty, thirty-two and sixpence--you'll lose it,
     madam, shall I make it two guineas--thank you--going at
     two guineas----

And so on, until the Lady has been hypnotized into acquiring the Stool
at something approaching five times its actual value, without so much as
noticing that it is, as usual, inexplicably coupled with One Aluminium
Frying-pan, two Waste-Paper Baskets, and one Child's Wicker Armchair,
with two castors missing.

Scene closes in, as Albert and his mate hold up to admiration an
American Parlour Harmonium and two China Mugs, leaving everybody in a
state of heat and exhaustion, except the indefatigable Auctioneer, still
repeating in a voice of cast-iron:

"Gentlemen, I'm not going to 'Ang About over this little lot, what shall
we say for a start?"--and so on until we do say something.


                     GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A BANK

First, perhaps rather unfortunate, General Impression distinctly
reminiscent of the _Zoo_, with a number of bored-looking animals
strongly confined behind a high grill. Second General Impression, also
reminiscent of the Zoo, that those behind the grill are completely
indifferent to the requirements of those on the other side.

Effect of colossal and business-like ink-wells, and handsome supply of
penholders laid along the counter.

     A CLIENT (needless to say, female). Oh--would you mind cashing
     this _crossed_ cheque for me, please--fourteen shillings and
     sixpence three-farthings? It seems an odd sum, in a way, but it
     just gets my balance _even_. I'm funny in that way, I'm afraid;
     I do like my balance to be an _even_ sum.

General Impression--(perhaps derived from the expression on the Head
Cashier's face as he meticulously counts out this remarkable sum?)--that
this is not the only way in which the client is "funny".

_In the Manager's Office._

     AN EARNEST YOUNG GENTLEMAN (who has asked for an interview, but
     does not appear to know how to get on with it). Perfectly
     marvellous weather, isn't it?

     THE MANAGER. Yes, indeed, Mr. Bates. Quite wonderful.

     MR. B. (unhappily). That's what I think. Wonderful.

     THE M. (encouragingly). I often think the British Climate is
     very much maligned.

     MR. B. Rather! Oh yes--_rather_.

General Impression that if he isn't helped, he will go on like this all
day.

     THE M. Anything I can have the pleasure of doing for you, Mr.
     Bates?

     MR. B. (starting in false astonishment). Oh yes--by Jove, I'm
     glad you reminded me--there _was_ a little matter--I--I think I
     had a letter from you, about my _overdraft_ or something----

     THE M. (disregarding Something as a mere puerility--which
     indeed it is). Would you like me to ascertain for you Exactly
     How Things Stand, Mr. Bates?

General Impression that they both of them know to a fraction Exactly How
Things Stand--or, more probably, do not Stand--but that amenities had
better be preserved.

_Later in the Day._

     A CONSCIENTIOUS YOUNG CLIENT. I just called because I wanted to
     explain about my account. You see, I'm afraid you'll think I'm
     overdrawn, and of course I am in a way--at least if the
     Gramophone Record People pay in my cheque at once, I am. But I
     thought I'd better tell you that _it'll be all right_, because
     it happens to be my birthday next week, and I always get a
     cheque for five pounds from my father, and if I send it to you
     _immediately_, that'll put me straight again. But _till_ then,
     I'm afraid I'm about one pound six shillings and a few pence, I
     don't know how many, overdrawn. If the Manager _says_ anything,
     will you explain to him, please?

     THE CASHIER. Certainly, madam.

General Impression that the Manager will, at all costs, be reassured on
this subject before there is any serious danger of the Bank closing
down. The Conscientious Young Client withdraws with effusive thanks, and
an air of relief.

     _In the Manager's Office once more_, Mr. Bates having departed
     in great disorder, and an Elderly Gentleman with a Bald Head
     having succeeded him.

     THE E. G. So you see it's a mere temporary
     accommodation--simply a matter of convenience.

     THE M. Quite, quite. Now in regard to _security_, Sir
     William....

General Impression that the crux of the matter has here been reached.

     THE E. G. (airily). Ah, yes. Well, _there_, to be perfectly
     candid with you, I find myself in a slightly anomalous
     position. As a matter of absolute fact--_actually_--it's hardly
     convenient, at the moment, for me to do very _much_, as to
     securities.

     THE M. (with unabated suavity). I quite follow you, Sir
     William. Quite. Now--if I may ask--exactly how far are you
     prepared to go?

General Impression that he knows, and Sir William knows, that the latter
is prepared to go exactly no distance at all, and that the consequent
negotiations are likely to be fraught with difficulties for all parties
concerned. As, indeed, is too often the case in these post-war days in
which we live....


                GENERAL IMPRESSION OF THE JANUARY SALES

First General Impression--which subsequently, one regrets to say, has to
be modified--that the usual jokes as to the resemblance between a Sale
and a Football Scrum are now completely _dmods_; an almost sinister
politeness prevailing amongst those present. (There are, as usual, about
a hundred customers to one sales-lady.)

     1ST PERFECT STRANGER. Excuse me--I'm afraid this is your piece
     of net?

     2ND P. S. Oh, it doesn't matter at all. I was really only
     _looking_ at it.

General Impression that she must--judging from the condition of the
piece of net--have been looking at it with both hands, and a strong set
of teeth.

     AN EXPERIENCED SALES-GOER. I'll take the navy coat and skirt in
     the window marked three guineas, and the red evening cloak in
     the same window, and half a dozen of these towels and three of
     the shop-soiled Hose Bargains in the Ladies' Wovens on the
     second floor, please. Would you kindly get down the Wovens at
     once, please, while I look after these other things?

(The result of this masterly firmness is that she is at once attended
to, and moreover places her purchases upon the only chair visible
anywhere in the vicinity, and sits down upon them.)

An Inexperienced Sales-goer, on the other hand, is left repeating
timidly at intervals: I wonder if I might trouble you to let me look at
a _hat_ in one of the _windows_, please?--without receiving the
slightest notice from anybody at all.

_In the Millinery Department._ Briskness, almost amounting to violence,
prevails.

     A MATRON. But these are all so _drab_. What's the scarlet one,
     over there? Or that little gold turban?

     THE SALES-LADY. The Turban is one of the very newest models
     from Paris, moddam. The scarlet one, by _rights_, oughtn't to
     be in the sale at all--but it's just one of those daring little
     _chapeaux_ that scarcely a dozen people could _wear_, if you
     know what I mean, moddam.

Presumption is that moddam _does_ know what she means, as she instantly
wedges the scarlet hat on to the extreme back of her large,
respectable-looking head, and gazes at the result in the mirror with
excited hopefulness.

     THE MATRON. You wouldn't call it too _vivid_, would you?

     THE SALES-LADY (registering scandalized astonishment). Vivid,
     moddam? That little hat _vivid_? Oh, moddam, it's _the_ colour,
     just now. Why, it's positively _macabre_, I assure you,
     compared to what's being worn in Paris, just now.

General Impression, not to be avoided, that this may or may not be true,
but that this particular Sales-lady has never in her life been nearer to
Paris than the Hammersmith Palais de Danse.

     A DETERMINED VOICE. I beg your pardon--but I've already Decided
     on this Hat.

     A LESS DETERMINED VOICE. Excuse me, but----

     THE D. V. I'm really very sorry, but you should have been
     quicker. The moment I saw that hat, I made up my mind. I always
     make up my mind very quickly, I'm afraid, and I knew _At_ Once,
     that was _My_ Hat.

     THE LESS D. V. But I'm afraid it's _mine_. I----

     THE D. V. Please don't let's have any unpleasantness. I assure
     you that I'm one of those people who _never argue_. I'm not at
     all annoyed, I assure you, but it's quite useless to argue. If
     you'd seen the hat first, I should have been the first person
     to ask you to take it----

     THE LESS D. V. But I _must_ take it. I brought it here. It's
     the hat I came in, and I only took it off to try on another
     hat.

_Just about an hour after the official closing-time_: Collection of
Young Ladies now transformed by means of coats, hats, and the absence of
Floor-Walkers, into ordinary Young Londoners, preparing to go home.

     "I thought we'd never get rid of that last old trout! You'd
     have thought she'd _see_ the place was practically closed."

     "Coo, what price my _feet_ to-night? Red-hot, they are."

     "Worse by the end of the week, dear!"

     "That boy's waiting for you _again_, outside the side entrance,
     Lily."

     "Good-night, all. Sorry I can't offer you a lift in the Rolls,
     but my shovver's got the influenza, and so I shall be taking
     the Tube...."

General Impression that there's Nothing Like a Joke to Brighten Things
Up a Bit.


             GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A DENTIST'S WAITING-ROOM

First General Impression that this--like so much else--has changed, and
there is no longer the old amount of Clean, Wholesome, English Fun to be
derived from the whole subject of Dentistry ... since no one's head is
tied up in a handkerchief, no one is in tears, and no one says a word
about False Teeth. _O tempora! O mores! Mais o vont les neiges
d'antan_--and so on and so forth ... reflections that spring inevitably
to the Thoughtful Mind in contemplating a careless generation....

Temporary revival of the Thoughtful Mind at sight of the same old
periodicals on the table, survivals of the old order of things ... a
copy of the _Sphere_ of seven years ago, two numbers of _Punch_ dating
from the Armistice, an _Illustrated London News_ with most of the leaves
torn out, and a mountainous erection of a strange little
periodical--never encountered anywhere else in the civilized
world--entitled _How to Tell the Wild Flowers from the Birds_--or
_something_ like that, anyway.

     A VERY SMALL CHILD (brightly). Don't you _love_ coming to the
     dentist, Mummie?

     MUMMIE (with that lack of candour so characteristic of a
     parent). Very much indeed, darling.

     THE V. S. C. I do _hope_ he'll use that nice _buzzer_, don't
     you, Mummie?

     MUMMIE. I dare say he will, darling, if you ask him nicely.

General Impression that in the _old_ days, a dentist on receiving such a
request as this, whether made nicely or otherwise, would certainly have
suffered a severe nervous collapse from sheer astonishment ... but there
you are--neither children nor dentists are what they used to be.

     A LADY IN A RAFFIA HAT (to a Friend). Well, as I was telling
     you: I simply didn't answer one word. Not a single word. In
     fact, I couldn't have spoken, if it had been to save my life. I
     simply said: "Charles," I said, "I'm a woman of the world.
     Nothing shocks me. _Nothing._ But," I said, "what I saw this
     morning with my own eyes, _with my own eyes_" I said, "has so
     absolutely horrified me, that I simply can't speak of it."

     THE FRIEND (to the relief of everyone else in the room). My
     dear! But what exactly was it that you saw?

     THE RAFFIA HAT. _You_ know, darling--what I was telling you
     about in the taxi.

     THE FRIEND. What--About the H?

General Impression that the friend isn't playing the game at all with
this mysterious reference, and has let down the rest of the room badly.

Appearance of the Dental Parlourmaid (with--as is usual in all Dental
Parlourmaids--quite the worst and most projecting set of discoloured
teeth that ever disfigured human countenance)--enquiring if You will
Kindly Step This Way, please.

       *       *       *       *       *

_In the Dentist's Surgery._

     A NEW PATIENT. ... And I think the little gauze mask you're
     wearing such a _good_ idea, too.

     THE DENTIST (an infinitely tactful personality--as his singular
     choice of a profession indeed necessitates). All our modern men
     are going in for them. It's really more agreeable for the
     patient....

General Impression that, although he so charmingly puts it like this,
there may be another, and exactly converse way of looking at it,
although Wild Horses wouldn't induce him to put it into words.

       *       *       *       *       *

     AN OCTOGENARIAN FEMALE PATIENT. I'm almost certain that some of
     these upper teeth are rather _loose_. Now I wonder why that is?

     THE DENTIST (in tones of concern and astonishment). Just let me
     make certain which ones you mean.... Well, certainly, there
     _is_ a tendency.... Of course, even modern science hasn't
     entirely got to the _bottom_ of these things, you know ...
     there really seems no accounting for the slight Receding of the
     Gums that sometimes overtakes The Jaw in quite early Middle
     Life....

General Impression that this could hardly have been better--even if more
accurately--worded.

       *       *       *       *       *

     A VOLUBLE GENTLEMAN IN THE CHAIR. My experience of Government
     work, I may tell you ...

Deft interposition, by the Dental Operator, of a gag, a small tube, a
pad, a wedge, a quarter of a pound of Cement Stopping, three anonymous
Instruments, and a couple of his own fingers.

     THE D. O. (with the utmost suavity). Just a minute....

General Impression that Government Work simply isn't in it with this
kind of thing.


             GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A SERVANTS' REGISTRY OFFICE

First General Impression, that the inventor of a Noiseless typewriter
ought to make a fortune. Humiliating conviction of one's own
significance--amounting, indeed, to invisibility--in the eyes of painted
and efficient young persons.

     VOICE (abruptly). Can I direct you?

     A VERY APOLOGETIC LADY. Well--I'm looking, really, for a
     Kitchen-maid.

General Impression that the Apologetic Lady is more fool than knave. She
is conducted pityingly to a suave black-satin woman sitting at a large
desk.

     THE BLACK-SATIN WOMAN (discouragingly). Yes?

     THE V. A. LADY. Well, I know it's not easy to find them, of
     course, but I--well, as a matter of fact, I'm _really_ looking
     for a kitchen-maid.

     THE B.-S. WOMAN. Town or Country?

     THE V. A. LADY. Oh, London.

The V. A. Lady revives a little, as she says this, evidently feeling
that it's a point in her favour.

"We don't do London here. Miss Dalrymple! Take Madam to the Bureau for
Town Situations."

Madam follows Miss Dalrymple to another desk, presided over by auburn
hair and a pince-nez.

     THE PINCE-NEZ. For London? (Suspiciously) Not suburbs, is it?

     V. A. LADY. Oh no. Nothing like that. Eaton Terrace.

     THE PINCE-NEZ. Ah! Right off the bus route, isn't it?

General Impression that the V. A. Lady has been shown up as an impostor,
and that Eaton Terrace is a poor address to boast about, anyway.

     THE PINCE-NEZ. Did you want a kitchen-maid? They're very
     difficult to get, you know.

     THE V. A. LADY (faintly). I'm offering _good_ wages.

     THE P.-N. (sharply). What do you _call_ good wages, Madam?

     THE V. A. LADY (temporizing). Well, what would you suggest
     yourself?

     THE P.-N. (evincing an iron determination not to help her in
     any way). Quite impossible to say, Madam. What have you been
     giving?

     THE V. A. LADY. Well, the last girl had thirty-four.

The Pince-Nez lady shuts up the ledger with an air of finality and
sketches a pitying smile. General Impression that the Apologetic Lady
had better go, before worse befalls.

     THE V. A. LADY (hysterically). But I _would_ go to forty. (The
     Pince-Nez maintains a brassy silence.) Or even forty-two.
     Perhaps--if she was experienced--I _might_ say forty-five.
     (Slight symptoms of relenting on the part of the Pince-Nez lady
     and the ledger. Negotiations resumed.)

In another Department an interview is progressing between a Mother and a
candidate for the post of Nursery Governess, who has described herself
on paper as young, bright, and willing, but gives rather the impression
of being elderly, depressed, and unwilling to the point of stubbornness.

     THE MOTHER. It's really not at all a hard place, especially for
     anyone who likes the country. The children are out a great
     deal. I like them to walk for an hour or two every day at
     least, in all weathers, and in-between-times you could just run
     about and play with them, don't you know--the three boys are
     very active and the little girls rather tomboys--and of course
     we mustn't neglect the _lessons_. I want the boys thoroughly
     well grounded for school, and they all do callisthenics, and
     those nice eurhythmics, you know, and then I should like you to
     teach them all five music, and drawing for the three eldest.
     Oh, and needlework for the girls. Then, of course, there's just
     the mending, and I always ask my governess to make the baby's
     little things. You see, you have the evenings quite to
     yourself. I'm afraid I'm out a good deal myself, but the
     children will keep you quite lively, you know. They're never
     still, which I always think is such a good sign.

     THE N. G. (who has applied unavailingly for seven posts in the
     last five days and knows that she can't pay for her lodgings
     any longer). And what salary are you offering?

     THE MOTHER (airily). Forty to fifty--but as you haven't got any
     French----

     THE N. G. (hastily). I'm quite ready to take forty-five----

General Impression that she has bitten off a good deal more than she can
chew, but is lucky to have got the chance.

_At the Desk of the Presiding Deity--enthroned behind glass._

     THE P. D. Anything to-day?

     A CLERK. That woman we sent to Lady Poker is leaving.

     THE P. D. (unmoved). Ah, they've found out she drinks, then.
     Send her name to the gentleman in Belgrave Square who's
     offering eighty, and you might let those American Ladies have
     it, and anybody else who's offering over eighty. That'll keep
     them quiet for a bit. No applications from permanent cooks, I
     suppose?

     THE CLERK. Not one.

     THE P. D. Then answer this letter from Curzon Street and say
     we're giving the lady's name and requirements to some
     first-class cooks, and that she ought to hear from them in a
     few days.

Business proceeds briskly. General Impression that the whole question of
Domestic Employment is in a rather parlous condition, and that it ought
to be looked into.


               GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A WEST-END DRAPER'S

First General Impression, that an extraordinary and unnatural amount of
electric light is being cast over goods that it would be a good deal
easier to select by daylight.

     A LADY IN A FUR COAT. Which way are Stockings, please?

     A GENTLEMAN IN A FROCK COAT. Ladies' Hose, moddam? Through the
     Wovens and Round to the Right, moddam, just opposite Perfumery,
     you'll find them.

The Fur Coat obediently goes through the Wovens and Round to the Right,
and having with difficulty disentangled Perfumery from Drugs and from
Ladies' Hairdressing, finds herself in Stockings.

     A YOUNG LADY. Can I help you, moddam?

     THE F. C. Stockings, please.

     THE Y. L. (very kindly, but in a faintly astonished voice).
     _Stockings_, moddam? Oh certainly, moddam. Any particular
     colour?

     THE F. C. Brown, please.

General Impression amongst all the Young Ladies that moddam is a
complete amateur at this kind of thing.

     THE Y. L. (gently). What shade did Moddam wish? Nigger, fawn,
     sunburn, beige?

     THE F. C. (with almost unbelievable strength of mind). _Brown_,
     I said.

     THE Y. L. (distantly). Of course, moddam, brown isn't being
     worn this year. I doubt if we have anything in brown. But if
     you'd care to see the new tones of bronze, or tango, or nut, we
     have a very good selection.

In the Inexpensive Evening Dress Department, where it is almost
impossible to avoid a General Impression that Colour, at our present
stage of British Civilization, is considered to be of more importance
than Cut.

An elegant young Mannequin is parading in a scarlet tea-gown before two
ladies of matronly build.

     FIRST LADY (enthusiastically). There, that's what I mean, dear.
     That delightfully slim line.

     THE FRIEND. Yes. Unless perhaps ... You don't think the
     _colour_ might be a tiny bit trying?

     THE SALES-LADY (very firmly indeed, and with a good deal of
     musical laughter). Oh no, moddam. The _Colour_ isn't trying.
     Not in the very least. It's really a wonderful colour, _in that
     way_, if you see what I mean. No one could call it _trying_,
     moddam. (This is apparently true, as, after this, no one does.)

_On the Second Floor._

     AN EXHAUSTED SHOPPER. I want the Lift, please.

The usual directions as to going Straight Through, Round to the Left and
the Lift will be facing you, follow.

     LIFT ATTENDANT (impassively). Going up, please. Blouses,
     jumpers, ladies' underwear, children's outfitting, third floor,
     Elizabethan Restaurant, Tropical Lounge, Mannequin Parade,
     fourth floor.... Going _up_, please.

     HALF A DOZEN VOICES (entirely regardless of this). I want to go
     downstairs, please. The Ground floor.

     L. A. (looking straight through them and in a still more
     impassive voice). Going up, please.

Disappearance of Lift. A fresh throng of exhausted shoppers hastens to
the gate to await its reappearance. When this eventually takes place,
the workings of some strange law entirely incomprehensible to the
general public compel the L. A. to proclaim exactly as before:

     L. A. Going up, please. Blouses, jumpers ... and so on. Going
     up, please.

Second disappearance. A rumour spreads that there is another Lift, just
round the Department to the Right, and this will be Going Down, please.
General Impression that if one makes a rush for it, the first Lift will
inevitably reappear, this time on its way to the basement. The majority
of Exhausted Shoppers give it up and go down by the Stairs.

In the Coat Department a Gentleman is helping his wife to choose a
winter coat. Fifteen of these garments are strewn on surrounding chairs
and sofas, and a sixteenth is being Tried On.

     THE LADY. I like this one, Robert. (_She has said this about
     almost all of them._) What do _you_ think?

     ROBERT. Very nice, dear.

     THE LADY. But which do you think suits me best, Robert? This
     one, or the navy-blue, or that one with the fur collar, or the
     green?

     ROBERT (quite at random, but in the faint hope of hurrying
     things up a little). The green, I think, dear.

     SALES-LADY (enthusiastically). Moddam looked marvellous in the
     green, I thought. Won't you slip it on again, moddam?

Robert is assailed by an intimate and painful conviction that the Green
will turn out to be the most expensive of the lot, and that his wife
will insist upon having it because he _said_ it was the one he really
preferred her in, and anyway it's always an economy in the end to get a
thoroughly good thing.

And this, indeed, is exactly what happens.


                    GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A HUNT BALL

General Impression (that we perfectly well remember registering last
year, and the year before, and the year before _that_) of the large
number of ladies who fail to realize that pink, red, orange, and scarlet
frocks are a Mistake at Hunt Balls.

     A VERY YOUNG THING. Hallo, Edward, you idiot! You're nearly too
     late; I'm practically booked up.

     EDWARD. I don't really give a dam' if you are. There are any
     number of leading hearties here that I want to dance with.

     THE V. Y. T. Don't be so putridly off-hand. What about 7 and 8?

     EDWARD. All right, if you want to. See you later, then.

General Impression that the mutual admiration of Edward and the V. Y. T.
has, if anything, been increased by this sprightly passage of wits.

     A WIFE. What about _dancing_, dear?

     HER HUSBAND. Oh, must we?

     THE WIFE. Well you see, dear, I don't really know how to _do_
     these new dances, and certainly _you_ don't, so I think we'd
     better just dance with one another till we pick it up a little.

     THE HUSBAND. It isn't really what I call _dancing_ at all. Just
     walking, _I_ call it. (They walk accordingly.)

     THE WIFE. Simply splendid, dear--you see it's quite easy--one
     and two and three and--the _time_ is just a little bit tricky,
     every now and then--you didn't happen to notice if this one is
     a waltz, or a foxtrot, or _what_, did you?

Painful conviction that he _didn't_ gradually invades them both, as it
does everyone else in the vicinity.

     ONE OF SOME TWENTY SUPERFLUOUS YOUNG WOMEN, TO ANOTHER
     (brightly). I simply _love_ watching a scene like this--it's
     almost more fun than _dancing_, I always think. All the little
     things one sees and hears, don't you know!

     SECOND S. Y. W. (even more brightly). I know. People are simply
     _killing_, aren't they? I always try and keep a dance or two
     free, just for the sake of watching.

General Impression, as the evening wears on, that she is getting almost
more than she bargained for, of this form of amusement.

_An Elderly Gentleman in a Pink Coat, approaching a contemporary Lady in
Vermilion Chiffon._

     THE E. G. And which of your daughters is here to-night--or have
     you brought them _both_?

     THE V. C. _Neither_, I'm afraid. Mollie had a Girl Guide
     Meeting, don't you know, and she wouldn't miss it for the
     world--she's _so_ keen about her Guides--and Dollie is giving a
     raffia demonstration at the Women's Institute. So I'm here
     quite by myself.

     THE E. G. Then let's _dance_, shall we? Topping band, this.

     THE V. C. Too marvellous.

_On the Stairs._

     A VOICE. ... Frightfully heavy going, but I got well away, and
     kept in sight of hounds pretty nearly all the way....

     ANOTHER VOICE. But I _said_ to him, "The mare may be a good
     fencer," I said, "but _does she like water_?" I said. Of
     course, between you and I and the gate-post, that little mare,
     as I know very well ...

     YET ANOTHER VOICE. My dear, she _always_ has her skirt a _good_ eight
     inches longer behind than in front, and a petticoat showing below
     that! Of course _that's_ the result of marrying a parson, and living
     in the country all the year round.

     A COUNTY MATRON. _He_ married a Sock--a _Yorkshire_ Sock--her
     mother was a Boote, you know, a daughter of old Lord
     Hatt--there's some connection with the Westcotts, of
     Somersetshire....

     HER NEIGHBOUR. Ah yes--through the _Coats_ family. One of them
     married a ... (And so on.)

General Impression that they have happily solved the frightful problem
of What on Earth to Talk About.

This is being dealt with in various other ways by various other
people--the Floor, the Band, the Weather, Prohibition (look at
_America_, my dear), the Garden, and the Depression in the City all
playing their usual parts, until a General Impression that the English
Countryside takes its pleasures perhaps rather _solemnly_, is
triumphantly overlaid by the strains of "John Peel".


           GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A SECOND-HAND CLOTHES SHOP

First, and most unpleasant, General Impression that there must be a
Decaying Mouse somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the discoloured
and shapeless garments that lie in heaps All over the Place, or else
drip dejectedly from moth-eaten clothes-hangers suspended by a sagging
piece of grey tape above the counter.

The Proprietor, in a stained and mustard-coloured waistcoat, is
thoughtfully, but thoroughly, making use of a Hairpin to explore his
Back Teeth, and at the same time giving contemptuous attention to a
client.

     THE CLIENT (recklessly throwing open a large Black Bag). How
     much for _these_?

     THE PROPRIETOR. Very little doing nowadays. But let's have a
     look.

He has a look at three old pairs of boots, two bowler hats, a
pepper-and-salt suit, and a large pile of miscellaneous underwear.

     THE P. (in accents of despair). There's nothing _there_, you
     know. Not a thing.

     THE C. Come, come. Don't say that. It isn't as if you and me
     weren't old friends.

     THE P. I know, I know. It isn't that I _won't_, but that I
     _can't_. You can see for yourself that there
     simply--isn't--anything--whatever--_there_.

They both gaze with the extreme of gloom at the multiple contents of the
Black Bag, now spilling all over the counter.

     THE C. (rallying). What about these _Boots_, now? There's
     always a demand for a good _Boot_, you know.

In order to emphasize this point, he picks up one of the Boots and
poises it on the fingers of one hand, looking at it admiringly with his
head on one side.

     THE P. Ah, there's Boots, _and_ Boots. Now if this had been a
     _Hunting-Boot_, I don't say----

The Boot, however, declines to transform itself into a Hunting-Boot, and
the Client wisely transfers his attention to the Bowler Hats instead.

     THE C. I'm not saying it to _influence_ you in any way, ole
     man, but it is a Fact that Top-hats are absolutely Gone
     Out--_absolutely_--and nach'rally there's a demand for Bowlers.
     It _follows_. _You_ know that as well as I do.

     THE P. Ah, but what about _Felts_? Now I could get rid of any
     number of Felts, easy enough, but when it comes to
     _Bowlers_--well!

General Impression that Bowlers represent the lowest depths of
degradation in the sartorial world.

     THE P. (at last, and after much discussion). Well, for an old
     friend like yourself, let's say Seven Shillings and Sixpence.

Feint on the part of the Client of scooping everything back into the bag
again.

     THE C. I couldn't do it, ole man. I'd rather Go Elsewhere.
     There's Twelve Shillings here if there's a penny.

     THE P. Twelve Shillings? Twelve _Shillings_?

     THE C. (firmly). Every penny of Twelve Shillings.

They glare at one another for some moments. General Impression that a
deadlock has been reached when the Proprietor suddenly thinks better of
the whole thing, produces a ten-shilling note and a florin, and sweeps
the black bag and all its contents beneath the counter with a single
gesture of contempt.

     THE C. (mysteriously, as he departs). I may be round again, in
     a week's time. He's off for Winter Sports, he is, and that'll
     mean _another_ new outfit, I suppose.

_Later in the Day._ Entrance of an uncertain-looking Female, with a
large cardboard box and a newspaper parcel.

     THE F. Good afternoon. A--A friend of mine, who's had to go
     into _mourning_, you know, has asked me to--to dispose of a few
     _Things_ for her.

     THE P. (who knows all about that kind of Friend). She _has_,
     has she, miss? And what kind of Things _are_ they?

General Impression that they are particularly mildewy, disreputable, and
out-of-date kind of things, and consist mainly of old Feather Boas,
well-worn Evening Dresses, and Corsets of Queen Victoria's date.

     THE P. (unerringly). The Moth's been in _here_, miss. _Still_
     in, as like as not ... ah, I thought so. And of course the
     dresses--well, there, you can see for yourself. Gone under the
     arms, every one of them.

     THE F. Of course, they've been _worn_--but then they're _good_
     dresses. I mean, they're from a _good_ place. A person could
     easily alter them a little, to bring them up to date.... (Her
     voice falters into silence under the pitying Eye of the
     Proprietor.)

     THE P. Well, miss, of course there's really nothing there
     that's of the slightest use, to me or anyone else, but as I
     don't want to disappoint a lady--What were you asking?

     THE F. I'd rather you made me an offer, please.

     THE P. (inexorably). What are you _asking_, miss?

     THE F. I don't really know, I'd rather _you_ said.

     THE P. (with sudden righteous indignation). But I can't be
     buyer and seller _both_, can I?

This, of course, defeats the Uncertain Female at once. General
Impression that it is only a question of time before she caves in
completely and crawls out of the shop, leaving everything behind her
sooner than do up her parcels again beneath the Proprietor's Eye, and
with the sum of One Shilling and Sixpence in exchange--for which, in all
probability, she has meekly said Thank You.


         GENERAL IMPRESSION OF AN ATLANTIC LINER (FIRST DAY OUT)

First, regrettable, but quite unmistakable, General Impression that
every individual passenger on board is commenting unfavourably on the
appearance of every other passenger. This stage, fortunately, modifies
itself after the first twenty-four hours.

     A NAVE LADY (excitedly, to her husband). Henry, I've found out
     about the Purple Jersey. She's the _sister_ of the Plus Fours,
     not his wife, and they're going out to visit an old _mother_,
     who's married again and lives in a town called
     something-or-other--quite a large place, I gather. And just
     fancy, the mother is seventy-three!

     HENRY (of a sardonic humour). And what date is her birthday,
     and what did they send her for a birthday present?

_Amongst the First-class Passengers_, a gentleman with a Fur Coat and a
cigar is looking down at the third-class passengers on the lower deck,
in the company of a lady in a Fur Coat and a Rope of Pearls.


     THE ROPE OF PEARLS. I never can imagine where they all _come_
     from, can you?

     THE CIGAR. Never. Nor where they're all _going_ to, don't you
     know.

     THE ROPE OF PEARLS (tolerantly). Oh well, I daresay they have
     their own interests, you know. What I always say is, that it
     takes all sorts to make a world.

In less exalted regions, the second-and third-class passengers are
remarking to one another that they really wouldn't care about travelling
first, even if they could afford it, because--"My dear, look at the
_people_. They're simply too Awful. And half those pearls aren't _real_,
everyone wears _Woolworth_ nowadays."

_In a Four-berth Cabin._

     A LADY WHO HAS HAD A PERMANENT WAVE PUT IN HER HAIR BEFORE
     STARTING AND IS ANXIOUS TO DRAW ATTENTION TO IT. The worst of a
     sea-voyage is that it's so difficult to keep _tidy_.

     A LADY WHO _HASN'T_ HAD A P. W. (and is conscious of being All
     Over the Place). You should tie your head up in a handkerchief,
     as _I_ do.

     THE P. W. I suppose I shall have to. That's the worst of
     _curly_ hair, isn't it--the sea air, you know----

General Impression that she has drawn attention to her curls at the
expense of her popularity with the other ladies, and will live to regret
it.

     A GENTLEMAN IN A BERET (walking briskly round the deck). I
     believe in _exercise_, you know, on board ship. The only way to
     keep _fit_. I do this round fifteen times every morning and
     five times every afternoon. That's the equivalent of a
     five-mile walk....

_In the Dining Saloon._

     ONE PERFECT STRANGER (to another). And is this your first time
     across the Atlantic?

     THE OTHER P. S. I've crossed sixteen times already.

     1ST P. S. (not to be outdone). Well, it's my twenty-first trip.

     A LADY. Will it get much rougher than this?

     HER HUSBAND. It isn't rough at all yet.

     THE LADY. But is it going to be?

     THE H. Well, of course, dear, the Atlantic is the _Atlantic_.

General Impression that this is perfectly incontrovertible, and that his
wife had better resign herself to the Worst.

_At a Port of Call._ General Impression that we are taking on nearly a
Hundred New People here, and disposition on the part of the original
passengers to resent this violently, and despise and dislike the
new-comers. This attitude not incompatible with a frenzied desire to see
them come on board, and a general rush to the side for the purpose.

     A CRITIC. My dear, I _ask_ you, _Is_ there a decently-dressed
     woman amongst them? And really, you know--_children_! I always
     think children are so _out-of-place_ on board ship.

       *       *       *       *       *

Usual agitation in regard to cabins, hand-luggage, and deck-chairs and
rugs. Melodramatic atmosphere introduced by the striking of a gong, and
repeated adjurations to any Passengers for the _Shore_, please. In spite
of this, two elderly people prolong their farewells to their friends,
and realize too late that We Have Started.

