Part 4

I pocketed my notebook and set off for the East End. Oh, there were all sorts of flowers and doubtless it looked the funniest of flower shows you would ever have seen. For example, the qualification necessary for exhibition was that your plant had been grown in a pot and on a window sill. It was a qualification not difficult to fulfil. In all my wanderings there to find the place, no plot of ground did I see, save a graveyard around a church. But the only things that grew there were the stones in memory of the dead; and they, begrimed with soot and dirt, were sorry flowers to grace a tomb.

You can imagine the pitiful, shrivelled little things that had struggled to maintain life on the window sills of the houses in those dingy courts and darksome alleys. Never did I see such an array in all my life. They would almost, when you thought of country gardens where the daffodils stand up and brave the April winds, they would almost have brought the tears to your eyes.

Little geraniums there were, blinking their poor, tired eyes at the light. One woman brought a plant of sweet pea, which was climbing so wearily, yet so anxiously out of its little pot of red up a wee thin stake of wood. You knew it would never reach the light of the heaven it so yearned to see. The two faint blossoms that it bore were pale, like fragile slum children. What would I not have given then to wrench it out of its poor bed and give it to the great generous sweep of an open field, with a hedge of hawthorn perhaps on which to lean its tired arms.

The woman saw my eyes in its direction and she beamed with conscious pride.

“It doesn’t look very healthy,” said I.

She gazed at it and then at me with open wonder in her eyes.

“Not ’ealthy?” she said—“why, I’ve never seen none looking better. Look at that pansy over there—it can’t ’old its ’ead up.”

“But why compare it with the worst one in the show?” I asked—“I didn’t mean it as a personal criticism when I said it wasn’t healthy. I’m sure you’ve taken a tremendous amount of care over it.”

“Care!” she exclaimed—“I should just think I ’ave. It’s ’ad all the scrapin’s off the road in front of our ’ouse.”

I passed on, for the judges were coming round and the young curate just down from the university has not a proper respect for the Press. He has probably written for it. Now the young curate of the parish was the principal judge.

I did not hear what he said about the sweet pea. I had gone further on to where a woman was standing with her hand affectionately round a pot from which rose a fine, healthy plant, with rich, deep purple flowers nestling in the leaves that grew to the very pinnacle of the stem. There I waited. I wanted to hear what the judges were going to say about this one. I wanted to hear very much indeed.

This woman, too, seeing my interest in her exhibit, smiled with generous satisfaction.

“Think I’ve got a chanst, sir?”

“I don’t know,” said I—“it’s fine and strong.”

“And look at all the blossoms,” said she with enthusiasm—“you wouldn’t believe it, but my son brought that from the country last year when ’e went for the houtin’. ’E brought it back, dragged up almost to the roots it was—an’ it was in flower then. ‘Put it in a vawse,’ I says, but my ole man, ’e says—‘Shove it in a bloomin’ pot,’ ’e says, ‘that’ll grow,’ ’e says—‘it’s got roots to it.’ So we puts it in a pot and sticks it out on a window sill, and there it is. It died down to nothin’ last winter, but my ole man, ’e wouldn’t let me throw the pot away. ‘Give it a chanst of the spring,’ ’e says—‘give it a chanst of the spring.’ And bless my soul, if we didn’t see little bits of green sticking up through the mould before the beginning of last March.”

“It’s been a constant interest since then?” said I.

“Hinterest! Why my ole man said as I was killin’ it, the way I watered it and looked after it.”

“And what do you call it?” I asked.

“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Nobody seems to know. We call it—William.”

I laughed. “There is a flower called Sweet William,” said I.

“Perhaps that’s it,” she answered, thoughtfully. “But it don’t smell—leastways, I’ve never smelt nothin’ from it.”

I stood aside as the judges came up. When he saw the plant, standing so bravely and so healthily, and so beautifully in its bright red pot, the curate laughed out loud.

“Look here,” said he to one of the other judges, who came up and laughed as well.

“Do you know what you’ve got here, my good woman?” asked the curate.

