Chapter III: Part 3

It was first rumoured and then announced in the papers. By and by the full programme of events was published, and then invitations to this and that were issued. There was nothing unseemly about the Millport manœuvres before the great battle of Exclusive Rights. No one admitted that there had been, was, or would be any demand for invitations to anything; not even for the big garden-party where the King and Queen were to be present. There was a semi-private luncheon too, but that was a sacramental feast. No one spoke of it beforehand, any more than a duke would rush into his club, shouting, “I say! I’m going to get the Garter--are you?” No. One read about it in the paper next morning; that was all. But there was a wider choice of behaviour with regard to the other invitations. People behaved like the animals in the Ark, each one after his kind. The sort who are at their best early in the morning, and are therefore unpopular with liverish hosts, were in great spirits about the whole thing. They applied early for tickets for everything. The appointed day lay before them as a rosy picnic. But this was not the attitude of quite the best people. They did all their spade-work by moonlight, when the busy revellers were in bed, dreaming happy dreams, with medallions of their Majesties put out with the clean shirts for the morning. But in those dark hours the county families worked for promotion like heroes, appearing next day spruce and unconcerned as usual, with the suggestion, “Shall you be going to the garden-party? We might drive out together--Oh, haven’t you? How extraordinary! These things are frightfully badly managed. I expect they haven’t got half the invitations out yet; ours only came last week.” In the case of those whose midnight labours had been unblessed with cardboard fruit the formula was a little different. There was no pretending that the fruit was unpalatable and had been rejected. Millport is not so crude as all that. The formula was to the effect that invitations were being issued on a purely official basis, and mismanaged at that, and that there would be an awfully queer crowd there. How would they behave?

Reginald was on the committee of the hospital which the King and Queen were to visit, so, of course, Polly would be provided with a good place. One thing was quite clear, that the occasion asked for, if it did not actually demand, a new dress.

“My dearest life,” said Reginald, “to begin with, the Queen is short-sighted, and to go on with, you will be hidden by abler and stouter persons than yourself in the front row.”

Polly argued that there would be the tea afterwards, and, besides, anyhow----Reginald gave her a cheque at once, because when women begin saying, “besides, anyhow,” it is far wiser to give in. Such words never preface the truth, and the business of hearing what follows is generally very long and tedious. Polly had an almost new afternoon dress which, had it been a success, she would have worn; but it was not altogether right, and Mrs. Henry, whose husband was also on the committee, had been in the shop when she bought it, and would remember its age. Also she had since been given a hat which was not quite right with the dress. It would need all a woman’s life as a context to show up trifles like these so that they would figure as reasons before a husband’s mind. Therefore, we invent reasons which look solid, rather than bring forward the nebulous truth which would probably be met with contempt.

“I want a dress for the King’s visit, Miss Price,” said Polly, standing next day in a small room at the top of a dingy little house. Miss Price, very minute, very wizened, very commanding, stood beside a round table on which were a vase of artificial flowers, several photographs of worn, though cheerful, faces, and some fashion papers of remote date.

“I am afraid I shan’t be able to manage it, Mrs.--er--” she said, “I am so rushed already, I can hardly get through the orders I have.” Polly took no notice of this. “Are you making for a lot of people?” she asked with deep interest.

“There’s Mrs. Beehive,” began Miss Price. “She’s ordered a very nice dress.”

“Oh, has she?” said Polly, “what fun! I shall look out for it. Is it very new?”

“Well, no,” Miss Price said hesitatingly, “the new styles would hardly suit Mrs. Beehive. She is all shapes and sizes, you would think, according to the weather.”

Polly sopped this up like nectar, and retailed it to Reginald when she got home. “Great Scot!” he said, “I hope Beehive doesn’t go and look over my waistcoats at the tailor’s, and ask the fitter how much he has let out since last year. What curious creatures you are.”

“It’s all right,” said Polly, “I love to know beforehand what people are going to wear, and then I know what to avoid.”

“But I think you told me that Miss Price said she couldn’t make it?” said Reginald.

“Oh, that is just a little nervous habit of hers,” Polly assured him, “like nice-mannered people wanting to be pressed to a second helping. Would you believe it if your tailor said he hadn’t time to make you a new coat?”

“I never heard of any tailor saying such a thing,” Reginald replied.

“No, of course not,” retorted Polly contemptuously, “because you order your clothes in March, and they come home the year after next. I might undertake to make you a pair of boots if I could wait to deliver them until after you were dead. And I don’t suppose you ever complain, do you?”

“Oh yes,” said Reginald. “Haven’t you seen boys tearing along the Exchange with large cardboard boxes under their arms? If you got on to the Flags you would find the place littered with tissue paper, and Beehive, and Henry and I trying on each other’s trousers. That means that we complained of the delay and sent a boy to fetch the things at once.”

One rather sad feature of the traffic that went on in Miss Price’s dingy apartments was the immense pains which were taken by all the ladies to find out what was the very last word in fashion, and so attire themselves for the delight of their Sovereigns. Little did they suspect that a creation from the Rue de la Paix will avail a woman at the gates of Buckingham Palace no more than a pair of blue corsets will soften the heart of Peter. In both cases the facts would very likely be used against her. The desire to please nearly always contains elements of pathos.