     1ST ELDERLY PERSON. But we aren't _going_! We have to get
     _off_!

     A STEWARD. The launch will have left, madam....

     ONLOOKERS (in an explanatory manner to one another). Those
     people have got left behind! They only came to see someone off
     ... they're being taken on by mistake....

Variety of General Impressions: That they will have to go All the Way to
America Now--that they will be Lowered over the ship's side by
Ropes--that a Special Boat will be launched to take them back to
shore--that they will have to pay a fine of A Hundred Dollars--and so
on. General Anti-climax when it turns out that the launch _hasn't_ left
after all, and they're in Plenty of Time if they Look Sharp.


               GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A CHILDREN'S PARTY

First General Impression of dispassionate onlooker: that it is a mistake
to mix Children and Grown-Ups. First, Second, and Final Impression of
every Mother in the room: that her own children are better-looking and
better-behaved than any others--combined, however, with a completely
illogical and yet wholly rational conviction that Nannie ought never to
have been allowed to cut John's hair herself, as he is a Perfect little
Sight like That, and that Joan is pretty certain to disgrace herself by
Bursting into Tears if they have to stand about waiting for tea much
longer.

     THE HOSTESS. We ought to play a nice _game_, oughtn't we? Oh,
     how-d'y-do--and _how_ d'y-do, Teddy dear--it _is_ Teddy, isn't
     it?

     MOTHER OF THE NEW ARRIVAL. No, this is _Archie_.

     HOSTESS. Oh, _Archie_, of course. Stupid of me--of course I
     remember Archie perfectly.

General Impression, to which the Hostess is by no means insensitive,
that she is not speaking the truth.

     A SMALL BOY (suddenly and loudly). I want my Tea, Nurse.

     NURSE (rashly). You shall have it in a minute, dear.

     SPECTATORS (to one another). _Did_ you hear that little chap
     saying he wanted his tea? _Aren't_ children refreshing ...?
     Isn't he quaint ...? Don't you call that rather sweet ...? and
     so on.

     MOTHER OF THREE (to a Lady Unknown). Which are _your_ dear
     little people?

     THE L. U. None of them, I'm afraid. I came with the Browns.

     M. OF T. Really? I hope you love children, as they've brought
     you to such a _very_ baby-party.

General Impression that the L. U. is now in a delicate position, from
which, however, she extricates herself by a small, civil, and entirely
non-committal laugh.

     THE HOST. I've just been talking to your boy, Mrs. Brown--the
     big fair-haired fellow in the Eton suit. Is that your
     _youngest_?

     MRS. BROWN (aged thirty-three, and having always been told that
     she looks younger). _My_ little boy is the one crawling on the
     floor, in the blue silk smock, and I _haven't_ any youngest.
     He's the only one, so far.

_At the Tea-table_, from which the Grown-Ups have been wisely excluded,
but from which no human power can keep about a dozen Mothers from
hovering like flies.

     A LITTLE BOY (proudly). _Last_ time I went to a party, I was
     Sick in the Night. _Five_ times.

     HIS NEIGHBOUR. Once I was sick _eight_ times, when I had
     whooping-cough.

     THE L. B. Ah, but mine was _pink_ sickness!

The Neighbour, recognizing that she can produce nothing from her past to
compete with this achievement, subsides.

     A MOTHER WHOSE CHILD HAS CURLS. Dear me, how very untidy Pamela
     looks! It's _so_ difficult to keep her hair tidy for five
     minutes together.

Mothers of Straight-haired Children express polite admiration of
Pamela's curls--which is exactly what Pamela's Mother meant them to do.

     A GOVERNESS (who is in imperfect sympathy with her charge). If
     you can't behave better than _that_, Johnnie, what do you
     suppose people will say?

     JOHNNIE (artlessly). That my governess doesn't teach me
     manners, I suppose, Miss Smith.

_In the Drawing-room._

     A MOTHER. ... But I've _tried_ punishment, and I've _tried_
     coaxing, and I've tried reasoning, and I've even tried taking
     no notice whatever--but it doesn't make _any_ difference.

     HER FRIEND. Really? Now with _Mary_, you know, I never have the
     least difficulty. It isn't that she hasn't plenty of
     _spirit_--but it's just ...

General Impression that the rest of this conversation will not be worth
listening to--which is perhaps as well, since neither lady is paying the
slightest attention to what the other is saying.

     A LADY WHO HAS DOMESTIC DIFFICULTIES. So I said, "Nurse," I
     said, "what is the Meaning of This? Didn't I _distinctly_ tell
     you, _Milk_ for Baby's supper, and _Not_ Extract?" I simply
     asked her, straight out. I was determined to show her once and
     for all _who_ the child's Mother was. And of course she gave
     notice next day.

     A SYMPATHETIC LISTENER. I know of _such_ a good
     Temporary--absolutely trustworthy, and lets one into the
     nursery _whenever_ one likes, practically, and does all her own
     dusting--a perfect Treasure.

     THE LADY WHO HAS D. D. Oh, _do_ give me her address. I'd simply
     give her _any_ wages she liked----

     THE S. L. Oh, she's with some people in _Australia_ just now, I
     believe--at least she was three years ago. But I know she's a
     perfect Treasure.

_At the End of the Party._

     A NUMBER OF DUTIFUL VOICES. Thank you very much for having
     me.... Thank you for my nice party.... Good-bye, I've enjoyed
     myself very much, thank you....

     HOSTESS. _Good_-bye--I hope you'll come and see me again one
     day.

     A YOUTHFUL GUEST (literally). When?

General Impression that it's all been a great success, and if we don't
have the windows of the car up, Betty will certainly catch cold, but on
the other hand if we _do_, Billy is quite likely to be sick. Mothers and
Nurses, as usual, grapple with these and other problems, to which the
Einstein Theory is as nothing, but for the solution of which they will
receive no credit whatever from anybody.


                  GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A LADIES' CLUB

First General Impression that the whole establishment is owned, managed,
and generally kept going by the Hall Porter.

_In the Lounge_, where a Very Young Gentleman sits bolt upright on a
sofa in an obvious agony of alarm, and where a dozen ladies are all
talking at once.

     A LARGE LADY IN BLACK (very earnestly indeed). So I said to
     her: "But life is so _Beautiful_," I said. "There's Beauty
     Everywhere, if you only have Eyes to see it. It's _all_
     Beautiful." (With a spacious gesture, she knocks over a small
     ash-tray at her elbow, with disastrous results.)

     HER FRIEND. It doesn't matter a _bit_, dear--no, really, I
     _like_ it--this is only an old frock, anyway--quite all
     right--do go on about Beauty. It's all so _true_.

     A WAITER (approaching the V. Y. Gentleman). Miss Wells is not
     in the Club, sir.

     THE V. Y. G. (blankly). Isn't she? Er--it was really Miss
     _Winter_ I asked for.

     THE WAITER. Miss Winter, sir? Perhaps you'd speak to the Hall
     Porter, sir?

This is the last thing that the V. Y. G. wants to do, but he meekly
conforms, and is obliged to cross the lounge under some twenty pairs of
female eyes, whilst a complete silence descends upon the room for the
space of nearly ten seconds.

     THE HALL PORTER. Miss Winter? No lady here of _that_ name, sir.

     THE V. Y. G. Isn't this the Minerva Club?

     THE H. P. It's the _Minerva_, right enough, sir.

General Impression that if the V. Y. G. knows Infallibility when he
meets it, he will do well to retire at this point. Instead of which, he
murmurs a faint suggestion about Looking Up Miss Winter's name in the
Book.

     THE H. P. (very sharply indeed). Twelve years hall porter of
     this Club, sir, and I know the name of every member. I expect
     it's the Ladies' Tribune Club _you_ mean, sir.

Although it is patent that there is no particular reason why the V. Y.
G. _should_ mean the Ladies' Tribune Club, this defeats him, and he goes
away still murmuring wistfully.

_In the Dining-room._

     A MEMBER. Really, the food is disgraceful here. I never have a meal
     here if I can help it, and one simply can't invite a guest.

     A FELLOW-MEMBER. I know. Look at the lunch to-day. It's really
     too bad. One feels one ought to complain to the Committee, or
     something.

     1ST MEMBER. I know. One ought to, really.

They both appear to meditate on this in silence, nevertheless a General
Impression is unmistakably afloat that neither of them intends to do
anything at all about it, and that in consequence the service will
remain at its present low level.

_Upstairs._

     A SPECTACLED MEMBER. I'm looking for the lecture on _Art_.
     Where _is_ the Art lecture going on?

     A CLUB SERVANT. The Hall Porter could tell you, madam.

The Spectacled Member goes to the lift, which is a self-working one, and
rings the bell, when it descends, and she is confronted by an extremely
aged and rather offended-looking Member.

     THE AGED MEMBER. You brought me down from the third floor. I
     hadn't _time_ to get out.

Apologies from the S. M.

     THE AGED MEMBER. I quite understand. It's only a little
     _disappointing_, that's all, when one had just gone all the way
     up, to be brought all the way down again.

_In the Smoking-room._ A Member, after ringing the bell five times,
manages to arrest a waiter on his way through, and ask for Saxon
Cigarettes.

     THE WAITER. No Saxons, madam. I can let you have some _other_
     kind--these, or _these_.

The Member instantly and meekly acquiesces, and says no more except:
Thank You Very Much.

_In the Hall_ a Country Member enters, and enquires if a gentleman has
asked for her.

     THE HALL PORTER. Let me see--the name, Miss?

     THE C. M. Miss Winter.

     THE H. P. (without a quiver). A gentleman did call, Miss, but
     said he couldn't wait. He didn't leave his name.

_In the Drawing-room._

     A NEW MEMBER (triumphantly). And what I always say is, Why
     shouldn't a Woman's Club be just as comfortable, and well run,
     and efficient, as a man's?

General Impression that there _is_ an answer to this, but that nobody is
going to give it.


            GENERAL IMPRESSION OF A CHRISTMAS SHOPPING CENTRE

Christmas comes but once a year.... General Impression, waxing stronger
every hour, that even this is rather overdoing it.

_In Our Oriental Bazaar_, which displays a profusion of brass ash-trays,
raffia bags, hand-painted almanacs, and an occasional carved blackwood
elephant to add local colour, about eighty-five ladies, one gentleman,
and a sprinkling of children, are competing for the services of Two
Young Ladies.

     A SHOPPER. What about Uncle _Ernest_? He doesn't _smoke_, and
     he doesn't _drink_.

     HER FRIEND (understanding that this handsome testimonial merely
     denotes the limitations imposed upon choosing a present for
     Uncle Ernest). That makes it so _difficult_, I always think.
     What about a fire-screen? For when he sits over the fire in the
     evenings, I mean.

     THE SHOPPER (doubtfully). Well--he might like it. But I think
     he always goes to his Club in the evenings, and he wouldn't
     want to carry it _about_ with him.... This orange china frog is
     rather quaint, isn't it?

     THE FRIEND. Sweet. But I like the hand-screen _better_, I
     think. I mean, I think it's more _useful_.

     THE SHOPPER (severely). Still, dear, it isn't what _you_ like,
     is it? It's what Uncle _Ernest_ would like.

She realizes too late that this pungent snub has, in some mysterious
way, the effect of committing her to the Orange Frog, for which she
subsequently pays, with great reluctance, the sum of seven shillings and
sixpence. General Impression that if she expects any enthusiasm about it
from Uncle Ernest, she is being unduly optimistic.

     A SOLITARY GENTLEMAN (timidly). I'll take these Christmas
     cards, please.

     A SALES-LADY. Sign, please.

Sign, in the person of a Gentleman in a Frock coat, materializes, bowing
affably from the waist.

     THE SALES-LADY. Six at six-three, two at nine and a half, one
     Pock-Cal. at one-eleven-three, and six at a penny-three. Sign,
     please.

General Impression that Sign hasn't the faintest idea what she means,
but will willingly execute a perfectly illegible flourish with a pencil
on the bill, in order to get the whole business over and done with.

_In the Toy Department_, the floor being entirely packed with shopping
Mothers, Aunts, Grandmothers, nurses, governesses, and children, a
Christmas Novelty is displayed in the shape of a dejected-looking Santa
Claus, driving a Real Sleigh drawn by eight Real Ponies.

     PRACTICALLY EVERY MOTHER IN THE PLACE. Oh, look, darling. Why,
     there's _Santa Claus_!

General Impression that half the infants present are in tears, between
fatigue, bewilderment, and alarm at the appearance of the ponies, and
that the other half are only to be held back by brute force from
wrecking the whole equipage in their excitement.

_In the Groceries._

     A POLITE VOICE. And what can I have the pleasure of doing for
     you, madam?

     A VAGUE LADY. I really want a _Biscuit_, that I used to know
     very well years ago, but that one simply never _sees_,
     nowadays.

A pause, as though either the owner of the Polite Voice or the Lady
herself might here break into a short poem--_Amiti d'Autrefois_, or
something like that, after the style of Franois Villon, suggested by
the subject. Instead of which:

     THE V. L. Not a _Cheese_ biscuit, and yet not exactly a _Sweet_
     biscuit. Something between the two, if you know what I mean.

     THE P. V. (with more suavity than sincerity). Perfectly, madam.

     THE V. L. (confidentially). We used to like them so much as
     _children_, you know, and I've always wanted to get a tin of
     them for my _own_ children. I'm afraid I can't remember what
     they were called, but the _shape_ was oval--rather a _small_
     oval.

The P. V. continues to assent to these, and similar, pieces of
information with unabated brightness and readiness. General Impression
that between them they will probably run the lost gems to earth in the
end, but that it will all take _Time_.

_On the Ground Floor_, the Jewellery Department, unlike any other,
exhibits more salesmen than customers. A Moleskin Wrap is, however,
talking to a Nutria Coat in the centre aisle.

     THE M. W. My dear, they're really rather twee--long ruby drops,
     you know, set in platinum--Peter's Christmas present.

     THE N. C. My dear--he _doesn't_ wear ear-rings, does he?

     THE M. W. My dear, what an idea! His Christmas present to _me_,
     of course. He does so hate shopping in all the crowd that I
     always do it _for_ him, you know.

     THE N. C. My dear, how sweet of you! I wonder if Paul would
     like _me_ to do that----?

General Impression that whether he would or not, this is what will
happen.

     MOST PEOPLE (sooner or later). Well, what one always feels is
     that Christmas is the _children's_ festival....

Exeunt, to engage usual table for the usual dinner-dance at the usual
London restaurant.




                  MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN IN FICTION




                             MEN IN FICTION


                            PROFESSIONAL MEN

Novelists, although they do not much like one to say so, are terribly
conventional, especially when they write about men. Take professional
men in fiction, for instance. They may be all kinds of things, but
there are also all kinds of things that they mayn't be. Who, for
instance, ever made his or her hero a dentist? The present writer does
not want to be harsh about this. Beyond a doubt, it is difficult to
visualize the scene in which a young man comes to the knowledge that
his true vocation lies in fumbling about inside the open mouths of his
fellow-creatures--but there must be ways of getting round this, and of
making this very important and necessary calling sound as interesting
as it really is. Writers, however, have as yet made no attempt to find
out these ways.

Doctors, on the contrary, are numerous in fiction. Mostly, they come out
well, but not in detective fiction. In detective fiction, the doctor is
only put in because it is absolutely necessary that, after one glance at
the corpse, he should look up and say with quiet certainty:

"The squire has been shot through the left lung, and his head battered
in by a short, blunt instrument, almost certainly a poker like the one
lying on the floor in a pool of blood beside him. The bruise on his left
side was caused by a hobnailed boot. Death must have occurred exactly
six hours and fifteen minutes ago, which fixes the time of the murder at
precisely quarter-past-eight this morning. There is nothing to be done
for him now."

After this, the doctor leaves the police in charge, and it isn't till
hours afterwards that someone or other finds out that the old squire's
injuries were all inflicted after death, which was really due to
drowning.

It is never said, in the detective story, whether the doctor's practice
suffers heavily from this professional carelessness in failing to notice
that the old squire's lungs were full of water all the time.

When the story is not a detective story, but a long novel about a
doctor's whole life, he is a very different type of person. He is never
called in to a murder case at all, and, indeed, the only cases of which
much notice is taken in the book are confinement cases. These take place
usually in distant and obscure farm-houses, in the middle of the night,
and to the accompaniment of a fearful gale, or a flood, or a snowstorm,
or any other convulsion of Nature which will make it additionally
inconvenient for the doctor to attend the scene.

Authors like obstetrical details, but the present writer does not, and
knows, besides, that in real life doctors are quite as often called out
in the night on account of croup, or pleurisy, or even a bilious attack
if sufficiently violent, as on account of child-birth.

The doctor in this kind of book always has a frightful financial
struggle. He never attains to Harley Street, or anywhere in the least
like it. His wife is almost always a perfectly lovely young creature
with extravagant tastes that help to ruin him, or else she dies young,
leaving him to a housekeeper who never puts flowers in the sitting-room.
In the latter case the doctor thinks about his wife when he comes in,
from one of his perpetual baby-cases, at three in the morning, with the
prospect of the surgery before him at seven. (Doctors in books never get
more than four hours' sleep on any night of the year, and often none at
all. But they always persist in opening the surgery at this unreasonable
hour.)

One could go on for a long while about doctors in fiction, but theirs,
of course, is not the only profession dear to authors, although
certainly one of the most popular.

Business men are much written about, and curiously enough are treated in
an almost exactly opposite way to doctors, since they nearly always have
helpful and endearing wives, who would never dream of dying and leaving
them to housekeepers, and they end up highly successful, and immensely
rich, although starting from a degree of poverty and illiteracy that
would seem to make this practically impossible.

The early parts of the book are almost entirely given up to the most
terrifically sordid and realistic description of their early
surroundings, the language--one word and two initials--that their
fathers and neighbours used when intoxicated, the way in which their
elder sisters went wrong, and the diseases that ravaged their mothers.
But by degrees, this is worked through. The situation lightens, and the
business--which started as a stall in the Warwick Road, or something
like that--begins to prosper. Its owner turns his attention to social
advancement, and in the course of it marries a pretty, innocent, but
extremely practical young thing with quite a short name, like Anne, or
Sally, or Jane. They rise in the world together. Then another woman,
with a much longer name--more like Madeleine, or Rosalind--and of more
exalted social standing, interferes.

The lengths to which the affair subsequently proceeds depends entirely
upon what the author feels about his public: whether that's the sort of
thing they want from him or whether it isn't. (Publishers are usually
helpful about this, although biased on the side of propriety, as a rule,
because of the circulating libraries.) Anyway, Anne, or Sally, or Jane
takes him back in the long run, absolutely always.

Unlike real life, affairs of this kind, in books, never lead to the
complete wreck of the homestead, or of the business. On the contrary. So
that novels about business men have at least the advantage of a happy
ending--a thing which some readers like, though others would go miles to
avoid it.


                                 LOVERS

The well-known saying that All the world loves a lover, is, like so many
other well-known sayings, quite inaccurate. There are numbers of people
who find lovers more annoying than almost anything, and these include
employers, doctors, many parents and grandparents, and others too
numerous to mention. Authors of fiction, although such income as they
achieve is largely derived from the exploitation of lovers and their
various reactions, do not really care much about them in real life, for
authors, unfortunately, are usually more than a little egotistical by
nature.

In fiction, however, there is no doubt that lovers are popular. In fact
it almost seems, sometimes--judging by the way editors and publishers go
on about what they call the love-interest--as if, but for that, fiction
wouldn't ever be read at all, in which case there would be little point
in writing it. We will not, however, dwell upon this improbable and
melancholy contingency. Instead, we will get started about the men in
fiction who are lovers--which, of course, most of them are. And we are
bound to say that the first thing that strikes us about nearly all of
them is that they attach much more importance to love than do the
ordinary men of everyday life.

Take the agricultural lover--since authors are extraordinarily fond of
writing about the passions of farm labourers, although comparatively
indifferent to those of navvies, engine-drivers, or stokers.

The agricultural lover is seldom less than six feet tall, and he wears
his shirt open at the neck whatever the weather, although there are many
months in the year when a woollen muffler would be a sign of greater
common sense; and if the novel is at all a modern one, he takes about
with him a smell of soil and sweat wherever he goes. (In our own
experience, brilliantine is much more noticeable, at any rate on
Sundays, but of this nothing is said.)

Well, this son of the soil is invariably fated to fall in love with
somebody too utterly unsuitable for words, either because she lives in
London, which constitutes--for reasons unstated--an immense social gulf
between her and the farm labourer, or else because she is so frail and
frivolous by nature that anyone, except a lover in a book, would have
seen through her at the first glance.

In the first case, the outlook is bad, but not hopeless. The girl from
London either writes, paints, dances, or does all three. She is probably
engaged, or semi-engaged, to a talented youth of her own social
standing, and they exchange immense letters, full of quotations and
similes and things, which are very often given in full. She has, to all
appearances, never been in the country in her life before, because she
always does something amazingly unpractical, like falling down an old
mine-shaft--with which authors seem to think that the countryside is
freely peppered--or setting out alone to cross the moors just when a
snowstorm is coming up. Then, when she has got herself into serious
difficulties, the agricultural lover pulls on his boots--boots play an
enormous part in these idylls of the soil--and takes one look at the sky
and says with great confidence: "Reckon the moon should be up over the
quarry by the time the cock crows from Hangman's Hill," and goes off,
finding his way unerringly through pitch darkness, and floods of rain,
and drifts of snow, and anything else the author can think of to show
how well he understands Nature. And by the time he has found the girl
and carried her into the farm as though she were a child, the whole
thing is settled.

Though, personally, we have never thought, and never shall think, that
that sort of girl is in the least likely to make a suitable wife for any
farm labourer.

The other kind is quite different. She is a village girl, and is
referred to by those who are taken in by her artifices as a "lil' maid,"
and by those who aren't as "a light o' love" or "a wanton lass". Her
chief, sometimes her only, characteristics are vanity and sex-appeal. In
the end, after the agricultural lover has fought somebody in a pub. for
using a Word about her, and has thrown various other fits, she usually
goes off and marries his stepbrother from the Colonies, or a rich
widower forty years older than herself; and the lover, instead of
realizing that this is all for the best, walks out into the night.
Common sense tells one that sooner or later he will be obliged to walk
out of it again, but before this inevitable, though unromantic, point is
reached, the author usually brings the book to an end.

Lovers in books that are not agricultural are, of course, numerous, but
there is not enough space to deal with them all in one article.


                                HUSBANDS

Authors, beyond a doubt, go very wrong indeed when it comes to husbands
in fiction. They only seem to know about two kinds. The first and most
popular of these is quite young, and most deadly serious. He has a
simple and yet manly sort of name, like John or Richard or Christopher.
He marries, and his wife is lovely, and he adores her. Instead of
getting accustomed to her charms with the rapidity so noticeable in real
life, and taking her comfortably for granted by the end of the second
year, he adores her more and more, although on every page she is growing
colder, more heartless, and more extravagant. She lives, in fact, for
nothing except cocktails, night-clubs, clothes, and the admiration of
other men.

(The present writer, who has been married for years and years, often
wonders very much what makes authors think that any man ever looks at a
married woman when there are unmarried girls anywhere within miles. The
present writer is not complaining--only just wondering.)

To return to John:

He puts up with things that no husband outside the pages of a book would
either tolerate, or be asked to tolerate, by even the most optimistic
wife. He sits up at night over the bills that his Claire has run up. He
always does his accounts at night, and they always take hours and hours.
He never seems to have any bills of his own, although in real life it is
usually six of one and half a dozen of the other.

One might suppose, after two or three of these nocturnal bouts, that
John would either put a notice in the papers disclaiming responsibility
for his wife's debts, or have the sense to separate from her. But
neither of these courses so much as presents itself to him. He tells her
that he is overdrawn at the bank, and so on (and makes as much fuss
about it as though no one had ever before been in this painful, but
thoroughly familiar, quandary), and explains that he is already working
as hard as it is possible for anybody to work. And then he goes and
spoils the effect of all of it by suddenly telling her how much he
adores her.

In real life, very few English husbands ever say at all that they adore
their wives--and absolutely none at the very moment when they have been
scrutinizing bills that they cannot pay.

Sometimes John and Claire have a child, and Claire is not at all pleased
about it. As she makes no secret of this, it is not reasonable of John
to be filled with incredulous dismay and disappointment when she
neglects it--but all the same, he is. After this, things run a rapid
down-hill course, and Claire goes off with somebody else, and John is
plunged into an abyss of despair, although it is perfectly impossible
that there shouldn't be times when it must occur to him that he is
thoroughly well rid of her.

But if so, we are never told about them.

And the child grows up, and adores her father, and they are perfectly
happy together; and after about fifteen years Claire wants to come back
again, and John has the incredible idiocy to let her do so, and she
turns out to be dying, and he forgives her.

And if that is the author's idea of being a successful husband, it does
not coincide with ours.

       *       *       *       *       *

The other type of husband in fiction has really only one noticeable
characteristic, and that is a most phenomenal and cast-iron stupidity.
He is, in fact, rather out of place in this article, because in the
books where husbands are of this kind, it is naturally the wife upon
whom the author has concentrated. A good many pages are given up to her
struggles between Love and Honour, and in the end she decides that the
brave, straightforward, and modern thing to do is to go to the man she
loves. (This is not the husband, needless to say.) And authors,
strangely enough, very seldom tell one what the husband feels about it,
or what happened to him afterwards. Though, after all, he has to go on
living ordinary everyday life, just like anybody else.

On the whole, husbands are not particularly well viewed by authors. It
is not, perhaps, for us to judge, but the thought does occur to one that
possibly this may be because authors themselves very, very seldom make
good husbands.


                                FATHERS

In books, fathers are almost always called "Daddy", because this is
somehow more touching than just "Father". And fathers in books are
nothing if not touching. Unless they are absolute monsters of cruelty or
stupidity. We will, however, deal with the touching ones first.

Their chief characteristic is a kind of whimsical playfulness, that
would be quite bad enough taken on its own merits, but is made much
worse by masking a broken heart, or an embittered spirit, or an
intolerable loneliness. Fathers of this sort, conversationally, are
terribly fond of metaphors, and talk like this:

"Life, sonny, is a wild beast. Something that lies in wait for you, and
then springs out and tears you to pieces."

Or:

"Grown-ups have their own games, dear, just like you kiddies. Sometimes
they pretend to be heroes, and princes, and wear glittering armour and
go about looking for dragons, and lovely princesses. But the armour has
a way of falling to pieces, and when they find the princess, somebody
else has got there first and carried her off, and there is only the
dragon left."

"And is the dragon real, Daddy, or does he fall to pieces, too?" asks
the obliging child, who never misses its cues.

"Yes, little one, the dragon is real enough," says Daddy, with a
strange, far-away expression. "You'll learn that some day. The dragon
is always real. It's only the prince and princess who are not real."

Also--this is our own addition--the entire conversation, which is not
real. Because a flesh-and-blood father who went on like that would find
his children quite unresponsive.

"Now," they would say, "tell us something sensible, about an aeroplane,
or a cat-burglar."

But in books, the relation between the father and his child, or
children, is a good deal idealized, so that the kind of conversation
given above may take place frequently. Also, the children ask questions.
Not the sort of question that one hears so frequently in daily life:

"Father, why can't we get a nicer car, like the one the Robinsons have?"
or "Do you have to brush your _head_ now, instead of hair?" or even
"_Why_ aren't we allowed to stay in the bathroom more than ten minutes
and you have it for nearly an hour?"

But questions that give openings for every possible note to be struck in
the entire gamut of whimsical pathos or humour:

"Has _your_ heart ever been broken, Daddy?" and "Why do your eyes look
so sad, even when you're smiling, Daddy?"

The answer to the first one is: "Hearts don't break very easily, girlie.
Sometimes we think they're broken, but Time has a magic wand and mends
the pieces, and we go on--not quite the same as before, ever, but able
to work a little and dream a little, and even--laugh a little."

The answer to the second one is--but there are many alternatives, for
it really is an admirable question, in the amount of scope that it
gives. Daddy can talk about the lady called Memory, who looks out of his
eyes, and about the Help that a smile is, and all that kind of thing; or
he may be of a more virile type--a clean-limbed, straight-gazing
Englishman--and then he just says something brief but pregnant, about
White Men who Play the Game and Keep Straight Upper Lips and Put their
Backs into It. And, in any case, whatever he says sinks deeply into the
consciousness of his child, and returns again and again to its
assistance on strange and critical occasions, as when it violently wants
to cheat at an examination, or--later in life--is in danger of sexual
indiscretion.

Fathers in books are almost always either widowers, or else
unfortunately married. This leaves them free to concentrate on their
offspring, from the page when, with clumsy, unaccustomed fingers, they
deal with unfamiliar buttons and tapes--(why unfamiliar? their own
shirts and pyjamas have buttons, anyway)--till the end, when either the
daughter marries, or the son is killed in India, and the father left
alone. They are, indeed, a lesson against putting all one's eggs into a
single basket.

The other type of father is generally either a professor, a country
clergyman, or an unspecified bookworm--and always very, very
absent-minded. His children are usually daughters, and he calls them "my
dear", and everything he says, he says "mildly" or "absently".

The daughters of real-life professors, country clergymen, and bookworms
must wish to goodness that their fathers were more like this, instead
of--as they probably are--the usual quite kind, but interfering,
domestically tyrannical and fault-finding, heads-of-the-household.

Finally, and fortunately not very often, we get the absolutely brutal
father. He is usually lower-middle class, and his daughters have
illegitimate babies--since this is the one thing of all others that
infuriates such fathers--and his sons run into debt and then hang or
shoot themselves sooner than face the parental wrath; and his wife dies,
or goes mad, or deserts him. Books about this kind of father are compact
of gloom, and are described by the reviewers as being Powerful.

On the whole, fathers in fiction are a poor lot, and bring us, by a
natural transition, to the subject of the next article, which will be
Criminals in Fiction.


                               CRIMINALS

When it comes to criminals, authors of fiction completely let themselves
go. They endow their heroes with qualities that they simply wouldn't
dare, for one moment, to bestow upon any respectable, law-abiding
citizen--qualities like chivalry, and tender-heartedness, and idealism.
You feel that they absolutely adore them, and admire their crimes far
more than they would anybody else's virtues. And we will at once
forestall the remark that shallow-minded readers may feel inclined to
make, by saying definitely that it is _not_ women writers who usually
indulge in this kind of hero. On the contrary.

Well, the things that jump to the eye about the criminal of fiction are
several. To begin with, he has no Christian name, but is just known as
Jaggles, or Ginger Mac, or Flash Ferdinand. And he is always
frightfully, frightfully quiet. Not so much when he is actually on the
job--because then, after all, quietness would naturally be taken for
granted--but in his manner, and appearance, and behaviour, and voice.
And this quietness merely denotes his immense reserves of fire and fury,
all of which come out later when the blackmailer is threatening the
helpless girl, or the heavily armed householder is getting ready to
shoot. But, even in his gravest straits, or most heated moments, the
criminal hero never shouts. He just says, very, very quietly, things
like: "The game's up, I think," or "Check-mate--Colonel." And he always
remembers to smile a little, with the utmost nonchalance, whilst
covering his man, or, if necessary, men, with a six-shooter, or heavy
automatic, or machine-gun, or whatever it is that he carries about with
him.

Curiously enough, the criminal of fiction is rather good at love-making.
He takes an interest in it. This is probably because, as a rule, he
seldom has any contacts at all, except with devoted but intellectually
inferior male followers, detectives and victims. One is never told that
he has parents, or brothers and sisters, or ordinary social
acquaintances. So, naturally, he can concentrate on the one woman he
ever seems to have anything to do with.

And either she loves him and says that she will wait--(meaning until he
has finished his sentence at Wormwood Scrubbs)--or else she throws
herself between him and the detective's gun, and dies of it.

Either _dnouement_ is rather unsatisfactory.

In real life, people who serve sentences in prison very seldom come out
quite the same as they went in, and it isn't every woman, unfortunately,
who improves by waiting.

As for throwing oneself about in front of bullets, this is not really as
easy as it sounds, and might quite well end in a mere flesh wound, and
would anyhow almost certainly bring down the most frightful curses on
the person who got in the way, for men like to settle things for
themselves, unhampered by feminine interference.

A delicate question to those who have the interests of morality at heart
is: Do these criminals of fiction ever repent? The answer is--as so
often in life--both Yes and No.

If the book is to have a happy ending, Ginger Mac, just before embarking
on a final enterprise, says: This is the last time--the very last! and
then kills off somebody so unspeakably bad that it is almost a good deed
to have rid the world of him, and then goes to find the woman he is in
love with, and says that he is utterly unworthy of her, which is
probably very true. And the book ends with some rather ambiguous phrase,
as it wouldn't quite do for criminality to triumph openly. So the author
just says something like:

"But as she turned away, he saw that there were tears in her beautiful
eyes."

Or:

"In a year's time," she echoed. "In a year's time, _who knows_?"

Well--the author knows, and so does Flash Ferdinand, and so does the
least experienced reader. So that's all right.

When the criminal does not repent, he dies. This rule is never violated.
To the mind of the fiction-writer, there seems to be nothing whatever
between reformation and death. The possibility of persistence in
wrongdoing does not apparently occur to him. So Jaggles,
gentleman-buccaneer, or burglar-sportsman, or whatever he may be called,
either jumps off the highest sky-scraper in New York to avoid capture,
or is shot at the very last minute, and dies saying that it was a Great
Game after all.