She shook her head.

“Well, we can’t give you anything for this—it’s only a common nettle—a red dead nettle.”

“But it’s a beautiful colour—ain’t it?” said she, with a flame of red in her face.

“Oh—it’s a beautiful colour, no doubt,” replied the curate easily—“so, I hope, is every plant that grows in the highways and the byways.”

“Well, then, why shouldn’t it get a prize?” she demanded.

“Because it’s only a common dead nettle,” said the curate, very softly, turning away wrath.

“But it’s ’ealthier and stronger and finer than any o’ them other flowers,” said she.

“Quite so—no doubt—you might expect that. These others are cultivated flowers, you see. This is only a common dead nettle.”

I saw the editor when I returned.

“No stuff worth having,” said I—disconsolately, for I was thinking of my few short lines.

“Nothing funny at all?” he asked.

“Nothing,” said I, and I told him about the red dead nettle.

“But I think that’s dammed funny,” he said.

“Do you?” I said.

XII

THE FEMININE APPRECIATION OF MATHEMATICS

XII

THE FEMININE APPRECIATION OF MATHEMATICS

If I could approach mathematics with the same spirit as do ninety-eight women out of a hundred, I might be rather good at them. As it is, my power of will in face of algebraical figures, in face even of numbers that exceed the functions of the simplest forms of arithmetic, my power of will stands aghast. I can do nothing.

Now, ninety-eight women out of a hundred are far more ignorant of the mere rudiments of mathematics than am I; yet with an instinct which I would give my soul to possess they can solve problems and carry on the ordinary business of life with an ability that is little short of marvellous.

Truly, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and most especially when that learning is of mathematics. If once you have tried to weigh hydrogen on an agate-balanced scale, you are for ever unfitted for the common-or-garden mathematical exigencies of life. Now this is where a woman has all the pull. The most that she has ever had to calculate the weight of is a pound of flour or seven and a half pounds of sirloin already weighed and attested by the butcher. When, then, it comes to weighing the baby on the scale-pans in the kitchen, she will fling on the weights with such a degree of confidence that the result is bound to be correct. You and I, on the other hand, would approach the matter with such delicacy of touch—believing, and quite rightly, that a baby was of far more importance than all the immeasurable quantities of hydrogen in the world—with such delicacy and care should we approach it that the poor infant would have caught its death of cold and be in a comatose condition of exhaustion before we had decided that the scale-pan was clean or the weights were in proper condition to be used.

This smattering of general education is a fatal business. It unfits men for all the real and useful demands of life.

Only the other day, my friend Cruikshank broke a brass candlestick and looked up helplessly from the wreck.

“Where on earth can I get any solder from?” said he.

“What’s solder?” asked Bellwattle, his wife.

The question was so direct that, for the moment, it confused him.

“Solder?” he repeated. “Solder? Oh, it’s stuff to mend metal with.”

“I’ll do it with sealing-wax,” said Bellwattle.

Cruikshank laughed and, as he said to me afterwards—

“I gave it to her to do. It’s best to let women learn by experience. Sealing-wax!” And he laughed knowingly at me. I knew he meant it kindly, so I laughed with him; but the next day I made inquiries about the candlestick.

“How did she get on?” I asked.

“By Jove, she’s done it,” said he. “It won’t bear much knocking about, of course, but it stands as firm as a rock. It’s only a woman,” he added, “who’d think of mending a brass candlestick with sealing-wax.”

“It’s only a woman who’d succeed,” said I.

But this has nothing to do with mathematics, and it is of mathematics that I want to speak.

If you have any interest in photography, you know how tricksy a matter is the exposure of a plate. It is tricksy to you and I will tell you why. It is because your academic study of the process has taught you that the two-thousandth part of a second is sufficient exposure in order to get cloud effects. Conceive, then, how your brain whirls with figures when you come to take a photograph of an interior or a portrait of some one sitting in a room. I will not remind you of the tortures which your mind must suffer, nor the result of such torture when at last you develop the plate in the dark-room—both are too painful to speak about. Now, a woman knows nothing about this two-thousandth part of a second. She would not believe there were such a measurable fraction of time if you told her. She just exposes the plate; that is all.