The programme of the great day’s proceedings was dull enough reading. It not only left one with a strong belief in the divine right of kings, but also suggested that Providence went a step further and provided rulers who, though human in many respects, were fashioned of immortally tough material. We read about the woman’s heart beneath the queenly robe, of the home life of monarchs, and the birthday festivals of princes. The papers assure us that the King frequently expresses regret at the loss of his collar-stud, and that the Queen enjoys a chat with her intimate friends. Anecdotes are related of how an emperor once remarked to a gamekeeper whom he met traversing the park, “I expect you find plenty to do towards the middle of August,” and how the wife of a reigning Sovereign entered the cottage of an old woman and observed with a smile, “I see you have been peeling onions; you must remember not to cut your husband’s bread with the same knife.” All these incidents show, beyond any doubt, that the same heart beats alike for rich and poor. But there is one heaven-sent quality which distinguishes rulers from the common herd, and that is an insensibility to boredom and the pangs of platitude which transcends all mortal endowments. Human nature has the power to endure; the higher and royal nature, I hope and believe, does not mind.

How much the Imperial pair observed of all the labour which had been expended for their pleasure it is impossible to say. Whether it ever struck her Majesty that Polly’s sleeves were cut from a more exclusive design than Mrs. Henry’s, or whether she was startled by Mrs. Beehive’s superior knowledge of the habits of the Court, no one will ever know. But probably the fact that all sorts of hidden details had been attended to with enthusiasm by every one, that a spider on the roof of the hospital had been dislodged from his perch, that the chairman had given extra attention to the parting of what hair he possessed, that the matron had on her last new underbodice, and that the address which was to be delivered by the Recorder had been carefully prepared: all these trifles, if unrecognized separately, must yet have combined to express a general sense of happiness and welcome.

The morning of the great day dawned gloomy and cold, the first wet day there had been for three weeks. A chilly north-west wind brought, alternately, penetrating fine rain and short intervals of greeny-grey sky, through which the sun peeped without interest. On the first moment of these intervals macintoshes and umbrellas were eagerly put aside, the enthusiasts lining the streets emerging gay as a rainbow, until the fretful clouds gathered once more, and everybody with one voice exclaimed, “Dear me! What a pity!”

Inside the hospital there had been very little sleep for anybody. It would be interesting to know whether persons marooned on a desert island, with the whole day before them, begin to get in a hurry when the time comes to dish up what frugal meals are available--say, two bananas and a sweet biscuit. It is certain that the importance and extent of preparations to be made for an occasion have no bearing on the amount of time needed to complete them. There will be a scurry at the end, whether the occasion is the beanfeasting of a thousand people, or the getting off of one man and his papers for an early train. Whether we allow half an hour for the one (and make the beanfeast impromptu), or whether we prepare for the other six months beforehand (reminding him every hour that the time is getting on, and finally ourselves putting the tobacco-pouch in his pocket), the result will be the same; the thing will get done with equal hurry and impatience. Everything had been quite ready the day before this visit of the King and Queen; yet no one in the hospital went to bed, except the patients, who were in bed already, and they got very little sleep. The visit, which it was reckoned would take half an hour, was timed for eleven, and by nine o’clock the invalids were all washed and had ribbons in their hair; the wards were spotlessly tidy, and such windows as were to be occupied by guests were already nearly filled. There was to be a short reception in the hall when their Majesties arrived, and a few people were to be presented.

* * * * *

When the moment was over, and the royal couple had passed on their way through the wards; when they had been ushered past the fluttering windows; when they had re-entered their carriage, and disappeared, methodically bowing, along the glittering, bobbing, trotting, waving, cheering vista, which is to most of us the whole life of our King and Queen, then, happy and relieved, we returned to the official tea downstairs, and resumed our several natures.

_CHAPTER X_: FIDELITY

“I wish that people wouldn’t write these ridiculous letters,” said Polly, laying aside a bundle of about eight closely written sheets. “It’s Octavia Sinclair. She says she is quite sure that I have forgotten her. I have not forgotten her in the least, only she doesn’t fill the whole of my landscape; it is so absurd that people should want to.”

“It is almost barbaric to want a landscape to remain the same always,” I agreed. “One runs up villa residences everywhere now, of course, and the place looks different; but the old earth is the same underneath, if people would only have the sense to understand.”

“Do you think I run up lots of villa residences?” Polly asked wistfully.

“I was trying to help you, dear, not to criticize,” I replied.

“You see,” Polly explained, “if you are making anything, no matter what, the pieces you are making it with don’t all stay in the same place. When the world was being made it would have been dreadful if all the mountains and countries had been made in succession and just stuck down one in front of the other, and if each tree and each animal had stayed where it was----”

“My dearest Polly,” I begged, “stop just one minute. You don’t see trees as men, walking, do you?”