There are, of course, other types of criminals than the ones we have
indicated. There is the criminal in the detective-novel proper, for
instance--but the writing of detective-novels proper has now been
brought to such a fine art that nobody can possibly tell who the
criminal is, till the last paragraph but one. And then it turns out to
be the idiot grandmother, or the fine old white-haired magistrate, or
the faithful servant.

Lastly, there is the criminal in those short, powerful, gloomy,
sociological novels that have pages and pages without any conversation
at all, and that are so full of little dots.... In these cases, there is
never any doubt as to guilt. The criminal committed the murder all
right, but the guilt lies with almost everybody else in the world--the
rich, Society, the Church, politicians, the older generation, the
younger generation, the men who administer the law, and so on.

It is all very painful and realistic, and ends up with the execution,
and more dots, and then some utterly irrelevant statement like:
"Outside, a small, orange-hued dog was nosing in the gutter----" and
then a final crop of dots....


                           WOMEN IN FICTION


                                   I

Fiction is always full of women, and it seems rather a strange thought
that so few of them are really at all like ordinary everyday women in
real life. Authors, unfortunately, divide women into types--the Modern
Girl, the Prostitute--(these are two separate types, _not_ one and the
same), the Country Woman, the Mother, and so on.

Let us begin with the dialect novel.

There are about three kinds of women in a dialect novel: two young and
one old. The old one is almost always a grandmother, and either full of
silent wisdom or else of crafty malignancy. The silent sort just look,
with far-seeing eyes, at the distant hills, or the rolling tide, and say
very little until the absolute end of the book, when they suddenly sum
up the difficulties in which all the other younger characters have
become involved.

"Ah, my dears," they say quietly, "it isn't the _law_ that matters, it's
whether you're found breaking it or not."

In this way a new light is cast on the whole situation, and everybody
realizes that great-great-grandmother has acquired wisdom and tolerance
and kindness, and all those sort of things, in the course of her
ninety-seven years. And when they have realized this, somehow everything
looks absolutely different, and in a way the book might just as well
never have been written at all, because whatever the problem was that
has occupied its three-hundred-odd pages, it now completely melts away
in the illumination cast by grandmama. Nor does she in the least lose
her head after this achievement, but just quietly--she is always
quiet--brings the whole book to a conclusion with something very simple
and homely:

"Put up the shutters, lad, whilst I broil thy grandfather's slice of
bacon."

And picking up her pattens, or her Bible, or her darning, she
walks--still quietly--into the old farm-house.

The malignant grandmother is--naturally--quite different. She dominates
the book, and all the people in it, and the destinies of every one of
them. Briefly, it is the general rule that her sons should be weaklings
and degenerate and her daughters neurotic victims of sex-repression, but
her grandchildren, curiously enough, are fearfully strong characters,
and end by defying her. Grandmothers of this description end either by
having strokes--brought on by their suddenly getting on to their feet in
an access of rage, after being bedridden for nigh on fifty years--or
else by being found dead, usually by the old dog, or the village idiot,
or somebody quite unexpected like that.

The younger women in dialect novels have the most terrifically strong
passions. Either it's the old homestead, or the moor, or George who is
married to somebody else, or the Squire's oldest son, or perhaps their
own oldest son. But whatever it is, they are unbridled about it, they
never change, and it leads them to every sort of length. This rather
singular tenacity has something to do with the soil. Country women,
especially in dialect novels, are very closely connected with the soil,
and it has this extraordinary effect upon their characters. Their
conversation is also unlike that of other women, in that it abounds in
agricultural similes.

"My hair is like the red bindweed, that the curlews nest in come April,"
they say, as if it was the merest matter of course.

Or:

"To be jealous is like eating the young leaf of the rhubarb-plant that
grows below the monkey-puzzle tree."

Nor do they ever give a straight answer to a straight question, for even
if asked something quite simple, like the time, or the date, they have
to reply that it's the best part of an hour since the sun sank behind
the top of Dead Man's Rock, or it'll be a fortnight come Lammas since
the old sow farrowed.

Most of the women in dialect novels seem to be mothers--sometimes in
wedlock, sometimes out of it. But in or out, their method is seldom very
successful. They take the whole thing too seriously. (Probably this is
the soil, again.) If married, they take that seriously as well, and are
never happy about it, but usually fall in love soon after the wedding
with the husband's younger brother, or the travelling man who comes
round with lisle-thread stockings, and this immediately leads to
trouble.

Humour is one of the qualities that women in dialect novels hardly ever
possess, and when they do, it is of a very obscure description, and
difficult to distinguish from their other characteristic conversation,
because it, also, consists mainly of agricultural similes.

"Children in the house be like onions in a stew: a little of 'em goes a
powerful long way."

"Husbands allus puts me in mind of feyther's old donkey: the more you
urge 'em the less they heed."

Things like that--all terse and epigrammatic, and yet at the same time
profound.

Nor are country women usually allowed to end up happily, in dialect
novels. They are very often murdered--(which is, in a way,
understandable)--sometimes by a husband, sometimes by a lover, but
almost always in some rough, unpleasant way, such as strangulation, or
the old-fashioned blunderbuss that hangs up over the chimney-piece in
the living-room.

Having now shown that the dialect-novel type of woman is almost
altogether encompassed in gloom, we will turn our attention to the
greatest contrast afforded to her in fiction--the heroine of the
Pseudo-Historical volume.


                                   II

The pseudo-historical book can be recognized at a glance by its title.
This is almost always alliterative, and quantitative as well: _Twelve
Terrible Termagants_, or _Horrible Harlots of History_, or _Virgins of
the Vatican_. That kind of thing.

The women in this type of book are Simply Awful. There is no other way
of describing it. If they weren't, people wouldn't want to buy the book.
No book of this kind has ever yet been called _Seven Sinless
Spinsters_--or if it has been, nobody has taken the least notice of its
publication.

Sinless women have no place whatever in the affections of those who read
pseudo-historical books. Such readers only want _Depraved Duchesses_, or
_The Thirteen Worst Women of West Wickham_, or else the life-stories of
peculiar creatures who for years pass themselves off as Admirals, or
Foreign Legionaries, or even Popes, and then give the whole thing away
by suddenly producing a baby.

Let us leave them to it, and turn to another branch of the
pseudo-historical. The kind of book that begins something like this:

"How now, Fabiola!" exclaimed a tall youth in a toga one morning of
spring in the year A.D. 400 as he strode across the tessellated marble
pavement to the plashing fountain where sat the maiden Fabiola, of noble
Roman birth and pensive mien. "How now, Fabiola! Art thou not coming to
see the dogs of Christians thrown to the wild beasts in the presence of
the Emperor and the whole Court?"

Fabiola, however, backs out. She does not say, in a straightforward
manner, that she has just become a Christian herself, because if she
says anything like that, she knows, and the reader knows, that it is
asking for trouble. The kind of trouble, moreover, that will bring the
story to an end too soon, and is being kept for the last chapter.

So the tall youth in the toga goes away discouraged, and enjoys the
entertainment without Fabiola beside him. Fabiola, who takes her
pleasures quite differently, borrows a black lace scarf from a faithful
peasant-girl called either Maria or Lucia, which serves to disguise her
completely, and goes off to the Catacombs.

And that, practically, is all we ever get to know about Fabiola. It has
been evident from the first that she will come to a violent, painful,
and heroic end, and that the sight of it will certainly revolutionize
the view-point of the youth in the toga, the faithful peasant-girl, and
several rough centurions, coarse jailors, and renegade Christians. And
this, though very fine, is not as interesting as it might be, from the
point of view of feminine psychology.

It must, however, be admitted that the Fabiola type of book is not in
fashion nowadays, and is seldom seen except at school prize-givings.
(School Prizes, strangely enough, are not selected by their winners. If
they were, Fabiola would never stand a chance against Mickey Mouse,
Wilfred, or Bulldog Drummond. School Prizes are selected by
Schoolmasters--than whom there are no worse judges of juvenile likes and
dislikes in the whole world--and with them Fabiola continues popular.)

The historical novel proper usually contains about two women, one of
whom is thoroughly bad, and the other one thoroughly good. Neither of
these states bears any relation to any known condition prevalent in
human beings, and therefore we are again reluctantly obliged to suggest
that these female characters are lacking in interest. There _is_ a third
variety--usually an international spy--who starts thoroughly bad, but,
rather unfairly, makes a bid for compassion at the end of the book by
falling frantically in love with an English Gentleman, or some quite
hopeless person of that kind, who naturally won't look at her.

(Why should he, when there is a good, pure, English girl who has been
marked out for him from the very start?)

So the female spy either commits suicide, by a direct method, or gives
up her life for somebody else. There aren't any alternatives, like
getting over it, or falling in love with somebody else, such as are so
readily to be found in everyday life. Historical-novel characters are
nothing if not thorough.

Finally, we come to a type of woman in fiction only too terribly popular
nowadays. Not historical, exactly, because the story doesn't go back as
far as Beshrew me, and Oddsbodikins, and Nay, my liege, rather let me
lose my life than my virtue. Not present-day either, because the whole
point of the book is to show how extraordinarily well the author has
recaptured the atmosphere of Victorian days, and with what astonishing
diligence he or she has looked up the old-fashioned illustrations of the
period, so as not to mix up crinolines with bustles, or pork-pie hats
with Dolly Vardens.

The result is usually very sartorial. The reader learns more about the
heroine's frilled drawers, leg-of-mutton sleeves, wreath of white
camellias, and so on, than about her disposition. Her relations with her
parents are made a good deal of, since it is well known that all parents
living under good Queen Victoria and/or King Edward VII. were
unconscionable tyrants. Her relations with men fill the last half of the
book--sometimes more--and are gloomy in the extreme, and all the fault
of the Victorian period. The chief merit of this sort of woman in
fiction is that she gives her creator an opportunity for working off all
the repressions and resentments of youth.


                                  III

In allegorical fiction there is almost always a character called the
Woman, another one called the Man, and hosts of minor ones, such as the
Child, the Dog, the Spirit of Charity, the Essence of Ammonia, and so
on.

It is, unfortunately for ourselves, the Woman with whom we are
concerned. Unfortunately, because she really is more wholly intolerable
than almost any other female in fiction. In fact, nothing will do
justice to her except a short excerpt from the type of book in which she
is to be found. (And usually it is an expensive little book, though
small and thin, bound in a bilious green, with a ribbon marker that
comes off after about a week, and all its T's and C's linked together at
the top in an affected style.)

The Woman, as often as not, is a mere stumbling-block in the way of the
Man, and then she goes on something like this:

SCENE. _The Garden._ (Allegories are always given an out-door
background, we do not know for what reason. Why not an allegory in a
tea-shop at Ealing, or the out-house of the golf-course at Burlescombe?
But no, it has to be in a garden, or an orchard, like Adam and Eve and
the Book of Genesis.) Very well, then:

_The Garden_--or _A Garden_. The Man is standing at the Gate--(always a
Gate in allegories, though in real life more often a hedge of Portuguese
laurels, or two cement posts and a wall with a door in it)--and on his
shoulders he is carrying a Pick--which is the allegorical symbol for
work, not Grave-digging--or a Burden, or a Wounded Stag, or a Naked
Child, or any other utterly improbable article that he almost certainly
wouldn't be seen dead with in real life. The Woman, who always has long
hair, regardless of fashion, and wears something rather unpractical like
a tunic, or draperies, or sometimes nothing at all, is standing at the
Gate too, usually on the other side of it, because she is certain to be
either luring him in or keeping him out, and either course will turn
out to be treacherous and bad.

The Man begins by saying: The time for play is over, the buttercup
wreaths have all faded, and the work of the world is calling me. Let me
go. (This is the allegorical way of saying: Don't keep me, dear, or I
shall be late at the office.)

Stay, replies the Woman, and help me gather wild asphodels. (There's
nothing like asphodels, in an allegory, unless perhaps it's amaranth.
Sooner or later, one or other of these turns up, whatever the season, in
every allegory.)

The Man says some more about the work of the world.

Stay, repeats the Woman, and help me gather wild asphodels.

Then the Man has usually quite a long speech, recapitulating all the
things it is necessary for the reader to know, about his previous
relations with the Woman, and the buttercup wreaths, and his inward
certainty that the time really has come now to make a break, and get a
move on with the work of the world.

And at the end of it all, the Woman just says, all over again, "Stay,
and help me gather wild asphodels". And if she says this once, in the
course of the allegory, she says it a hundred times. Allegories are
rather like anthems, in the way they go on reiterating one single
phrase. To the ordinary mind this is an aggravating trick.

Well, they just go on and on like that. The work of the world--wild
asphodels--backwards and forwards like a rocking-horse. In the end the
Woman wins. That is to say, the Man puts down whatever he is carrying,
and joins her. (Nothing is ever said about what happens to the discarded
Pick, or Wounded Stag, or Naked Child. And yet either of the two latter,
if left about too long, would get him into serious trouble with the
police.)

And the end of the Allegory is the slamming of the Gate by the Woman. To
the strange mind of the allegory-writer, there is evidently something
frightfully final about the slamming of a gate. No doubt he, or she, is
not in a position to realize that the slamming of gates is an effect
that can be, and constantly is, produced all over the place either by
defective latches or careless children.

The mention of children brings one at once to another type of woman in
allegory. She is, either actually or potentially, The Mother.

She has little in common with the Woman, except that her clothes and her
hairdressing are equally unusual. Her conversation is more extensive,
and she makes extraordinary and inaccurate generalizations:

"When a sunbeam falls on a lettuce-leaf, it means that, somewhere in the
world, a baby has hiccoughed."

Or:

"Every time a little child weeps, a cloud passes across the face of the
moon."

Common sense and statistics alike revolt at the statements of the
allegorical Mother. But, in the allegory, she gets away with them every
time, and the other characters seem to think that she has said something
significant and moving.

The Old Man passes his hand across his furrowed brow, and mumbles that
_his_ Mother told him that, bending over his cradle in the middle of the
night and stirring the red embers of the peat, close on ninety years
ago.

The Little Children press close to her, and look wistfully up into her
face. (Well they may, poor little things, probably hoping that they were
hearing the beginning of a Grimm's Fairy Tale, with robbers and wolves
in it.)

And The Man is there, too, because all allegories have some of each sex
in them, and in fact sex is usually the main interest in allegories,
though it would not do to say so.

The worst type of allegory of all is disguised as a children's story,
and is called _The Kiss of the Rainbow_ or _How Bunnie the Rabbit found
a Soul_, and no ordinary, normal kind of child can endure that sort of
story. The children in the allegory have names like Little Mirth, or
Gentleheart, and walk about in woods and gardens hand in hand, looking
for ridiculous things like The Purple Flower of Happiness, or the Great
God Pan, or Eternal Love. And when they've wandered about for pages and
pages, exchanging the most sickeningly whimsical, wistful, quaint, and
utterly impossible conversation, they find a dead bird, or a trapped
butterfly, or God knows what, and some Spirit or other surges up out of
nowhere, and explains that this is really what they were looking for all
the time.

Enough has now been said to show that the present writer does not care
much about allegories, nor the female characters in them.


                                   IV

Of almost all the women in fiction, prostitutes get the best treatment
nowadays. They are credited with every kind of virtue, but especially
generosity, courage, and good-heartedness. The respectable women haven't
got a chance in the same book as a prostitute. The best thing they can
hope for is that they may have their eyes opened by her to the utter
futility, selfishness, and triviality of an ordinary breadwinner, wife
or mother, when compared to a heroine of the streets.

Stories about prostitutes are mostly written by young writers. It helps
them to feel grown-up, and it makes the female ones--we regret to
say--hope that reviewers will mistake them for men.

Prostitutes, for reasons not fully understood by the present writer, are
tremendously associated with pink. (Not, of course, the official "pink"
that people wear out hunting, but just the ordinary colour, pink.) Their
bed-sitting-rooms are entirely decorated in pink, their own
underwear--always a good deal insisted upon by the author--is a dingy,
flimsy pink, so are the lampshades, the bedspread, the cushion-covers,
and the flowers--if any--on the table.

From a psychological point of view it is difficult to take the
prostitutes in books very seriously, first of all because they are all
so exactly alike, and secondly, because the books hardly ever tell one
the really interesting thing, which is how they originally entered the
ranks of their profession. Sometimes, of course, the prostitute tells
the hero of the book the story of her life, beginning with the old
Rectory garden and the artist who came to lodge in the village in a
long-ago May, just when the apple-blossom--and so on. But even that
story, moving though it is, doesn't really account for everything,
because, after all, one swallow needn't necessarily make a whole summer,
and in fact in real life it hardly ever does. This continual discrepancy
between women in real life and women in fiction is nowhere more apparent
than in stories that have anything to do with prostitutes, and
discourages one quite a lot from reading them. At the same time it
doesn't do to be unjust, and there _are_ writers who go in for the most
terrific realism, and produce long-short, or short-long, stories that
almost always contain prostitutes, sailors, boxers, negroes, and
climatic peculiarities, such as torrents and torrents of unceasing rain,
waves of unparalleled heat, or spells of Antarctic cold. These stories
are very modern, and don't have any plot at all, and just as you get
interested in one of the characters, three little dots appear ... and
you have to turn your attention to somebody quite different.

They don't have any beginning or end either, because that wouldn't be
modern; they just kind of drop on to the page with some statement,
usually of a thoroughly unpleasant nature, like: "He knew that he was
going to be sick" or "She loved him so that it made her long to strangle
him and then trample his body under foot". (Yes, I know, when ordinary
people in everyday life love anybody, they do not have these unhallowed
impulses, but there it is again--women in fiction bear but little
resemblance to anything human.)

Almost all the stories of this type show a strong resemblance to one
another, even though some--only too many, in fact--have a Russian
background, and perfectly impossible names, all several syllables long
and indistinguishable from one another, and others take place in squalid
and sordid parts of London, and almost all the rest in some bit of New
York called the Bronx, or Chinatown, or Harlem, and end inconclusively,
and are compact of solid gloom from start to finish. (Shakespeare, of
whom all writers always say that they think so highly, took quite a
light-hearted view of harlotry, but modern novel-writers never attempt
to imitate him in this. However, that may have something to do with
their chance of selling their film-rights--which after all didn't exist
in Shakespeare's day--so one must not judge hastily.)

The single point on which the authors of all these books and stories are
absolutely at one, is that every prostitute has a heart of gold. There
is apparently something about her way of life that makes it inevitable.
And really, having said that, there seems very little else to say about
the prostitute in fiction. Little or nothing is told one about her other
characteristics. Either she is unutterably young, and entirely devoid of
paint or even powder--which is perfectly ridiculous, in reality, and
only male writers ever put it in--or else she is quite elderly, with a
raddled face and dyed hair, and drinks.

But neither age, youth, drink, nor anything else interferes with the
heart of gold. A prostitute and a heart of gold just seem to go together
naturally, like country-women and aphorisms in a dialect novel.

On the whole, prostitutes add but little to the average person's
enjoyment of novel-reading. On the other hand, authors like writing
about them, because they are pretty well the only topic left on which it
is still permissible for the modern writer to be thoroughly sentimental.


                                   V

Detective novels, nowadays, are very highly thought of by publishers,
who are as a rule the last people to think highly of any book, whatever
they may say in their advertisements. (We are writing from inside
knowledge, having had both interviews and correspondence with various
publishers, on the topic of our own books. And we have subsequently been
astonished at the difference between what the publisher eventually puts
on the jacket of the book, and what he said about it to us, firmly and
regretfully, when we were trying to persuade him to let us have
twenty-five pounds in advance of royalties.)

Detective novels, then, are the mode. All sorts of eminent people
confess--usually to one of the daily papers, always a good medium for
confession--that when they are over-worked, or unable to sleep, or
worried about super-tax, they read a detective novel. Naturally, after
this, authors who wouldn't otherwise have thought of such a thing, sit
down and write a detective novel, and some of them do it passably, but
most of them don't, and a very, very few do it really well.

All of them, however, seem--as usual--to slip up when it comes to the
female characters in their books. No doubt the writers concentrate on
the murder, and the necessity for keeping the identity of the murderer,
and the method employed, concealed from the reader until the last page
but one. And such powers of characterization as they may display are
always lavished on the amateur detective. The other people in the book
have to be content with labels, and are just the peppery old Colonel,
the voluble charwoman, the querulous invalid, or the wealthy,
relentless, and extortionate blackmailer. As for the detective himself,
he may be anything, or do anything, or have any number of extraordinary
idiosyncrasies, like being able to see in the dark, or play the
trombone, or disguise himself as a Chinaman so that his own mother
wouldn't know him. And if, in addition, he has a broken nose, or an
eye-glass, or a foreign accent, then he is absolutely firmly established
as one of the most real and vivid creations in detective fiction.

What, therefore, _can_ be hoped for, in the case of the women in
detective books, when this is the best that can be managed for the
men--who are always vastly in the majority in this type of book?

Not so very long ago there were only two women to be found in any
detective story, and one was called Mary, which meant that she was the
heroine and would have to be rescued from sinister and extraordinary
machinations, and the other was called Mrs. de Lacy, or Seora da Silva,
or any other name suggesting un-English connections, masses of
blue-black hair, and a discreditable past, sprinkled with lovers.

This convention has now passed away. Instead, we get something very very
young, and modern, and colloquial, called either Jane, or Susan, or Ann,
and far from having to be rescued, she usually does all the rescuing,
and a good deal of the detecting, herself.

Let us suppose that the body of her uncle and guardian, with whom she
has always lived, has just been found sprawling across the library
table, with a dagger between the shoulder-blades, the face mutilated
beyond recognition, the room spattered with blood, the clock stopped at
2 A.M., a loaded revolver on the blotting-paper, a hideously sharp Malay
_kris_ from the collection on the wall lying on the floor, and the
poker, all covered with human hairs, clenched in the corpse's hand.
(Besides all the doors being locked, and the shutters fastened from the
inside, and the fire burning on the hearth so that nobody could have
come down the chimney.)

Confronted with all this, Ann may, or may not, exclaim: Oh, poor
uncle!--but if she does, it's as far as she goes. The next moment she is
examining the blotting-paper for clues, and noticing some frightfully
significant detail, such as that one candle has been burning longer than
the other, or that the uncle's left shoe-lace is done up wrong.

She says nothing about this, at the moment, because all the rest of the
house party is also in the library, but later on, usually about tea-time
the same day, she confides the whole thing to the amateur detective of
the party--a young man of about her own age--and they decide to unmask
the murderer themselves, from amongst the guests. The guests, we may
add, do not disperse just because their host has been found murdered.
They stay on and establish cast-iron alibis for themselves, and break up
the cast-iron alibis of one another, and on the evening of the very day
on which the crime was committed they all come down to dinner in their
usual evening clothes and are put through the third degree by Ann and
her friend, in a modern, colloquial, and thoroughly flippant style.

Readers of detective fiction will not require to be told that the
criminal is by these means unmasked, usually within twenty-four hours,
and that Ann and her collaborator decide to become engaged--their love
scene probably taking place in the identical library, with uncle,
_kris_, poker, and all, still uncleared away.

We can but leave it to our readers to decide whether even the youngest,
and most up-to-date, feminine nervous system is really up to this sort
of thing. Personally, we know very well that at no time in our career
could we have done any of it, nor could any of our friends, relations,
or acquaintances.

Apart from these extraordinary young girls, detective novels also have
less-young, but still young, wives. The main thing about them is that
they are such prize liars. They have to be, partly so as to confuse the
evidence and make it more difficult for the detective, and partly
because they always have: (_a_) a lover, (_b_) a collection of fearfully
compromising letters, (_c_) a secret connected with their past which
must, at all costs, be kept from their husbands.

So that these young wives, really, although so necessary to the plot,
are not terribly interesting as studies in human nature, being all so
very much alike, and actuated throughout by the instinct of
self-preservation and absolutely nothing else.

The only remaining type of woman in the detective story is the domestic
servant, and anything less like human flesh and blood it would be
practically impossible to find. She drops her H's, she listens at doors,
she wipes her hands on her apron, and is verbally comic under
cross-examination, and generally behaves after a fashion that would
ensure her instant dismissal within half an hour from any house in which
she might have taken service.

It seems fair to add that detective stories, in the main, form a most
desirable addition to any library, and those who write them are, in the
opinion of the present writer, faced with a task that requires an almost
superhuman degree of intelligence, accuracy, and ingenuity. So that
really it seems unreasonable to ask much in the way of feminine
characterization.


                                   VI

Years and years and years ago somebody published a novel elliptically,
but intelligently, entitled _The Woman Who Did_. This created quite a
fuss at the time, and it is a curious and interesting thought that, in
order to create any similar amount of fuss nowadays, a novel would have
to be about a Woman who Didn't--because anything else is now so
frightfully unoriginal.

The only question in a modern novel is _why_ she did, and this is
usually explained in pages and pages of dialogue between the woman and
some man with whom she either is, or isn't, in love.

Because--(and this is what makes it so difficult to write this article
so that it can be read in the Home Circle)--the modern woman in fiction
views life, apparently, simply and solely in terms of sex.

It makes no difference that she usually has a career. That's only just
thrown in for local colour. She may be living in a flat in Chelsea with
another girl, or married and looking after her husband and children in
the suburbs, or running a house of ill-fame in New York--but, sooner or
later, this overrated question as to her relations with men will take
the bit between its teeth, and we shall hear of nothing else for the
whole of the remainder of the book.

Well, the present writer feels rather in despair about the whole
situation. Quite evidently, falling in and out of love is very important
and interesting, and readers like reading about it, and authors, God
knows, appear to like writing about it. But from the point of view of
ordinary, everyday life, there are quite a lot of other things going on,
and if we _are_ going to be psychological and analytical, their effect
upon the modern woman should really not be so completely ignored. What,
for instance, about the absolute impossibility of ever finding a
petticoat that is not either too long or too short to wear under a thin
frock, and the perpetual difficulty of getting any attention in any
restaurant unless accompanied by a man, and the state of one's
overdraft, and the fear of starting a cold, or having to have a tooth
out, and the strain of fitting in a shampoo-and-set once in every ten
days?

These things, and millions of others exactly like them, are going on all
the time, whereas the vagaries of passion, even in the most exotic
careers, do ebb and flow quite a lot. But to read the great majority of
novels about modern women, you'd think they never gave a moment's
reflection to anything whatever except emotional considerations.

It will not, after this, come as a surprise to anybody if we add that
the modern woman in fiction shows practically no sense of humour
whatever. When she does laugh, it is an affair of bitterness, and is
caused by the discovery that her lover has run off with her best
friend--or that her husband, for whom she has sacrificed everything in
the world, doesn't really love her after all--or that the only man she
ever cared for has just been killed at polo.

"_She put down the letter, and sat perfectly still. The crumbs upon the
table-cloth ... she found herself counting them ... one, two, three....
Presently a strange sound broke the silence. Like the buzzing of a
dental drill...._

"_She realized that she was laughing._"

That kind of thing. Of course, there may be women who will recognize
these symptoms--to whom it all comes home--who will exclaim, as they
read about the crumbs on the cloth, and the dental drill, and
everything: "Goodness me, yes! That was _exactly_ what happened when I
heard about Daddy having gone off with that woman and left me and the
children to face the creditors.... I remember the way I laughed, just
like that.... Human nature is the same all the world over, doesn't that
just show?"

And if so, of course, it is one up to our modern novelists. But if not,
on the other hand, it begins to look as though the last word hadn't yet
been written, in psychological novels about women.

Sometimes the author takes the woman about whom he is writing from the
cradle to the grave. Usually, then, it is all very introspective, and
melancholy, even in the very earliest chapters of all, and long before
an ordinary person would have thought it possible, we are all mixed up
with sex again, and never get really far from it until the last few
pages--by which time the heroine has become a grandmother.

There is yet another type of modern woman in fiction, and she is usually
quite young and does practically nothing except drink, dance, and go
about with men. It is a gay life to read about. But literal-minded
people get quite worried, wondering where on earth the young men came
from, when everybody knows quite well that there isn't such a thing to
be found, as a rule, and especially not in the country. And even if
found, they don't want to be making love all the time, but would rather
be out in the nice fresh air, killing something, or playing with a ball.
But in the books, they drift about from one party to another, and talk
endlessly, and make love to women, or get tired of them and break their
hearts. Or else it's the other way on. Whichever it is, one would like
to see women in fiction rather more realistically, and less
conventionally, treated.

Of course, it might seem prosaic, after all the strange types of
womanhood now irrevocably associated with modern novels. But then, why
not let's make up our minds to admit, once and for all, that real life,
and real people, women included, _are_ prosaic?


                          CHILDREN IN FICTION


                                   I

If Women in Fiction, why not Men in Fiction, and/or Children in Fiction?
There is no reason why not, except that there are fewer of them.

Children in fiction are, by comparison, quite rare, and this is really a
very good thing, because they are almost always very depressing, and
quite extraordinarily unlike children in real life. (Not that children
in real life are not very often depressing, especially to their parents,
but that is for quite different reasons.)

Dividing children into types--since it is the mistaken, but almost
universal, custom amongst authors to do this with the characters they
write about--we find that there really are only two types of children in
books: the sort that the author believes him- or her- self to have been
and the sort that he or she is perfectly certain that he or she never
was. Both kinds are often to be found in the same book, and it is
usually a very long one.

Sometimes it begins with a genealogical table, which is a comparatively
simple expedient, but sometimes it goes back to the most ungodly
lengths, and starts by saying: Hardly had the last shot been fired at
the Battle of Bosworth Hill, when young Homfray Rook, then aged
twenty-two, ran away with the wife of his elder brother, Nigel Rook of
Rookscliffe, a lovely red-haired creature of scarcely seventeen.

(The lovely red-haired creature is, of course, the wife--not Nigel Rook,
who is as black as his name, and probably drinks, or makes himself
unpleasant in other, worse ways.)

Well, one may or may not be interested in lovely red-haired creatures,
scarcely seventeen, who let themselves be run away with by their
brothers-in-law. The present writer is never terribly enthusiastic about
them, but very likely this is simply jealousy, since almost everybody
would like to be lovely, and red-haired, and seventeen, but very few of
us ever are, and then not for long. But anyhow, one does one's best to
follow it all intelligently--only to find that after about fourteen
pages, Mary, or Nancy, or whatever her name is, has been rushed
successfully through motherhood, grand-motherhood, and very likely
widowhood as well. Years and years have rushed by, and have been crammed
with places and people, and descendants, and the original children of
the original couple have married complete strangers, and had children of
their own, and these have repeated the process, and it is absolutely
impossible to remember who anybody is. And then, at the end of the
fourteen pages--which the reader has had to turn back many more than
fourteen times, in order to try and find out the relationship between
any single character and any other--_then_, it turns out that the whole
intricate and breathless accumulation is simply there in order to lead
up to the birth of one particular baby, round whom the rest of the book
will revolve.

Nothing, in fact, could be more disproportionate than the way in which
whole long lives are compressed into tabloid form,--and then every
single detail of the hero, or heroine's, infancy and childhood is spread
out upon the page. Every single detail, that is to say, which seems
relevant to the author, for there are many things readers would like to
know that authors leave for ever unrevealed, and still more things that
readers care very little about, but that authors are determined to put
on to paper.

We are, however, straying from the child in fiction; and we are first of
all going to deal with the little creature as presented to us by the
author who is secretly convinced that it accurately represents the
childish self of the writer.

Two things about this child immediately spring to the eye: it is
phenomenally sensitive, and it has entirely preternatural powers of
observation. Things that an ordinary child in real life would take in
its stride, or overlook altogether, make the most terrific impression on
the child in fiction. Scenery, to which in everyday life children are
coldly indifferent, has the most extraordinary effect upon it. For it is
always a most intelligent child, and often very gifted as well, and its
naughtiness is an affair of temperament, and of obtuseness on the part
of everybody else. And it has interesting faults like temper, or pride,
or obstinacy, but it is never untruthful, averse from washing, or
addicted to teasing animals. Yet in everyday life, as every mother knows
...

As for its powers of observation, they really border on the miraculous.
The little thing, from a cot in the night-nursery, overhears
astonishing, and often very improper, conversations between its parents,
or the servants, and not only remembers every single word of them, but
draws from them the most distressing conclusions, which turn out to be
perfectly correct.

Time goes on--though not very fast--and the child goes to school. The
whole scholastic question, in this kind of novel, revolves round one
single word; and it is a word, we are afraid, that any reputable
printers would certainly refuse to print. So we will only say that if
the school is a Public School, things are worse and more lurid than if
it isn't. This convention is an absolutely cast-iron one amongst
authors.

Soon after these searing experiences, the child passes into a slightly
more mature stage, and is no longer a fit subject for this article. But
we have said enough to show that authors, as usual, have loaded the dice
heavily, and that children in fiction, however interesting, bear little
resemblance to ordinary ones.

For one thing, they never talk about their food, and real children
prefer this to almost any other topic.


                                   II

The best and most popular novelists do not, as a rule, have children in
their books at all, and this is wise. Parents are about the only people
who are interested in children, and they merely in their own ones.
Doctors, dentists, and teachers, indeed, have to be interested in
children, whether this comes naturally to them or not, but they do not
carry their interest into the realms of fiction, as will readily be
understood.