One day I had to get a photograph taken in a hurry. I marched into a photographer’s in the Strand. There was first a narrow passage, hung with frames filled with photos of young men and young women looking their worst in their best. Then I was confronted by a flight of stairs which I mounted, to find myself in a great big room hung also with photographs—photographs of family groups, of babies in their characteristic attitudes as their mothers had given them to the world. Every conceivable sort of photograph was there, but the room, except for an American roll-topped desk near the window, was empty.

I coughed, and the head of a young girl—not more than twenty years of age—popped up above the desk.

“Can Mr. Robinson take my photograph this morning?” I asked.

“Mr. Robinson is not in at present,” she replied.

“I rather wanted my photograph taken in a hurry,” said I.

“Oh, you can have it taken,” said she. “Would you like it done at once?”

“At once, if you please,” I answered.

She rose from her seat behind the roll-topped desk and she walked to the door.

“Then will you step into the waiting-room?” she asked.

I obeyed. The waiting-room had a mirror and a pair of brushes. When I thought of the families whose portraits I had seen within—I refrained.

“I shall do,” said I, “as I am.”

After a few moments’ delay there was a knock on the door. I opened it. There again was the little lady waiting for me.

“Will you step up to the studio, please?” she said, and I received the impression from her voice of anxious assistants waiting in rows to receive me, ready to take my features and record them upon a photographic plate for the benefit of posterity.

Up into the studio, then, I went; a gaunt, great place with white-blinded windows that stared up to the dull, grey sky. But it was empty. I looked in vain for the assistants—there were none. And when she began to wheel the camera into place I stood amazed.

“Are you the whole business of Robinson and Co.?” I asked.

She smiled encouragingly.

“Mr. Robinson is out,” said she.

“I don’t believe there is a Mr. Robinson,” I replied.

She laughed gleefully at that and repeated that there was such a person, but he was out.

“And does he leave you to the responsibility of the entire premises?” I asked.

“Yes,” said she.

“What do you do if any one comes into the portrait gallery downstairs while you’re up here?”

“Oh, that’s all right,” she replied confidently; “they don’t often come.”

I let her fix that abominable instrument of torture at the back of my neck. Her fingers tickled me as she did it, but I said nothing. I was trying in my mind to assess the value of this business of Mr. Robinson. It was no easy job. I had not got beyond single figures when she walked back to the camera.

I glanced up at the leaden sky.

“It’s rather dull,” said I; “what exposure are you going to give?”

“Oh, I think once will be enough.”

“Once what?” I asked.

“Just once,” said she.

“But, good heavens!” I exclaimed, and I thought of the two-thousandth part of a second—“it must be one of something. Is it seconds or minutes or half-hours or what?”

She burst out laughing.

“I don’t know what it is,” she replied, as if it were the simplest matter in the world, “only Mr. Robinson says my once is as good as his twice.”

“Is it?” said I. “As good as his twice? What a splendid once it must be!”

Now that is what I mean. That is the feminine appreciation of mathematics. I wish I had it. It may not be of much service on the office stool, but in a world of men and women it is invaluable.

XIII

THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

XIII

THE MATERNAL INSTINCT

Some things there are which you may count upon for ever. The fittest will always survive, despite the million charities to aid the incompetent; the maternal instinct will always be the deepest human incentive, no matter who may gibe at the sentiment which clings about little children.

Now, if it be true that Art is the voice of the Age in which we live; that the painter paints what the eye of the Age has seen, the singer sings the songs which the Age has heard, the man of letters writes the thoughts which have passed through the mind of the Age—if all this is true, then how strange and unreal an Age this must be.

For if for one moment you chose to consider it, there are but few painters, few singers, few writers who express the immutable laws of life. Among writers most of all, perhaps, this is an age which devotes itself to the unfittest. The physically unfit, the morally unfit, the socially unfit—these are the characters which fill the pages of those who write to-day.