“If you are going to be like the serious raconteur’s comic brother in the pantomime, I’ll stop,” she answered. “You must either follow me or stay at home. I see, in my mind’s eye, the Almighty evolving a perpetually changing order out of the chaos that occurs every day. You don’t make a world out of a hill, and then a tree, and then an ocean, stuck down like salt-cellars on the table. The sea is being made into rain to wash the ground into different shapes: the trees settle down into coal, or we cut them up to build things with, and we clear the ground for villa residences to hold the new people whom Providence sends. Sometimes there is an earthquake which throws up the dead whom we have forgotten and swallows up the living. It is all like a kaleidoscope making different patterns of the same bits.”

The door opened and Reginald looked in, decided that the moment was not for him, shrugged his shoulders, and went out.

“You can’t play a game with every one staying in the same place,” resumed Polly. “You can’t embroider if you don’t use first one thread and then another; you can’t paint a picture without adding new colours to the old ones; you can’t make music with one note; you can’t----”

“I’ve got that point, dear,” I said. “You can go on. You can’t make a hotel a lively place with only one guest. Yes?”

“I am not talking of enjoyment,” said Polly, “but of any work of construction. I am constructing my life, and even though I were a hermit (so you may dispose of your vulgarities about hotels and villas) I could still add new experiences to the old without being accused of infidelity.”

“But suppose you repented of your past experiences?” I suggested.

“I shouldn’t wish them undone,” said Polly calmly. “I should merely see them in a new light, and they would fall back into their place in the background of my life’s pattern.”

“Poor experiences! Alas! Octavia, my poor friend!” I murmured.

“I feel the same thing about men,” said Polly; “they are in the pattern too. Sex is merely a matter of colour in the threads.”

“Which is what colour?” I asked.

“They are both all colours,” she said; “that is why they make such a good picture together.”

“Well, what do you mean by saying that it is the same with men?” I asked. “What is the same?”

“I mean that it takes a great many men to make one husband, just as it takes a great many Octavia Sinclairs to make one person’s life,” she explained.

“How many husbands have you besides Reginald?” I asked with some hesitation.

“It is very difficult to be patient with you, Martha,” replied Polly. “I have only one husband, as you know, but he is compounded of all the men I ever met. When I meet a man who is bad-tempered, I weave the thread of his ill-temper beside that of Reginald’s amazing patience, and you can’t imagine how Reginald’s colours glow. When I meet another who admires what Reginald calls my waffle-headedness (which he dislikes, by the way), I enjoy a perfect orgy of waffle-headedness, and use it all up before Reginald comes back, and then he restores the balance on the other side, and there, again, we have proportion, which is the art of life. I know several men whose trousers are either perfectly creased or not folded at all, and between them I realize that Reginald’s are the nearest to the ideal trouser, showing thought for the temple of his spirit without the exaggerated anxieties of you, for instance, Martha. Wasn’t there some poet who spoke of ‘the need of a world of men for me’? The lady whom he mentioned there had lost her husband or her lover, or whoever he was, and she felt, I suppose, that it would take several men to replace him. Now I have not lost mine, and his beauty is immensely enhanced by the qualities of all the rest of his sex. As for embracing and that kind of thing, that is quite beside the mark. I dare say that if we were all in the garden of Eden I might occasionally salute the marbled brow of one or two of the most perfect, just to emphasize some point in what I was saying, or as the expression of some passing emotion; but the thing has got to mean so much more than Nature intended, that one doesn’t do it, and it is no special deprivation to me to do without.”

“And suppose the threads of your pattern get restive,” I asked, “and won’t stay in their proper positions. Are you never confronted with a blazing flower of the tropics when you were at work on a daisy?”

“No,” she replied quite seriously; “but if I were, of course I should work it in somehow.”

“Does Reginald embroider on the same plan?” I asked after a pause.

“I expect not,” she answered; “because I don’t think that men are so wrapped up in themselves as we are--I don’t mean fond of themselves, I mean wrapped up. And another thing. I never think that there is much substance in my mind except what other people put in--and that, I admit, I develop very nicely--but Reginald has stuff of his own which he spins out of his inner consciousness, and which takes shape when it encounters facts. I don’t know whether that is the difference between other men and women, but I have an idea that if Moses had been a woman he would have come back from the wilderness rather bereft of ideas, and not having done any useful thinking at all. Perhaps his (or her) mind would have ‘turned on itself,’ as they say, and he (or she) would have been at loggerheads with all the fowls of the air. ‘There was a most impertinent vulture,’ the female Moses would have told the children of Israel, ‘who made a point of settling down first on whichever rock I had arranged to sit on. Of course if I had been a man he wouldn’t have dared. It has taken me forty years of intense thought to dodge him, but I believe I could manage it now if I went back.’”

“But Moses had no society, either, to help his great thoughts to take shape,” I said pettishly; “and when he did get back he was a kill-joy, and finally died of temper.”

“Well, my dear,” said Polly, “you find taking two children to the seaside quite as much as you can manage. I don’t know, I’m sure, what you would say to forty thousand, or whatever the number was whom Moses took. If you got through as well as he did you’d be lucky. And remember, he had to keep them amused for more than a month.”

