Chapter 3

"So am I," said Mother, "and I like room to turn round. No, Ernest, I am as fond of fresh air as anyone--you know I always have my bedroom window open at least two inches at night--but air is not everything. Give me a comfortable bed and good catering if I am to go on holiday and enjoy it. _You_ can please yourself."

That is the mistake Mother made. Ernest ought not to be allowed to please himself. He doesn't know what is good for him. And, when he departed on his walking tour accompanied by his tent, his sponge-bag, a copy of OMAR KHAYYAM, but very little else, Mother felt uneasy.

"What will happen if you get your feet wet?" she asked. "I'm sure you ought to take more things with you, Ernest."

"What more do I want?" he demanded, "'A loaf of bread beneath the bough----'"

"A loaf of bread indeed!" echoed Mother. "Fiddlesticks! Mind you get at least three good meals a day." She then gave him the address of the boarding-house where we had finally decided to spend our holidays and told him to send her a wire at once if he got a cold in the head.

* * *

It was the hour of dinner at the Select Boarding Establishment (sep. tables, 3 mins. sea, elec. lt., mod.) where we had spent ten days of our entirely select holiday. Everyone was assembled in the lounge hall waiting for the gong to announce the meal. Mother, basking her soul in the atmosphere of gentility, was chatting with the half-sister of a bishop, who was just remarking that Mother must call on her in town, when a strange _fracas_ was heard at the back of the hall; a moment later a strange figure thrust itself in our midst and looked wildly round.

"Ernest!" murmured Mother faintly. She was a wise woman to know her own child under the circumstances. Perhaps she identified the tent-pole to which he was still clinging. Otherwise he was scarcely recognisable. His hair was wild and unkempt, his clothing torn and damaged. His boots clung to his feet by the uppers only and were held together by fragments of a sponge-bag.

"Mother!" said Ernest, singling her out from amongst the gay throng. The moment was dramatic.

"I--I was arrested," went on Ernest. He spoke in a purely conversational tone, but it's surprising how far the human voice will carry at times. Everybody about the place, including the lift-boy and the Belgian waiter, seemed to hear that remark.

"Arrested?" whispered Mother in reverberating tone-waves.

"Yes. How was I to know that I had pitched my tent on private property and was unwittingly trespassing? They would have prosecuted me if I hadn't----"

"You had better come up to my room and explain there," interposed Mother; and we followed her, a broken woman, to the lift. People fell aside to make a passage for us.

Mother held up until she got to her own room. Then she sat down and cried. "Why did you disgrace us like this?" she asked at last of Ernest. "Was it necessary for you to come _here_?"

"I had to," said Ernest apologetically. "You see I hadn't any money."

Mother looked up quickly. "But what of the extra ten pounds I insisted on your taking with you in case of emergency?"

Ernest appeared slightly shame-faced. "Well, when those fatuous asses hauled me up for trespassing they left me in the charge of a gamekeeper while they 'phoned for the police. I induced the chap to let me go, and I had to square him with a tenner."

There was a long pause. Mother's mind seemed to be working at some abstruse calculation. Then she dried her eyes and looked up with the triumphant smile of the woman who gets the last word and wins her point.

"And so, Ernest," she said, "it _did_ cost you five guineas a week to 'breathe the pure air of Heaven' after all."

* * * * *

Illustration: "SORRY TO HEAR YOUR HUSBAND IS LAID UP AGAIN, MRS. GRIGGS."

"YES. THE TROUBLE IS HE BE AN OLD MAN, AND HE _WILL_ TURN A DEAF EAR TO THE WRITIN' ON THE WALL."

* * * * *

PRAWLING'S THEORY.

(_By a Student of Jargon._)

By the courtesy of Professor Prawling, F. R. S., who has supplied us with the MS. of his recent lecture before the Psycho-Economical Society, we are in a position to give our readers a full account of that masterly and epoch-making address, of which, strange to say, no adequate notice has so far appeared in any newspaper.

