Chapter II: Part 2

"That may be," she said, "but you 're going to London, and I'm not. You'll have to do it this time."

"Oh, very well," I said; "have it your own way; but I warn you I shall buy silver candlesticks."

The two elder girls, who had been listening with eager interest, now broke in.

"Dad," said Helen to Rosie, "is going to try for his old candlesticks."

"Yes," said Rosie; "but you'll see he won't be allowed."

"Cease, babblers," I said. "In earlier and less conjugal days no wedding was considered complete without my silver candlesticks. It was all so simple, too. I called at Gillingham's, wrote out a card, gave an address, and away went the present. And what's more, they all wrote back and said it was the one thing they had been longing for."

"Oh," said the lady of the house, "they'll write like that about anything. At any rate, we won't have candlesticks. They're quite useless now, you know. Nobody has candles."

"And that," I said, "is what makes candlesticks so valuable. There's nothing base and utilitarian about them. They are appreciated for their beauty, and there's an end of them. Do, do let me buy a pair for George Henderson."

"No," she said; "the whole of the rest of the silversmith's art is open to you, but we will _not_ have candlesticks."

"I told you so," said Rosie to Helen.

In the afternoon, accordingly, I wandered into the establishment of Messrs. Gillingham, jewellers, goldsmiths and silversmiths, and heaven knows what besides. For a few moments I steeped myself in the glittering magnificence of the objects displayed around me. Then a polite and very well-dressed young man--not my usual one, but a stranger--spoke to me.

"Are you being attended to, Sir?" he said.

"No," I said, "not yet. I'm not quite ready for it. Still, I may as well begin."

"Yes, Sir."

"What," I said, pointing to a diamond tiara, "is the price of that?"

Two ladies who were making a purchase turned round and gazed at me with an awe-struck but approving look. The young man was evidently much impressed.

"That," he said, "is one of our newest designs. The stones are all specially selected. The price"--he studied the little tag attached to it--"the price is L1,050; very cheap for the value."

"It is," I said, "wonderfully cheap. I can't think how you manage to do it. I will think about it. In the meantime I should like to see something smaller and not quite so valuable."

"Is it a wedding present, Sir?"

"Don't," I said, "let us call it a wedding present just yet." If we do it's sure to turn out a sugar-sifter. Let's think of it as a mere gift."

"Yes, Sir."

"Of course we may find that the man to whom we're going to give it is about to be married, but that will be only the long arm, won't it?"

"The--I beg your pardon, Sir;"

"A coincidence, you know; and we're not the men to be put off by coincidences, are we?"

"No, Sir. Would you like to see the manager, Sir?"

"No," I said, "the manager would only confuse me. Show me some silver inkstands and some sugar-jugs--I mean some claret-sifters--that is, some silver decanters, you know, and some silver fruit-baskets."

"Yes, Sir." He went away and returned with an inkstand.

"This," he said, "is a very favourite pattern. It combines a large inkpot and a match-stand and a rack for the pens----"

"I know," I said; "they never stay in it."

"No, Sir. And there's a little candlestick for sealing-wax----"

"I'll have it," I said feverishly. "Put it aside for me at once. This is really a most remarkable piece of luck."

"Yes, Sir. Anything else?"

"Yes," I said. "I'll have a sugar-sifter, too. Any sugar-sifter will do. I'm only doing it as a concession."

"Yes, Sir. Where shall I send them?"

I gave the address with great gusto, and when I reported the result of my labours at home I said nothing about the little candlestick. The mere joy of having bought it was enough for me. Thus George Henderson received from us his fifth inkstand and his seventh sugar-sifter. He wrote and said that they were the two things he had most been wishing for.

R. C. L.

* * * * *

"He looked at her with infinite gentleness. 'I know all about
it,' he said.

She covered her face with her hands and cried brokenly. But,
coming closer, he put both hands on her shoulders, and lifted
her tea-stained face to his."--_Tasmanian Courier Annual._

Tea merchants are invited to compete for the advertisement.