Polly is like that; it is impossible to take any of her arguments to a logical conclusion. I tried to make her see that Reginald was very forbearing to find all his ideals of womanhood in her without seeking outside inspiration, and she said that “men were like that”; they had no ideals, and were prepared to take just anything and muddle along with it provided it fulfilled some of its purposes. “Have you ever watched them shopping?” she asked; “they never turn out a whole shop as we do. They say, vaguely looking round, ‘Is this all you have?’ and the girl, of course, grins and says, ‘Yes, it is the very best, and the other kinds are never asked for now’; and he says, ‘Oh, very well then, just send it up, will you, please,’ and he pays far too much for it. Now we, even when we have bought a thing, often see something else that would have done far better, and then we fret over it, or take steps to alter it. That is idealism.”

“Oh, Polly!” I remonstrated. “You make my head ache so. Do you mean that men are never discontented with their wives? And, besides, you said yourself that all the other men you saw only made you admire Reginald the more.”

“Martha, Martha,” said Polly, reprovingly. “You have that worst type of mind--if it can be called a mind--that labours a point until it breaks. Everything that I have said to you is perfectly true, but if you pick the whole of it to pieces you will find that none of the bits match, and that none of them are alike on both sides. Character study is not a science--it is an art; and you have to keep one eye closed very often while you work.”

“Anyhow,” I said, “to return to the original subject, Octavia Sinclair. What are you going to say to her?”

“Tell her not to be an ass,” said Polly.

“Is that your best way of making her understand that you ‘love her still the same?’” I inquired.

“Well, I don’t love her the same when she is an ass,” said Polly. “She was a duck when I loved her first. I tell her not to be an ass, because I can’t love her under that disguise. When she stops being an ass she will become a duck again--at least, I hope so--and if she is the same duck I shall find a nice pond for her in my heart; not necessarily the same pond, because that may be filled up by now--I forget--but one quite as good as the old, if not better. And if she has any sense, she will get out of it sometimes and walk about on the grass by herself.”

“I shall go home and write a chapter on ‘Fidelity,’” I warned her.

“It is not fidelity to your friends to put them into books,” she said severely.

“It is not worse than putting them into embroidery-frames,” I answered snappishly, “and then luring them into that monster hotel of yours, where you even forget their numbers, and don’t answer their bells.”

“Never mind, don’t let’s quarrel,” said Polly. “You repeat in your book what I say to you in confidence----”

“Not at all,” I assured her; “I am merely assimilating other people’s ideas in the elegant way you described just now as being the habit of women, and when they emerge again you won’t know your own. They will have taken life in an entirely original shape. I can’t spin new stuff out of nothing, as you say your husband does----”

The door opened, and the parlour-maid announced, “Mrs. Beehive and Mrs. Henry.”

_CHAPTER XI_: THE RETURN OF THE BRIDE

Polly had invited several of us to meet a young bride. Mrs. Henry said that when her brother William heard of the party he said at once, “Of course you won’t go until you know _who she was_.” His sister assured him that it was a matter of indifference to us who the girl was; we all knew her husband, and that would speak for her.

“I don’t believe that was the end of Mr. William.” This was the little bait I offered her, and it landed a beauty.

“The end of William!” she exclaimed; “not a bit of it. He said that if the girl was a nonentity to begin with, marrying Mr. Spicer wouldn’t galvanize her into anything worthy of the name of life; and that if she was anybody before she married, the fact that we knew Mr. Spicer wouldn’t alter the shape of her immortal soul. And what do you think he said after that?” she added rather breathlessly.

“What?” we asked all together, with round eyes.

“That we were evidently going to meet to-day in the spirit of vultures on the track of food, and that if the girl happens to be rather dead stuff we shall probably like her better than if she is a frisky lamb!”

Mrs. Beehive confessed that she “didn’t quite follow his idea.” Polly, who was looking out of the window, remarked, “Mr. William would make the world an awful place if he had his way. Imagine the menus he would write! Your talking about carrion--well, you said something very like it--reminded me.--

“Soup. Odds and ends off people’s plates.

“Fish. Brill. Not absolutely fresh. Has fallen once on to the pavement and innumerable times on to the floor of the shop before it got here.

“Cutlets. (Then there would be a short history of the lives of the lamb and the butcher who killed it--very unfavourable to the butcher.)

“Pudding. Batter made of eggs a week old, margarine, milk (chock-full of germs), flour--Oh, here she comes.”

We were talking like monkeys when the bride was announced. She was small and pale and pretty. We gave her tea, and then invited her to unbosom herself, which she did.

“Do you find it awfully dull when your husband goes down town in the morning?” she asked.

We looked at one another, and Mrs. Beehive, who is never at a loss, replied pompously, “No, I can’t say I have ever felt dull for a moment; not even when I was first married. I was always a great housekeeper, and attended to everything myself; and after I had paid the books and been to give my orders at the shops, the morning seemed to have flown.”

“Oh dear!” said the poor bride. Polly made a comforting little muddle with the cups and winked at me.

“And in the afternoons, of course, there were social duties,” continued good Mrs. Beehive. “My husband and I were, I think I may say, exceedingly popular, even in the early days.”

“Oh dear!” sighed the bride again, “but this is the first social duty I have had at all yet.”