There are, however, authors who think that they can, and in fact must,
write about children. Many of them have a passion for what they call
fantasy--(and we should like to take this opportunity of saying, once
and for all, that it is a passion wholly unshared by the present
writer).

They begin with what seems like a straightforward statement of fact:

"It was Peter's seventh birthday" or "Jean had found a robin's egg that
morning".

Well, that's all right. But what does it all too often lead on to? The
most extraordinary and improbable revelations, such as Peter's
invincible determination to find the crock of gold at the foot of the
rainbow, and his preliminary passage through Halls of Fear, and Towers
of Truth, and other, similar, architectural impossibilities. And at the
end of it all, as like as not, there isn't any crock of gold at all, but
only some not-very-original discovery to the effect that Courage
overcomes Cowardice, or Kindness is better than Cruelty. Common sense
tells us at once that Peter could have found this out much more easily
by staying at home and looking it up in his copy-book.

As for Jean and the robin's egg, the whole thing is a plant. There is
nothing for ornithologists, and nature-lovers, and people like that, to
get excited about. The robin's egg will turn out to be symbolical, or
not really there at all, and Jean will do nothing but talk about
Mothers, and Little Furry things that Live in the Woods, and Love making
Everything Easy. (As we all know, it usually, on the contrary, makes
everything extremely difficult.)

Authors do not seem to like writing about children as they really are.
This is, in a way, understandable, because in real life children are
seldom picturesque, and almost always disconcerting. But all the same,
the present writer thinks that there ought to be _some_ limit to the
extent to which authors draw upon their imaginations when dealing with
child-psychology.

Almost the worst type of child in fiction is the silent, intelligent,
determined, sensitive little boy--usually called either John or David,
although Thomas is creeping into fashion--with the utterly worthless
mother. (Fiction writers take no stock in the theory that great men have
remarkable mothers. Remarkably foolish and frivolous, perhaps, but
nothing else.)

Well, this mother does everything she possibly can to mess up David's
life. Sometimes the father is dead, sometimes he is merely
unsatisfactory, and sometimes he, also, has his life messed up by this
wretched woman. In no case does he ever do the only sensible thing--get
rid of his wife and send his children to boarding-school.

David struggles on, the mother like a mill-stone round his neck, and
long before anybody would have thought it possible, he has established
himself as a well-known writer, or financier, or whatever it may be.

In the second half of the book, he falls in love with the sort of girl
whom one would expect him to avoid like the plague, since she is merely
another, younger edition of his mother, and this girl always ends by
going off with his greatest friend. (From the very minute that David
meets this greatest friend, on his first day at school, it may be taken
as an absolute foregone conclusion that the friend will eventually take
away either his wife or the girl he is in love with.)

In the end, David marries somebody with grey eyes and a fearless
outlook, called Elizabeth or Anne, and they have a baby, and it is a
silent, determined, intelligent, sensitive little boy--and so it all
goes on _ad infinitum_.

We must not exclude girls from this rather unenthusiastic review of
children in fiction. There are not, perhaps, quite so many of them, but
in their own way they are just as exasperating.

Very often they have Irish blood in them--which, in itself, to the
non-Irish, seems unnecessary. It does, however, provide an excuse for
their being named Patricia, which they usually are.

The main point about Patricia is that she attracts the attention of men
at a very early age. Often and often, the reader cannot see why this is
so, but it _is_. Also, she dances beautifully, and can, and does, quote
obscure poetry. We do not think that in real life this would please any
man we have ever met, unless he happened to be the actual author of the
quoted poetry--and perhaps not even then,--but in books Patricia gets
away with it, and the man not only recognizes her quotation, but admires
her for making it. In real life these would not be his reactions at all.

Patricia is very fond of the open air, and walks for miles and miles,
and at the same time talks about sex with whoever is walking with her.
Anybody would think that sex was the only subject in the whole world, to
read about Patricia, because she never seems to take any real interest
in anything else, from the time she is four years old and asks her
mother, How do babies come? and the mother declines to give her any
intelligent reply. But as we have said before, mothers in fiction are
like that.

We often wonder how the author supposes that Patricia and David and Co.
grow up into the pure, sane, honest, modern, and clean-minded creatures
that they are said to be, when their childhood is one perpetual
handicap.




                           HOME LIFE RELAYED


                                    I

Good-morning, everybody, good-morning. We are now taking you over to No.
74 Floral Crescent, Highgate, where Mr. Clarion Vox will give us his
impressions of everyday life as it is lived by so many of us.... MR.
CLARION VOX.

       *       *       *       *       *

Good-morning, everybody, this is Clarion Vox speaking from No. 74 Floral
Crescent, Highgate. No. 74 Floral Crescent is situated in one of the
most residential parts of Highgate and I am speaking from there. I'm
going to do my best to describe to you everyday life as it is being
lived every day. ... Clarion Vox speaking.

It is just breakfast time now ... at least if the black marble clock on
the dining-room mantel-piece is right it is, but on the other hand, the
cuckoo-clock in the hall ... but listeners can hear for themselves what
the cuckoo-clock is saying....

Mother is coming into the room now ... she has on a blue jumper and
skirt ... she is saying something about the bacon ... she is trying to
get it said before Father comes into the room.... Father is on the
stairs now ... he can be heard quite distinctly ... I am sorry to say
that he seems to have tripped over something.... I'm sure listeners
will agree that the front stairs is not the proper place for the cat at
eight o'clock on a Monday morning.

Now the bacon is being taken out of the room by Norah ... it looks as if
she would run straight into Father on his way to the dining-room ... but
she may clear him.... Yes ... she'll do it.... Father has another three
steps to go.... Now Norah has practically got her foot on the swing-door
... she's through it.... No--no--she's not.... I'm sorry, everybody, but
in the excitement it was a little bit difficult to make sure ... but
Norah and Father have now definitely fouled one another on the
linoleum....

Listeners can hear for themselves what Father is saying.... No, no, I'm
sorry, everybody, but the B.B.C. has to consider the susceptibilities of
listeners all over the country, and on the whole, just at the present
juncture....

Now the children are coming into the room.... I'm sorry I can't tell
listeners what they're saying, because Father is still talking about
Norah and the bacon ... still talking ... not quite finished yet.... Now
I think he's drawing to a close.... No, no ... not quite yet.... Now
it's dying away. ... All over now.

Mother has just begun to pour out ... she is asking Dickie if he has
washed his face ... she wants to know why not ... she is speaking very
quietly so that I find it difficult to hear ... she has one eye on
Father all the time.... Now she is making signs to Doris to go out and
get the bacon whilst Father is still occupied with his porridge. Doris
has gone out. Listeners must have heard the door bang for themselves,
and I'm very, very sorry to say that this has upset Father all over
again.

Now Baby is at the door asking to be let in, and Father wants to know if
this is the nursery or what, but the return of Doris with the bacon is
diverting his attention again, and Baby is crawling quite unobtrusively
under the table.... Listeners will very probably agree with me that this
is a thoroughly short-sighted policy, and will almost certainly lead to
trouble later on.

At the moment, everybody seems to be concentrating on the bacon, which
appears to be rather over-cooked ... in fact a piece chipped off by
Dickie has just gone on the floor ... he is grinding it into the carpet
with his heel....

Now Father is talking about the bacon again ... he still seems to have
plenty to say about it ... everybody else is perfectly silent.... Father
is still going on.... I can hear Mother murmuring Hush, dear, to Doris,
who has made a crunching sound with her teeth....

I only wish that listeners could hear for themselves the extraordinary
number of times that Father is bringing in the word "bacon" without ever
saying the same thing about it twice.

I must beg everybody's pardon for having forgotten about Baby all this
time ... he is still under the table ... he has found the piece of bacon
chipped off by Dickie and is quietly eating it....

Father has reached the marmalade stage now.... Doris has had a
misfortune with her tea, and I'm sure listeners will all join with me in
hoping that this may escape notice from the head of the table.... I'm
afraid it's caught his eye.... No, it's all right, Mother is drawing his
attention away ... she is saying that it looks like more rain....

I'm sorry to say, everybody, that my time is now drawing to a close, but
I hope to resume my running commentary on home life at No. 74 Floral
Crescent very shortly.

We have just a moment or two left, I see, so listeners may like to know
that Father is just starting for the office ... there has been rather a
tense moment or two relating to the absence of his boots, but I see that
Norah has rushed them up from the back premises just in time.... Now
Mother is helping him into his overcoat.... She is reminding him that
they have promised to go to supper at the Laurels with Grandpapa and
Grandmama to-night.... Father has gone off, slamming the door behind
him.... Listeners will draw their own conclusions as to the significance
of this gesture.

Mother is going back into the dining-room again, where I am afraid that
Baby is becoming very seriously involved with the table-cloth.... Yes, I
was afraid so....

I am sorry to say, everybody, that my time is up.... Clarion Vox
speaking.... Good-bye, everybody, for the moment. Good-bye.


                                   II

Hallo, everybody, hallo. This is Clarion Vox speaking, and before we go
over to No. 74 Floral Crescent, Highgate, for my running commentary on
home life there, I should like to say a few words to those listeners who
have so kindly written to me about my last talk.

The suggestions received have been very helpful indeed, and later on it
may be possible to carry them out, or at least some of them. I'm afraid
the idea of a running commentary on the daily round at Pentonville is
not quite practicable at the moment, and the same thing applies to the
relaying of home life at the Vatican ... but I hope listeners will
realize how grateful I am for these, and similar, suggestions.

I am now going to take you over to No. 74 Floral Crescent, Highgate,
where everyday life is going on in a thoroughly everyday spirit....
Clarion Vox speaking, from No. 74 Floral Crescent, Highgate.

I am going to do my best to give listeners an impression of what is
going on all round me ... this is Clarion Vox speaking....

The breakfast things are just being cleared away from the dining-room
and Mother is asking Norah to be careful.... I am afraid this is not a
very successful remark, as Norah is flouncing out of the room and
shutting the door with her foot rather sharply.

Now Mother has turned her attention to the canary ... she is saying
that the state of the cage is a disgrace ... the canary is chirping....
Mother is speaking seriously to Doris, and Doris is kicking the leg of
the bamboo table ... Mother is still speaking, and Doris is still
kicking ... the canary has stopped chirping. The table with the cage on
it rocks every time that Doris kicks it ... the canary is clinging to
its perch.

I wish I could convey to listeners the feeling of suspense that is
invading the atmosphere ... very nearly over, then, but not quite ...
the situation is still unchanged ... Mother is still speaking seriously,
and Doris is still kicking. Still going on ... still....

I'm very, very sorry, everybody, but the catastrophe always seems to be
averted at the eleventh hour, just as one expects ... this time it
really _must_ be.... No, no--not yet ... the canary is practically
upside down, but----

Listeners may possibly have heard the crash for themselves ... the scene
is one of great confusion, but I'm sure everyone will be glad to hear
that the canary is still alive. Doris is in tears, and Mother is picking
up bird-seed from the floor.

Now things are more or less _in statu quo_, except for the canary's
chirp, which is, unfortunately, quite extinguished for the time being. A
little later on, I shall hope to inform my listeners as to the progress
of our little feathered friend.

Now Dickie has come into the room, and is saying that he and Doris will
both be late for school. I am inclined to the opinion that he is
perfectly correct, as it is past nine o'clock already.

Mother is telling them to take their mackintoshes, and they are asking
Why.... Now she has got them to the front door ... they're off.

No! I'm sorry, everybody, but Dickie is jibbing badly at the mackintosh.
I think he's going to win. ... No, Mother is holding firm ... he's taken
it.... Now Doris has come back to say she's sorry about the canary....
They really _are_ off this time.

Mother is going to the telephone with a list of groceries in her hand
... she has been given the wrong number ... now she's being told that
the number is engaged ... the Exchange is saying that it will ring
her.... Listeners who may have had similar experiences in their lives
will know how far this statement is to be depended upon.

I can see Baby coming into the room, and I am glad to be able to say
that I can hear the canary twittering faintly once more. Baby has left
the door open, and now the cat is walking in. This, I am sorry to say,
has completely silenced the canary again.

Now Mother is making a fresh attempt ... she has the receiver in one
hand and the list in the other ... she's asking for the Home and
Colonial ... she's got them ... she's starting on the list.

Baby has produced a small tin trumpet and is blowing it.... Norah has
come back and is taking away the rest of the breakfast things, and
Mother is still in touch with the Home and Colonial. She is having some
difficulty in making clear her requirements in the way of sardines....
Now Norah is breaking into the discussion with a reminder about cheese
... she declares that the master likes Gorgonzola ... Mother is
ordering a quarter of a pound of Gorgonzola.

It's a little difficult for me to hear everything that's going on,
because the laundry van has just driven up to the door, and the man has
left his engine running and is talking with Norah on the front-door
step, but I can positively assure listeners that Mother is keeping up
her end well with the Home and Colonial ... the sardine question is
settled, and they have got on to furniture cream. ... Baby is still
blowing the tin trumpet spasmodically.

Well, everybody, I'm very sorry to say that my time is drawing to a
close, but I shall look forward to another talk a little later on. One
last little piece of good news to end up with is that the canary.... No,
I'm very, very sorry, everybody, that wasn't the canary at all--it was
simply the Home and Colonial ringing off.


                                  III

This is Clarion Vox speaking--good-evening, everybody, good-evening. We
are now going to switch you over to the Laurels,--which is simply a
twopenny fare from No. 74 Floral Crescent, Highgate,--where, as I am
sure listeners will remember, Grandpapa and Grandmama are expecting
their son and daughter-in-law to supper to-night.

This is Clarion Vox speaking from the Laurels. ... I am going to do my
best to describe to you what is taking place here this evening....

In the first place, I'm sorry to say that it's a very, very wet evening
... there is a depression off the coast of Ireland that is rapidly ... I
beg everybody's pardon, I was announcing the Weather Forecast last week,
and for the moment I forgot.... But this is really Clarion Vox, in a
running commentary on home life....

As I was saying, the weather is most unfortunate, and Grandmama is
laying down sheets of newspaper over the linoleum in the hall.... I'm
sure listeners will realize that, with every desire to make the talk as
full as possible, it is quite impossible for me to give them the actual
names of the newspapers.... The B.B.C. has to make very stringent rules
as to anything of that sort, and naturally....

Very well, then, Grandmama--as I was saying--is laying sheets of
anonymous newspaper over the linoleum. Grandpapa is ... well, at the
moment, Grandpapa doesn't seem to be doing anything very much ...
perhaps later on in the evening I shall be able to tell you rather more
about this side of things....

Now there's a ring at the bell ... they're just arriving ... they are
all saying that it's a wet evening ... they're all saying it.... Now
they're saying it again, in different words.... Now Grandpapa has said
it, all by himself, but the others have got on to something else--I
think it's the children--and nobody is taking any notice. They're all
moving into the drawing-room now and saying how nice it is to see a
fire. Grandpapa is sticking to his guns, and going on about the
weather.... I'm sure listeners will all agree that this is the spirit
that has made England what she is to-day.... Nothing very much is
happening ... things are going on quickly.... Now supper is taking place
and Grandmama is carving the beef.... Everything still very quiet ...
the stewed rhubarb and custard are on the table now ... cheese and
celery ... port.... All over now, and they've gone back to the fire.

A suggestion has been made as to a game of Bridge ... yes, I thought so,
they're going to play.... Grandmama is saying that she and Grandpapa
will play together ... he seems to be objecting.... Yes, he's quite
definitely objecting ... still holding out ... firm as a rock ... he'll
carry his point.... Yes, he's done it. Grandmama is dealing ... now we
shan't be long.... I'm sorry, everybody, it was a mistake ... it'll be
another moment or two before ... _Now_ I think we're off.

I do really beg everybody's pardon.... I should like to describe the
position of every card in detail, but it's quite difficult to see any
hand excepting Grandmama's, and hers, rather unfortunately, can be seen
by everybody ... she's being asked to hold it up.... Grandpapa has gone
no trumps ... now it's two hearts ... three no trumps ... four clubs ...
things are moving so rapidly that it's rather difficult to follow ...
but the upshot of the whole thing is that Grandpapa has been left with
three no trumps doubled ... he's not looking quite as confident as one
would wish.... No, things are not going very well for him ... now
they're going still worse ... and Grandmama is perhaps rather making the
most of the situation.... Wait a minute, though ... she's played out of
her turn ... Grandpapa says that this entitles him to call a lead ...
listeners may very well have heard him say it, he's very much excited
... he's being supported by his daughter-in-law ... the whole situation
is becoming involved.... Now Grandmama has flung her cards all over the
table and is saying that this is simply a friendly game, played for
amusement.... I'm afraid she's in tears ... nobody can do anything with
her--the game is breaking up in confusion.

I don't quite know what my listeners would feel about Grandpapa if they
could see him at the moment ... he's picked up all the cards and has
begun to play Patience rather ostentatiously ... this is really reducing
Grandmama to a state practically bordering on insanity ... it's almost
too distressing to describe.... I'm so very, very sorry, everybody, but
it's really quite doubtful whether I can go on.... But wait a moment
... things are clearing up a bit ... yes, I think the situation is
improving ... the servant is bringing in cocoa, and Grandmama is being
persuaded to drink a cup ... I think this ought to restore her
_morale_, beyond a doubt.... Yes, she's quieting down now ...
a question is being raised as to a new line of printed linen
bedspreads, eight-and-eleven-three, at Harper's Sale in the High
Street ... she says she's thinking of going to look at them
to-morrow ... her daughter-in-law is offering to go with her. The
conversation is now becoming almost entirely feminine, and I'm really
not quite sure whether ... Besides, as a matter of fact, it's really
time for our talk to come to an end, and it almost looks as though
Grandpapa felt the same about the visit of his relations.... No, that
_wasn't_ Clarion Vox.... It was Grandpapa saying Good-night,
everybody....


                                   IV

Clarion Vox at the microphone, everybody, and we are taking you over
once again to No. 74 Floral Crescent, Highgate, for further glimpses of
home life.... Clarion Vox speaking....

Now this morning I'm going to begin by reminding listeners of the dear
old familiar quotation, so peculiarly applicable to the daily round as
lived in the family circle:

                   In every life some rain must fall,
                   Some days be dark and dreary.

This, I am sorry to say, is rather markedly the case at No. 74 Floral
Crescent just now, both literally and figuratively. A depression off the
Hebrides, which listeners will remember from recent weather forecasts,
is making itself felt in a very inopportune manner, as to-day happens to
be Father's birthday.... Perhaps I'd better say that again. This is
Father's birthday, and his birthday treat is to be a day in the country
... the rain is falling very steadily indeed and the barometer in the
hall ... In point of fact the barometer in the hall is not working, but
if it were it would certainly be falling rapidly. The children have
their faces pressed to the window-pane.... Mother is cutting sandwiches
without very much enthusiasm....

I can see Father's presents on the dining-room table ... there is a
penwiper, cut out in red flannel and shaped like a cat's head ... and a
small brass ash-tray ... and something that looks rather like a drawing
of a steam-roller, that I fancy must be Baby's effort.... Now Father is
examining these offerings ... he is saying Thank you ... he is listening
to an explanation about the steam-roller, which turns out to be a
lion.... I'm sorry, everybody ... it is, definitely, a lion and not a
steam-roller.

Now there is a discussion going on ... well, perhaps it's rather too
one-sided to be called a discussion. Father has just said that when once
he's made up his mind, he's not the sort of man to alter it again....
I'm sure listeners will hardly require to be told what Mother's reply
is.... Yes, she's said it, just as I thought.... "I know, dear" ... just
that traditional note of resignation, too.... It's the wives and mothers
of dear old England who've helped to make her fathers and husbands what
they are, as we all know.

The position now is that Father has _said_ he's going to take them all
to spend a day in the country, and he's going to stick to that, whatever
happens.... Mother is obviously very much against it, and keeps on
referring to wet feet and Baby's catching cold.... Dickie and Doris are
saying very little, but each is standing first on one leg and then on
the other, which I think denotes anxiety.... Baby, I'm afraid, is making
it rather difficult for me to ascertain exactly what his point of view
may be, because there are things in his mouth, but I think on the whole
I can safely say that he's backing up Father ... yes, I'm sure he is....
Not that Father really requires any support, because, as he says
himself, when once he's made up his mind ... Yes, he's just said it
again.

Now Norah has burst into the room.... I'm sorry, everybody, but that
really is the only way to describe the way that girl comes in and out.
... Norah, as I say, has just joined the party, and says she supposes
they'll want dinner as usual and there's nothing, only the mutton, in
the house. ... Listeners will, I know, be glad to hear that it is being
made clear to Norah that this sort of discussion must be conducted in
the kitchen.... Father has perhaps put this a little more forcibly than
I should have done myself ... but I daresay it's ...

In any case, the main issue is still entirely unchanged, and I can
assure listeners quite definitely that Father is sticking to his
original programme of an expedition into unknown Hertfordshire. In fact,
he is, at the moment, going to fetch the car round.

Now Mother is in the room again ... she is talking to the children, and
the word "goloshes" is plainly audible ... it's coming almost regularly.
... I think she's finished with it now.... Doris and Dickie are going
off to get ready, and Mother is shaking moth-balls out of all the warm
wraps she can find in the chest in the hall....

The rain, I'm very, very sorry to say, is coming down harder than ever,
and the wind, which is blowing from the north-east, is unusually
piercing.... Father has just brought the car round ... it looks a
little as though the hood might be blown inside out by the wind, but I
hope not.... Now he's coming up the path, and whilst I can see his lips
moving, I am not able to hear exactly what the words ... Of course,
listeners will realize, as I do myself, that the situation is, under
certain aspects, rather a trying one. Here we have Father, nothing if
not a man of his word, committed to a certain course of action, and the
elements, as it were, attempting to defy him.... Mother, whilst not
going quite so far as the elements, is yet making a final effort to
dissuade him.... Listeners will hardly require to be told that this is
not a success....

Here come the children ... Doris is protecting a picnic-basket under her
waterproof, and Dickie is holding an umbrella over Baby.... Now Doris
and Dickie are on the little back-seat, where listeners will, I know, be
sorry to hear that they have no shelter whatever except that of the
umbrella, which they will almost certainly be unable to keep open....
Mother is in front, beside Father, and Baby is on her knee ... they're
just off.... No, there's a hitch somewhere ... Mother and Baby have had
to get out again, so that Father can leave the driving-seat.... Yes, I
see what it is: he's forgotten the waterproof rug.... Now we're all
right, though I'm afraid everybody is very wet already.... Father's
stopped the engine, but he's started it again almost directly.... Now
they really are off.... I daresay listeners can hear the splashing of
the rain for themselves.... The very last words I can hear from Father
are that he's not the kind of man who changes his mind....

Good-bye, everybody--good-bye.


                                   V

This is Clarion Vox, everybody, calling you from one of our great London
termini, where various scenes are being enacted that are very closely
connected with our usual running commentary on home life ... for
instance, there is a little party from No. 74 Floral Crescent, Highgate,
and I can actually see Grandmama ... listeners will remember Grandmama,
from the Laurels ... making her way towards them....

Now Grandpapa can be heard. I can't see him, as yet, but I can hear him
distinctly.... He is saying things about seeing other people off and ...
But perhaps it is hardly fair to follow Grandpapa too closely at the
moment. The crowd is very dense indeed, and he is finding a difficulty
in keeping up with Grandmama.... Now he's drawing level ... he'll catch
up in another minute.... No, no, he won't ... there's a paper-boy in the
way ... Grandpapa has dodged him very skilfully ... but I'm afraid it's
only to find himself rather badly mixed up with a lady who has a little
dog on a chain.... Things would, I'm sure, be simplified if Grandmama
would only look round ... but no ... she's forging ahead steadily. I
think her objective is Platform 1 ... she's asking a porter where the
boat-train starts from.... As I thought, he says No. 1. Now Grandmama
is asking a second porter ... she has received the same answer.
Grandpapa has cleared the lady with the dog and is making slow but
steady progress.... Grandmama has caught sight of a ticket-collector ...
she's making straight for him.... Now she's asking him which platform ...

Listeners would perhaps like to turn now to another aspect of the
situation.... Clarion Vox speaking, as I said before, from one of our
great London termini. The boat-train is due to start in another eight
and a half minutes.... I can see our friends from No. 74 Floral
Crescent, Highgate, just taking their places ... that is to say, Mother
has taken hers, and Baby is on her lap ... Dickie has been told to keep
a look-out for Grandmama and Grandpapa, and he is certainly at the
carriage window, though I am inclined to think that he is giving the
greater part of his attention to a neighbouring engine. One of the most
active figures in this scene of activity is undoubtedly Father. Just now
he is engaged in a rather sharp altercation with a French gentleman who
has appropriated a corner seat to which Father feels that he has a prior
claim. It is a little difficult for me to give listeners quite as clear
an impression as I should like, of this rather unique little episode, as
things are moving rather quickly ... the French gentleman is difficult
to follow ... he is getting more difficult to follow.... Now Mother is
intervening, and begging Father to give over, dear.... Father is taking
little or no notice of this, but the French gentleman is lifting his hat
and bowing.... I only wish that listeners could see for themselves this
very typical example of the famous Gallic courtesy ... _toujours la
politesse_.... Now he and Father are at it again ... the guard is
approaching ... I feel very nearly certain that he will be called upon
to adjudicate.... Yes, I thought so.... The guard is hearing both sides
... still hearing them ... still. ... Now he's breaking in.... I think
it's going in Father's favour.... Yes, everything seems to be tending
that way ... the French gentleman is out of it ... definitely ... he's
leaving the carriage altogether ... his voice is dying away in the
distance ... Father's, on the other hand, is just as audible as ever ...
though I don't actually know that anyone is paying very much attention
to it at the moment, as Grandpapa and Grandmama have just joined the
party.... I am sorry to say that Grandmama is predicting a bad crossing
... she says that a gale is blowing up.... Several people in the
vicinity are looking at her with evident resentment and dismay, but it
has no effect on her.... I don't think I've mentioned Doris, yet. She
is here in navy-blue serge, and just at the moment seems to be absorbed
in a paper with coloured illustrations and very inferior print, but no
doubt as the moment of departure draws near ... Yes, she's roused
herself now, and is being warned by Grandpapa not to drink a drop of
water anywhere in France before it's been boiled and filtered.

Well, I think they'll be off in a moment or two now. Listeners will very
probably realize, from experience, that few people are quite at their
best in a scene of this kind, and that a certain amount of rather stale
repetition becomes almost inevitable. This is the fourth time that
Mother has said they won't be long now.... Grandpapa has said it twice,
and now Grandmama is saying it. The children have each said it once. Now
a green flag is being produced by the guard, and everyone is looking
distinctly relieved. However, it isn't unfurled yet ... Grandmama will
have time to put in a reminder about hoping to get a picture post-card
from Boulogne. Yes, she's said it.... Now, I really _do_ think that in a
moment or two ... Mother has sent her love to several people ... I'm
afraid she's doing this to fill in time ... the whistle has just sounded
... the train is beginning to move ... Grandpapa seems to be making a
determined effort to keep pace with it ... he's shouting a last remark
... it is to the effect that they're really off now ... the train is
gathering speed and Grandpapa is dropping behind ... Grandmama is saying
a few short, sharp words as to his folly in trying to ... But really, I
don't think the B.B.C. can quite ...

I sometimes wonder whether listeners altogether realize the strain of
following home life so very, very closely as one is obliged to do for
the purposes of this talk ... there seems to be something about home
life ... though one doesn't for a moment mean to imply anything in any
way derogatory ... this is still Clarion Vox speaking....

       *       *       *       *       *

_There is just one S.O.S. to-night: Will the relations of Mr. Clarion
Vox go at once to Hanwell_ Asylum, _where he is lying dangerously
ill.... Perhaps we'd better have that again: Mr. Clarion Vox at Hanwell
A S Y L U M.... Good-bye, everybody_, good-bye.




                       STUDIES IN EVERYDAY LIFE


                               MOVEMENTS

Most of us, at one time or another, have been drawn into Movements,
sometimes in the capacity of promoter, sometimes merely as one of the
objects that the Movement is out to benefit, or suppress, or transmute
into something quite different. For the great aim and object of all
Movements is to alter existing conditions. The promoters do not, as a
rule, say why this is so necessary: they just set to work.

A great deal is accomplished by speaking, but this part of the good work
is always done by the promoters, and never by the objects, of the
Movement. Probably this is one of the reasons why hardly anybody ever
knows what are the reactions of those who are the objects of a
Movement's benevolent offices.

Speaking is done on Committees: a good deal of it, usually, by the
person in the chair, some by the secretary, and still more by such of
the ordinary Committee members as are determined and self-assertive by
nature. There are also professional speakers.

These usually have an address in London (though sometimes in
particularly inaccessible parts of the North of England instead), but
they live in railway carriages, in cars sent to meet them, or fetch
them, or take them away, and in the houses of other people. A speaker,
whether coming for one night or for a fortnight, carries a little bag,
which apparently contains nothing whatever except papers. The present
writer does not know what they do about night-attire, but female
speakers usually have the kind of hair that requires, or at any rate
gets, no brushing, and male speakers are frequently bald, so that the
problem of a brush and comb is practically eliminated.

It generally happens, either through the peculiarities of the railway
time-table or by the apparently deliberate choice of the speaker, that
he or she arrives at the house from which the Meeting is being
organized, at a time which makes it almost impossible to have either tea
or dinner at anything approaching a normal hour. A meal has to be
arranged that is neither one thing nor the other, at which everybody
usually drinks coffee and eats eggs.

This is one reason why speakers are, for the most part, unpopular with
men, especially men who are husbands and accustomed to consideration.
Speakers do not consider anybody, excepting Our Chairman, concerning
whom they are very loyal and hearty, and Our Secretary, whom they like
much less, but against whom they wouldn't say anything for the world.

It might very reasonably be supposed that the Movement, its progress,
aims, and objects, would be the one subject that speakers would wish to
avoid, on the few occasions when they are not obliged to be mentioning
them from a platform. But this is not so. They do not ever want to talk
about anything else. This, of course, makes it easy to entertain
them--indeed, it may be said that they entertain themselves--but on the
other hand, it makes it difficult to reconcile other members of the
household, or ordinary visitors, to their presence.

Movements in general are usually associated with Meetings--Committee
ones or ordinary ones. The psychology of the former kind is so strange
that it requires an article to itself.

Ordinary, or general, Meetings take place in a hall, or a drawing-room,
or if in the country, in a garden. These last are very apt to finish
either under umbrellas, or in a general rush to the Vicarage
dining-room.

Meetings, really, vary very little, whatever the Movement may be.
Sometimes they begin with a song. The person on the platform who starts
the song does not usually possess what is known as perfect pitch, and so
a severe strain is put upon the Meeting at the very offset. However,
half of those present do not sing the high notes at all, and others drop
their voices an octave lower and hope that they are really singing
seconds, and it is over quite quickly.

The speeches, especially if political, are not over at all quickly. Very
often a speaker has to go on and on at political meetings, because it is
the custom of Our Member, or Our Parliamentary Candidate, as the case
may be, to pledge himself to appear at two different ends of the county
at one and the same time, and this naturally leads to a certain delay in
his arrival at whichever place he leaves to the last.

Meetings, unless dispersed by the police, end with Votes of Thanks. The
system by which these are at present conducted, is not really a very
good one. Someone on the platform proposes a vote of thanks to the
speaker, for coming here to-day and giving us such an interesting
address, and nobody has ever yet succeeded in restraining a meeting
from, at this point, breaking into quite premature applause. Because
immediately afterwards, someone else on the platform has to stand up,
and say exactly the same thing, only if possible in rather different
words, in order to second the vote of thanks. And then the chairman
stands up, and gathers the thing together as it were, and calls for the
customary demonstration--but by that time the first impulse of relief
that the whole thing is over has died away, and people are beginning to
tread on other people's feet, and look for the things they have
dropped--and such applause as there is, comes as an anti-climax.

Anti-climax, as a matter of fact, is the great danger of all Movements.
It is a frightful thing for any Movement, when its object is
accomplished, for such reason as it had, or felt itself to have, for
existence is then gone. Providence, however, working as usual, in a
mysterious way, arranges that very few Movements ever do succeed in
accomplishing their object.


                          LOOKING AT SCHOOLS

Sooner or later most parents do this, but the supreme example is the
mother of an eldest, or only, boy. The father comes too, but he is
usually silent, and walks a few paces behind the mother and the
Headmaster on the tour of inspection, although at the end of it he
sometimes puts a single, shrewd question about the Drains.

The mother, on the other hand, puts hundreds of questions, and generally
answers a good many of them herself.

She says: "Don't you think that _every_ boy needs absolute _individual_
attention? I always feel that so very strongly myself. And with John,
I've always found ..."

It is not necessary for the Head to listen to the next bit, and indeed
he never does. He knows what John's mother has always found, with John,
and if he doesn't, it makes no difference to him. Nothing that any
mother ever says makes any difference to any Headmaster--but fortunately
few mothers realize this. Headmasters, naturally, conceal it, politely.
They say:

"Quite, quite. That is so true. I may say that in the experience of
thirty years, with hundreds of boys passing through my hands term after
term, I have never yet failed to understand each one thoroughly and
individually, through and through. I wish I could show you some of the
letters that I receive by every post from boys who were under my care
twenty years ago...."

Then it is the mother's turn to stop listening. Quite possibly she takes
the opportunity of turning to her husband and hissing through her
clenched teeth: "Demandez-lui s'il fait un _reduction_ pour les frres."