* * * * *

"Hodgkins, however; drew ahead, and finally won as stated,
the scores being: Hodgkins, 400; Sunderland, 367. The winner's
best breaks were 24 and 17 (twice), and the doser's 32, 25,
and 20."

_Sporting Life._

He should have made the dose stronger.

* * * * *

* * * * *

FARES.

"Is that you, Herbert?" I said in surprise.

It was.

Strange how machinery can influence a man. The last time I had seen Herbert he was a rubicund cheerful gardener. He was now a London taxi-driver, with all the signs of that mystery on him: the shabbiness, the weariness, the disdain.

"Are you glad you gave up gardening?" I asked him.

"Can't say I am now," he replied. "There's more money in this, but the work's too hard. I miss my sleep, too."

"You can always go back," I said.

"I wonder," he replied. "I'd like to. This being at every one's beck and call who happens to have a shilling is what I'm tired of."

"What about tips?" I asked.

"I get plenty of them," he said. "In fact, if the clock registers tenpence or one and fourpence or one and tenpence I practically always get the odd twopence. That's all right. It's the people who don't want to tip but daren't not do it that I can't stand. And there are such lots of them. That's what makes taxi-drivers look so contemptuous like--the tips. People think we want the tips; but there's a time when we'd rather go without them than get them like that."

I sympathised with him.

"Then there are the fares who always know a quicker way than we do. They're terrors. They keep on tapping on the glass to direct us, when we know all about it all the time. It's them that leads to some of the accidents, because they take your eyes off the road."

I sympathised again and made some mental notes for future behaviour myself.

"But the pedestrians are the worst," he continued.

"The pedestrians?"

"Yes, the people who walk across the road without giving a thought to the fact that there might be a vehicle coming. The people that never learn. The people that call you names or make faces at you after you've saved their silly lives by blowing the hooter at them. Every minute of the day one is having trouble with them, and it gets on one's nerves. It's them that makes a taxi-driver look old sooner than a woman."

"So you'll go back to the land?" I said.

"I don't know," he said. "I'd like to, but petrol gets into the blood, you know."

I suppose it does.

* * * * *

"Dr. Grenfell remarked that the tourist traffic [to Labrador]
was beginning to grow. Life in winter was very attractive, and
was enjoyed as people enjoyed winter in Norway. One of his
few personal reminiscences was how he fell through the ice and
expected to be frozen to death."--_Manchester Guardian._

Us for Labrador, every time.

* * * * *

Paragraph in a petition addressed to a Government official by a Baboo who wished to protest against the conduct of another Baboo:--

"His hatred of me is so much that in the heat of his animosity
he wilfully omitted to put in the formal ephithet 'Mr.' to my
name, which no man of honour would drop because not so much
for disregarding me, but that he would be doing injustice to
the European etiquette."

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

"THE LAND OF PROMISE."

"I'M about fed up with God's Own Country," says the waster in the play, a youth who, after exchanging a safe thousand a year at Bridge for the dangerous delights of "Chemin-de-fer," had been invited by a stern sire to migrate to Canada. And even so he had not been present during the Third Act to see the things that we saw, or he would have learnt some more discouraging facts which are never mentioned in the philosophy of the emigration-agents; for example, that the solitude and wide spaces of the Golden West seem to induce, even in the honest native worker, a reversion to the state of a dragon of the prime. But he had already seen, in the case of _Norah Marsh_, whom poverty had driven to seek the shelter of her brother's roof on a Manitoba farm, how the drudgery and petty jealousies of a narrow Colonial _menage_, the familiar society of hired hands, and the lack of life's common amenities, had developed a gently-bred Englishwoman into a sour-tongued shrew.

Worse was to follow when, as a sole escape from the bitter spite of her plebeian hostess, she consented to marry a barbarian who was looking for a woman-of-all-work to manage his primitive shack. Here, having already mislaid her feminine charm, she loses all sense of honesty. First, when ordered to do her household duties--which were of the essence of the contract--she declines to obey till he uses brute force; and then, when he demands of her the attitude of a wife (a very embarrassing scene), she protests that this was no part of the bargain.

I can't imagine what she supposed the bargain was about, if it didn't require her to be either wife or servant.