“Well, don’t bear it unaided,” I said; “do let us help you if we can.”

“You don’t care for fancy work, do you?” asked Polly.

“No,” the poor girl said dolefully. “You see, I never had time for it at home. I used to ride and go out with my brothers a good deal, and there were always people straying in to talk.”

“But what about your cook?” I suggested. “I find that she fills my day so completely that I have no time to think, or to paint in water-colours.”

“My cook!” she said with astonishment. “Why, there are only ten minutes in the day when I am allowed to see her.”

“Now, look here,” I said; “you must learn this sooner or later, and we are all among friends--that is a ruse of hers, like an ogre pretending that he is out district-visiting all day, and that the little girls he brings home are orphans whom he is taking care of. She just does that to get your confidence. Then, by and by, she’ll begin inviting you down for a minute or two at a time----”

“Why, she did ask me to come down and look at the tomatoes to-day, just before I came out,” reflected the bride.

“That’s it!” I exclaimed, slapping my plate triumphantly. “To-day it was the tomatoes, to-morrow it will be the sausage-skewers: there will be one missing, and she will wish you to see for yourself, so that there can be no misunderstanding later on. The next day it will be two things: to smell the rabbits in the morning, and see whether you--a young, inexperienced child--think it wise to cook them----”

“But, my dear,” interrupted Mrs. Beehive, “surely there is no harm in that, and Mrs. Spicer would prefer to make sure.”

“Do you know how a rabbit ought to smell?” I asked the bride, in fairness, “because I don’t know to this day. It all seems to me equally uninviting.”

“I didn’t know they ought to smell at all,” the girl murmured.

“You’ve a lot to learn,” I said kindly. “Anyhow--rabbits in the morning, and in the afternoon, say, perhaps, that it is early closing day and she had forgotten that you would want butter.”

“Then what does one do?”

“Ah, that is what cook says that she prefers you should decide,” I concluded happily. “You won’t find the time heavy on your hands for very long, especially if anything turns up that you want to do.”

“Thank you very much indeed,” she said gratefully; “it is so good of you to tell me these things.”

“Is there anything else that troubles you?” asked Polly, holding out a piece of cake.

“No, I don’t think so--” the bride hesitated, and then, after a moment’s pause, threw this at us: “I suppose there isn’t really very much that one _can_ have for breakfast, is there?”

“Just the bacon,” I remarked; “that is always as nice as anything.”

“Oh dear me,” said Mrs. Beehive, “surely we have got beyond those days when it was ‘bacon and eggs, eggs and bacon,’ every morning. The Americans have done so much for us there: all sorts of tempting little hot dishes can be made--and fruit; you should give your husband fruit, it is so good for him.”

“Paul won’t eat fruit,” said the bride.

“Well, then, try him with some light, vegetarian dishes,” said Mrs. Beehive, now quite in her element. “_Onions farcies_, tomatoes and cheese, ramekins of prawns, soufflés of liver, réchauffés of marrow on a hard-boiled egg, with soubise sauce----”

“Well, you see,” the perplexed little dear objected, “cook doesn’t come down much before half-past seven, and we breakfast at eight sharp, because Paul----”

“Make her,” Mrs. Beehive interposed, rolling her kid gloves into a hard ball.

“How big is your cook in her stockinged feet?” asked Polly.

“Oh, she is quite a little thing,” answered the innocent bride, “quite young, and very pleasant. But I couldn’t exactly go and fork her out of bed, could I? I shouldn’t like to.”

“Give her orders,” said Mrs. Beehive firmly, “and if she doesn’t obey them dismiss her.”

“No, no,” Polly and I almost shouted in the same breath, as we each laid a hand on an outlying knee of the bride. “Don’t do that! Never change anything but yourself,” said Polly. “Remember, dear, it is like the sun revolving round the earth--things are not what they seem. Never sack your cook, never leave your tradespeople, never be disillusioned in your friends, never divorce your husband. All the others you could get instead would be just the same, fixed and immovable like the sun. You can only shift yourself and look at them from another side----” Polly was quite breathless.

“Only the sun does move,” I said gloomily, “carrying us with it. ‘Soon will cook and I be lying each within our narrow bed,’ thank heaven!”

“You are letting your spirits run away with you, Martha,” said Mrs. Beehive, “and you are not helping Mrs.--er--at all.”

“But, then, aren’t all wives alike, too?” asked the bride, who had evidently been swallowing Polly’s metaphors whole, and feeling very uncomfortable.

“Certainly they are,” replied Polly; “at least they are all the same as each other, but they are never the same as themselves for long. But all the people, men, cooks, etc., whom we have to handle can be depended on to a certainty. That is why I suggest that any shifting which has to be done shall be done by ourselves if we want to be comfortable.”

“You are not a suffragette, are you?” the bride asked in alarm. “Paul can’t bear them.”

“Oh dear no,” said Polly airily. “If my dear Sisters in the Cook became a governing body they would be lost to me, because they would become part of the solid mass of things which you and I have to handle and walk round. It’s no good mixing or changing governing bodies. They’ll go on governing away just the same, and as fast as they do away with one thing another will crop up. Some one has to stay outside and see to things. Have some more tea?”