The husband, dazed, will simply reply: "What did you say, dear?" and
there, for the time being, the matter rests.

"Here we have our hot-air cupboard ... Matron is very particular ... wet
stockings ... The Sanatorium--(not that we ever have any of the boys
_ill_, I am thankful to say)--... the Dining-Hall.... One of our
Dormitories ... another of our Dormitories...."

All this kind of thing is mere advance-skirmishing.

The real encounter begins when the school has been seen, and the mother
has said "Yes, I see, that's really delightful" a sufficient number of
times, and the Head has affably invited the parents to sit down, either
in his own particular study or in his wife's drawing-room.

He knows that the moment has come, and opens with: "And how old is your
boy?" in the most interested voice that he can command.

No mother has ever been known to answer this question by the simple
statement that John is six, or seven, or eight, as the case may be.

She says that he is six and a half, but very much in advance of that age
in some ways, whilst on the other hand, in _other_ ways--but all that it
concerns the Head to know is whether John is under seven or over seven.

If the former, he replies: "Ah, then you've time before you, still." If
the latter: "Ah, then you want to come to a decision fairly soon."

In either case, the mother rejoins: "Oh yes. But--I know you'll
understand what I mean--we do feel that it's most important to get the
_right_ school for John. In some ways, he's so unlike other boys."

Some Headmasters allow the mother a free rein at this stage--others do
not. They interrupt. They try and prove to her that they know more about
her little boy, whom they have never seen, than she does, simply from
their vast experience of other, exactly similar, little boys. But this
is never a success. All mothers know that their little boy is different
to all other little boys.

In any case, it is almost always the mother who wins in the end.

If the Head has known many parents--and what Head has not?--a word here
and there will give him all the necessary clues, and he need only attend
from time to time.

"From the day he was three years old ... clockwork mouse ... Meccano ...
really quite wonderful ... engines ... wireless ... pulling things to
pieces ... a brilliant engineer cousin of my husband's so much
struck...."

(A destructive child, interested in seeing the wheels go round because
he is deficient in imagination and initiative.)

But on the other hand:

"Almost too fond of reading ... bookworm ... tells Baby the most
wonderful stories ... goes on for hours and hours ... bound to write,
one of these days...."


(Probably a poor physique, spectacles, and might even walk in his
sleep.)

"John, I'm afraid, is _not_ fond of his lessons. Just a regular _boy_
... anything to do with a ball ... so delightfully keen ... really what
I call sporting...."

(The average dunce.)

The experienced Head takes these notes in mental shorthand, dismisses
them from his mind, and never, in any circumstances whatever, refers to
them again.

In exactly the same way, his wife, if he has one, listens when her turn
comes to injunctions about John's physical welfare.

"As a rule, he's very good about his food--I've always been most
strict--but about parsnips, I really have found that he can't manage
them. What I mean to say is, he really can't manage them, I've found. As
a matter of fact, I was exactly the same myself at that age."

This last is an argument that all mothers look upon as being entirely
conclusive.

"Yes, I see."

The wife of the Headmaster also sees, about John's tendency to colds in
winter, his inability to do without nine hours of sleep every night, and
his peculiarly rapid growth. She knows that the curriculum of the school
will not be deviated from by a hair's breadth to suit any individual
John, and she does not for a moment believe one single word of what
John's mother is saying.

But the hall-mark of all Headmasters and their wives is scepticism, just
as that of all mothers is a profound suspiciousness.

Nevertheless, they all part from one another with earnest and graceful
cordiality.

John's father asserts himself at the last by bringing off his question
about the Drains, and is answered effusively, since all school drains
are always bran-new and absolutely up-to-date having been entirely
relaid the term before last, and John's mother says: "Then may I write
to you?" with a smile full of hopefulness.

"Do--do," replies the Head, equally hopeful. And the parents, so
indistinguishable from all other parents, depart; and the Head says:
"Thank God that's over."

So does the father, who does not really feel that it matters where John
goes, so long as he goes there soon, and gets plenty of cricket and
football. But he knows very well that he has not heard the last of
John's school yet.

"You see, dear, although I quite liked _some_ things about the place, I
do feel that, with a boy like John, one has to remember that one isn't
dealing with a perfectly ordinary boy, exactly like other boys...."

And they go and look at the next school on the list--which will differ
from the last one about as much as the Headmaster from all other
Headmasters, the parents from all other parents, and the boy from all
other boys.


                             BEING PARENTS

This, like so many other jobs, is no longer what it used to be. The
bottom has dropped out of the market since the days of Edward VII., son
of good Queen Victoria.

Parents, after booming for many years, have now slumped. It looks,
indeed, as though they were unlikely ever to rise again.

In the old days there was an _ipso facto_ meritoriousness about being a
parent (within the bounds of wedlock) at all. The oftener, the better.
Now, it is not a case of the oftener the better. On the contrary, the
fewer the higher. Twice, certainly--three times, perhaps. Anything
beyond that, and you are a case for Dr. Marie Stopes.

The children, when they are there, give less trouble than they used to
give, in one way, but more in another. There is no trouble about
naughtiness, because they never are naughty--only highly strung,
mismanaged, or repressed. It is often difficult, however, for a mother,
especially when in a hurry, as mothers so often are, to distinguish
between the highly strung, mismanaged, or repressed child and the
old-fashioned naughty one. But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of
little books to be a help. They say things like--

"Never raise the voice, in rebuking a child."

"Punishment should rarely, if ever, be inflicted. When it is, let it be
the logical outcome of the fault."

"Never use force, to coerce a child into obedience. Reason with it."

Sometimes it seems almost impossible to obey the little books literally.
If the child that is being rebuked is itself roaring, beating a drum
outside the door, kicking the furniture, or blowing a trumpet in one's
ear, it becomes imperative to raise the voice--to raise it, indeed, more
than a little--in rebuking. Again, it is very, very difficult for some
mothers to feel certain what punishment, exactly, is the "logical
outcome" of spitting over the banisters, or putting small shells down
the baby's ear.

To avoid the use of force in coercing a child into obedience is
comparatively easy--especially as the child grows older and force, from
the average mother, would seem likely to prove even more unseemly, and
less efficacious, than the little books suppose. Fathers, however, even
nowadays, have few scruples about force. They do not read the little
books. Neither do they reason with their children. For one thing,
children almost always win, in a reasoning match, and fathers dislike
being defeated in argument; and for another, being just as often in a
hurry as are the mothers, and far less conscientious, they prefer to
save time. But less is expected--now as always--of fathers than of
mothers.

Modern fathers do not always realize how much they have to be thankful
for. In the days of Miss Maria Edgeworth, or those of Mrs. Sherwood,
their rle was a far more strenuous one than it is nowadays. Take Mr.
Fairchild. At any moment his four-year-old son Henry might say to him:
"Pray, Papa, what has the Bible to say for and against the practice of
dancing?" or Emily enquire: "What is the process, Papa, by which iron is
extracted from its ore?" Mr. Fairchild had not only to be prepared to
answer these intelligent enquiries, but he had to answer them at immense
length, with illustrations, and edifying examples, and quotations, and
to devise conundrums of his own, designed to prove whether or no Henry
and Emily had listened to, and fully understood, his explanations. He
had to set a good example, in word--or rather, in many words--and in
deed;--he had to read aloud (from Paley's _Evidences_, or kindred
works); he had to take his whole family for walks--(in the course of
which they almost always met some Poor Person, to whom Mr. Fairchild
gave pious admonition);--and he had, when necessary, to administer
punishment to the children with a rod.

These strenuous obligations were imposed upon him by the convention of
parental infallibility. It would have been entirely impossible for Mr.
Fairchild to say simply in answer to any question, however abstruse, "_I
don't know_". The cosmos of Henry, Lucy, and Emily would have been
shattered--to say nothing of that of their parents. Even Mrs. Fairchild,
though less omniscient than her husband, never went further, when
cornered by her children, than to say: "My love, these are matters which
our poor finite minds are not intended to understand".

Parents, nowadays, are never asked the kind of questions that the
Fairchild parents were asked, so they are not confronted with the
frightful necessity of replying to them. On the other hand, they are
asked other sorts of questions, mostly of a personal nature, and
beginning with Why, and to these it is necessary that they should return
adequate and rational answers.

It is, very rightly, no longer considered either adequate or rational to
reply, "Because Father says it will be so" or "Because Mother thinks it
best".

So that much time is spent in explanation.

On the whole, modern parents make up on the swings for what they have
undoubtedly lost upon the roundabouts. The ones who do not get it either
way are those, rather less modern, who were once children under the old
rgime and are now parents under the new.


                            MR. FAIRCHILD

One has, perhaps, been accustomed to look upon Mr. Fairchild too
exclusively in the light of a Parent--and an Early Victorian parent at
that. But just as clergymen so often say that they are Men first and
Parsons afterwards, so Mr. Fairchild must have been a Man first and a
Parent afterwards.

It is possible to spend hours in conjecturing what Mr. Fairchild was
like (_a_) as a baby, (_b_) as a young gentleman, (_c_) as a suitor for
the hand of the future Mrs. Fairchild.

How, for instance, did Mr. Fairchild propose? One may safely assume that
he said it with texts,--but here imagination is hampered by the fact
that nowhere is Mrs. Fairchild's maiden name revealed to us. During the
years of their married life, Mr. Fairchild called her "my dear" and
spoke of her as "your mama" or "your mistress" according to the persons
whom he was addressing. The baptismal name of Mr. Fairchild himself is
shrouded in similar obscurity, but it was probably Percy, Herbert, or
Henry. Perhaps all three.

I have seen only one illustration to _The History of the Fairchild
Family_ that conveys any real feeling of authenticity to my mind. It is
in an edition published by Messrs. Routledge, in or about the year 1898.
Mr. Fairchild, with side-whiskers, and wearing a very small pork-pie
hat, a morning-coat, and a long, very tight pair of white trousers, sits
upon the extreme edge of a rustic bench beneath a tree, holding a small
book. Underneath the picture is printed the simple, straightforward
legend: "Mr. Fairchild reading his Bible".

It was a good moment to choose. Far better than "Mr. Fairchild taking
his children to gaze upon a gibbet" or even "Mr. Fairchild returning
thanks for cold raspberry and currant tart"--characteristic though
either of these episodes might have been.

This business of the gibbet is still, after all these years, brought up
against Mr. Fairchild on almost every occasion that his name is
mentioned. [And it is, I may add, mentioned a great deal oftener than
might be supposed.]

The facts of the scandal are these:

When Lucy, Emily, and Henry Fairchild were respectively aged nine,
eight, and six years old, they had a quarrel. They fought, and were
separated by Mr. Fairchild, who explained to them the evils of violence,
whilst at the same time he whipped, with a little rod, the hands of all
the children till they smarted again. "After which he made them stand in
a corner of the room, without their breakfasts, neither did they get
anything to eat all the morning. When John came in to lay the cloth for
dinner, Mr. Fairchild called the three children to him and asked if they
were sorry for the wicked things which they had done."

It will readily be believed that they were very sorry indeed.

It is a relief to know that Mr. Fairchild, after forgiving his children,
gave them leave to dine with him as usual, for a severe ordeal lay ahead
of them.

Their papa took them to a very thick and dark wood, in which they were
assured that "something very shocking" awaited them. So, indeed, it did,
in the shape of a gibbet, "on which the body of a man hung in chains:
the body had not yet fallen to pieces, although it had hung there some
years ... the face of the corpse was so shocking, that the children
could not look upon it".

The unfortunate children begged to be taken away, but Mr.
Fairchild--always thorough--replied: "Not yet. I must tell you the
history of that wretched man before we go from this place." And so he
did.

Mrs. Fairchild had wisely declined to associate herself with this
expedition.

A very few days later, Henry so far forgot himself as to steal an apple,
and then deny having done so. With some lack of judgment, he committed
this misdemeanour before breakfast, and was immediately "shut up by
himself in a little room, at the very top of the house", where he
remained, without food as usual, until night-time, when his mama came to
him and enquired whether he had been thinking of his great wickedness.

Upon Henry's assurance that he had been thinking of it a very great
deal, he was once more restored to the family circle. Mr. Fairchild
kissed him, cut him a large piece of bread-and-butter, and explained
that he had punished him "in order to save his soul from hell".

It was not an argument which admitted of reply, as Henry, between his
bites at the bread-and-butter, probably realized.

Mrs. Fairchild, upon all occasions, supported Mr. Fairchild, and
occasionally made spirited contributions of her own to the sum-total of
the children's information, as when Henry made enquiry of her concerning
Roman Catholics.

"The Roman Catholics, my dear, are called Christians," said Mrs.
Fairchild, "but there is much in their religion which the Bible does not
approve. They make images and saints of holy men and worship them; they
whip their own bodies, and keep long fasts, and make long and painful
journeys to the graves of saints; thinking by all these things to save
themselves. And now, my dear, you understand in part what the Roman
Catholics are."

One is grateful to Mrs. Fairchild for "in part". Mr. Fairchild would not
have said "in part". It was his masculine prerogative to be infallible,
omniscient, and uncompromising in his judgments.

Who can forget his attitude towards his unfortunate friends, the
Crosbies?

"I am sorry," said Mr. Fairchild, "that Mr. Crosbie still thinks so much
about eating. It always was his besetting sin, and it seems to have
grown stronger upon him as he has got older."

It must be admitted that the subsequent behaviour of the entire Crosbie
family, when they came to spend the day with the Fairchilds, afforded an
excellent opportunity for the study of Besetting Sins. No wonder that
Mrs. Fairchild, escorting her guests round the garden, found an early
occasion to tell them that "no family could be happy in which the fear
of God was not the ruling principle".

It is impossible not to regret that we are not allowed to follow Mr.
Fairchild into old age, or to see the results of his efforts on behalf
of Lucy, Emily, and Henry in after-life. We are reluctantly compelled to
take leave of him after his accession to a handsome property, in the
vicinity of Reading. The last, and most characteristic, performance
recorded of him is his gift to Henry of five shillings, to be expended
at Henry's sole discretion, for the benefit of twenty of the village
schoolboys. Upon the production, by the infant Henry, of twenty
packets, each one containing a twopenny ball and a pennyworth of string,
Mr. Fairchild forbore to comment more severely than by observing that he
was not angry, but he wished Henry to understand "that he has fallen
into what is wrong to-day not in having judged amiss by spending a sum
of money, which might have been made really useful to the poor boys, on
useless and inappropriate presents, but in giving way to that
self-sufficiency which set him above the advice of those whom he knew to
be wiser than himself".

This is the last recorded speech of Mr. Fairchild, although it is
impossible to doubt that his family and dependants were given many other
opportunities for profiting by his eloquence whilst he continued in
their midst.

The rest must be conjecture--a field that is of unending fascination to
the true lover of the Fairchild Family.


                  THE NON-GARDENER'S GARDENING CALENDAR

People in England who do not like gardening are very few, and of the few
there are, many do not own to it, knowing that they might just as well
own to having been in prison, or got drunk at Buckingham Palace.

But curiously enough, the Gardening Calendar, which I have only to-day
discovered (rather unfortunately, since it is already July), is likely
to hold more appeal for those who know nothing about gardening than for
those who make it the hobby of their own lives and the bane of everybody
else's.

It is one of those Calendars that has a little text for every day, and
on July 14th it says, quite quietly and simply:

"_If Seedling Turnips are attacked by fly, dust with soot when the dew
is on the leaf._"

What a train of thought the whole thing rouses! The Seedling Turnips
attacked by fly--(the Calendar, I _think_, means flies, not only just
one fly, but "fly" reads more dramatically)--and the owner, warned by
some mysterious instinct, hastening to collect soot. What happens if
there is no soot? It is July--all the fires may be out. Probably,
however, true gardeners have reserves of soot that ordinary people do
not know about. They collect the soot, therefore, and dust either the
Seedling Turnips or the Fly, or both--whichever the Calendar
means--"when the dew is on the leaf".

Of all the pretty touches! It reminds one of "When the bloom is on the
rye".

Non-gardeners do not so much as know what the dew looks like, on the
leaf of the Seedling Turnip. But it is easy to imagine what the
garden-lover looks like, crawling out of bed before the sun has had time
to interfere with the dew on the leaf, and dusting the soot about all
over the place.

Then again: "_Onions should be ready to pull and dry in the sun_", says
the Calendar, rather peremptorily. Onions _should_ be ready. If they
aren't, the whole thing is evidently all off, because the very next day
we dash off into:

"_Continue to bud Roses_", and nothing more is ever said about giving
the Onions a second chance.

Naturally, with 365 days in the year, it is almost impossible for the
Calendar to assign a definite task to every one of them, so sometimes it
just says things like:

"_Stocks and Pansies will be ripening their seed_" (which has a Biblical
flavour), and "_Geranium Cuttings will not strike freely in open
ground_".

The gardener-born, on reading this, looks at once to the Geranium
Cuttings, and if by any frightful chance they _are_ striking freely in
open ground, knows that something is wrong somewhere and rushes them all
away to whatever is the opposite of open ground.

Much later on--for it is impossible to resist looking on ahead--a
faintly reproachful note is sounded:

"_If not yet done, sow Onions to stand the Winter_".

There is something about "_if not yet done_" that should strike a chill
to the heart of anyone who has put off this business of sowing the
Onions to stand the winter. They will obviously only have themselves to
thank if the Onions break down at sight of the first snowflake.

There is something more hopeful about "_Celery may still be planted_",
on August 21st. There has been procrastination, and even slackness, the
Calendar means, but it isn't too late.

"_Dis-bud Chrysanthemums_" has an element of Dr. Marie Stopes about it
that makes one unwilling to dwell upon the topic.

It is depressingly followed by the command to "_Sow Cabbage for winter
and spring supply_". Winter and spring! Will one have to eat cabbage for
months and months?

Evidently one will.

"_Lift Potatoes as soon as the Haulm has died back_" leaves me cold. For
one thing, I have no idea what the haulm is, or how I can tell when it
has died back; and for another, I do not want to lift the potatoes, then
or ever, for I do not know where, or to what heights, the Calendar means
them to be lifted. For once, it has overreached itself, and I shall do
nothing.

"_Gather Tomato fruit as it ripens_" is much simpler, and might almost
be called obvious, but "_Mulch and earth up Celery_" is not, unless one
has a previous acquaintance, which I unhappily have not, with the verb
_To Mulch_.

Quite late in September is the briefest entry of all: "_Harvest
Onions_". Not Harvest Home, but Harvest Onions.

The Calendar, in fact, has a weakness for Onions. They get more texts to
themselves than any other product of the vegetable world.

The most engaging one of all comes in August: "_Bend down the heads of
well-grown Onions to help the development of the bulb_".

Perhaps garden-lovers have always known about this, but for my part it
would never have entered my mind to set about bending down the heads of
my well-grown Onions to help the development of the bulb. But it strikes
me as a very pretty, gracious, and generous action, symbolical of the
strong helping the weak, and many other things of the same kind.

Right at the end of the Calendar, as far as I can see without tearing, I
_think_ it rather slacks off, with generalizations, such as "_Violets
will need careful attention_", which simply makes one anxious about
them, without giving one a lead.

And "_Leave Parsnips in the Ground_" on November 13th is ridiculous,
since I shouldn't ever have thought of moving them, if the Calendar
hadn't said anything.

One is also inclined to carp at "_Rock Gardens may now be made_" with
its casual plural. However, "_Dig and Manure all vacant ground_" is much
worse, and opens up unlimited fields of really hard labour. One turns
with relief to "_Watch the ventilation of your greenhouse_", which is,
anyway, a passive, quiet way of spending the time.

On the whole, the Gardening Calendar is calculated to brighten the day
of the non-gardener. All its mysterious counsels are probably as clear
as daylight to the real garden-lovers, who take all this thinning, and
dis-budding, and covering of crowns, and lifting of crops, in their
stride.

The non-gardener, however, in a quiet way, can extract quite a lot of
clean, healthy English fun out of trying to guess what it all means.




                       LOOKING AT THE CLASSICS


Experienced writers are always being asked to advise inexperienced
writers--without receiving any fee for doing so, and usually at a vast
expenditure of valuable time and energy--and one of their
favourite--because one of the shortest--ways of doing it, is to say:
Look at the Classics! Read your Shakespeare! Go to the Great
Masters!--and things like that.

Very well--one goes to the Great Masters--one looks at one's
Shakespeare. Or one would, if there was ever time. And the result would
be perfectly extraordinary.

We will suppose that a young gentleman called Vavasour is writing a
play, and has been told, by three out of the eight experienced
playwrights whom he has already pestered, to Read his Shakespeare.
Vavasour has done this (and had the usual shock on discovering that his
Shakespeare is responsible for various sayings that Vavasour had always
attributed to his aunt), and having completely soaked himself in the
Classics, sits down to his own rather elusive masterpiece.

Construction, hitherto, has presented difficulties. But Vavasour's visit
to the Classics has simplified all that.

For the purposes of his plot, A has to overhear a conversation between C
and B. Does Vavasour rack his brains for a plausible situation by which
A can, without the vulgarity of deliberate eavesdropping, assist unseen
at the tte--tte between C and B? Not at all. He evolves a garden
scene, with C and B making love, or plotting an assassination, or
arranging a practical joke, on a rustic bench. Whilst they are in the
midst of it he brings on A, who strolls behind a little hedge,
right-centre, and remains there, continually looking round it, above it,
through it, or--if practicable--underneath it--without ever being
observed by C and B, who are, indeed, particularly careful not to glance
in that direction. They just continue to plot, or to make love, or both,
at the tops of their voices, and A says Ha! or Foul hypocrites! or
anything else he likes, and is not, apparently, heard by anybody except
the audience.

Again, the subtleties of psychology are much modified by the Great
Masters. Mrs. B and Major C, in a triangle play, are in love, but young
Vavasour, anxious to score a popular success, rightly sees that by the
end of the Third Act it will be advisable for Mrs. B's affections to
have reverted to her lawful husband. Is it necessary to indicate the
dawnings of this change of heart through pages and pages of dialogue?
Not if he continues steadily and faithfully to Look at the Classics. He
waits till five minutes before the last curtain, and lets passion ramp
to the very furthest of the limits imposed by the Censor and then--quite
suddenly--introduces a bran-new character. Say an innocent young girl,
bringing home the washing or something. Major C observes her, falls in
love with her on the spot, and says so. Mrs. B says What! Faithless? and
instantly realizes that the only person she herself really loves is her
own husband. At the same moment, the husband, who has been away at the
North Pole, returns quite unexpectedly by aeroplane, and enters the
drawing-room. In less time than it takes to get one's hat out from under
the stall of the theatre, the four characters are happily paired off,
and the best classical traditions have been followed.

But supposing Vavasour to be a reactionary, and romantic. He is
determined to have a happy ending. Major C and Mrs. B love each other,
so do Major C's wife and Mrs. B's husband. So do hosts of other minor
characters, all more or less mismated. After engineering the most
desperate complications, young Vavasour remembers the Great Masters. As
a result, in Act III. the butler comes into the room where all these
agitated people are gathered together and announces quietly that Major
C's wife has just fallen into a river which has risen in flood and has
been drowned, and that Mrs. B's husband, who was just then passing, has
been thrown by his horse and killed, and that several minor characters
who happened to be playing golf on the adjoining links were so upset at
these occurrences that half of them collapsed and died, while the
remainder decided to emigrate and have already left to catch the boat at
Tilbury.

Thus is the coast cleared for Major C and Mrs. B.

Nor do the Great Masters fail their disciple when it comes to those
delicate and difficult pieces of psychology without which young Vavasour
knows well that his play can never be acclaimed as the remarkable Human
Document that it really is.

Vavasour has created the figure of X--a morbid and perverted creature,
in whom Vavasour has let loose all the strange impulses that he can
himself never indulge in because if he did he would probably be kicked
out of his Club, and so on.

X, throughout Three Acts, has wrought untold damage and messed up the
lives of everybody within reach. His only logical destination is either
the asylum or five years' hard. But will the Box Office stand for that?
It will not. Young Vavasour again flies to his Shakespeare. He comes
back quite calm, and resumes Page One hundred and thirty-five. The
situation is as involved as possible: all is gloom, impropriety, and
horror.

But X walks on, practicable door O.P., and informs all the other
characters in the play--who have suddenly foregathered from the four
corners of the earth for the purpose of hearing him--that he has been
asleep in the garden, and awakened with a complete change of heart. It
has quite suddenly come over him that all this wickedness is a mistake.
There is to be no more of it. He is, in fact, going into a monastery in
two hours' time. But meanwhile, he will make his will. (The man who has
come to wind the clocks, by a coincidence, here turns out to be the
family solicitor, who just disguised himself for a joke, and has a
Will-form in his pocket.) X distributes the whole of his fortune
amongst the people who need it, to make them happy--and the Classics,
once more, have done their job.

The only thing that really remains to be seen is whether the managers to
whom young Vavasour submits the result of so much thought and effort
will fully appreciate the example from which all these inspirations have
been drawn.

Even if they do, there will still be the public to reckon with. And if
they do not, the whole fabric of classical literature as an example more
or less crumbles to the ground, surely... ... ...?

Now let us look at the Classics again--this time not so much for what we
can get out of them in the way of actual construction, as for ideas in
regard to plot.

(It is a well-established convention amongst writers that to lift a plot
wholesale out of the Classics and use it does not constitute plagiarism.
No writer has ever yet been misguided enough to try to find out on
exactly what basis it is that this convention is so well established.)

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us assume that young Cathcart-Symington--as we will, for the sake of
convenience, call our dramatist--has it in mind to write a rather
brilliant comedy, of the kind that is likely to appeal to a London
audience. Of course, one must realize that plenty of other people beside
Cathcart-Symington have exactly the same scheme in mind, but most of
them haven't actually tried to write a play, on the grounds that they
haven't got time, so for the purpose of this article they will be
ignored. We can write another one for them, on totally different lines,
as soon as they have really got down to the writing-table--if they ever
do.

Cathcart-Symington is one of those authors--there are many such--who can
write reasonably sparkling dialogue with comparative ease, and who can
also create reasonably convincing characters, that he vows aren't taken
from any persons now living--but to whom the invention of a plot
presents the most appalling difficulty.

Let us suppose that _Act I. Scene 2: Lady Isobel's Drawing-Room in
Mayfair_ is already inscribed on Cathcart-Symington's typescript. He has
gone so far as to add: _Enter Harris Faulkener, M.P._--and there is
little doubt in his mind, or indeed in ours, that Lady Isobel and Harris
Faulkener are about to have a terrific scene together. The author can
handle terrific scenes perfectly all right, and audiences simply love
them--but the drawback to a terrific scene is that it has got to be
_about_ something. It must have a _raison d'tre_, a _cause clbre_, a
_modus operandi_--anything of that kind.

This is the moment for going to the Classics. The Classics abound in
everything of that sort.

Cathcart-Symington goes to them. And What, reader, does he find?

He finds that Lady Isobel and Mr. Harris Faulkener are passionately in
love with one another, but have just made the frightful discovery that
they are really, owing to the indiscretion of an earlier generation,
Grandmother and Grandson. Unfortunately, when they find this out, it is
already---- Well, anyway, it would have been a great deal
better--although less poignant--if they had found it out several months
earlier.

As, however, they didn't, Harris Faulkener has the classically sound
idea that it will improve the situation very much for Lady Isobel,
blindfolded and with flowers in her hair, to be burnt alive in the
courtyard, and for himself, after watching her die, to make the
chauffeur drive over him at full speed in the largest and heaviest car
to be found in the garage.

And there you have a plot straight from the Classics.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of course, one has to pause and think. Cathcart-Symington may have in
his mind what Judges call a reasonable doubt as to the reception
awaiting this masterpiece from a first-night audience. He may have in
his mind something resembling a reasonable certainty, rather than a
reasonable doubt, as to whether it will ever have any audience _but_ a
first-night audience.

He may even feel that the Censor will care but little for the central
situation of his play. Censors will allow almost anything to be said or
done on the stage by characters named Cassio and Herodeta--but they take
a very different view if the characters wear ordinary evening-dress,
instead of wreaths and togas, and are called by ordinary English names.

So that Cathcart-Symington, perhaps, may wonder whether this plot is
absolutely the happiest selection that could have been made. He may try
again, and the result of his second effort may be quite as odd as that
of his first. The Classics are nothing if not odd.

       *       *       *       *       *

This time Harris Faulkener is again passionately in love with Lady
Isobel, but she is not in the least in love with him. Some people, not
classical writers, might think this is all to the good, because Harris
Faulkener and Lady Isobel are each of them married to somebody else.

The husband of Lady Isobel is ninety years old, and has, as the
euphemistic saying is, lived his life to the full. The wife of Harris
Faulkener is young, and rather inclined to talk about Taking the
Veil--which, as a matter of fact, is far more easily said than done,
especially in the case of married women.

Well, Lady Isobel is definitely sorry for Mrs. Harris Faulkener, and
also terribly wants to teach Harris Faulkener a lesson, and get rid of
him once and for all. So she chooses a large, open terrace, with plenty
of marble pillars about, and Mrs. Harris Faulkener meets her there, and
they have a cosy little talk about it all, and finally decide that Lady
Isobel is to pretend to be in love with Harris, and that she and Mrs.
Harris Faulkener are to change bedrooms that very night, and then ...
Well, they go into all sorts of details that wouldn't be at all suitable
for these pages and not only do they go into them, but in the next act
the bedroom actually appears on the stage, and so do Lady Isobel and
Mr. Harris Faulkener, and it is difficult indeed to say whether this
scene should or should not be played in pitch darkness.

All is additionally complicated by the fact that the ninety-year-old
husband has hidden himself--not for any sound reason, but by a mere
caprice of senility--in a large cupboard in a corner of the room. By a
coincidence, Mrs. Harris Faulkener has had exactly the same idea, and
there they both are ... and if the classical tradition is really to be
followed faithfully, the results should indeed prove singular.

       *       *       *       *       *

There are several possible _dnouements_ to this strange situation,
although at least two of them, unfortunately, cannot possibly be
detailed here. But it would be quite in keeping with classical tradition
to have either a happy, or an extremely unhappy, ending.

In the former case, the nonagenarian can fall in love with Mrs. Harris
Faulkener, and Mrs. Harris Faulkener, after a very short attack of
coyness, returns his passion, and suddenly explains that she and her
husband have never been really married at all, and, therefore, she is
perfectly free. Meanwhile Lady Isobel realizes that Harris Faulkener ...
Exactly what she realizes is, as a matter of fact, rather difficult to
explain, but, anyway, she sees that she hasn't ever done him justice
before, and they call in the chaplain, who is always on the premises,
day and night, for just this kind of emergency,--and all get married
then and there.

The alternative, or unhappy, ending starts with the murder of the
nonagenarian by Mrs. Harris Faulkener, who accomplishes her purpose with
the help of red-hot branding-irons, kept on the landing because the
Harris Faulkeners own a sheep farm in Australia--and immediately
afterwards throws herself out of the window.

The next part concerns itself with Harris Faulkener's revenge on Lady
Isobel, and the publishers of this book say that it is not to be put
in--which in itself really practically proves that the thing wouldn't go
down with a West-End audience--and the last curtain of all is Lady
Isobel strangling herself with her own hair--which cannot, naturally, be
either bobbed or shingled.

       *       *       *       *       *

It will now perhaps be understood that there may be a certain element of
doubt in young Cathcart-Symington's return to the Classics. What he
finds there will be--but perhaps really the best word to describe what
he finds there is just "classical".




                          THE SINCEREST FORM ...


                        THE SUPREMACY OF MR. PONDS

Take Sir Woodcock Wells, for instance. When you stopped talking--if you
ever did--about Art, Militarism, God, Fascism, Feminism, this League of
Nations business--Sir Woodcock Wells would say: "Cheep".

He was always saying it. Like a canary.

"Cheep!"

But Mr. Ponds could not allow himself to be divorced from Sir Woodcock
by "Cheep". Needed him. That they might make History. World History.
History like the Conquest of Babylonia by the Persians, the Removal of
the Papal See to Avignon, the Burning of the Cakes by Alfred, the
formidable careers of Solomon, Ninon de Lenclos, and Horatio Bottomley.

You _needed_ Sir Woodcock.

You needed him in Fleet Street. To buy up all the dailies, weeklies,
monthlies, in one vast conglomeration of printer's ink, and to reissue
them as one. Making you its Editor.

"Why," said Mr. Ponds, "not?"

Mr. Ponds became the Omnipotent of Fleet Street.

And Fleet Street recognized it. Mutely accepted his stupendous, and yet
unstupendous, domination. Rotherbrook and Beavermere ate out of his
hand. _The Times_ crawled to him. The whole of the monthlies threw up
their pens. Of the weeklies only _Ebb and Flow_ held out.

"_Ebb_," said Sir Woodcock, "and _Flow_?"

"Put," said Sir Woodcock, "an end to it."

"It," said Sir Woodcock, "what-I-mean-to-say _Gets my goat_. Cheep."

"The Press," said Mr. Ponds, "was evolved originally as a fighting,
competitive thing. It was made so. It is still made so. It competes
instinctively. Like a woman dressing for a party. Or an actor-manager on
the stage. Or a frog trying to swell itself into an ox. Anything like
that. Take Prohibition, for instance, or the Einstein theory. Take the
South Pole. Take _Russia_. Size. Space. A Gray Deal of it," said Mr.
Ponds.

"_Cheep!_"

Mr. Ponds vanished instantly.