Terrorism was the man's simple solution; but those who looked, in the last Act, for a tamed and adoring shrew were to be disappointed. Brute force had only produced a patient obedience; and it was not till a damaged crop had brought them to the edge of ruin that she consented to become his ministering angel. But by that time we knew too well her distaste for Manitoban methods to believe in the sincerity of this sudden conversion.

Altogether, after what Mr. MAUGHAM has done to my illusions, I have given up any thought of going to God's Own Country in search of a larger existence.

The acting was perhaps better than the play, though the play was good up to a point. The Second Act, with its fierce jealousy and wrangling and the futile efforts of the farmer (admirably played by Mr. C. V. FRANCE) to intervene between wife and sister, was excellent. For the rest, it was the personality of Mr. GODFREY TEARLE, as the savage mate of the shrew, that dominated the scene. There is no better rough diamond (and he was really very rough) in the whole stock of stage-jewellery. Miss IRENE VANBRUGH, though no actress could have done more with her part, had less chance than usual of showing her particular gift of _finesse_; and _Norah's_ character was too inconsistent to command our sympathy. Not that we necessarily gave it to the man. Indeed it was a flaw in the play that our sympathies were never thoroughly engaged by either party. We were, of course, prepared to range ourselves on the winning side, but there was no victory. The issue was decided by _force majeure_ in the shape of a wretched weed that destroyed the crop.

_Norah_ Miss IRENE VANBRUGH.
_Frank Taylor_ Mr. GODFREY TEARLE.]

The situations, though of a rather strenuous order, gave occasion from time to time for humorous relief. At first, when the English servant in the opening Act rudely interposed with a facetious comment on the sincerity of the grief of certain mourners, I feared lest the humour was going to be distributed loosely without regard to the propriety of its mouthpiece. But the rest was reasonable enough; and my only complaint about the best repartee ("There's no place like home." "Some people are glad there isn't") has to do with its antiquity rather than with its appropriateness.

I have never been to Manitoba (and, after seeing _The Land of Promise_, I am definitely resolved, as I said, never to go), so I cannot say whether Mr. MAUGHAM'S interiors corresponded to the facts; but their freedom from any signs of picturesqueness gave them an air of being the right thing. Life in these parts no doubt revolves largely round the simple joys of the stomach. Seldom have I seen so much eating on the stage. We began at Tunbridge Wells with a funeral tea (though perhaps I ought to pass this over as taking place outside the Dominion); then as soon as we get to Dyer (Manitoba) we had a mid-day dinner, with washing-up; and then at Prentice (Manitoba) we were regaled with a supper of black tea and syrup.

I am confident that there is a great opening for drama dealing solely with Life Between Meals. To see people smoking on the stage is sufficiently irritating; but, when you are assisting at a First Night after a sketchy repast from the grill, all this feeding on the stage, however frugal the menu, makes for exasperation.

Finally I must compliment Mr. MAUGHAM on his ironical title. For his play, too, is a thing "of promise" rather than achievement, if it is to be judged by the test of the Last Act. Still, if a play only promises well enough and long enough--as this play did--that is an achievement in itself.

O. S.

* * * * *

THE TORTOISESHELL CAT.

THE tortoiseshell cat
She sits on the mat,
As gay as a sunflower she;
In orange and black you see her blink,
And her waistcoat's white, and her nose is pink,
And her eyes are green of the sea.
But all is vanity, all the way;
Twilight's coming and close of day,
And every cat in the twilight's grey,
Every possible cat.

The tortoiseshell cat
She is smooth and fat,
And we call her Josephine,
Because she weareth upon her back
This coat of colours, this raven black,
This red of the tangerine.
But all is vanity, all the way;
Twilight follows the brightest day,
And every cat in the twilight's grey,
Every possible cat.

* * * * *

The Thrusters.