“And what about all the evil in the world?” demanded the round-eyed bride, “Paul says----”

“My husband takes a very peculiar view,” interrupted Mrs. Henry, who had not had her fair share by any means; we all felt that and made way. “He says that the evil arises--it is really very naughty of him--from our first parents having been driven out of Eden before they had had time to get enough apples. That if we were to know good and evil anyhow, we ought to know enough about it. I think he means that we are all being as clever as we are able, but that there is not enough intelligence in the world to cope with the demand: so he just does the best he can. But he talks a great deal of nonsense, of course, and doesn’t mean half he says.”

“I wish that Paul had a profession that would make him work at home,” the bride said presently. “If he were a clergyman, now, or an artist, just think how nice it would be!”

“My dear, you don’t know what you are saying,” Mrs. Henry assured her. “My husband works at home, and there are times when I would pay anyone any sum to take him away, and let him join the Morris Dancers, or anything that would take him into the open air.”

“Really!” said the bride. “But can’t you take him out yourself if he needs exercise?”

Mrs. Henry snorted. “It is not that I care whether he needs exercise or not,” she said, “but I should be thankful to have the house to myself sometimes. If I so much as start the sewing-machine in the room over his head, he comes out like an animal from its den, and says he can’t think of a word with that noise going on. Or if Bella is turning out the room either above or below him, he complains that she is throwing rocks about, and he can’t keep his papers on the table. If we clean the passage outside his room, and the carpet-sweeper happens to touch his door once, he flies out in a rage; and I can’t talk to anyone in the drawing-room without his hearing. Then either he wants his meals taken to the study, or else he comes down and won’t let the children speak; and he slops the gravy all about, and wants the meal hurried through so that he can begin to smoke--and I do draw the line at smoking at meals, don’t you, Mrs.--er--?”

“Oh no,” said the amiable little bride, “my husband might fill all the dishes with smoke if he liked, and I would turn out the rooms myself if only he would stay at home; but it is so dull being alone.”

“Well, my dear,” said Polly, “if there were a way to preserve your present superfluous loneliness in water-glass or screw-topped bottles, I’d buy it off you with pleasure, or, better still, make you keep it to use later. You’ll want it.”

“We are dining out to-night for the first time,” said the bride, cheering up at the prospect; “and then, perhaps, I shall get to know a few people.” We felt that it would be only right to take the top off this dream as well, and to show her the realities which lay beneath. “Oh, I expect you’ll have plenty of callers by and by,” said Mrs. Beehive. (“The better to see you, my dear,” I added in my mind, remembering Red Riding Hood.)

“Don’t pour out all your soul on the carpet after dinner, there’s a dear,” said kindly Polly.

“What do you mean?” the victim asked, beginning to get frightened.

“Well,” I suggested, “if anyone asks you whether you have early tea in the morning, and whether your husband finds that he can manage with four clean shirts a week, put them off with some excuse----”

Polly broke in earnestly, “And don’t let out any little theories you may have formed about living or anything, and don’t answer when they ask if this was your first offer of marriage, and----”

“And,” I interrupted across her, “don’t say if you like games, or you will be placarded as a champion hockey-player. Don’t admit that you can read, write, cipher, walk, ride, drive, see, hear, taste, smell, get in a temper, or play on any instrument, or that you ever wash, eat, sleep, cry, laugh, or thread a needle. Admit nothing, deny nothing, express no hopes or fears, acknowledge no creed. There is only one subject on God’s earth which you can broach without danger to your reputation, and that is the weather. If you find yourself being led into an expression of opinion about anything, throw the evil thing from you and take up the weather where you left it--and may heaven defend you.”

“One more thing,” said Polly; “and mind what I say, or you’ll regret it. If anyone offers you a footstool or a cushion behind your back, kick it away and sit up, whatever you feel like.”

“But I do very often feel tired,” said the bride.

“Never mind,” replied Polly, with inexorable breeziness, “sit up; lock the gates; put your tongue out. If the rabble once gets into your heart, they’ll sack the place and use everything in it to your disadvantage.”

Mrs. Henry was tying her veil and thinking about something else, but Mrs. Beehive looked, somehow, as if she had eaten too much. The little bride hurriedly looked at the clock and exclaimed: “Oh how late! Paul will be back; I must fly! Thank you a thousand times for all your kindness and advice. I can’t believe all you said just now, but I expect you didn’t mean it, did you?”

She wrung our hands and disappeared. Mrs. Beehive and Mrs. Henry summoned a taxi and drove off together.

“Why were you so frank, Polly?” I asked when we were alone. “I am always pleased to back you up, but do you think it is any good?”

“Of course not,” said Polly; “I should have bitten my tongue out if it were. But, anyway, we shan’t have it on our consciences that we didn’t warn her.”