How to defeat _Ebb and Flow_. Just to defeat it. Thoroughly.

An attempt had been made to buy it up. Useless. Mr. Ponds went himself
to interview the Board of Directors. It was a feminine Board, and
therefore to be conquered _en masse_ by the beauty of his slight, but
permanent, wave, the eloquence of his language, and the extraordinary
quality of his sex appeal.

A formidable contingent of reporters was present.

The Editor of _Ebb and Flow_ was in the Editorial Chair.

"That Chair," said Mr. Ponds. "Mine."

"No," said the Editor.

Round the chair, clustering thickly, were the Directors, the Office
Staff, a handful of Direct Subscribers. Obstinate, idealistic,
socialistic, democratic, antagonistic. Some, even, feminine. Talk,
thought Mr. Ponds. Talk to them.

"Take the Government," said Mr. Ponds. "Or take the Lambeth Conference.
Take Agriculture. It's like a pincushion that's been stuffed with
marbles. All wrong. This _Ebb and Flow_ business. _Look_ at it."

He found the word he wanted.

"_Zinziberaceous_" said Mr. Ponds.

You went on talking. On. And on. And again on. About Disarmament, and
the Coal-crisis, and Birth-control, and Politicians. You heard the
Direct Subscribers drop away, making low, unimaginative sounds, rather
like bullocks. You could see the Office Staff retreating down the office
stairs, gesticulating, rather like penguins. But the Directors, and the
Editor, stayed. Rather like mastodons.

"_Cheep!_"

You became excessively aware of Sir Woodcock Wells. In the office.
Carrying a glass retort. And the liquid in the retort was seething and
swirling, here totally stagnant, and there wildly ebullient, and
wherever the retort was not convex, Mr. Ponds observed that it was
concave.

"Ugh," he said.

"Microbes," retorted Sir Woodcock. "If I let them loose out of that
glass container,--well, Fleet Street goes west. It isn't only _Ebb and
Flow_. That too, of course."

Mr. Ponds was unable to refrain from looking at the Editor, and the
still clustering Directors.

"Not ready to die." That was the illuminating phrase.

Unready.

"The microbes," said Sir Woodcock, "will devastate the universe.
Kingdoms, Empires. Homes. Institutions. Newspapers, with their Editors
and Directors. They'll have to go. Then we shall build. New. Clean.
Untraditional. Sociological. Building."

A strange conflict prevailed in the mind of Mr. Ponds. He found the
thought of the microbes disconcerting, for who knew where they might
stop? But devastation was necessary. For the elimination of _Ebb and
Flow_.

"_My_ world," said Sir Woodcock. "Run on Words."

"_Cheep!_"

A crash, as the glass retort broke. Another crash--louder. As Fleet
Street went west. Several crashes. All at once. The Editor and the
Directors. A universe of sound pressed upon Mr. Ponds. The words of Sir
Woodcock, building up his New World.

"_Cheep!_" Like a canary. And again "_Cheep!_" Almost more like a parrot
than a canary, perhaps.

"_Done it_," said Sir Woodcock Wells.

Then Mr. Ponds went off at a tangent.

"The _Ebb and Flow_ people. What-I-mean-to-say, where _are_ they? You've
been in too great a hurry. Exterminating them like that.

"What-I-mean-to-say, take Work. If you and I are talking all the time,
who's to _do_ it?"

Sir Woodcock glanced at Mr. Ponds.

"_Cheep!_" he said at last.

Never before had Mr. Ponds heard a "Cheep" so fraught with indecision,
so unconvincing.

"It isn't," said Mr. Ponds, "good enough."

The illuminating word flashed upon him.

"Not Woodcock," said Mr. Ponds. "_Poppycock._"


                             ARNOLD PROHACK

                             _Journal 1929_

NOTE.--Most of the Hotels mentioned here bear no name. I have censored
the names, sometimes for reasons understood only by myself, and
sometimes for fear of sending the prices up.

_London._

I resolved not to drink cocktails any more. Champagne is better, because
more expensive. I went to a party, and talked to a very famous rich man.
He said: "Drink is a very great evil". He drank five cocktails. My own
consumption was limited to three.

_Paris_

I took a young friend out to lunch. I ordered a magnum of champagne.
They said they had only half-bottles. So I ordered two magnums. Then
they brought them. The fish was good, and served with two sauces poured
on it together. I sent for the manager, and told him that I should not
be prepared to pay separately for each sauce; it was absolutely out of
the question.

Then my young friend confided to me that she wanted to buy a pair of
ear-rings, so we went by car to a large expensive jeweller's shop,
containing millions of pounds' worth of jewellery. The lovely,
ridiculous, mysterious, acquisitive creature spent two hours choosing
what she wanted--one hour for each ear-ring. I thought: Men and women
are entirely different. They conduct the business of living differently.

_Rome_

A very large Hotel, with very large prices. I engaged a large double
bedroom with private bathroom, and had a fire all the time in each. One
of the pillow-cases had been darned. I got this changed.

Food good.
Lighting indifferent.
No dirty-clothes basket.
Heating bad.
Drink ruinous, but worth it.
Lavatory lined with porcelain.

Went by car to Frascati, where there is a Grand Hotel, with uniformed
porter.

_Sunset in Rome_

I ignite a most excellent cigar, on the top of the Pincio. An Earl of my
(intimate) acquaintance once said to me that a Corona-Corona is better
smoked after dinner than before it. I agreed with him.

I look down on the scene below me. There are people, cars, buildings.
Most of the cars are cheap makes. I look at the sky. The sinking sun
reminds me at once that the hour is ripe for the drinking of cocktails.
I send for two cocktails and one olive. Later, two olives and one
cocktail.

_New York_

I met an American millionaire, who asked me for the address of my
tailors. I replied that it would be impossible for him to afford their
prices.

_Antibes_

A party of sixty-five of us went for a picnic, which included
motor-boating, driving in cars, flying in aeroplanes, yachting, eating,
drinking, sleeping, and drinking again. The only picnic I have ever
really enjoyed. Women enjoy picnics, although men do not. But then women
are like that.

After lunch we had tea. After tea, dinner. After dinner, supper. After
supper we found a night-restaurant where they served salads and coffee.
After that it was breakfast-time.

_London_

I went to see a famous play. It seemed to me poor. The stage-door-keeper
failed to recognize me as I went in: Why? I am constantly being
photographed for the Press. Before the play, the longest lunch that I
have ever attended, lasting from 2 P.M. to 8.5.

_Copenhagen_

A good Hotel. The one defect of the town is that the cafs are too far
apart. Also there were only unpadded coat-hangers in the bedroom.

_Berlin_

If you tell a woman that women are charming, inferior, irresponsible,
ridiculous creatures, who cannot understand food and wines, she will
resent it. The foolish, pretty thing!

Charlotte Bront may not have been a great novelist, but at least she
was unhampered by sex appeal. What an entirely futile creation on the
part of Providence!

_London_

I dined in Park Lane. The food was bad. No caviar. No out-of-season
fruit. Yet there was a good fruit-shop no further off than Piccadilly. I
went home so hungry that I was obliged to order soup, sandwiches, and a
bottle of champagne. I am troubled with insomnia. I cannot understand
_why_ I should be a bad sleeper.

_Tokio_

The great Hotel de Luxe is a very solemn subject. In my opinion, a
unique, tremendous, colossal subject. Volumes should be written about
it.

_London_

Cup Final, and the streets full of charabancs carrying football
enthusiasts. One charabanc was labelled "From the Potteries". I was
struck by this nave self-revelation. I asked myself what I remembered
in connection with the Potteries, the life of the Five Towns. _Nothing._


                          SUPER-SUPERLATIVE

It was two and a half minutes to 4 A.M. The managing director of the
greatest luxury-hotel on earth or in Heaven crossed the enormous foyer,
in which the chandeliers--twenty-five lights apiece--blazed. The
Reception counter had only twenty lights. The Enquiry Bureau fifteen.
The Grill-room one hundred, that were kept burning day and night.

The night-manager was at his post. He was an Italian, of French
extraction, with a Polish father, no mother, and some Anglo-Indian
cousins.

The eight hall-porters, on duty from 6 A.M. to 6 A.M. all the year
round, sprang to attention as Cecil, perfectly correctly dressed,
appeared. Four of the hall-porters were Jugo-Slavs, two were agreeably
Irish, and the remainder came from a place called Putney, of which the
hotel knew naught.

Some millionaires and a young girl were coming in at the immense
revolving doors as Cecil went out at them. He was obliged to make a
complete circle and follow them in again. Mysterious compulsion! He had
seen the vivacious, agreeable back of the young girl, and had instantly
visualized her as his mistress. And similar reactions to the backs, or
fronts, of scarcely seen young women are entirely natural to all men.

The lift-man--a naturalized Bulgarian on his mother's side--rushed to
press the central switch that brought all the twenty-eight lifts of the
greatest luxury-hotel in the world to attention at once. Each
millionaire entered one of them and was wafted out of sight.

The young girl and Cecil gazed calmly at one another.

"Now," thought Cecil, "this is all very well, but the ridiculous,
inconsequent, womanish creature must know well that this will cause talk
amongst my secretaries, housekeepers, managers, sub-managers,
floor-waiters, head-waiters, ordinary waiters, and hall-porters."

(The eight-thousand-odd fellow-creatures below the rank of hall-porter
who worked day and night in the service of the Super-Superlative, he
reckoned as naught.)

Ingratiatingly, intimately, amazingly, she stepped up to him.

"Come with me to Paris for the week-end. At once!" she commanded.

Astonishing creature! She had guessed at once that he intended to allow
her to seduce him!

And he was delighted, provided that she did not expect to interfere
with his career, his work for the greatest luxury-hotel in the universe.

Cecil was a serious man with a conscience. His career came first. And he
knew women. "They" were all alike. "They" made a fuss if they were
neglected, they thought about appearances, they disliked being ill, or
unhappy, or cruelly treated. Nevertheless he was ready to concede to the
exquisite, entrancing, stimulating daughter of one of the hotel's
millionaire clients a week-end in Paris with him, so long as she was
prepared to give everything and to ask nothing.

"Miss Prowler!" said Cecil curtly--Napoleonically.

Miss Prowler was the hotel's head-Housekeeper, and her suite was on the
roof-garden of the hotel, whence she could look down on the tower of
Westminster Cathedral far below.

Efficiently, miraculously, instantaneously, Miss Prowler appeared. She
had been on duty without a break since midnight of the previous Saturday
fortnight, for such was the devotion of its employs to the greatest
luxury-hotel in the world.

"I want an aeroplane," said Cecil as casually as possible.

And Miss Prowler, equally casual, replied:

"Certainly, sir. I'll telephone to the Works at once."

Admirable creature! She knew as well as possible that the Works might be
shut at 4 A.M. Nevertheless, she disappeared, and in an instant
returned, followed by twenty of the fourteenth-floor valets, carrying a
disused aeroplane that had once been left at the hotel by an absconding
Sultan in lieu of payment. The amazing, resourceful Prowler had
remembered it!

"Thanks," said Cecil negligently, and was secretly thrilled to see tears
of joyful gratitude spring into the eyes of Miss Prowler at his
acknowledgment of her faithful service.

Nevertheless, in another instant he had forgotten the very existence of
Miss Prowler, as he found himself being piloted through the air at a
hundred miles an hour by the millionaire's daughter--the magnificent,
cajoling, alluring Gracie.

"Where are we going to stay?" he ventured to ask.

"Oh, at the Railway Inn at St. Cloud," she answered carelessly.

The astonishing girl had realized that he would not want to stay at the
Ritz, where he was well known as the managing director of the greatest
luxury-hotel in the whole of creation!

Women were all alike. "They" had intuition--impossible to deny it.

He would have to reward her. "They" needed rewards, notice, occasional
kindnesses. "They" also needed quarrels, scenes, blows, reconciliations.
Poor, feeble, exquisite things! Gracie, for a week-end, should be
permitted to minister to him, to be his slave.

At the St. Cloud Railway Inn, Cecil sought the telephone. He must needs
enquire after the welfare of the Super-Superlative.

It was naught to him that Gracie expected him to remain at her side.
She was his toy, his distraction, his delectation. But not to be
compared to his career as managing director of the greatest luxury-hotel
ever known.

It took Cecil nearly an hour to get into telephonic communication with
the Super-Superlative. Monstrous outrage! It should have been
instantaneous. When at length there came a voice across the wires, it
was unintelligible. Yet it was that of his own third secretary, a young,
fluffy Eskimo girl of Swiss origin, who knew scarce a word of English.
Strange how women were all alike! Unable to make themselves intelligible
in languages that they had not yet learnt to speak.

He saw that he must return instantly.

He would have to arrange for his third secretary to receive lessons in
English from his head Banqueting-Manager, a Franco-Russian with
international blood in his veins. They could meet in the vast basements
of the Super-Superlative, between four and five every morning, when it
would be at its least active.

Cecil thought: "I am a matchless director. There is no detail beneath my
personal attention where the hotel is concerned."

He walked away from the telephone-box in search of a special train.

He recked naught of Gracie, left alone in a strange Railway Inn at St.
Cloud without a word. Masculine, implacable, omnipotent, he re-entered
the Super-Superlative less than five hours from the time that he had
left it.

Breakfast cocktails were being carried in every direction as he walked
into the restaurant: every one of the eight hundred tables was occupied:
every one of the nine hundred waiters--the exact nationality of each one
of whom, however hybrid, was known to Cecil--was also occupied.

The greatest luxury-hotel in any of the four quarters of the globe had
survived the unexplained absence of its managing director.

But only just.


                            STILL DUSTIER

PUBLISHER'S NOTE. (Not in Music.)--Here is the successor to a very
remarkable best-seller. The author's theme is the complete physical,
mental, and moral degradation of middle age in the provinces, contrasted
with the bright, brilliant decadence of quite utterly modern youth,
straight from the 'Varsity and London.

                                 PART I

How could one stop one's husband from talking about county families? The
habit was growing on him. As for her, she knew that she was the only
woman left, even in the provinces, who wore elastic-sided shoes, with
black lisle-thread stockings. Her hat, even, was a three-and-elevenpenny
one bought at a sale just before her marriage, fifteen years ago. She
gave it a kick before carefully putting it away in the wardrobe....

Yet she was really a lady, even if not county. Somewhere inside her
there was blue blood. She wondered exactly where, and thought of trying
to find out with one of her old-fashioned hat-pins. But she was too
tired, and it didn't seem worth while. Better go to the cinema.

                               PART II

She--(not the same she--another one, shingled, but still
provincial)--had relations who hunted. At least, they had been relations
once, but that was before she married a man of a different class. Now,
probably, they wouldn't even have returned the calls that she was never
able to pay, because she could not afford engraved visiting-cards, and
yet knew that one couldn't use printed ones. Seeing a young man in a
pink muddy coat and muddy breeches, without a horse, limping along the
road, she realized instantly that he had been thrown, out hunting. Once
she had known people like that almost quite well. She offered him a
lift. She offered him a boiled egg for tea, knowing from the past that
nothing else would really do.

                               PART III

He and she and it were visible a long way off, all three walking with
imperious self-confidence. Everyone in the public gardens turned round
to look at them, their drab, middle-aged eyes nearly dropping out of
their old-fashioned heads as they saw the young man's plum-coloured
georgette shirt and broad yellow handkerchief, carefully knotted round
his head in place of a hat, the young woman's pure gold lip-stick case
that she was using as she walked along, and the spaniel's ribbon bow,
embroidered with a small cipher.

They had come.

Presently they would be gone.

Just now they were still here.

                               PART IV

They--the he, she, and it ones--took the others, those queer,
middle-aged, middle-class ones--out for the day. To a country-house.
With the democratic tact of true aristocrats, they took special pains
not to introduce one to the relations who owned the house--not even to
the illegitimate son. Quite right. They knew, in their careless,
confident, brilliant way, that one wasn't up to the mark. After lunch
and tennis and tea the host appeared, crawling across the lawn. He
looked away from them, shuddering and retching.

One guessed that he was not, really, pleased to see one there.

                               PART V

It was over.

They had looked in and been given tea for the last time. This time
to-morrow it would be cocktails.

Where?

One saw them on the Lido, or in the Land of the Midnight Sun, or on the
top of the Woolworth Building in New York, while one remained at home,
thinking about county families, and eating chocolate shape for supper,
while one's husband sang in the bath as he always did. Habit.

One must tell him.

"Please listen ..."

He listened.

Immediately one began to think. Seeing oneself at forty, at
four-and-twenty, at fourteen, at four ... one could feel the feel of
one's first pair of stockings against one's four-old legs ... where were
they now? (The stockings, not the legs.)


One remembered the whole of one's life clearly and in detail.

But he did not wait to hear about it.

While one was still remembering the exact sound of the squeak made by
one's first slate-pencil on the slate given one by one's grandmother, he
had tired of waiting, and gone away.

They--he, she, and it--had vanished--gone back to London, to the
'Varsity, and to a society where people hunted and had boiled eggs for
tea afterwards, and were presented with gold cigarette-cases from the
tenants.

                               PART VI

Over. No. Yes. Quite.

He was singing in the bath _again_.

He was gone. (Not the same he, but the other he. One's pronouns ... how
was one to disentangle them, even?)

Giving it up, one slept.

Over, as they said in county cricket.


                           PLATFORM SWEEPERS


                             By ALBERT HALL

                               CHAPTER I

All the Sweepers have genius: it is their characteristic. No Sweeper has
ever been known to fail in any undertaking, just as no Sweeper has ever
acted any part in Shakespeare less than perfectly.

The first Soot the Sweeper was born just after that very successful
piece of play-acting by one Jacob--acting that played his brother Esau
clean off the stage, over the footlights, and into the very back of the
pit--and indeed it is possible that it was the story of that histrionic
achievement which first inspired young Soot to adopt that career that
was to send all post-Flood civilization clean, stark, staring mad about
him.

"For why should I sweep chimneys?" demanded Soot the Sweeper, who was to
become the father of Master Soot the Sweeper's son, the grandfather of
Tom, Dick, and Harry Sweeper, the great-great-great-grandfather of
countless other Sweepers, the remote ancestor of a long line of
faultless Hamlets and inspired Othellos.

                              CHAPTER XX

Sweepers always get what they want. Dick Sweeper wanted at fifteen to
play _Lear_--wanted to badly. Play it in London, to a house that should
scream, sob, stamp, roll all over the stage itself in a very frenzy of
appreciation. No Sweeper ever put up with anything less than that from
any audience. That had been the reception accorded to Carpet Sweeper,
whose acting in tragedy--she could never touch comedy--had driven every
other actress of her day to instant suicide.

So _Lear_, at fifteen, Dick needs must play.

And--"It's not a part for a fifteen-year-old. Fifteen should still be
playing utility in a fit-up on No. 3 tours."

Thus Dick's mother, born and bred in the prompt corner, able to speak
her lines as Volumnia before she was well out of swaddling-clothes,
nurtured on a stick of grease-paint.

But Dick was right. He played _Lear_ as _Lear_ had never been played
before, and Europe went mad.

"Capture, Rapture." (The old saw of the Sweepers, come true for the
thousandth time, as Dick took his five hundred and eighty-first call on
the successful first night of his _Lear_, that was to be spoken of
throughout the world for the next fifty-four years.)

Merry, Very.

                              CHAPTER L

It is a fact that in 1891 there was not a woman in England or in America
capable of playing Juliet to Tom Sweeper's Romeo.

He went to the most recently acquired of the Sweeper wives--a duchess in
her own right. No aristocracy has ever been anything but gratified at
alliance with the Sweepers.

"Frankly, I'm at my wits' end. I've tried out three-and-a-half-dozen
women. Not one of them has charm. I've never met any woman, except a
Sweeper, who has."

"A Sweeper by marriage acquires Sweeper characteristics," said a
brilliantly evasive Femina, deliberately letting the suggestion come
from him. For she knew her Sweepers, did Femina.

And Tom leaped at the hint like a hungry shark at a bather's foot.

"I can get away with it," declared a confident Tom (forgetting for a
moment that the expression was not in use at that date).

Clever, Ever....

He flung Femina into Juliet, lock, stock, and barrel, as a cook flings
rice into stew. Day and night he rehearsed her, worked at her with the
brilliant efficacy of the Sweepers, brought her to the point at which he
wanted her.

The result justified him hand-over-fist, head-over-heels,
one-over-the-eight.

Femina was the rage of five continents--would have been the rage of ten
had there been ten continents.

                              CHAPTER CXIV

Later in his career, young Chim Sweeper--a brilliant, dare-devil Chimney
had demanded, and obtained, the abbreviation--was to declare that he had
always known that every star on the post-war London stage was the
mistress of either his father, or his uncles, or one of his brothers.

Mocking, Shocking....

He himself married old Femina Sweeper's third boy's niece-by-marriage,
and swept her instantly into the talkies. The success that she achieved
there is still the talk of the five-and-ten-cent stores of Ohio.

But he had reckoned without the previous generation of Sweepers. An
outraged generation that had never heard of talkies, never intended to
hear of them.

It was the talkies that killed Harry Sweeper, in the reign of King
George V., just as it was the movies that had killed Dick in the
nineteen-hundreds, and the musical-comedy craze that had killed Tom in
the late 'nineties.

Fashion, Passion....

                              CHAPTER CCCLXV

Clean Sweeper, the epitome of all the Sweepers, leapt into stardom at
two years old, as an active mouse leaps away from a pursuing cat.

Hurry, Skurry....

(Are there many more Chapters to come?--EDITOR.

As many as there are Sweepers. And the Sweepers run to children. There
is still the illegitimate branch, started by the original Soot the
Sweeper and now sweeping the _revue_ stage, yet with an occasional
brilliant throw-back to _Timon_, or one of the _Henrys_.--AUTHOR.

Well, I'm afraid if there are as many of them as all that, we can't
afford the space.--EDITOR.

But I wanted to go on till I could put January 1, 1900--December 31,
2000, on the last page.--AUTHOR.

You can do that now, straightaway. In fact you'd better.

Stop it, Hop it.--EDITOR.)


                         WOMEN AND CHILDREN LAST

          (But journalistic young gentlemen don't, for very long)

                                FOREWORD

If I reopen the stale old question as to whether women have souls, I
shall be accused of writing journalese, and that accusation becomes a
trifle monotonous when it is repeated in every one of the eighteen
hundred letters, five thousand post-cards, and two hundred and fifty
telegrams that I receive for every paragraph of mine that appears in the
Press. But at least it proves that women, everywhere, are gnashing their
teeth and tearing their hair--two things, I may shrewdly observe, that
no man ever does--at the thought that I, who am, after all, known all
over Oxford and the part of London that counts, have seen through them
as a sex. I may observe that I am, I believe, the first man, and very
possibly the only one, to have done so.

I suppose that if I were really to give my opinion about women to the
world, pandemonium would be let loose. All kinds of women would commit
suicide. A few would emigrate. Others would go mad. Hundreds would write
to me, and have appalling nervous breakdowns when I sent no reply, and
still worse ones when I did. It would be hell let loose.

Yet why should a simple statement of fact cause all this despair? It is
more than time that women realized exactly what I think of them. I have
been thinking it ever since I was six years old--when I may observe that
my mentality, outlook, and vocabulary were almost precisely what they
are now. (Men are often like that. Women never.)

Let us therefore take my statement in its broadest sense. Women cannot
possibly have souls. This fact, to me, is so obvious, that only the
unceasing popularity of this woman-theme in our daily Press could have
induced me to write about it. These pages will therefore contain the
epitome of all the eternal verities that I have hitherto given to the
world in mere columns and half-columns of newspaper.

(1) _What I shall do to make my wife happy_

(_a_) I shall insist upon having an exact account of every penny of mine
that she spends. A wife cannot expect to be treated with either the
confidence or the open-handed generosity that a man shows to his
mistress. _And yet some of them do!_

(_b_) Three times a week I shall catch her by the shoulders, shake her,
bite her in the calf, and then kick her down the cellar stairs. All
women are masochists, and any psychologist will tell you that this sort
of treatment keeps them bright and contented.

(_c_) I shall make her face the truth, long ago discovered by myself,
that every year a woman lives she becomes a year older than she was the
year before. I don't want the woman I love to find that out abruptly. I
shall remind her of it every day. Perhaps twice, on some days.

(2) _Mothers with a capital M_

Thousands of mothers write to me. I suppose it must be because my mind
is quite fairly superior to that of anybody of my generation, or their
generation, or any other generation. Perhaps they know that whenever I
see a mother--silver-haired, tremulous, in the dear, old-fashioned
bonnet and shawl of a bygone fashion--I instinctively realize that here
is tragedy. Here is a woman who has nothing left in life. She has had
children, and those children have grown up. A tragedy! If my own mother
were asked whether she did not view her son in the light of a tragedy, I
sometimes wonder what she would reply. But I have never asked her.

(3) _Where women go wrong_

The supreme error of all women is that they do not know how to give a
man everything he wants, always, at the exact moment that he wants it.
That is why I have never allowed even the greatest courtesans in Europe
to make love to me. _They cannot do it well enough._ Probably they know
this, and are afraid of me, for so far they have not attempted to
conquer me.

(4) _Where I myself go wrong_

Sometimes I have asked a woman out to dinner, and found that she
expected me, simply because I happened to be the host, to pay for her
dinner as well as my own. This makes me very angry. Yet it is surely
pure, incontrovertible logic that if a woman smokes like a man, she
ought to be prepared to pay for her own dinner, and his, too. If you let
a woman look at the menu card in a Lyons restaurant, she will almost
certainly choose to have her tea brought in a tea-pot, which costs
fourpence more than if it was in a cup. I have seen this colossal ramp
perpetrated time and time again by women who would absolutely disagree
with you if you told them that they were dishonest, fraudulent, immoral,
and deserving of at least fifteen years' penal servitude.

Contrary to what is believed all over the world, I am not a woman-hater.
It is because I want to give women a chance of earning my approval that
I write the truth about them. Sometimes after I have written the truth,
I have been called vulgar, and at other times I have been called vulgar
without my having written anything at all. But I have never known why.

The other day, I was sitting in a public lounge (I always use this word,
although I know perfectly well that refined people do not, because it
seems to me prettier than the alternative, vestibule), when I saw a
sight that seems to me to sum up the entire question of the relationship
between the sexes.

_I saw a man get up and open the door for his wife._ The thing was
horrible. It was the negation of all the most sacred principles of
masculinity. I don't say that the wife ought to have opened the door for
the husband. These are questions that all individuals must thrash out
for themselves. But I must say, once and for all, that in no
circumstances whatever, when I am a husband, shall I open the door for
my wife. And if you reply that I am _not_ a husband, I can sum it all up
by saying that the woman whom I shall marry has not yet been found.

But I am always there--waiting.


                     (_NOT_) FOR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE

                (As it will only make them feel worse)

(PUBLISHER'S NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR.--The Author's birthday is in June.
She has a natural Permanent Wave and weighs exactly eight stone in her
bathing-suit. She has twice been mistaken for a film star--a different
one each time.

The author is a very keen hiker; she crochets a good deal. Her previous
novels--However, never mind about that. The Personal Note is what
readers want. If they still insist upon knowing about the novels, they
must look on what we in the trade call the Back Flap.)

All day we went on hiking. Later, I was to wonder why we had ever
thought it was a good thing to do. At the time, I only thought of
keeping level with Arnold's markedly long stride, and of recognizing
Stewart's quotations from Osbert Sitwell. Also, three of us were
wondering what would be the best and quietest way of murdering the
fourth.

Mrs. Mardick never knew what we were talking about. Later, I was to
discover that when Stewart, hobbling his twenty miles an hour as best he
could on two broken legs, talked about Simpson's in the Strand, Mrs.
Mardick thought he meant something by P. G. Wodehouse.

It was this sort of thing that made us feel she ought not to be allowed
to go on living. It has always seemed to Stewart and me that the easiest
way of avoiding the society of the people who do not speak our own
language, is to put an end to them. Later, I was to wonder if there were
flaws in this system. I do not know if Stewart ever wondered. On the
hike, we neither of us wondered at all. Arnold may have wondered, in the
seventeen different languages and twenty-five dialects of which he was
master, but in his detached, impersonal way--later, I learnt to love
that detached, impersonal way of his--he said nothing.

As it was, Mrs. Mardick could out-hike, out-sleep, out-eat all of us.
She could not out-quote us, that was all.

Detachedly, as I knotted the boot-lace that Arnold had broken, with that
absent-minded gesture of his that occurred twenty times in each day's
march, and that I was, later, to find so endearing--I realized that if
we went on hiking long enough, the men were bound to fall in love.
Biologically, I knew that both would fall for the same woman. With
scientific impartiality, I told myself definitely that this would lead
to unpleasantness. Perhaps to rape. Stewart and I have always called
things by their right names. Especially things like rape. It was an odd
experience, this cold analysis of probabilities.

I was not a woman who liked the idea of sharing her men. Usually, I
didn't have any to share. This endless hike of ours--later, Stewart and
I were to agree that forty miles a day in shorts, and without hats, was
too much--was going to mean that sooner or later the talk about modern
poets would come to an end, and then there would be nothing left to talk
about except sex. Stewart and I have always agreed, quite frankly, that
sex exists.

I told myself, quite impersonally, that I should prefer to be the only
woman available when the moment came for the two men to fall in love.

From that time onwards, Mrs. Mardick really had no chance at all.

I am not sure when I took the final decision. It may have been when that
boot-lace of Arnold's finally gave way, after I had mended it for the
fourteenth time in one morning, sitting by the roadside with the gnats
buzzing round my head, and the nettles stinging my bare legs, and the
bramble-bushes tearing at my left shoulder-blade. "My dear," she said,
"you've tied a _granny_-knot, and that's not really the _best_ kind of
knot. Let me show you."

I threw the boot-lace in her face.

It was hysteria, of course. Later, I was to recognize that. Arnold, I
believe, recognized it at the time. Stewart may have recognized it.
About that, I am not absolutely certain. Mrs. Mardick thought that it
was temper.

Physically, we were all in a low condition because for forty-eight hours
we had been unable to get anything to eat or drink, but Stewart and
Arnold had begun to talk about James Joyce, and that sort of
conversation has always been more important to me than food and drink.
It was not till later that I was to know it was that which stimulated me
so that I was able to do what I did do without any compunction at all.

I took Mrs. Mardick's clothes while she was asleep.

It was a dishonest thing to have done, and I am not a naturally
dishonest person. But I even removed the nightgown that she always wore
at night, although three of us had long ago discarded anything of that
kind. I left her there like that.

When she woke she would, I knew, notice nothing. She was not an
observant person. I have never heard what actually happened, whether she
caught cold or not. After I had left her, I joined the two men, and we
went on with the hike.

I still feel no remorse whatever about Mrs. Mardick. That is what
prolonged hiking does to one.


                       PORTRAIT OF A DARK CIRCUS

                   A TALE (Two or three Tails, in fact)

I am aware, I can assure you, that this is the story of the Circus,
rather than of those who brought about that shattering, overwhelming,
cataclysmic disaster to the performing fleas. They, I fancy, would tell
you the same thing, if they could make you understand them, and if they
were not dead--gone down all together in that last dizzy crash, with the
Clown cowering under the gas-jet--it was part of Massa Johnson's
magnificent oddity that he never would adopt electric light--and the
acrobats hanging silently, head downwards, from the horizontal bar,
looking on.

These details may seem to you utterly trivial, and I can even believe
that you will doubt their truth; but to me, at the time, they all
appeared inevitable, even to the Clown's red-hot poker, that was to play
so great a part in the destinies of all of us before the end. Not, you
understand, the end of the red-hot poker--though that came into it,
too....

But the performing fleas. The whole troop of them, gathered together in
the tent, and Massa Johnson's six foot eight inches hanging over them,
as I saw it that night.

You'd have liked him if you'd see him then. You couldn't have helped it.
He was such a perfect gentleman. Even the fleas realized that, just
before the end came. They didn't bite. Just gazed up at him,
fascinated.

And here I must interpolate this--namely, that through all the
extraordinary catastrophes that followed, one after another and some of
them simultaneously, my own reaction was one of purest happiness. But
the different ways in which it took hold of us all was part of its
strangeness.

The fleas, for instance, didn't view it with the absolute detachment of
the piebald horse--but then the horse wasn't being crushed between that
gigantic finger and thumb of Massa Johnson's--wouldn't have _let_ itself
be crushed, I feel nearly certain.

So we stood, all of us, and watched murder done. Oh, but it was murder.
I'm quite clear about that, and so would you have been, if you'd seen
that row of fragile corpses, and that massive six foot nine inches
towering above them.

"I didn't mean to," he said quietly. "It was a feeling of irritation
..." He stopped, and one of us--I think it was the negro with ears like
a dog's and the ruby bracelet on one ankle--quoted in a curious falsetto
whisper: "_De mortuis_ ..."

And then their trainer came in. Someone--it may have been the cross-eyed
dwarf in the spangled tights--attempted to fling an antique
purple-and-silver Charles the Second bedspread over the bodies, but not
quickly enough. Oh, but not nearly quickly enough.

He saw. The trainer saw. Saw that the performing fleas wouldn't perform
again, ever.

That moment did something to all of us. I was to know what, later on.
But just then I only saw horror, and chaos, and fierce brilliant colour,
and dead fleas, and figures running away, and other figures running
after them, and still other figures doing nothing, and those who didn't
look like leopards, or sardines, bore the strangest resemblance to
pieces of furniture. It is difficult for me to give you an orderly
account of the climax.