"The Ball given by the Ministry of Communications last night
in the new Waichiaopu Building was a great success in every
way. Although only 1,500 invitations were sent out, more
than that number of guests attended the Ball."--_Peking Daily
News._

* * * * *

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

(_By Mr. Punch's Staff of Learned Clerks._)

I think I could best convey my impression of Miss ETHEL SIDGWICK'S work by quoting the advertisement of a popular magazine which used to proclaim that "these stories are different." All of Miss SIDGWICK'S are this, though you might possibly be hard put to it to say exactly how. It is chiefly an affair of style; there is about all of them a certain dignity of utterance that combines with their humanity to produce an effect wholly individual and rare. Take her latest example, _A Lady of Leisure_ (SIDGWICK AND JACKSON). There is really very little to arrest attention in the story itself; the characters are persons whom you could meet every day, but in Miss SIDGWICK'S hands they become creatures of extraordinary fascination. The result is a novel by no means easy to criticise; partly because one is left with the feeling (of course the most subtle compliment to any author) that the characters have fashioned it themselves. Time and again one seems to observe Miss SIDGWICK working towards some inevitable _scene-a-faire_, when bounce! off go her people on an entirely unexpected tack, which you must yet admit to be the very one they quite obviously would follow. Never was a cast so incalculably alive. Naturally for this reason its vagaries (they are almost all in love and generally with the wrong person) would take too long to recount in detail. I can only state my personal preference for the group that consists of the heroine, _Violet Ashwin_, her father, the fashionable physician, and her brainless but quite wonderful mother. I plump for the _Ashwin_ household in short as a really brilliant contribution to the homes in modern fiction. I don't say you will find their charm easy of assimilation. The society of such clever and elusive folk as _Violet_ and her father is bound to be hard going at first for the general. But _Mrs. Ashwin_--oh, she is a joy, a marvel, an exasperation! You will delight to read about her.

* * * * *

The first thing I have to say about _Initiation_ (HUTCHINSON) is that it might have been written by Dr. CLIFFORD. The nice people in it are all Roman Catholics, but a group of Huguenots or of Calvinistic Methodists would have served the author's purpose equally well. For ROBERT HUGH BENSON, the novelist, has (so to speak) told Monsignor BENSON, the priest, to mind his own business, and leave him to his, which is the telling of a story, and not the advocacy of any particular form of religion. The second point to notice in the book is that it divides its characters, and incidentally all characters, into those who are initiated and those who are not. The initiated are those who have learnt, chiefly by suffering, the lesson of life, which is that it treats us as it likes. Because they have learnt it, they trust, even when they do not understand, the purpose of the life-giver; because they trust they do not kick against the pricks. The young Catholic English gentleman, of whose initiation the story tells, suffers prodigiously under two of the greatest misfortunes, physical and mental, that a man may endure and live. And yet, when he comes to die, you feel, and he knows, that they are not misfortunes, but the opening up of the way of life. The chief cause of his mental suffering, a young girl of eighteen or nineteen, is described (well on in the book) as a practically insane egoist. She is, to my mind, the weak spot in the story. Frankly I don't believe in her. A girl of her age could not have been so selfishly cruel, and yet have taken in her world as she did. I will own that she took me in at first; but that was the author's fault. He ought not to have let me, as his reader, think her charming and particularly sympathetic when he knew all the time that she cared for no one but herself. I don't think that is playing the game. All the I same, I like his book.

* * * * *

Having read Mr. REGINALD BLUNT'S book, _In Cheyne Walk and Thereabout_ (MILLS AND BOON), I am now prepared to pass an examination in the history and the worthies (or unworthies) of Chelsea. I know that DON SALTERO was no Spaniard, but an ardent collector of childish curiosities who for a time kept a coffee-house and a smoking club of which "the ornaments and apparatus" were eventually offered to CHARLES LAMB. If I am asked about Dr. MESSENGER MONSEY I shall say that he "tried hard, but with indifferent success, to popularise his own method of extracting teeth by tying one end of a piece of catgut to the offending molar and the other to a perforated bullet, putting the latter with a full charge of powder into a revolver and then pulling the trigger." Then again there is BARTHOLOMEW JOSEPH ALEXANDER DE DOMINICETI, Lord DE CETE ET DE CORTESI, Knight of the Holy Boman Empire and Noble of Venice in terra firma. How did he with his resounding name come to be in Chelsea and there establish "baths, fumigatory stoves and sweating chambers" for the relief of distressed humanity? This question and a hundred others of a similar nature you will find answered in Mr. BLUNT'S delightful book. Let Mr. BLUNT take you by the hand and guide you through his beloved Chelsea. He is the most urbane and the most agreeably gossiping companion. He will re-introduce you to Sir THOMAS MORE, Sir HANS SLOANE; to NEILD, the prison-reformer, and his son JOHN, the famous miser; to the CARLYLES and their servant JESSIE HEDDLESTONE, and a host of others. And he will remind you that Dr. JOHNSON endeavoured to manufacture Chelsea china, and that his _chefs d'oeuvre_ always collapsed in the firing. Take my advice and acquire Mr. BLUNT'S book.