_CHAPTER XII_: JUST THE USUAL

If there is anything more remarkable than the way in which everything in the world is constantly changing, it is how everything goes on just as usual; just as it has gone on for centuries and centuries. That perpetual business of the toilet dates from the Fall. Sundays have always come round in due course. I expect that the family dinner-table, that uncouth institution, has been going on a long time. Domestic friction occurs in the first pages of Genesis. Who was the first monthly nurse? She probably dates pretty far back. And the only part of the show which we are definitely assured will be done away with is the only bit of it which has any real permanent interest--marrying and giving in marriage. On that showing we may have to face the endless routine of getting up, washing, eating, talking, and going to bed again with all the flavour that there is in any of it--gone! It will be worse than being in a nunnery, because there will be nothing to renounce. So long as one knows that the world, the flesh, and the devil (which are for each sex concentrated in the other) are only separated from us by our own will it is all right; but not to have them prowling about outside within reach, should we change our minds, is unthinkable. It will be just like an everlasting party of pew-openers, for they are the only people I can think of who have no sex. Another curious thing is that Creation--Nature--whatever you like to call her--manages to vary her show continually, while the lords of creation, who are supposed to be better equipped with intelligence, cannot for the life of them think of any new way of doing the same old thing. In Nature the same ideas are repeated, without appearing to be the same. Quite old-fashioned customs like sunrise and sunset, the seasons, the weather, recur as usual, but they are not often monotonous: except in exaggerated places like the Poles or the Equator, where it goes on being dark or light for too long at a time, or only rains once a year, or where the snow doesn’t know when to stop. But these exceptions are just faults. They don’t show the utter lack of resource displayed by the mass of human beings. Think what it means to pass our little span of time in a world where one may ask on any Sunday, “What is there for dinner?” and be told, “Just the usual!” And the usual is the absolutely usual; it is not like the setting of the sun, which goes on as usual, but with differences enough to make the performance always surprising. There is no difference whatever between the beef of one Sunday and that of the next; every bubble on the Yorkshire pudding is in its appointed place--even the burned side is the same--and the tart or pudding (it is immaterial which) is so identical with last Sunday’s that no thinking mind can seriously reject the doctrine of immortality.

“What fruit have you to-day, Mrs. Globe?” you may ask the greengrocer’s wife on Monday.

“Well, m’m, there’s not very much to-day, except the apples; they’re very nice; two-pence-halfpenny the pound.” And yet the shop looks full of fruit. But when you come to look at it closely, it is like the egg in “Alice in Wonderland,” which receded from every shelf to the one above it. The other fruit doesn’t actually melt away under one’s gaze, but it becomes impossible to obtain. It is either a pine-apple at seven-and-sixpence (very nice, but quite out of the question), or nice English grapes (which you can’t make into a serviceable pudding for a family), or some outlandish fruit, two-pence each (which, of course, wouldn’t do), or else the oranges, which we are rather tired of; and besides, they are going off now and are not recommended.

There are some days when I believe all the food in the shops is made of painted cardboard like a doll’s-house dinner-party, because, although there appears to be an endless variety, there is, in fact, nothing that can be bought and eaten by ordinary people. If you examine each item separately, this will become evident. All the things in the windows are frauds, for the reasons described in Mrs. Globe’s shop, and therefore there is nothing for it but to have just the usual; to return up the street again to the butcher. We always “fall back” on his bloated, striped perpetuity.

“What about a nice fowl?” asks some bright spirit, and, indeed, that is true; what about it? except that, even supposing you can afford to spend three-and-sixpence on a quarter-of-an-hour’s amusement for four persons, there is not really any difference between this fowl and the last we had, so we may as well fall back on the butcher, who gives more for the same price. The fish-monger has all sorts of delightful traveller’s samples in the way of foreign birds hanging over the front of his shop, but, if you look into them, they are all plain fowls at heart; and when you get the two-and-sixpenny ones home and undress them, really it would come cheaper and be just as satisfactory to pot a sparrow out of the bathroom window with a catapult. By the way, I wonder that is not done oftener. It would be a change from the neck of mutton, and until they become “just the usual” sparrows, and find their way to the poulterers, we shall not be told that they are very scarce and not in season.

Perhaps the reason why many of us behave so much as usual is that, although there are many varieties of conduct available, we have got into a nervous habit of eliminating most of them from our list of what is possible, just as we reject many eatables which the shops would provide. But in either case it is not actually necessary to fall back on the apples or the butcher or the nice thing to say. There is plenty of variety to be had if people would stop falling back on the “old favourites” either in food or conversation. The dullest permanent officials and ladies in the world have thoughts about what is going on, if they would only allow themselves to think them: thoughts as peculiar to themselves, as different from their neighbours’, as are the curves made by two lambs jumping in the air. But they won’t tell us what these thoughts are. They push them away, saying to themselves, “No, that would never do,” and so they fall back on the apples. That is to say, they dish up the same old remarks in the same old way, until those of us who feel boredom begin to scream and cry and throw the food about. It is dreadful. I have seen people sitting round a table deliberately, wantonly refusing us the thoughts which the good God put into their heads in order that that they might share them with us. Some funny fellow on reading this will discover that it would be capital sport if we all said what we thought. He will picture insults flying like bullets, and all decency at an end. But no one is suggesting that the usual topics of conversation should be changed unless with the consent of all present. All we require is that when the scenery of Dorsetshire or the marriage of one’s son or the book which every one is reading is under discussion, the company should not limit their conversation to what it is “always as nice as anything” to say; that they should not give us “just the usual,” but try some of the other things in the shop, in season and out of season, as we have been taught. The price, of course, may be a little higher; but though some will call us vulgar if we do not fall back on the apples, others will call us dull if we do, so what does it matter? No one, however careful, can be a perfect lady to the whole world. So when Mrs. Beehive asks us what we feel about the scenery of Dorsetshire, let us be as open with her as we should be with our doctor if he suddenly lost his temper, thumped his fist on the table, and, looking us straight between the eyes, thundered, “Damn it all, madam, what have you had for breakfast?” We should tell the truth at once then, without stopping to think whether we had not better leave out the fifth cup of tea. It is just the fifth cup of tea that may be the significant note in an otherwise commonplace breakfast. It is sickeningly dull hearing you tell us, not what you noticed about the scenery of Dorsetshire, but what you decided years ago that it was a nice thing to think about the scenery of any county. The apples were all right in their place, but why fall back on them?