Professor Prawling's credentials, we may premise, are of a nature to inspire the utmost confidence. His father, Theodore Prawling, was the inventor of the speedle, that remarkable implement, fully described by _Punch_ in the early seventies, which rendered possible the emulsification of all gelatinoid substances and revolutionised the marmalade industry. He is duly commemorated by the fine statue which is one of the principal features of Dundee. His son, however, has even greater claims on our respect and admiration. Educated at the High School, Crieff, and the Universities of Glasgow, Upsala, the Sorbonne and Princeton, he is generally recognised in the United States as the foremost authority on Paedological Gongorism and the cognate science of Mendelian Economics.

The problem with which he grapples in his latest contribution to these fascinating studies may be tersely summed up in a single sentence: Can a healthy metabolism be superinduced on an economic system already showing symptoms of extrinsic conglucination?

Professor Prawling is of opinion that it _can_, but only if and when the evils of co-partnership and co-operation have been neutralized by a diastolic synthesis. To compute exactly the extent to which these evils have been developed he has devised a syncretic abacus, in which, on the principle of the spectroscope, the aplanatic foci are arranged in fluorescent nodules each equidistant from the metacentre. With a frankness that cannot be too highly commended, Professor Prawling admits that this instrument is founded on BENTHAM'S Panopticon. But the deviations from BENTHAM and the expansions of his machine are far more remarkable than the resemblances to it. Prawling--if he will allow us the familiarity--is not a utilitarian. His aim is to re-establish our textile pre-eminence by reconciling monistic individualism with the fullest solidarity of the social complex. He is meticulously careful in stressing the point that the demarcations arrived at by the use of his abacus are not absolute, but conditioned by EINSTEIN'S theory of relativity. The ancillary industries, each moving in its orbit, whether jurassic or botulistic, must be placed on a contractual basis with liberty of preferential retaliation. Thus the whole industrial polyphony is linked up by enharmonic modulations, and thrombosis--or, at any rate, conglucination--of the central ganglia of commerce is reduced to negligible dimensions.

At this juncture it is well to point out in the interests of clarity that regurgitation can only be avoided by a rigorous adhesion to the canon of CRITTENDEN--that the unit of nutrition must vary inversely with the square of dilution.

It will thus be seen that by the logical application of a few simple and easily apprehended principles Professor Prawling has built up a great edifice of practical economics, which, whether we regard it in its subliminal or its pragmatic aspects, cannot fail to have influence on the dynamics of International Industrialism.

One word more. The conglucination theory appeals with especial force to _Punch_, because it reminds him of the kindred and remarkable speculation on Snooling discussed by him many years ago. The new theory, like the old, deserves to be treated "in no spirit of sedentary sentimentalism, but in its largest and most oleaginous entirety. It is no plan for fixing hat-pegs in a passage, nor is it a mode of treating neuralgia with treacle." How true and appropriate this is. _Mutatis mutandis_ we may add the further statement that it is "the truest and tenderest thesis that can occupy the most calculating cosmopolite." The corporate pursuit of a granulated conglucination is perhaps the highest achievement of which the present generation is capable.

* * * * *

Illustration: "I TRUST YOU'LL EXCUSE ME MENTIONING IT, MY GOOD FELLOW, BUT THAT IS THE RIGHT ENTRANCE--ON THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE ROAD."

* * * * *

More Impending Apologies.

"Cardinal Dubois, Archbishop of Rouen, has been translated, as most of us expected, to the Archbishopric in Paris. Being a very distinguished man of letters, the Academie Francaise would like to include him among the Immorals, but, alas! they are 'full inside.'"

_Evening Paper._

* * * * *

HEADLINING.

The thrilling incident of the stray cat at "Chez Nous" is never likely to get into the newspapers. On the other hand, lots of incidents which do get in never deserve to. It's all a question of head-lining, which is the bluff by which the public is induced to read matter it would otherwise skip.

The affair began while I was in the City. I learnt afterwards that Marjorie (my wife) was crooning to her needles the unmetrical jumper lullaby, "Six purl, eight plain; then the same all over again." Anyhow she was knitting, when she suddenly found herself looking into the wistful eyes of a tortoiseshell cat which had appeared--merely appeared.