I can see Massa Johnson's six foot ten inches crashing through the tent,
making straight for the three-and-sixpenny seats, and the others
following, and I can hear myself quoting from my favourite edition of
_Don Quixote_ to the trainer.

Then he broke away, without waiting for me to finish the quotation, and
plunged straight into the midst of the three-and-sixpenny seats, and I
couldn't stop him.

He was going to murder Massa Johnson--the whole six foot eleven of him.
They were all in it together, every one of those inches.

The murder was beginning to attract attention. People didn't like it.
One or two turned round in their seats and said "Hush!"

A great exhilaration seized me. The circus-ring seemed to be going round
and round and backwards and forwards and up and down and in and out, all
at once.

Then I saw that the end, then, was that.

Massa Johnson and the trainer, locked together, lurching through the
three-and-sixpennies, over the barrier, and into the sawdust of the
arena.

There was a silence, a blindness, a deafness, a dumbness....

Then I thought of another quotation from _Don Quixote_.


                               FLAMBOYANT

                  By the author of _Pink Post Chaise_

The sun poured down, hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter.

The _Calos_ (gypsies), dark, splendid, rugged, verminous, filthy,
swaggering, and honey-dark, lay at rest in the middle of a cactus-bush.
A baby had been born there during the night. Two or three babies.
Already their mothers were dancing, singing, drinking wine, walking
hundreds of miles behind their husbands and their husbands' mules.
Sometimes the new-born babies walked too, after the gypsy fashion,
sometimes they remained, naked, berry-brown, and forgotten, to fend for
themselves amongst the cactus-leaves.

_Australia_

The _Calos_ were walking to Australia.

Presently they reached Wimbledon. The Common was of a sombre, wine-dark
beauty, and after a wild, wicked dance or two, the _Calos_ (gypsies)
looked about for some cactus-bushes, for it was there that another baby
should be born. The baby--a girl, bronze, upright, honey-gold--arrived
without waiting for a cactus-bush to be found.

Almost at once, with a wild, effortless bound into the air, she began to
play a _pagandi_ (guitar), to dance the _romalis_ (dance), and to sing
_flamencos_ (songs).

The inhabitants of Wimbledon gathered round, staring at the _Calos_.
Their own brats, fair-skinned, flaxed-haired mommets, performed no such
antics.

Thomas Shovell, lion-headed, mouse-haired, bull-chested, stepped
deliberately forward and pointed to the child.

"How much?"

The _Calo_ (gypsy) deliberated. He knew that many, many other babies
were due to be born before the tribe should reach Australia. At that
very moment----

(EDITOR'S NOTE.--Has there been a mistake? This isn't "How a Baby is
Born," with nineteen illustrations and an appreciation, is it?

AUTHOR'S NOTE.--Well, it is and it isn't. Technically it isn't, but at
the same time, nothing much else is going to happen, except dozens of
these _Calo_ (gypsy) babies. And we haven't got nineteen illustrations.
As for the appreciation, that's rather a question for our readers, isn't
it?

EDITOR'S NOTE.--Something seems to tell me that they won't.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.--Of course, if you really feel like that about it, let's
stop. But it's a pity, especially as it's all working up to rather a
neat point. I was going to refer to the whole lot of babies as Flam an'
Co.--if you see what I mean?

EDITOR'S NOTE (final).--That settles it.)


                                 HEBRAIC

                        By STERN. (But not very)

The family lived in Vienna, Constantinople, Paris, London, Putney,
Dantzig, and so on. Anywhere except Jerusalem. Great-great-grandmother
Czelonitz lived in Jerusalem, amongst gilt candelabra, bonnets trimmed
with pink rosebuds, oil-paintings, bustles, crinolines,
_marrons-glacs_, relations, great singers, and lovers.
Always lovers, from the early Konrad in whiskers and peg-top trousers,
to the ultra-modern Gigi, in running shorts and saxophone.
Great-great-grandmother Czelonitz--always called Boadicea by the family,
from some odd, Jewish, associative idea about boa-constrictors--had
taken and discarded lovers lightly, throughout the ninety-eight years of
her easy, drifting, reckless progress that Peter's Rachel's Theodosia,
doing brilliant work as a plumber-and-fitter in Balham, always said
reminded her of the Wandering Jew.

"_Mon Majest la Roi_" Boadicea always called her lovers--for not a
Czelonitz amongst them but was at home in every language, from Hebrew
(_goy_ and _kosher_) to Hindustani (_mem_ and _sahib_).

But a succession of lovers was not enough for Boadicea's gay, exuberant,
indomitable vitality, inherited from the famous Nicolai Nicolaivitch
Czelonitz, that itinerant pedlar known to have walked from Buenos Aires
to the Albert Memorial, and to have picked up five devoted wives in
succession on the way, besides laying the foundations of the family
fortunes by his persuasive Czelonitz charm of manner in selling
rabbit-skins and boot-laces, so that no housewife could resist them.

The whole of that charm of manner had descended to Boadicea, together
with the abundant hair of Great-great-great-greatest-grandmother
Anabella from Munich, and the embroidered purple-and-gold spangled
tights that had belonged to German Trudi's Abraham's Betsinda's
youngest, in Cracow. It was that charm, that driving vitality, that
whole forceful personality, that had succeeded in bringing together the
forty-eight remaining branches of the family, under Boadicea's roof in
Jerusalem, for the wedding of young Ernestine Czelonitz to her cousin,
young Vladimir Czelonitz Czelonitz, of the second lot of the Bloomsbury
Czelonitz.

"Me, I will make you an Appelstrudel," chanted Boadicea, her contralto
voice--beautiful, though never at all in tune--booming above all the
English, Jewish, German, French, Czecho-Slovakian, Russian,
Central-American voices of the Czelonitz clan.

Young Ernestine and young Vladimir, ultra-modern Harlequins looking as
though they had been cut out of coloured paper and pasted on to the
furniture, sat smoking cigarettes, drinking cocktails, humming Jazz,
using slang expressions, and discussing sex--typical examples of the
modern type of Czelonitz.

Their great-great-grandmother Boadicea, glancing at the thin, whimsical,
ironic, impudent, daring, incredibly sophisticated period-piece that
they presented, frowned. The Czelonitz frown. The same frown that
Ancestor Adam Czelonitz had frowned at his wife, Eve, when the gates had
been shut behind them....

"Me, I do not approve of this marriage," burst out Boadicea.

Ernestine and young Vladimir, true moderns, shrugged their shoulders.
The Czelonitz shrug. The very one, probably, that met Ancestor Adam in
return for his frown.

"_Allons! Avanti! Caramba!"_ cried Boadicea, throwing out clouds of
energy, vitality, and sex appeal. "It is that I will arrange this
affair. I have the sagacity of our Grandfather Maximilian, the _flair_
of our third cousin Gretchen of Pomerania, the determination of Uncle
Fernando and his wife Carolina, who met in an old furniture shop in
Madrid and were married next day before the consul in St. Petersburg. I
will arrange it all, _mes enfants_."

The Czelonitz looked at one another in despair. The Paris lot raised
their eyebrows at the Moscow lot, with whom they had never been on
speaking terms since the affair of Aunt Suzanne's fifth girl with
Great-uncle Antonio Czelonitz's son by his first wife, picked up on the
quay at Marseilles.

"Me," said Boadicea, "I am a widow. Three, five, seven times a widow. It
is better that _I_ should marry Vladimir. The little Ernestine can live
with us, is it not, and any of the family that wish. The more," said
Boadicea, "the merrier."

No Czelonitz had ever been known to defy the super-grandmother. It was
the Czelonitz tradition to be ruled, root and branch--branches--by a
Matriarch.

Young Vladimir, sulkily reluctant, had to yield and be married by
Boadicea. Ernestine had to come and live in the Palestine flat. The rest
of the Czelonitz clan, from the original Jerusalem lot to the newly
discovered Esquimaux lot started at the North Pole by Reuben's eldest
early in nineteen-hundred, were obliged to come and settle close by.

As Boadicea, in her magnificent, opulent, daring, Czelonitz way,
declared: The more the merrier.

That, indeed, was the family motto of the house of Czelonitz.


             WHITE WICKEDNESS; OR, ON THE WAUGH-PATH


                                 _One_

"Us, Cain, Emperor of Ruritania, Chief of the Cannibal Tribes of
Wogga-Wogga-Wogga, do hereby proclaim ..."

Cain stopped dictating and gazed out at the dhows, the natives, the
mango-trees, bazaars, Arabs, monsoons, typhoons, massacres, spirillum
ticks, revolutions, and other items of local colour.

       *       *       *       *       *

(PUBLISHERS' NOTE TO AUTHOR.--What does all this mean? It's not at all
the kind of thing your public expects of you.

AUTHOR'S REPLY.--I _think_ I want to write that kind of book. You
know--bitter irony about the British Empire and those who help to make
her what she is.

PUBLISHERS' NOTE.--Well, for Heaven's sake be funny about it. Remember
_Vile Bodies_.

AUTHOR'S REPLY.--All right, all right. There are going to be any number
of vile bodies about this book before I've done with it. Still, I think
I see what you mean.)


                                 _Two_

BASIL.--Is there a party going on in this house?

THE BUTLER.--Two my lord.

BASIL.--Hallo there's Petunia! Hallo Petunia my sweet could you let me
have three thousand pounds?

PETUNIA.--The man who slept with me last night took all my money it's so
awkward I don't know who to borrow from next.

A DETECTIVE.--Shall I get a warrant issued for his arrest?

PETUNIA--That's no good darling the man who brought him didn't tell me
his name.

THE BUTLER.--Are the bailiffs to have champagne or not your Grace?

       *       *       *       *       *

(PUBLISHERS' NOTE.--A welcome return indeed to the meticulous realism
and almost photographic accuracy of an earlier style--but what is to be
the connecting link between the _haut monde_ of Mayfair and the Emperor
Cain and all that local colour?

AUTHOR'S REPLY.--I don't know.)


                                _Three_

For some minutes the British Ambassador and the Governor-General had
been eating salmi of lobster out of tins. Presently the Papal Legate
had some too. The Charg d'Affaires, the First Minister, and a couple
of Plenipotentiaries, were eating soft roes on toast, out of other tins.

They all called one another by nicknames.

"Toto, where are the despatches?"

"I'm awfully sorry, H.E., the puppy's eaten them."

"Hope they don't make him sick."

"I say, Birdie-boy, is it true that black fellow What's-his-name has
been massacred at least three times by some of his own people?"

"I don't think so, Pansy-face."

"Why don't you think so, darling?"

"I don't think it was some of his own people. I think it was all of
them."

       *       *       *       *       *

(AUTHOR'S APPEAL TO PUBLISHERS.--How's that? Rather subtle irony, don't
you agree? _That_ ought to get under the skins of the Colonial Office
and the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service all right.

PUBLISHERS' REPLY.--Of course it ought. Rather. Still, from a retail
point of view, that really isn't going to help your sales tremendously.
Wouldn't it be possible just to tighten the thing up a bit?

AUTHOR'S REPLY.--I've still got one idea left. I can use that.)


                                 _Four_

Lady Jane Jump and Miss Mary Minns were dressed for the tropics exactly
alike in solar topis, khaki shirts and skirts, thick shoes and
stockings, and green spectacles. The front teeth of each projected, and
both were flat-footed. They represented a Type of English Womanhood.

       *       *       *       *       *

(PUBLISHERS' NOTE.--It's your book, of course, but isn't this--or aren't
these--the least little bit out of date?

AUTHOR'S REPLY.--Very likely. I got them out of the better-class French
illustrated comic papers of the late 'eighties.

PUBLISHERS' REPLY.--Quite.)


                                 _Five_

Evening in Wogga-Wogga-Wogga. The new British Resident sat on the
veranda with his mistress drinking sundowners and eating caviar out of
tins.

"What happened to that black Emperor, Cain?"

"Oh, we cut off his head."

"Good business."

"Yes, wasn't it."

"What was the end of his Army?"

"Our fellows turned a dozen machine-guns on 'em."

"Very sound. And what about all those secretaries and people?"

"Just hanged--all except a few whom we burnt alive. Do let me have a
turn with the yo-yo now, darling."

Night in Wogga-Wogga-Wogga.

       *       *       *       *       *

(PUBLISHERS' QUERY.--But is that the end?

AUTHOR'S REPLY.--I'm afraid so. Rotten, isn't it?

PUBLISHERS' NOTE.--That's all right, my dear chap--we're sending it to
the Book Society.)


               THE GREATER BRITAIN, BY A GREATER BRITON


"_Up, Guards, and at 'em._"

(_Famous quotation quoted by the author on being relieved of office._)

_Introduction_

Romulus and Remus were the founders of Imperial Rome. From them we
derive the famous story of the Wolf, symbolizing what the British Empire
has now got to keep from the door.

_It is better to be safe than sorry._

       *       *       *       *       *


_The New Movement_

All Movements are new at the beginning, although later on they become
older. This particular New Movement was not invented in Great Britain,
but it easily might have been. It is essentially law-abiding,
constitutional, and conservative, but in objective it is communistic,
revolutionary, and anarchistic. It is entirely static, and at the same
time absolutely progressive.

The author has no apology to offer on the score of inconsistency.

       *       *       *       *       *


_Systematic System_

Debates, Committees, Tea-fights, Elections, Governments, Old Women and
Old Gangs, are one and all likely to prove fatal to the New Movement.
They must go.

Perhaps it would be better if the House of Lords, which comes under some
if not all of the above headings, were to go also.


      _The Citizens of this State and the Author of this Book_

In the opinion of the latter, it is absolutely essential that the former
should all take to living athletic lives. In this way only can Great
Britain deal with the Indian muddle, the Colonial confusion, the
agricultural depression, the falling birth-rate, and the rising tide of
taxation.

A general adoption of the athletic ideals of Ancient Greece would mean a
return to Ye Merrie England of Good Queen Bess, with ye fine olde
British sports of bear-baiting, cock-fighting, drinking one another
under ye olde mahogany, witch-burning, and so on. The men--ye mariners
of England--who carried the egg of Columbus across the Atlantic, were
like that.

_Waterloo was won upon the playing-fields of Eton._

       *       *       *       *       *


_Women_

It has been suggested that hitherto, in the New Movement, too little
attention has been paid to the position of women. _But every member of
our organization has, at one time or another, and some times at both,
had a woman for a mother._ Therefore the part played by women in the
Movement is important, although different from that of the men.

To many the idea may seem fantastic, but _men will always be men, and
women still more always be women_. In the New Movement, women will be
mothers as well, continually and all the time. In this way, the problem
will be solved.

_Woman's place is the cradle._

       *       *       *       *       *


_Conclusion_

Whether the New Movement is really new, or really a Movement, no one can
yet tell. It may be one and not the other, or the other and not the one,
or either, or neither, or both.

But whatever happens--or not--the author will still offer no apology on
the score of inconsistency.




                            WHEN I'M ALLOWED
                              TO BE . . .


                    MOTHER THERESA MAKES HER MEDITATION

It's thirty years since I found I'd the holy vocation, and me struggling
against it for all I was worth, and saying I couldn't ever leave
Tipperary, and the dogs, and the horses, and Jamesie and all. And just
to look at the way He works! I can see Jamesie now, like it was
yesterday, coming up and hugging the head off me, the way he did, and
saying: "Sis, if it's me that's keeping you back from your vocation,
you're in danger of mortal sin. And as like as not I'll be getting a vo.
meself one of these days."

"Never, Jamesie!" says I, for he was so wild, you'd never have thought
he'd a pious thought in his whole body, but that he went to early Church
the way I didn't always meself, on cold mornings.

"There's no knowing," says Jamesie.

Well, I was bound to mention, at the end of my next confession, that I
thought the Lord wanted me for His very own, and I remember I howled out
loud with sobbing at the end of it.

The Abbot was as kind as could be, and it was he who spoke to my Da in
the end, and got permission for me to enter the convent.

And after all these years I can remember that last night at home, and
all of us sitting at the round table, the way we always did, and the
lamp turned too low and smelling awful, and not one of us able to eat
any supper.

Father pretended to read, and Kitty sewed for her life at marking my new
postulant's handkerchiefs with the little Cross and the big M, and I
thinking I'd most likely soak the lot of them through, with crying, in
my first twenty-four hours in the noviciate. (So I did, too.) I'd the
dogs at my feet, and Jamesie was curled up almost on top of them, with
his head in my lap. (His hair was as red as fire, and he'd often been
fit to be tied, the way we laughed at him for it.)

But I didn't laugh that night, or the next day when he and father saw me
off from Dublin.

For the noviciate was over in England, if you please, although the
Reverend Mother was true Irish, glory be to God.

I got the grace given me somehow to go through with it, but there were
whiles I thought I'd go mad, with the stiff, prim English all round me,
and the postulant's veil, that nearly drove me silly the way it got
twisted, and the Novice Mistress refusing to let me cut off so much as
one hair of my head till I took my first vows at the end of a
twelvemonth.

They all came over from Ireland for my Profession Day--Father, and
Kitty, and Jamesie, dressed up in the grandest clothes they could lay
hands on, so as nearly to scare the life out of me. We sat in the
parlour and talked, I feeling like a fool with the wreath of white
flowers pinned on all askew over my novice's veil--God forgive me--and
they told me everything that had happened at home since I'd left, but I
couldn't tell them much about the religious life in return, for fear I'd
be saying what I oughtn't, or bursting out crying for home-sickness, or
something. Reverend Mother saw them, and said she hoped I'd the makings
of a good nun in me, and my Da gave her his thanksgiving offering, and
then they went away.

The very next week I was sent to the Orphanage in South America and
stayed there, teaching, for fifteen years. And Kitty married a black
Protestant, God help her, and died of it in a year--and Jamesie went for
a priest, the way he'd said he should, and my old Da was left all alone
at home.

When I went back to England--to London, this time--there was talk of his
coming over to see me, but he never did, and it was only Jamesie could
get to him when he lay dying. Jamesie wrote and said what an edifying
deathbed he'd had, thanking God and Our Dear Lady for the blessing of
two religious vocations in the family, and the Abbot administering the
Last Sacraments and all. So there was comfort in it.

I saw Jamesie once more, before he went out to the Foreign Missions, and
I wouldn't have known him, but for the red head of him, he'd grown so
tall and thin and grave-looking. He gave me a rosary that the Holy
Father had blessed.

The religious life teaches one detachment, thanks be to God. But it
doesn't take away the human heart of one, and I thought mine'd break
when Reverend Mother told me about Jamesie having been killed out in
Manchuria.

"You must be proud of your brother, sister dear," she said to me.
"Father James gave his life for the Holy Catholic Faith. God rest his
soul for a holy martyr."

The queer thing is that it's not any Father James that I find meself
praying for--though it's rather I should be asking _him_ to pray for
_me_, in Heaven where he is now--but Jamesie--the way I used to see him
with his red hair all on end, fit to be tied because we laughed at
him....


                               RETROSPECT

When we were children, and lived at home at the farm, Francie and I were
always together. We slept in the night-nursery, where the window
overlooked the yard, and every morning we used to hear the long-drawn
"cluck-cluck-cluck-a-clu-u-u-ck" of the hens, and then the crow of the
cock, much farther away, where the dung-heap was.

We played together, and sometimes quarrelled, but always made it up
before going to sleep, because something dreadful would happen if the
sun went down upon one's wrath.

We pretended things, that nobody else knew about, and had secret
catchwords and allusions.

And we knew one another with the unparalleled intimacy of shared nursery
days. After all these years I can still say what Francie's favourite
colour was, and why she never liked primroses any more after Dinah, the
sheep-dog, died, and how it was that she taught herself at last to
remember what seven times twelve makes.... And all that kind of thing.

We remained children a long while, I think--longer than most people. We
were, still, always together, even after we'd left the farm, and hadn't
a real home any longer, but lived in London in a boarding-house. We even
shared our friends, because we always liked the same people, and the
same people made us laugh.

We were very happy, and made plans, such as I suppose all young people
make, for a very successful and exciting future, that we were to share.

Francie met Hugo whilst I was away on a visit. She wrote and told me
that he was a new friend, and that I should like him.

When I came back, after only a week, I found that he and she knew one
another well.

I liked him, too, at once.

Hugo was very tall, and he had brown eyes that looked at one with a
curious, slanting kind of glance, and when he smiled he showed very
white teeth in a sunburnt face.

For a little while I think he could not make up his mind.

Then he fell in love with me. Already, I was more than half in love with
him.

And Francie cried. We knew one another so well that we could never hide
anything from one another. But she said:

"Nothing could ever come between _us_."

In a way, that was true.

But life takes one away, somehow.

Hugo and I went to India, and Francie married somebody also, and after a
time they went to Canada, where she died.

Hugo, my husband, came through the war, and we went back to India, and I
took up the curious, divided life of the woman whose man is abroad, and
her children at Home.

It was just packing, and unpacking, and one set of clothes, then
another, and Army talk, and rushing from school to school in England,
and all the time the thought of sailing again just ahead of one.

Just a rush, for all the years of my middle life, and the old sense of
always waiting for some kind of finality.

I suppose, in the end, Cheltenham stood for finality. At all events, the
rush is all over now. There is no more packing, there are no more
schools, the children are quite grown-up and have gone their several
ways.

Hugo died very soon after we came to the Cheltenham villa.

Sitting alone, in the evenings, with _The Times_ all folded up neatly on
the little brass table under the lamp, and no noise anywhere, one's
thoughts go back.

Although I think of Hugo, and that time in India, and of the children,
and the new Library novels, and the housekeeping, it's those far-away
farm days that I remember most often, and the cluck-clucking of the hens
under the night-nursery window, and the strong scent of the mint growing
in the sun, under the red-brick wall of the kitchen-garden.

It's strange, sometimes, to feel that, after all, it's not Hugo that I
miss most now that all the turmoil is over. It's Francie.


                           THE GENERATIONS

If it hadn't been for the rain, I don't suppose I'd have gone inside the
Cathedral at all. I've never been much of a one for churches. But it was
wet, and I'd more than an hour to wait for my train.

It felt chilly in there, and empty--just one or two people, kneeling or
sitting. I'd been there myself, sitting in the corner of the pew, quite
a little while before I remembered.

It must have been all of forty years ago. But it was in that Cathedral,
all that long while back, that I'd been a baby bridesmaid at the
Fanshawe wedding.

I was five years old, perhaps, or six. I wore a pink frock, with flowers
all over it, coming right down to my feet, and puffed sleeves, and a
fancy bonnet--pink velvet, with a little tiny frill inside it. I hadn't
thought of it for years and years--and there, all of a sudden, I was
remembering it quite plainly. It was just as though I could see myself,
as I'd been then, coming down the empty aisle.

And the thing I remembered best of all was the feeling that my mother
was there, in one of the front pews, looking at me and smiling, and that
in another minute she'd hold out her hand to me and take hold of mine.

It was queer, how the feeling came back to me then. I loved her so much
that it hurt. I thought she was the most wonderful person in the world,
and the most beautiful, and the kindest. I couldn't imagine ever loving
anybody else as I did her.

What happens to it, all that love and confident trust? That's what I
want to know.

Looking back, one doesn't know when the change came. One can't say,
_Here_ is where things altered, or _That_ was the moment when it all
went wrong.

There isn't any turning-point.

It just changes.

I suppose it's part of what life does to one. Children grow up and their
parents don't mean the same any more. It's like that for all of us.

Mostly, one doesn't remember how one felt then, only just sometimes it
comes back, like it did as I sat in the Cathedral and somehow saw myself
as a little girl, and my mother as she used to look to me in those days.

And I thought of Evadne, as was natural, I suppose, and the way she
always comes running to meet me when I get home. She'll throw her arms
round me, and be happier than she's been all day, because I've come
back, and she'll tell me she loves me, the way children do.

But Evadne'll grow up. It'll be the same for me as it's been for my
mother.

One loses them.

Only it seems queer that one can't ever say when it happens, or how.

I don't think about the past much, as a rule, or the future either for
that matter. There's never any time. I suppose it was sitting like that,
in the Cathedral, quiet and with nothing to do, that brought it all
back.


                       WHERE HAVE WE GOT TO NOW?

An ex-officer was crawling up Albemarle Street. He was not, needless to
say, literally crawling on hands and knees, but he was progressing at
the pace of a snail on a wall, owing to the extreme horror that filled
his mind at the thought of his errand. But there was nothing else to be
done.

He had already spent a frightful half-hour with the manager of his bank,
and the last words of the manager had been:

"Then we shall be hearing from you in the course of the next day or two,
I may take it? Quite. Exactly. Thank you, Captain Loder. Good-morning.
Wonderful weather we're having, indeed...."

Captain Loder, in spite of crawling, reached the house in which his
stepsister lived, and compelled himself to ring the bell. Although he
was thirty-six years old, it was with difficulty that he refrained from
dashing down the steps again and out of sight before it was answered,
after the fashion of little street-boys--although not from a similarly
light-hearted impulse.

Presently he was in his stepsister's flat--walnut furniture, mostly of
the period of Queen Anne, Dresden china, and quantities of silk
cushions--and Joan had greeted him affectionately. She was forty-six
and quite handsome. She was also very clever, and held some
superlatively important Government post that was known to carry a
pension as well as a considerable salary. Besides all this, she had a
private income that ran into four figures, and she had had the sense not
to marry, so that she was able to do exactly as she liked with her
money.

"This is very nice of you, Wilfred," she said. "How are you?"

"I'm all right, Joan, thanks. Still amongst the unemployed,
unfortunately----" He forced a laugh, that died away under Joan's
complete disregard of its existence.

"And how's Chrissie--and the baby?"

"The baby's splendid, thanks. Chrissie's not too fit, poor girl. A bit
worried just now." He didn't dare tell Joan, so modern and efficient and
rational, that Chrissie was going to have another baby. By the way she
raised her eyebrows, he was almost afraid that she'd guessed it, but she
said nothing.

"I really came, Joan, to--to----" No, he couldn't. "I say, how awfully
nice your hyacinths are!"

"Yes, they're rather good, aren't they? I do them in moss-fibre."

She went on talking about her bulbs, and he said Yes, and I see, without
listening to a word.

"You'll have some tea, won't you, Wilfred?"

"Thanks awfully, but I really mustn't stay. I think Chrissie's expecting
me."

Joan looked surprised. Well she might, reflected Captain Loder, since he
had been living at home with Chrissie in the Maida Vale flat for the
past two and a half years, and there could be no possible reason for him
to hurry back to it.

"Joan, I wonder if you'd do me a most frightful kindness?"

His heart was thumping in a sickening manner.

"If I can, of course."

Joan's voice was, he could not help feeling, full of the amiability of
the person who is in the superior position of granting favours.

"Could you possibly--It's just that--Look here, Joan, I know it's a
frightful thing to come to you like this--but Chris and I are in--in
fearfully low water just now."

If anyone had told him, ten years earlier, that he would ever try to
borrow money from a woman, even if she was his own stepsister--! He
clenched his hands, forcing himself to remember Chrissie crying at her
typewriter, because her back ached so, and the ghastly pile of bills
shoved away into the back of the writing-table drawer.

"Could you possibly lend us a couple of hundred pounds, to try and
straighten things out?"

He'd said it now. The worst must be over. She couldn't refuse, and
already he projected his mind into the blessed moment when he would be
out in the street again, her cheque in his pocket. He compelled himself
to meet Joan's eyes.

Into her face had come that mysterious change that always, invariably,
came into the faces of rich people when money was in question. It wasn't
a look of anger at all, but merely one that suggested the donning of
some impenetrable spiritual armour--protecting the precious money from
the insidious attacks of sentiment, or pity, or affection. No doubt, he
reflected in a detached way, if it wasn't for that armour, and their
capacity for donning it at a moment's notice, people like Joan wouldn't
be the rich, secure people that they were.

"Wilfred--of course, I'm very glad you came to me. We'd better have a
little talk, hadn't we? I'm sorry you and Chrissie are finding things
difficult."

"We are, a bit."

"You're not earning anything at all?"

"I can't get a job."

"It's such a pity you left that post with Uncle Ernest's firm."

"I thought I was safe to get that secretaryship--it was promised me, in
fact. I was absolutely let down over that----"

"I know, my dear boy, but--However, it's no use crying over spilt milk.
You threw up a perfectly safe job, that at least brought you in a small
income, and you found yourself high and dry. Do you still get the income
from mother's money?"

"I had the most frightfully bad luck over that. I was told of an
absolutely safe thing----"

"My dear Wilfred, do you mean you reinvested your _capital_?"

"Well--yes. You see----"

"And lost it?"

"Yes--most of it."

"I see. How much is left?"

"About three hundred was left, Joan. But of course----"

"Are you and Chrissie living on capital?"

"We've had to. We've got to have a roof over our heads, and then the
child----"

"Chrissie has a servant, hasn't she?"

"She has to. You see, the baby keeps her awake at night, and----"

"I suppose that costs you about three or four pounds a month. And her
food as well. Are you and Chrissie in debt, Wilfred?"

"Yes, we are," he burst out angrily. "We owe money to the tradespeople,
and they're starting to dun us, and the Bank won't let me overdraw any
more."

"Have you any securities left?"

"Only my life insurance policy."

"That's mortgaged, isn't it? Have you insured for the child's
education--one of those Educational annuities?"

"No--we couldn't have paid the first premium."

"Then you're practically living on credit?"

"Chrissie makes something by typing. I loathe her doing it, but what
else----"

"She hasn't anything of her own at all?"

"Nothing. As a matter of fact, she's even sold her jewellery, such as it
was."

"You don't get anything at all for jewellery. But, Wilfred--I thought
you had a small car!"

"I--we--I did get one on the instalment system, but I couldn't keep up
the payments."

"I can't think how you could ever have thought yourself justified in
getting one at all. And I must say, Wilfred, I don't know how you can
_live_, feeling that you owe money all round like that."

"It's been pretty ghastly," he muttered.

She rose from her chair and went majestically to the writing-table.

"What is your overdraft now, Wilfred?"

"A hundred and thirty pounds."

"I'll pay in a cheque to your account to-night that will put it
straight. I don't want you to repay me. The only repayment I ask is that
you should keep out of debt in future. It's utterly degrading to owe
money."

"Joan, it's frightfully good of you."

"You'd better let me have the bills, and I'll look through them and
settle with the tradespeople direct. I think Chrissie must have managed
very badly. I'll come and see you, and perhaps we can find out how she
can economize."

"Chrissie does her level best----"

"I understand. That'll do. Send me every bill, Wilfred. Do you know what
the total is?"

"About--about three hundred, if you count things like doctors and
rent----"

"Then the two hundred you asked for _wouldn't_ have put things straight.
I thought as much. Well, Wilfred ..."

When he had thanked her again and again he went away. He felt curiously
cold and weak, as though something vital had been drained away from him.

The debts were to be paid, the overdraft at the Bank to be wiped off....
But there'd still be no job, and no income coming in, and he and
Chrissie and the child would still have to find food and shelter and
warmth somehow. Now that he'd asked Joan once, perhaps it wouldn't be so
difficult to do it again another time.

Horrified at himself, he felt the thought creep into his mind, slyly
taking up a permanent corner there.


                               THE WIDOW

It's queer, now Father's gone, and I know it's an awful thing to say,
but in some ways I'm happier than I've ever been before.

In all the five-and-twenty years I was married to Father, I wasn't ever
anything but tired, and I never had a bit of pleasuring. He was a good
husband, but he just didn't hold with my going anywhere without I went
with him--and not much of that. If ever he saw me with a hat on, he'd
ask where I was going and why I couldn't bide home.

And it was only the other day I was thinking that I never had a new hat,
not in all the years I was married. Not a _new_ one. People where I've
worked have given me a hat, sometimes, and I've got one off the Jumble
from time to time, but never a new one of my own. Once, when I'd gone
out and done a bit of cleaning, I bought a new pair of shoes with the
money, and Father flew into such a passion he couldn't eat his dinner.
And it was money I'd earned, too, but he thought it meant I wanted to
go out somewhere, and that was a thing he couldn't abide.

He'd say, why couldn't I be content home, like he was. But then, Father
had his work, that took him out every day, and he could talk with the
other men in the dinner hour. I didn't see a soul most times, except the
days that baker's van called, from morning till night. Only the
children, of course, and children make a lot of work in a cottage when
they're little, especially when there's another one on the way--as there
mostly was with me, for I've had eight altogether. Many's the time I've
said to Father that if the man had to have a child turn and turn about
with the woman there wouldn't never be no more than two in any family.
And a good job, too. However, Father wouldn't have none of that, and he
said it was distrusting God's providence not to believe that He knew
best how many children a woman ought to have. It did give me a nice bit
of rest, too, when I had to lie up, only it was over so quickly, and
meant extra work as soon as I got about again.

I don't know that I've ever minded work, exactly, but I did use to feel
that I'd like to get about a bit sometimes. I never went to a concert
nor an entertainment until the Red Cross started in the village during
the war.

Father couldn't go to the war, because he couldn't pass his medical.
They said his heart was all wrong. We hadn't ever known there was
anything the matter with his heart, but Father got ever so nervous after
that, and I used to think what a pity it was he'd ever been told about
it. And in the end he died of pneumonia after all--nearly a year ago
now.