I once had a cook who greeted me every morning with the same remark, “There’s nothing left but just the spinach.” She pronounced it “spinack,” which made the offence worse, and she referred to the fact that we had eaten all the other vegetables in our twice-a-weekly hamper from the country. Conversation among careful people has, as a rule, very little left in it besides “just the spinack.” I mentioned this to Polly one day, and she said at once, without a moment’s reflection: “I have just had a luncheon-party, and there is nothing left of me but just the spinack, I can tell you. Another quarter of an hour and I should have fallen back on the apples.”

“I thought your party was delightful,” said Mrs. Spicer, who happened to be present.

“Of course it was,” said Polly, “because I gave you the best I had. It wasn’t much compared to the intellectual treat you might have had if I happened to be one of the Great Spirits of the Age, but it was all I had in the box; it wasn’t ‘just the spinack.’ I kept nothing from you.”

“But--” Mrs. Spicer seemed about to raise an objection, and hesitated.

“Yes?” said Polly; “don’t hover round your mind, please, rejecting things; we’re not tied to the apples.”

“You said yourself,” Mrs. Spicer reminded her boldly, “that you advised me never to say what I thought about anything--that it was not safe--that the weather was the only possible subject of conversation.”

“I never said that anything else was safe now, did I?” inquired Polly. “But you won’t make your parties a success if you go on the lines I indicated as safe. After all, what is life without risks?--especially in conversation.”

“But I don’t believe I could be interesting anyhow,” said Mrs. Spicer with a forlorn sigh. “I never can think of anything to say.”

“Then don’t say anything,” Polly advised, “and your silence will become so rich and meaty with thought (for every one, even a canary, thinks, there can be no doubt about that), that after a time, when you have quite lost the habit of thinking what to say, a moment may come when some slight emotion will unloose your tongue and it will speak for itself, and----”

“Polly, dear,” I warned her, “you will be so sorry when you have drawn the analogy between what Mrs. Spicer will say and Balaam’s ass; it will be easier to stop now than to explain it away.”

Mrs. Spicer giggled. We know her pretty well now, and she doesn’t mind.

“I wish, Martha, that you would rely a little more on my judgment and less on my knowledge of Scripture,” said Polly. “I had quite forgotten the story you refer to. What was in my mind was a vision of what it would be like if the things we call ‘still life’ suddenly spoke and told us how the world looked to them. It would be a delightful change from hearing how it looks to clever men. As it is, we have no missing link between the unusual sincerity of some of us and the usual insincerity of the rest. What we want is the truth--the whole truth--about what people with faces like turbot and macaroons think. I should stay awake all night with the excitement of knowing Mrs. Beehive as her Maker knows her. Probably she could throw a great deal of light on all sorts of obvious things that complicated people, like Reginald, miss owing to being tangled up in their own intelligence.”

“By the way,” said Mrs. Spicer, “talking of food, isn’t it absurd how we keep on with the same dishes when the cookery books are full of different ways of cooking everything? But, somehow, if you look through the books, there are only about three things one can have, because the others either want ingredients that we haven’t got in the house, and that are not worth buying for once, or they have to be prepared the day before, or they use too many separate pans, and cook grumbles about the washing-up; but it does seem unenterprising, as you say.”

“Considering, my dear, that since the time of Noah, or thereabouts, we have been going on as usual and found it less trouble, it is not likely”--said Polly sententiously--“it is not likely, so far as I can judge by the look of you, that you will return our calls by moonlight, or go to church on a week-day, or tell me which of us you would rather ran away with Mr. Spicer----”

“But you don’t do those sort of things yourself,” protested Mrs. Spicer.

Polly said, “Excuse me a moment,” and went to answer the telephone.

“I never knew Polly do anything actually unusual,” I said to Mrs. Spicer, “but she seems to do the usual things because they have just occurred to her for the first time as a good thing to do; not because there is nothing else she can do.”

“Just fancy!” said Polly, coming back; “Reginald says that the Henrys are dreadfully upset because their cook is going to marry the chauffeur, and she won’t be able to stay on with them. It is just what always happens, isn’t it?”