As she told me, she softly exclaimed, "A cat!" (right first time); then, because it looked so wistful, she directed the maid to set before the creature a saucer of milk. In fact--

HOMELESS BLACK-AND-TAN. LUCKY CHANCE CALL. TOOTING GOOD SAMARITAN.

When I arrived home, Marjorie ran into the hall to give me one of her smooth evening kisses. I stepped forward to exchange it for one of my stubbly ones when--

"Oh, Jack," said Marjorie, "you've trodden on her!"

"'Her,'" I said. "Who's 'her'?"

"The dearest little tortoiseshell stray cat," replied Marjorie. "You really might have been more careful."

"I say, that's rather unfair," I said. "I stagger home tired to the teeth after a particularly thin day in the City, followed by a sardine-tin journey, and my own wife turns on me in favour of the first outcast cat that comes along. It's enough to drive a man to dope." Or, as the headlines would have it:--

NEAR BREAKING-POINT. STRAIN OF BUSINESS LIFE. ORIGIN OF THE DRUG HABIT.

After a bath and a change I felt better, and came down to dinner humming a sentimental ballad in Marjorie's honour. But the word "love" died on my lips when I saw that in the lap of Marjorie's pretty pink gown reposed the stray cat. The colour-clash and the misapplication of caresses which should have been my monopoly threw me back with a jerk to a state of bearishness.

"Surely you're not going to keep that animal?" I asked.

"Of course I am, as long as she likes to stay," said Marjorie. "She's very fond of me, aren't you, pussy? Fonder than my husband, I 'spect."

"I know these stray cats," I said. "Stiff with microbes. Tribes of mangy lovers prowling round the house. A nest of kittens in my top-hat. I know."

"Poor li'l pussy," cooed Marjorie. "Don'tum listen to the big coarse man."

"Coarse be----"

In other (and more suitable) words--

HUSBAND'S PROFANITY. MASK OFF AFTER TWO YEARS. PEEVISH ABOUT WIFE'S PET.

Marjorie said coldly that she didn't know I had such a temper. I said hotly that I didn't know she could be so infantile.

We went on discovering things we hadn't known about each other:--

THE TESTING TIME IN CONJUGAL FELICITY, IS IT THE THIRD YEAR?

Dinner was an ordeal. I felt miles apart from Marjorie. A great gulf filled with black-and-yellow cat lay between us. Once only the topic of the beast arose (on the subject of fish-bones) and just as I was becoming big and coarse again the maid entered with the joint. She must have heard what I said.

SHOULD SERVANTS TELL? BACKDOOR SCANDAL.

Still, the meal itself was a cheering one, and, after Marjorie had risen, the sentimental ballad mood gained on me again. After all, what was a stray cat compared with one's marriage vows? If the dear girl wanted to keep the thing we would have it vetted, definitely named, and warned as to followers.

Marjorie's voice interrupted my amiable planning. "Puss, puss," she called. I joined her and stated my decision to relent.

"But she's vanished," said Marjorie. She had. And she has never come back. Ah! those stray cats.

NINE LIVES SPENT WHERE? FOUR-FOOTED NOMADS. FICKLE FELINE FRIENDSHIPS.

"Look here, old girl," I said, "I take back all I said about your little friend. I'm with you that she was the dearest, most hygienic, most moral cat that ever strafed a mouse."

"Perhaps it's all for the best that she's gone," said Marjorie.

The dear girl inclined her head towards my shoulder. Well, well.

WHAT EVERY WOMAN WANTS TO KNOW. IS KISSING DYING OUT? PRACTICIANS SAY "NO."

* * * * *

More Precocity.

"Unfurnished Rooms wanted (two or three), with attendance; one child, 4-1/2 years; at business all day."--_Provincial Paper._

* * * * *

LOVE'S HANDICAP.

[A daily paper points out that many girls find their sweethearts in print, and expresses the hope that when "a real man comes along he may be as brave and tender, as cheery and clean-living," as these heroes of fiction.]