Most of the children are earning, and my auntie's taken the little one
that's got hip disease, and I can manage nicely with taking in a bit of
washing at home and my widow's pension. But this year I'm going to the
panto if I have to die for it. The money isn't so very much, and I
haven't been to a theatre ever in my life, and I've always wanted
to--and I'm going to get a new hat, what's more, to go in.

He was a very good husband to me, was Father, and I haven't nothing to
reproach him with. He brought his money home to me regular, and never
lifted a finger against me or the children, and I never knew him use
language, nor saw him the worse for drink, and it's not every woman can
say that, by a very long way.

But he didn't ought to have made that fuss about me getting a pair of
new shoes with the money I'd earned myself.


                            END OF A HOLIDAY

The Harpers sat in a third-class railway carriage--they had it to
themselves, and no wonder, with two children and all that
hand-luggage--and Mr. Harper slept--noisily, for he had caught cold on
the boat--and Dickie Harper breathed on the window and then drew on it
with his forefinger, and Patsey Harper, swinging her short legs against
the opposite seat, sucked a piece of moist chocolate and whistled a
tuneless air just below her breath. She had been whistling it,
intermittently, ever since Dinard.

Mrs. Harper, tensely and quite unconsciously clutching a magazine that
she supposed herself to be reading, watched them all.

She was watching, as she had been doing throughout the whole of the
journey, and most of the holiday before that, for the moment when Mr.
Harper should turn round and be annoyed about something, Dickie suddenly
lose his temper in a spasm of nervous irritability to which nobody in
the world, except possibly his mother, could assign any rational cause,
and Patsey stop whistling, turn pale-green, and announce that she wasn't
feeling very well.

The train shrieked and plunged into a tunnel.

Mr. Harper shifted in his corner-seat.

"The last lap now," he muttered.

He had said the same words when they went on board, and also when they
landed, and his wife was aware that he would say them again when they
reached Victoria, and perhaps also when they got into the taxi that
would take them and all the luggage to Hampstead.

It really would be the last lap then.

Mrs. Harper's mind, that resembled nothing so much as a highly-strung
mouse in a very small cage, took a flying leap forward and anticipated
the arrival at No. 9 Hill Walk.

Had Cook received, read, understood, and acted upon the post-card about
a _hot_ supper? The post-card had been posted in France, and foreign
postal services were unreliable.

Would there--but of course there would--be a small pile of bills on the
dining-room table awaiting Harold, and would it be possible to put them
out of sight just for the first hour or two? It would make all the
difference to the evening.

Would Alice have remembered about getting the man to put a new battery
in the wireless?

About winding the clock.

Ordering the newspaper to start again.

Getting in some fruit for the children.

Unpacking the parcel from the cleaners, and putting the clean covers on
the chairs.

Airing the beds thoroughly.

Sorting the laundry, and having it waiting in the bedroom.

(At the thought of the little piles of clean handkerchiefs, Mrs. Harper
caught her breath. Everyone had run short of handkerchiefs, although
they had all borrowed from her. She had washed and rough-dried a good
many, but it wasn't at all the same thing.)

"Kin I have a drink please, Mummy?"

Mrs. Harper, in one practised movement, signed to Patsey that the drink
should be forthcoming, that she was on no account to wake her father,
and that she was to hand her mother the basket from the floor.

In the basket, taken from Hampstead to Dinard, and now in process of
being taken from Dinard back to Hampstead, was a collection of articles,
small in themselves, of which the aggregate weight mounted apparently
into hundreds and hundreds of pounds.

The basket was Mrs. Harper's insurance against emergencies.

It held books for the journey, eau-de-cologne and Mothersill in case of
sea-sickness, a pack of cards for the children to play with if they
became restless, a bottle of iodine, a roll of lint, a pair of scissors,
plaster, a packet of biscuits, a horn mug, a bottle of lemonade, a
bottle of Eno's Fruit Salts, a change of socks for each of the children,
and a large number of other things.

The basket had disgraced them continually. Its handle had given way, and
had had to be lashed with string; the mug had rolled out and been
retrieved by a French porter with many ejaculations; on one occasion the
current bottle of lemonade had broken, and odorous stickiness and broken
glass had pervaded the belongings of the whole party for days
afterwards....

Altogether, the weight, appearance, and behaviour of the basket had
rendered not altogether unjust the things that Mr. Harper had
continually said about it.

Nevertheless, in the opinion of Mrs. Harper, its presence was completely
justified at such moments as the present one.

Patsey could have her drink at once, instead of having to wait another
hour and a half for it.

"Are we nearly there now?"

"Very nearly."

Mrs. Harper's smile responded to Patsey's, and there was a sympathetic
note of eager anticipation, the echo of Patsey's, in her carefully
lowered voice. But the mouse in its little cage made another frantic
dash forward.

Unpacking.

The dreadful scramble of getting the things out before the children's
bed-time--the necessity of throwing all the damp bathing things into
fresh water, and rinsing them out, and hanging them up--the lugging of
the empty suitcases up to the attic--even the sorting out of the soiled
and crumpled linens and cottons that must go straight to the laundry, as
opposed to the soiled and crumpled woollens that would have to be done,
very carefully, at home--all oppressed her with a despairing sense of
mingled fatigue and exasperation.

She became aware that Dickie was moving.

She knew that he would stumble over his father's feet, and made a futile
warning gesture--too late.

"I'm sorry, Daddy."

"Can't you look where you're going?" enquired his father--but
despairingly, rather than with anger.

"Hullo--we're nearly in!"

They went through the familiar motions of arrival, lifting down
suitcases, stuffing mysterious accumulations of paper beneath the seats,
looking round for elusive coats and hats and handbags.

"Well, well, well," said Mr. Harper. "Home again, thank goodness. And I
only hope you children realize that a great deal of money has been spent
on your pleasure and amusement, and it's not every father, let me tell
you ..."

Dickie and Patsey were not listening, although they looked up at him so
attentively. Their mother knew it well, and she tried to make up for
their inattention, and still more to keep her husband from noticing it,
by answering for them:

"Yes, indeed. It's been so good of you, Harold."

"I'm not asking for gratitude," Mr. Harper returned, a little
inaccurately, "but the children ought to understand that they're a good
deal more fortunate than most youngsters of their age. My word, think of
it--a fortnight's holiday in France!"

"Why do people have holidays?" idiotically said Patsey.

She meant nothing whatever. Her ear had caught the sound of the word
"holiday", that was all.

Mrs. Harper rushed into speech, seeking to avert her husband's attention
quickly from his child's tactlessness.

"A really good holiday, a complete change, makes all the difference to
the rest of the year," she cried, grasping the basket for the last time.

"That's right," her husband agreed.

He hadn't realized what Patsey had said.

In the extremity of her relief, Mrs. Harper felt tears pricking behind
her eyelids.

The sensation passed in a moment, almost unnoticed, for it was many
years since she had had either time, or a sufficiently relaxed nervous
system, for tears.

Besides, she saw that Dickie was just about to drop an armful of books,
and that her husband was looking for coppers instead of crumpled and
filthy five-franc notes.

She had foreseen that need--there were plenty of coppers in her bag, if
only she could get at it....


                              THE MOTHER

From the time when they were all little children Cecil was different.
The younger ones would play together, and with the animals on the farm,
and when one of them was naughty, it was mostly mischievousness, and
soon over. But Cecil wasn't like that. It seemed as if he couldn't ever
enjoy himself, or let himself be happy, like they were. Difficult,
everyone called him. Only I knew that he couldn't really help it. He was
just different.

People said I spoilt him, and that I thought more of him than of all the
others put together. It used to make my husband angry. Dad was a hard
man, in some ways, though he was always a very good husband to me.

He was proud of the other children--Michael and Tony because they were
strong and sturdy, and clever with the animals, and Mary, who could ride
anything from the time she was two years old, and Rose for her
prettiness. But Cecil used to make him angry, because he didn't like any
out-door things, and seemed to be afraid of the beasts, although he'd
been brought up amongst them, the same as the others. And he'd argue
with Dad, and contradict him, showing off how clever he was.

They said school would make a difference, and we sent him right away to
the Grammar School, on a scholarship, but he was very unhappy there, and
I think it made him worse. After a time, he didn't tell me things any
more, like he'd done when he was little, and I couldn't help him at all.
That was the worst.

Sometimes I used to think it would be better if he didn't live to grow
up, and have to suffer more.

There were times, I remember, when I even used to feel angry with the
other boys for being so good, and happy, and popular, so that people
were always saying what splendid lads they were.

Cecil ran away, when he was fifteen and a bit. He sent me a picture
post-card of the Hoe from Plymouth, and then I didn't hear anything
more. I used to think of him, perhaps far out at sea, on stormy nights
when the branches of the big walnut tree behind the house beat against
the roof of the woodshed.

Dad and I didn't ever talk about him much. Dad couldn't understand the
way I felt, and he thought Cecil had disgraced us all, running away from
his good home like that. Once, he said that the boy had never been
anything but a misery to himself and us from the day he'd been born.

I dare say it might seem like that, to a man.

He couldn't be expected to remember the time when Cecil was little, and
how he was always ready to share his toys and his sweets with anyone,
for all his temper, and how he spent the very first shilling anybody
ever gave him on a blue mug that had a picture on it of St. Andrew's
Church, and gave it to me for a present.

Cecil didn't come home any more, but he wrote to me once, and asked me
to send him some money, to some place in America, and I did. I took it
out of the Post Office Savings. That was the only time I ever deceived
my husband--except for the usual little things, for his own good, like
every woman has to sometimes.

Dad lived to see Tony take over the farm, and marry a nice wife, and
Michael go into partnership with a big garage-proprietor, in Exeter, and
do splendidly. He saw his eldest grandchildren too, for Mary and Rose
both married early.

We were in our own house, that he'd bought, when he died rather
suddenly.

After Dad's death, I wrote to Cecil at that American address, but I
didn't have much hope of his getting the letter, because I'd written
there before, many times, and never had any answer.

The other children were very good to me, and Rose wanted me to go and
live with her and her husband in their nice place that had three spare
bedrooms. But I didn't go.

I just stayed on, in the house Dad had bought. I've been there a long
while now, and the grandchildren come and stay.

There was one more letter came from Cecil, ten years ago now, saying
that he was quite settled out in America, and doing fairly well, working
in a Bank. He didn't say anything about coming back to England, and he
didn't ask about his brothers and sisters, or anyone.

It's strange to think that if I saw Cecil now I shouldn't know him
again. He must be a middle-aged man by this time, only I can't realize
it, because the last time I saw him he was only fifteen.

His letter never said if he was happy, and I often wonder. It does seem
as if life was too much for some people, and they just can't fit in
anywhere. But perhaps it isn't like that for him any more, out in
America.

I don't suppose I shall ever know, now.


                           CONVERSATION-PIECE

"My dear, was it marvellous?"

"My dear, it was absolutely marvellous!"

They sat on Betty's bed and looked at one another and laughed,
feeling--and indeed looking--extraordinarily happy and young and
beautiful.

Betty's half-filled cigarette-case and Rosemary Ann's half-emptied box
of chocolates lay on the bed between them, and as they smoked they ate
chocolates and as they ate and smoked they talked, and Rosemary Ann also
drank cold water out of the tooth-glass, long and frequently.

"Go on--tell me the _whole_ thing," urged Betty.

She was twenty-one, and more earnest than Rosemary Ann, who was only
just nineteen. Nevertheless it was the love-affair of Rosemary Ann that
was engaging the attention of both at the moment. (The love-affair of
Betty was, so to speak, in rather a stage of transition between Kenya
and something very, very modern and artistic in Bloomsbury, and there
was nothing much to discuss about either.)

"Well," said Rosemary Ann, looking quite amazingly pretty, with her blue
eyes shining in her soft face, and her lovely mouth curving every now
and then into perfectly involuntary smiles.

"Well, my dear, it was too marvellous. You know how absolutely miserable
I've been for the last year?"

"I know," said Betty. "It's been frightful, hasn't it?"

"Too frightful. Honestly--" said Rosemary Ann ("Darling, eat this one
for me, will you? I hoped it was a hard one, but I'm sure by the feel it
isn't). Honestly, I don't know how I've kept myself from going mad. It's
been so awful, having to meet him everywhere, and always with that
woman--because she _did_ run him absolutely to death, everyone says
so--and I believe that's what sickened him in the end. But you can
imagine what hell it's been for me, all this time."

"Rather. Something like that time when I thought Nick was keen on
Patricia Godden--I simply couldn't _bear_ it."

"Darling! That really wasn't a bit the same thing. You only _thought_
you were in love with Nick--you know you say so yourself. It didn't last
any time at all."

"No, I know, but still it does matter frightfully while it's on, doesn't
it?"

"Oh, of course. But the awful thing for me was that mine went on and
on--absolutely. I think it's the way I'm made or something. There
simply never has been anyone but Robin."

"I know, darling. You've been too marvellous."

"It's not as if I hadn't tried to fall in love with other people. I did
my absolute best, with Gilbert, and the Somers man--Heaven knows he's
attractive enough--and it simply wasn't the slightest use. I never
thought of anyone at all except Robin. I used to think I was getting
over it--though I always knew I wasn't really--and the _moment_ I heard
that thing we used to dance to--'Colorado Baby'--on the gramophone or
anywhere, it was just as bad as ever. And, my dear, this is the really
marvellous thing--you won't believe it. On Wednesday, at this
extraordinary place in Leicestershire, where Robin was the _absolutely_
first person I saw when we got into the ballroom--and Heaven only knows
why I didn't faint or something from sheer astonishment--well, you won't
believe me, but the band played _that very tune_. You know how
frightfully old it is--I remember dancing to it at my first dance--and
of course one never hears it now in London. But that heavenly band
started 'Colorado Baby' ten minutes after we arrived."

"My dear, it must have been fate or something."

"I know. And Robin came absolutely straight across the room to me and
said 'Our tune, Rosemary Ann,' and looked at me, and I simply went
straight into his arms and we danced, and we made them give three
encores of 'Colorado Baby'. It was absolute heaven, my dear."

"Did he say anything?"

"About the hag? Only that it was all over and he'd been utterly mad or
something, and he'd been dying to ring me up but simply hadn't dared.
But he said the moment he heard that tune, that we'd _always_ danced to
together, he somehow knew everything would be all right."

"And it was?"

"Absolutely. We spent the whole, entire evening together. It was the
most wonderful dance I've _ever_ been to, which just shows you, because
really it was absolutely lousy, in itself--all county and huntin' and
shootin' people, and the men either terribly ancient or frightfully
young, and not a frock in the room except one's own."

"I know the kind of thing. Devastating. Did they have a polka, and all
the grandpapas and grandmamas simply leap into the middle of the room
and perform the most shame-making antics?"

"Practically. At least, it was a waltz, and a most fearfully good tune
as a matter of fact, but one just retired gracefully and let them have
the floor."

"I _cannot_ imagine why they do it," said Betty pensively. "Do you mind
if I drink, darling?--which side _didn't_ you use? Chocolates make one
so frightfully thirsty, I always think. Well, go on."

"There was one woman there, wearing the most utterly mouldy clothes,
with grey hair and collar-bones and things. And, my dear, when this
waltz-affair began, she said to the man standing next her--he wasn't
bad-looking, but absolutely bald--she said: 'Do you remember, Tony?' all
sentimental, and he answered: 'Those were the days, Elisabeth!' And
they started dancing together. My dear, I _ask_ you!"

"My dear, what _do_ they get out of it?"

"God knows," said Rosemary Ann, eating chocolate. "I don't."


                        MEN HAVE NO IMAGINATION

Taking it bye and large, I suppose you might say that I've not been a
good woman. It depends on the way you look at it, of course, but I'm
bound to say that I shouldn't like Evelina to inherit my temperament.
Ever since I was about fifteen. Now I'm fifty-six and, of course, it's
all over. Has been, for years.

No one, as far as I know, ever loved me as much as Maurice did, although
I was over thirty when I met him. We were both crazy, and even now, when
I think of the risks we ran, my blood runs cold, as people say.

He was the only person who ever really loved me as much as I wanted to
be loved, the only trouble being that he didn't go on long enough.

His love-making was what I call intelligent. I didn't have to think of
everything myself, and at the same time make it look as though it all
came from him, which is what really takes it out of the woman in most
love-affairs. He'd say all the right things, at the right moment. He'd
notice when I looked tired, and be terribly sorry, without ever making
me feel that looking tired is mostly the same thing as looking plain.

When he gave me violets, he told me that it was because he remembered
I'd once said I liked them.

Things like that.

Well, of course I went off the deep end. As I say, we were perfectly
mad.

I met him wherever, and whenever, he wanted me to, and I sent him the
kind of love-letters that every woman wants to send, if she can only
find the man who wants to get them. And he wrote me the same kind of
letter--every day.

Looking back, I suppose George knew. He never said anything. Some
husbands don't. Not that I should have cared if he had. I'd have left
him, and Evelina too, for Maurice, if Maurice had ever asked me to go.

He never did. For my sake, he said--and I believed it when he said it,
which just shows what a genius he was in his way. We had two marvellous
years. It's a relief to me, even now, to remember that it ended quickly.
Maurice's technique, as you might say, was too good to spoil the thing
by an inartistic finish. We said good-bye (in a garden, under a harvest
moon, and with someone or other playing the "Valse Triste" by an open
window) while we both of us cared enough to make it worth while.

       *       *       *       *       *

I got over it, of course, as one does. And some years later, when
Maurice was engaged to a girl straight out of the schoolroom, he wrote
and told me that he was going to be married. I'd always guessed that he
would marry some day.

George and I sent him a wedding present. I never met the girl.

A very stupid woman, who knew her, once told me that she'd spoken about
me--she thought that Maurice and I had been friends--and that the girl
said: "Oh! But Maurice doesn't want me to meet _her_. He told me she was
a wrong 'un."

Well, of course, it was true in a way. But it does make one feel that
men--even men like Maurice--have no imagination.


                           THE NIGHT SISTER

Rosewarne is a Cornish name, of course, and it was seeing the little
boy's name--Dickie Rosewarne--on the case-sheet that made me think of
Constantine Bay all of a sudden.

Just for a minute it was like a breath of wind from the north Cornish
shore blowing through the long polished wards and the scrubbed
corridors, all smelling of carbolic, and the cement-white stairs.

It's over twenty years since we went to Constantine for the summer
holidays. I was only ten years old and Roland was fourteen. I used to
call him "Brother".

We used to swim in a place known as The Gully, that was like a long
creek of ice-green water stretching away between two great towering
walls of rock; and at the end of it was a cave that we called
Smuggler's Cave, and a high rock like a giant. Once another boy dared
Roland to dive off that rock, and he did it. Nobody else was there
except me, and Roland told me afterwards that he hadn't been a bit
frightened until he was actually in the air, and knew it was too late to
go back.

Those were the best holidays we ever spent.

Later on, it got more and more difficult to afford things, especially
after Father died.

Mother said: "It doesn't matter, Cicely, about us, but Roland must have
his chance. If only he makes the most of it!"

She didn't understand Roland, although she loved him better than anybody
else in the world, poor Mother. He was very clever--but he didn't work,
and he didn't seem able _not_ to spend money. It all went--everything we
were able to give him, and more. Sometimes, when he came down from
Oxford, he used to bring us presents, though he'd left all sorts of
bills still unpaid, and Mother used to cry and say it was dishonest. But
I don't think it seemed like that to him. He was very generous, and he
just wasn't able to understand about money, ever. When he was at home,
Mother had everything as nice as she could, always, and from the time he
was a very little boy she'd give him everything he wanted. Afterwards,
she used to say it was her own fault, and that she'd spoilt him.

I don't know.

To me there was never anybody quite like Roland. He could make
everything amusing, and happy, and lovely just by being there.

When he was at home, I used to feel that it made up for all the things
Mother and I had to do without, even for my not going to College, though
I'd wanted to very much.

       *       *       *       *       *

The terrible thing, that made life quite different ever afterwards,
happened after he'd left Oxford and we were living in London.

Some people got hold of him--a man and his wife. He owed them money, and
I think he'd made love to the wife.

Roland shot himself.

Mother said he hadn't trusted us enough. He didn't understand that we'd
have forgiven him everything, and done anything to help him.

But I don't think it was like that.

I think Roland killed himself, like he'd dived off the Giant Rock at
Constantine--on a mad impulse, not realizing until it was too late to go
back.

It was years and years before Roland's debts were all paid off, but we
did it before Mother died. But then, of course, it was far too late for
me to go to College. But I got plenty of hospital experience during the
war, and a job after it was over.

       *       *       *       *       *

Time goes very quickly. When I get my holiday I usually go to the East
Coast somewhere with another nurse. That time that Roland and I were at
Constantine Bay, years ago, seems like another life altogether, and
"Cicely" seems quite a different person to "Sister", which is what
almost everybody calls me now.

It was the name of the little boy--Rosewarne--in Ward II. that brought
it all back to me, and Roland and me swimming in the Gully together, in
the days when I always called him "Brother", and we didn't know what
life was going to be like.


                               FAUNTLEROY

                              (To A. P. D.)

In due course, and with all the imperceptible speed of such transitions,
they passed from middle age into elderliness. From being Daddy and
Mummie, they became Father and Mother, and then Grandpapa and Grandmama.

Soon, as it seemed to them, scarcely anybody was left to address them by
their Christian names. They had passed into that region of which the
inhabitants have no real existence in the eyes of outsiders.

Their daughters wrote them nice letters every Sunday, one from Vancouver
and the other one from Lancashire, and told them things about the
children, and--in the case of the Lancashire one--the garden.

Their son was married, to a suitable wife, and lived with her and their
two little boys, in a house that was only two miles away from the family
home. It was understood, in a polite and unspoken way, that whenever
either of the old people should die, George and Doris and the boys would
come and live with the survivor at the Hall.

Meanwhile, George managed the estate, and Doris came over to tea two or
three times a week, and the little boys came up even more frequently
throughout their holidays.

Grandpapa and Grandmama had their own routine, and were satisfied with
it. They disagreed with one another rather frequently, but to that they
were accustomed, and it did not distress either of them in the least.

There was, for instance, the long-standing feud about the cat
Fauntleroy. He was a large, square, black stable-cat and had transformed
himself, by means of that indomitable friendliness that had earned him
his name, into a drawing-room pet. He sat in armchairs, and jumped on
Grandmama's knee, and was given milk at tea-time.

The unfortunate thing was that Grandpapa did not like cats.

Grandmama, on the other hand, did, and had allowed herself to become
deeply attached to Fauntleroy.

She was unreasonable about him, and would get up and open the bedroom
door at half-past six in the morning and let him in, and eventually give
him bread-and-butter from the early-morning tea-tray.

"I will _not_ have that dam' cat in the bedroom," said Grandpapa, who
never could wake up in time to say this at the moment of Fauntleroy's
admission, but always opened his eyes to the unwelcome sight of the
black monster purring on the quilt, replete with bread-and-butter.

In reality, Grandpapa did not particularly dislike Fauntleroy, who had
a good deal of character, but he disapproved of Grandmama's excessive
fondness, and had a strange conviction that he could cure her of it by
showing an exaggerated bias the other way. (This after being married to
Grandmama for forty-eight years, in the course of which she had not been
known to change her views more than half a dozen times all told.)

"I shall send the cat out of the house altogether if this goes on," said
Grandpapa with tremendous firmness, and ignoring the fact that the cat
had been in the house for nearly nine years already.

George and Doris--particularly Doris--supported Grandpapa, although
quite amiably, and without attaching any very great importance to the
point, in the matter of Fauntleroy. Cats, they said, were all very well,
but give them dogs every time. And in any case--this was Doris--not
_up_-stairs.

But the two little boys, Billy and Dan, loved Fauntleroy, and encouraged
his assumptions.

When the old lady, after rather a long illness, died, George and Doris
were very kind to Grandpapa, although unable to feel that the grief of
any very old person could be quite as real an affair as it would have
been in the case of a contemporary of their own.

When it was all over, and the funeral accomplished, and the move to the
Hall made, and the new rgime in full swing, they murmured to one
another that the old man would probably be really happier, now that he'd
got over the first shock, than he'd been for years.

"Grandmama, poor dear, did rule the roost completely. Poor Grandpapa
couldn't call his soul his own."

"Well--perhaps not. But I don't think she ever let him find it out,"
said George.

"Oh, I'm not so sure. Look at the Fauntleroy business."

"Oh, that. Yes, that was ridiculous," said George. "What are we going to
do about that cat? It's all over the place."

"Naturally. It's always been encouraged. Of course, it wouldn't do at
all to make an end of it, as it was such a pet of hers, but after a time
I should think it would naturally reach the stage when it was kindest to
put it out of the way."

Fauntleroy, however, did not look at all like having reached that stage.
He continued to stalk in and out of rooms, his tail waving gently, his
body every now and then curving into a half-moon round the legs of the
furniture and the children.

George sometimes sketched a kick in his direction, and Doris put him
firmly out of windows, saying coldly, "Not in here, puss," and Grandpapa
ignored him completely.

Apart from Fauntleroy, Doris was managing everything beautifully.
Certain changes, of course, had had to be made.

A great deal of the furniture was awful, and the dining-room and
drawing-room had needed redecorating for years, and the servants had got
into tiresome, old-fashioned ways. But Doris introduced her reformations
tactfully, and by degrees, and Grandpapa accepted them all.

He gave no trouble, and never interfered. He wanted George to be the
master of the house, and Doris the mistress, and as this was also what
George and Doris wanted themselves, the arrangement worked admirably.

The only thing Doris ever felt a little aggrieved about was a want of
perfect straightforwardness in Grandpapa. Sometimes, when he had
accepted an improvement or an alteration with smiles and polite
speeches, it would come out afterwards, through the children perhaps, or
some unguarded observation of his own, that he really hadn't liked it at
all.

This annoyed Doris very much.

"It isn't as though I didn't _want_ to make him happy and comfortable,"
she complained to George. "He might just as well be honest with me. But
he won't be."

Doris was quite right. Grandpapa was not always honest with her, for
very old people, equally with very young ones, are driven to deceit,
since it is usually the only means by which they can ever hope to get
their own way.

Moreover, Doris and George were slightly unreal to Grandpapa, exactly as
he was slightly unreal to them, although of this they had no conception.

"Doesn't it just _show_," said Doris, when the novelty of being an angel
to Grandpapa had completely gone, "that he really does humbug, rather,
dear old man. You know how he used to grumble at the cat, and say he
wouldn't have it upstairs, and all that? Well, yesterday when he had his
breakfast upstairs, I went in to him, and there was the wretched
Fauntleroy, curled up on the bed, eating bread-and-butter all over the
quilt!"

"I hope you kicked the brute out of the window," said George, not
meaning it.

"Of course I didn't interfere. Grandpapa must do as he likes. But after
all the fuss there was, it does make one feel that perhaps Grandmama may
have had something to put up with too. I mean, it must have been just
contrariness, his saying that he hated cats so. However, I'm sure it's
all to the good that he should spend the morning upstairs. The day is so
long for him, at his age."

Grandpapa perhaps thought so too. At all events he spent his mornings in
bed, and Fauntleroy the cat always came in with the breakfast, and
sprang ponderously on to the bed, and coiled his bulk round on the
quilt.

Grandpapa never spoke to him, or caressed him.

But his eye rested on Fauntleroy's glistening black form thoughtfully,
and from time to time he gave him bread-and-butter.

He, at least--so closely connected with the past--was quite real.


                        QUESTION WITHOUT ANSWER

All-out endeavour on my part, and absolute imperturbability on his. That
had been the history of the past three weeks. It had, very nearly,
assumed the character of a game of skill. Well--it would have done so,
if I hadn't had the misfortune to be very nearly seriously attracted.
It was years since that had happened to me--naturally, living as I do,
one can't afford emotional luxuries, and it's good enough if the man
isn't fat, or a bore.

I don't suppose I shall ever know what it was, about Morgan. Perhaps the
fact that he was clever, and wrote books, or just that he didn't talk
much, and had a way of listening, with blue, intent eyes and a very
serious expression. Anyway--it just got me.

It seemed easy, at first. Just the usual beginning: I sat at my table,
in the corner, and looked across at him once or twice having dinner all
by himself. I wasn't surprised when he came across to me afterwards, and
began to talk. It was just the usual conversation, too, except that he
didn't rush things at all.

I liked him for that.

I pulled all the usual stuff--about having had to divorce my husband,
and being all by myself, and life was very hard for a woman, like that.
It took me exactly twenty-four hours to realize that he was clever--the
sort of cleverness that knows all about people. Not that he ever said
anything, but I just sensed it.

So then I told him the truth. Well--as much of the truth as a woman ever
does tell to a man who's beginning to attract her.

And he listened, just the same way as he'd listened before--very quiet,
and attentive, and looking at me all the time with those eyes that
looked as if they'd seen such a lot, and yet hadn't lost interest.

(I believe it _was_ his eyes--and yet it's difficult to think that I
could have been such a fool.)

He took me to the south of France.

He said he just wanted to have three weeks there, before going back to
London. He wanted to be quiet, and not have to go out and find amusing
places all the time.

Well--I wanted that, too. Wanted it a whole lot more than he realized.

Before we got to Cannes, I knew what was happening to me, and I'd got to
the stage when I didn't much mind, if only I could make him care a
little bit too.

Looking back, I know I must have got it badly. Incredibly so, for a
woman of my experience. I even stopped drinking, because I didn't want
to be artificially stimulated any more. That just shows you--I might
have been a girl of twenty, thinking about love lasting for ever, and
being the greatest thing in the world, and all that.

We used to sit on the rocks, at a place called Agay that we motored to
nearly every day, and talk. I don't know that I'd ever done that before,
with anyone. I told him more and more things--about myself,
mostly--things that I hadn't even remembered, in years. Sometimes he'd
talk to me, and I liked it--God, how I liked it! It wasn't the kind of
talk that usually gets handed out to my kind of woman--it was the real
stuff, about what he'd thought, and done, and written. That's how I saw
it then--I've sometimes wondered, since.

Once or twice we dined at the big hotels at Cannes. I've known those
places, and all the others like them, since I was sixteen--but they
seemed kind of new--and when I caught myself thinking that, I knew
exactly what kind of a fool I was. The trouble was that I couldn't
deceive myself into thinking he cared for me, though there were times
when I tried hard enough. It used to make me wild, too, to think of
being caught in that age-old trap. All the same, I did just what women
always do, in spite of being harder, and more intelligent, than most.

I went all out to try and make him care too. And got just exactly
nowhere.

It was funny, being with a man and making no demands on him at all. I
don't believe it had ever been like that before, with me.

I gave him everything he wanted, when he wanted it, and I didn't let him
throw his money about, and I found out, the way one does, how he liked a
woman to behave when he took her out, and I played up to that.

It sounds insane when I look back on it, but not so insane as letting
him see that I'd fallen in love with him. I did that too. I got the
idea, somehow, that it would make him fall in love with me.

It didn't, of course.

The end, when you come to think of it, was funny.

We went out to dinner at a smart Cannes hotel, and it was the last night
but one, and I'd have lain down and let him walk over me, by that time.
Then we saw a whole party of people he knew--Americans, mostly. They
came over to our table, and he introduced me, and I could _see_ the
three men of the party just looking at me, and wondering. They couldn't
be sure--because I was feeling like someone different to what I usually
was, and I suppose I looked it too. I can't explain any better than
that.

However, the women knew all right--or thought they did--except one, who
was only about twenty-five. I don't know whether she was married or
not--I expect she was--and she had no looks at all, but any amount of
style.

She didn't care what she said, and said it all the time in a voice that
was just about as common as mud--and she had more vitality than anyone
I'd ever seen.

She made a dead set at Morgan from the very beginning. I suppose I
wasn't the only woman, by a very long way, to find those eyes of his
attractive.

He asked me to dance, first, and I said No. God knows why. Perhaps it
was because I'd got into the habit of knowing exactly what he wanted,
and I knew well enough that he wanted to dance with the American girl.

I'll hand it to her that she danced divinely. I'd known all along that
she would. She was the kind of woman that everybody in the room looks
at, all the time, and women may know that she isn't pretty--but men
never find it out at all. There isn't much more to tell about her. She
talked and talked to Morgan, and most of what she said was rubbish, and
all of it in that awful voice of hers--and he listened, and she made him
laugh quite a lot, and they both went on drinking champagne.

It was three o'clock before that party broke up. She'd given him an
address in London by that time, and told him she was going there in a
week's time, and he'd asked her to have dinner with him and go to a
theatre.

You couldn't be surprised. She knew all the rules of the game, and
played it right. Where I'd gone wrong was in thinking that Morgan wanted
anything different.

Or perhaps I didn't really think it. One believes what one wants to
believe.

Anyway, I didn't believe it any more after that night. I just knew I'd
been wasting my time. He gave that girl the look that I'd been waiting
for all the time, just as he said Good-bye to her. Just that
indescribable expression that nobody ever fakes, and that nobody ever
makes a mistake about either.

I let him talk about her, afterwards. He didn't say much, only just the
amount that men always do say when they're attracted and think that
nobody has found it out yet.

Two days afterwards I said Good-bye to him, and we said we'd write, but
of course we never did. I've often wondered why I thought he was
different, and whether he really was.


                               THE END



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    | Punctuation errors have been corrected.                      |
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    | The following suspected printer's error has been addressed.  |
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    | Page 227. missing word 'to' added                            |
    | (he went out to the)                                         |
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    +--------------------------------------------------------------+




[General Impressions, by E. M. Delafield]