The old hero, the man of great strength, of great honour, of great courage, he no longer exists in literature. I am told he is old-fashioned, a copy-book individual, a puppet set in motion with no subtle movements of character, but with wires too plainly seen, worked by a hand too obviously visible. There is no Art in him, I am told. I am glad there is not. He would lose all the qualities of heroship for me if there were.

In times gone by, though, this old-fashioned hero was just as real a man as is the hero of to-day. In times gone by this hero was not unnatural, not wanting in character or humanity when he slept with the maid of his choice, a naked sword between them guarding the pricelessness of her virginity. But now—to-day—how wanting in character do you imagine would he be thought for such a deed as that? How painfully unreal?

Is this the fault of the Age? Or is it the fault of the writer? Is it that the Age cannot produce a real hero? Or is it that he is there in numbers in the midst of us and the man of letters has not the clearness of vision to see him? For it is not the fittest, but the unfittest who survives in the pages of literature now.

And thus it is also when you find treatment in fiction of that immutable law, the maternal instinct. If in the novel of to-day you meet the character of a woman with a child, you may be fairly confident that it will be shown to you sooner or later in the ensuing pages how easily she will desert it for the love of some man other than her husband, or how, loving that man, her soul will be wracked ere she bids it farewell. But, tortured or not, she will go. No matter how skilfully she is shown to repent of it later, still she will go.

Now, is that the fault of the Age, or is it the fault of the writer? In danger or in love, do women desert their children? It may happen that they do, but that is a very different matter. All that glitters is not gold—all that happens is not real. Yet it seems to be the choice of the modern writer to seize upon these isolated happenings, give them a coating of reality, and offer them to the public as life.

But life is not a narrow business where things just happen and that is all. Life is the length and breadth of this great universe where things are, in relation to the whole system of suns and moons and stars. Now the maternal instinct is a law without which this wonderfully regulated system would shatter and crumble into a thousand little pieces.

But no one extols it in this age of ours. Talk of it and you are dubbed a sentimentalist at once. Write of it and the cheap irony of critics is heaped upon you. Yet there seems no greater and no grander struggle to me than when these inevitable laws march through the invading army of vermin and of parasites to their inevitable end of victory.

The other day I witnessed a most thrilling spectacle: a mother defending her child from death—a duel where the odds against victory were legion.

In the hedge that shields my garden from the road there is a thrush’s nest. I saw her build it. She was very doubtful about me at first; played all sorts of tricks to deceive me; decoyed my attention away while her mate was a-building; sent him to distract my mind while she was putting those finishing touches to the house of which only a woman knows the secret—and knows it so well.

I think before it was completed she had lost much of her distrust in me, for I did nothing to disturb her. It was not in my mind to see what she would do if things happened. I just wanted everything to be—that was all. And so, after a time, she would hop about the lawn where I was sitting, taking me silently thereby into her confidence, making me feel that I was not such an outcast of Nature as she had supposed me to be at first.

I tried to live up to that as well as I could. Whenever I passed the nest and saw her uplifted beak, her two watchful eyes gazing alert over the rim of it, I assumed ignorance at the expense of her thinking what an unobservant fool I must be. But there were always moments when she was away from home and I, stealing to the nest, found opportunity for discovering how things were going on. Five fine blue eggs were laid at last. I think she must have guessed that I counted them, for one morning she caught me with my hand in the nest. I slunk away feeling a sorry sort of fool for my clumsy interference. She flew at once to see what I had done. I guess the terror that must have filled her heart. But when she had counted them herself and found her house in order, she came out on to the lawn and looked at me as though I were one of those strange enigmas which life sometimes offers to every one of us.

At length one day, when I called and gently put in my hand—leaving my card, as you might say—the eggs were there no longer. In place of them was a soft, warm mass like a heap of swan’s-down, palpitating with life.

I met her later on the lawn, when she perked her head up at me and as good as said:

“I suppose you know I’ve got other things to do now, besides looking beautiful.”