Dear lady, put down for a minute That book which you eagerly scan, Intent upon finding within it Your perfect ideal of a man; Its pages reflectively closing, Consider a moment the strain Your standard may soon be imposing Upon some susceptible swain.

Those heroes whose fortunes you follow I've noticed are able to show The unparalleled charms of Apollo, The muscles of SAMSON and Co.; But he who comes seeking to win you May have, for supporting his plea, A palpable shortage of sinew And beauty distinctly C 3.

And, unprepossessing in mien, he May also lack some of the art With which Saccharissa the Tweeny Was wooed by Sir Marmaduke, Bart.; His tongue may (conceivably) stammer, His heart (not impossibly) quake, And in stress of emotion his grammar May even develop a shake.

But pause ere you "spurn his addresses;" His merits may still be as high As the sort that your hero possesses, Though they leap not so quick to the eye; At the least, you've the comfort of knowing, Since his heart at _your_ feet he has placed, That in one thing at least he is showing A wholly impeccable taste.

* * * * *

How Some Advertisers "Tell the Tale."

"We spin the yarn ourselves."

_Advt. in Daily Paper._

* * * * *

"'FULL TERM.'"

AN IMPRESSION AT CAMBRIDGE.

I watch the faces of the 'men,' boys in so many cases, jumping from their trains; from the north, the south, the east, the west they come, and they come not alone but _dona ferentes_--they carry tennis-racquets, golf-sticks, cycles, sidecars, kitbags, gladstone-bags, trunks, hold-alls."--_Evening Paper._

Hefty chaps, these post-war undergraduates.

* * * * *

"Question.--How much has the time for crossing the ocean been shortened since the day of Columbus?

T. E. C.

Answer.--Idaho is a North American Indian word meaning 'Gem of the Mountains' or 'Sunrise Mountains.'"

_Boston (Massachusetts) Herald._

We hope that T. E. C. isn't going to be put off with such a simple device as this.

* * * * *

Illustration: _Injured Party._ "IT'S ALL VERY WELL, PASSON, FOR YOU TO SAY WOT 'ORRIBLE LANGWIDGE, BUT 'APPEN YOUR MISSIS AIN'T SUCH A GOOD SHOT WITH A FLAT-IRON AS MINE IS."

* * * * *

OUR BOOKING-OFFICE.

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

There is certainly this to be said of Mr. HUGH WALPOLE--that, having devised a tale of gloom, he allows no weak consideration for his readers' feelings to deter him from making the worst of it. I write, having but now emerged, blinking a little at the familiar sunlight (yet oddly invigorated too), from a perusal of the four-hundred-and-seventy pages of his _Captives_ (MACMILLAN). Of course I have nothing like space to detail for you its plot. Summarised, it tells the life of a young woman, _Maggie Cardinal_, whom one may briefly call the bemused victim of religions--and relations. You never knew any well-intentioned heroine who had such abysmal luck with both. Her clergyman father, a bad hat, who spared us his acquaintance by expiring on the first page; her semi-moribund aunts in their detestable London home; the circle of the Inner Saints, with their intrigues that centred in the ugly little meeting-house; the seaside parish with its spiritually-dead atmosphere, in which _Maggie's_ hopeless married life is spent--all these and more are realised with an art that is almost devastating in its unforced effect. Sometimes I hoped that such universal drabness was too bad to be true; one caught touches of manipulation, times in which these poor _Captives_ seemed bound less by the chains of circumstance than by the wires of Mr. WALPOLE. The queer result was that I found myself believing in his compellingly human characters, but protesting that such unbroken misfortune could not, or need not, have encompassed them. To take an example, when _Maggie's_ "tipsy" uncle was shown into the Vicarage drawing-room on her "At Home day," no other guests had yet arrived. Surely therefore (save for peremptory orders from Mr. WALPOLE) she might somehow have removed the culprit to another room, or at least denied herself to subsequent callers, who included (of course) the most influential and scandal-mongering of the parish ladies. That is the kind of rather piled-up agony that made me suspect Mr. WALPOLE of letting his fortitude get at times the better of his commonsense. But he has written a big book.