* * * * *

I suspect that _Mr. Simpson_, who gives his name to the story _Simpson_ (METHUEN), can hardly have shared my own exhausting acquaintance with modern fiction, otherwise it is unlikely that he would have behaved as he did. What happened was this. _Simpson_, though on the wrong side of forty, well off and eminently lovable, was unmarried. Finding a charming old house in the country, he conceives the idea of renting it as a kind of bachelor residential club where he and other congenial cronies can enjoy the life of ease untroubled by any form of feminism. Well, that, to start with, one might fairly describe as "asking for it." But when I add that the old house in question was the property of a still young and charming widow you will probably agree with me that poor _Simpson_ hadn't even a dog's chance from the beginning. It is possible that this fore-dooming may a little spoil your enjoyment of Miss ELINOR MORDAUNT'S otherwise pleasant tale. Naturally, so far from women being banished from its pages, they simply abound; and the tale of the progress of the bachelor club resolves itself into a chronicle of proposals. There is however an attractive variety about the love affairs, of which I liked best that of the youngest couple. With two there is a note of tragedy; and though the courtship of _Gilbert Strong_, a respectable country lawyer, and the wild gipsy whom he marries may strike you as fantastic, the end of their romance is well told with a fine suggestion of inevitability. On the whole an agreeable and easy-going tale, though without any unusual claim to distinction.

* * * * *

* * * * *

I quite realise that I have not the shadow of a case against Mr. ALGERNON BLACKWOOD. He frankly calls his book _Ten Minute Stories_ (MURRAY), and that is exactly what they are. Nevertheless I did feel a little aggrieved when each of them stopped with a jerk just as I had become absorbed. One has a sense of having been cheated of one's rights. That is why, though many of these sketches are as good as they can be, I do not think that the book will be quite so popular as others of his. But devout Blackwoodsmen will add it to their collections and re-read the majority of its contents again and again, as I propose to do. On second thoughts, indeed, I may say that perhaps Mr. BLACKWOOD is not so unfair to his public as I have suggested, for he is one of those writers who are not dead and done with after a first perusal. He can pack a vast deal of food for thought even into a ten-minute story. A good example of what I mean is to be found in number fifteen of the collection, "Ancient Lights." Even a scene-shifter at the Savoy Theatre would believe in fairies after one reading of that. And if, after studying "If the Cap Fits," you lightly steal a fellow-member's hat from your club, I shall regard you as a very reckless dashing fellow. With the awful example of _Field-Martin_ before me, I would not do it for a fortune. I shall buy one of those frightful plush hats which you see in shops but never out of them, and I shall have my name in large letters on the inside band. And to the hat-waiter's insidious "This is just as good, Sir," as he offers me some sinister bowler or topper with a past, I shall reply with gestures of disgust and threats to write to the committee.

* * * * *

"Detached 7-roomed horse wanted."--_The Norbury Weekly News._

Where is your one-stalled ox now?

* * * * *

Transcriber's Note:

Page 161: 'Deutches' is as printed. Alternative spelling (Wikipedia)

"Herr REINHARDT'S Deutches Theater"

Page 174: 'beleagured' corrected to 'beleaguered'.

"likened to a beleaguered garrison,"

Page 174: 'lose' corrected to 'loose'.

"A bull has got loose in the china"

Page 174: 'privonces' is as printed. (A 'Punch' joke: Metrolopis).