But I thought she looked splendid. What is more, I told her so, and it seemed just for the moment as if she understood, as if there came back into her eyes that look of grateful vanity which she wore last spring when her mate was wooing her with his songs from the elm tree across the way. But the next moment she had put all flattery behind her and was haggling with a worm, not as to price no doubt, but haggling nevertheless for possession.

Well, the household went on splendidly, until one day I saw my cat sitting on the path below the nest staring up into the bushes.

“You little devil!” I shouted, and she went galloping down the garden with a stone trundling at her heels.

I kept a closer watch after that and, one morning, hearing a great noise as of the songs of many birds while I was at my breakfast, I just stepped out to see what was happening.

I was held spellbound by what I saw. For there, on the path again below the nest, sat the cat and two yards from her—scarcely more—stood my little mother-thrush, her eyes dilated with terror, her feathers ruffled and swelling on her throat, singing—singing—singing, as though her heart would burst.

It can only last a moment, I thought. One spring and the cat will have her. But, no! Before the greatness of that courage, before the glory of that song, the cat was silenced and made impotent to move. There, within a few feet of her was her prey. With one swift rush, with one fell stroke of her velvet paw, she could have laid it low. But she was up against a law greater than that which nerves the hunter to his cunning.

For five minutes, with throat swelling and eyes like little pins of fire, the mother sang her song of fearless maternity. The glorious notes rang from her in ceaseless trills and tireless cadences. I have heard a singer at Covent Garden, when the whole house rose as one person and applauded her to the very roof, but never have I heard such a song as this, which put to silence the very laws of God that His greatest law might triumph.

For five minutes she sang and then, with crouching steps, the cat turned tail and crawled away into the garden. The thrush ceased her singing and fluttered exhausted up to the nest.

And they write of women deserting their children!

XIV

FROM MY PORTFOLIO

XIV

FROM MY PORTFOLIO

He has just reached his eightieth year. Eighty times—not conscious perhaps of them all—he has seen the wall-flowers blossom in his old garden; well-nigh eighty times has he thinned out his lettuces and his spring onions, pruned his few rose trees, weeded his gravel paths.

Now he is bent with rheumatism; his rounded back and stooping head, his tremulous knees in their old corduroy breeches, are but sorry promises of what he was. Yet with what I have been told and what I can easily imagine, it is plainly that I can see the fine stalwart fellow he has been. Until the age of seventy-two he was the carrier for our village. How many journeys he made, fair weather or foul, always up to the stroke of time, never forgetting the message for this person, the purchase for that, they will all tell you here in the village. I know nothing of his life as a carrier. It is of an old man I give you my picture—an old man awaiting the coming of death with a clear eye and a sturdy heart, enjoying the last moments of life while he may, and facing those sorrows and deprivations which come with old age in a way that many a younger man might learn and profit from.

Only a short time since, his wife departed upon her last journey. The winter came and snatched her from him just as the first frost nips the last of the autumn flowers. Her frail white petals drooped and then they fell. He was left to press them between the leaves of that book of Life which, with trembling fingers, he still clutched within his hand.

He was too ill to follow her body to its quiet little bed in that corner of God’s acre where it was made; but I can feel the loneliness in the heart of him when he turned and turned with wakeful eyes that night, stretching out his knotted fingers to the empty place beside him—the place in that bed which had been hers for so many happy years and was hers no longer.

They thought he would never pull through that winter after his loss; and indeed he must have fought manfully with that undaunted courage of a man who clings to life, no matter what misfortune, because it is his right—his heritage. For imagine the long, sleepless nights which must have followed the departure of his gentle bed-fellow! Think of those weary, endless silences which once had been filled by the whisperings of their voices! For in bed and at night-time, the old people always whisper. It is as though they were deeply conscious of the invisible presence of God and His angels. They talk in hushed voices as though they were in church.

I can hear her saying—

“John.”

“Yes,” I can hear him reply.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes—are you?”

“I am. Isn’t it a windy night?”