* * * * *

Mr. E. F. BENSON, of whom it might justly be said that he produces not books but libraries (and the quality of his output under these circumstances remains for me amongst the literary wonders of the age), has been at it again. Hardly have I finished laughing over _Queen Lucia_, when I find him claiming a wholly different interest with a volume of personal recollections called _Our Family Affairs_ (CASSELL). By its theme and treatment this is work standing naturally a little outside criticism; but I can say at once that Mr. BENSON has never written with a more sympathetic charm than in these pictures of the childhood of himself and his sister and brothers; of the various scholastic and ecclesiastical homes to which the increasing dignities of that rather alarming parent, the Archbishop, transported his family; and (quite the best and most attractive portrait in the collection) of the mother whom all of them united to adore. There is an actual photograph of her here, taken at the age of twenty, which goes far to explain how she came to be the heroine of the story; the lurking gaiety and laughter of it quaintly foretelling the great ecclesiastical lady who, on one occasion when the Archbishop was absent, could announce to her enraptured children that family prayers should be remitted, "as a treat!" Schooldays at Wellington; Cambridge; some topical memoirs of the Georgian _regime_ in Athens, and (what will interest many readers most of all) the history of the origin of that famous lady, _Dodo_--these are but a selection from the contents of a volume that should find hosts of friends.

* * * * *

_The Girl in Fancy Dress_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) was so very much disguised in one way and another that _Anthony_, the hero, when he asked her to marry him, even for the second time, was taking considerable risks. The speed of the affair must also have been bewildering. _Cynthia_, the heiress, arrives on a Thursday to stay with his people, but, having tumbled out of a motor-car into a wet ditch on her way, she is dressed, rather like a stage coster-girl, in garments borrowed from a cottager. Naturally, as of course a nursery-governess is much more likely than an heiress to look like that, _Anthony's_ people mistake her for a poor country cousin who is also expected, and _Cynthia_, discovering that her host and hostess and their dreary daughters intend the heiress to marry _Anthony_ and, worse than that, that he has called her "the goose with the golden eggs," fosters the mistake and does her best to pay them all out. She leaves on the following Tuesday, but before that _Anthony_ has taken her to one dance as a peasant girl and she has talked to him at another disguised as a green domino, and he has proposed to her as his cousin and withdrawn his declaration when he finds she isn't. Next he sees her as _Lady Teazle_ in amateur theatricals, and then comes his final meeting with her in her proper person, which brings about a satisfactory ending for everyone but _Cynthia's_ other lover. I don't say that all these things couldn't have happened; I only say that as a rule they don't. Apart from that, the bright bustling action of Mrs. J. E. BUCKROSE'S story has a cheerful charm of its own, and _Cynthia_, as poor relation of one of the anxiously best families in a little country town, provides some amusing situations--for the reader.

* * * * *

If the shade of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON is jealous of its rights and its copyrights, Mr. JEFFREY FARNOL may look to be hauled up before the Recording Angel, on his arrival, in the matter of his _Black Bartlemy's Treasure_ (SAMPSON LOW), which he might just as well have called _Black Bartlemy's Treasure Island_ and have done. Never was such frank adoption of ideas; and yet no God-fearing, adventure-loving Englishman will regret it. For all my devotion to R. L. S. I heartily enjoyed this elaboration of his idea, split me (to quote the thorough-going language of it)--split me crosswise else! There are forty-seven chapters and a bloody fight in every one of them, save in the dozen set apart for an interval of refreshment and romance in the middle. Nay, but was not the primitive romance a gentler combat, itself, between _Martin Conisby_ and _Lady Joan Brandon_, marooned, solitary, upon the Island where they did find (and lose) a treasure even greater than _Black Bartlemy's_? After having "consorted with pirates and like rogues" and having "endured much of harms and dangers, as battle, shipwreck, prison and solitude," it seemed we had sighted happiness at last. But even at the very end things took an ill turn and our _Martin_, our dear _Martin_, is left stranded and in sorry plight. Yet must there be a sequel to this. Had he been left to die on the Island he could not have told us his story thus far; moreover his last word is that the tale is yet to finish. May I be there to hear!

* * * * *