Part 8

I once read somewhere that clever women always tell men that they look overworked. Yesterday I made the discovery of a form of words even more soothing when proceeding from feminine lips: another weapon in the clever woman’s verbal armoury—should she need any assistance that way. The solicitous phrase “You are looking overworked,” is unction perhaps more for the young than the middle-aged and elderly. No young man, however conscious of his own abysmal laziness, can resist it, or want to resist it. But the maturer man—the man to whom Father Time’s chief gift is an increase of girth—must be differently handled. He may be overworked, but to be told about it, however seducingly, does not much interest him. Besides he knows when it is not true: when what looks like the effect of overwork (supposing the lady to have something to go upon) is really due to late hours or a glass too many. In short, he is a little too old for any flattery but the kind of flattery he is not too old for. Therefore the clever woman, in dealing with him, must do otherwise. Taking him by the hand, she must look at his features with a close and careful scrutiny which, although it is assumed, can be extremely comforting, and then say, in a tone almost of triumph, “You’re getting thinner.”

Isn’t it about time that you sent me another medical report? Here is a passage in Swift’s letters that I hit upon last night:—

“And remember that riches are nine parts in ten of all that is good in life, and health is the tenth; drinking coffee comes long after, and yet it is the eleventh; but without the two former, you cannot drink it right.”

And here is to-day’s poem:—

If on a Spring night I went by And God were standing there, What is the prayer that I would cry To Him? This is the prayer: O Lord of Courage grave, O Master of this night of Spring! Make firm in me a heart too brave To ask Thee anything!

Who do you think wrote that? It is a very fine specimen of what I call “Novelists’ poetry”—the poetry which men known for their prose and romance now and then produce. Most of them occasionally try their hand, and often very interestingly. One of the best short poems in the language is an epitome of the life of man by Eden Phillpotts. Grant Allen wrote some remarkable lines. The author of _The Children of the Ghetto_ has published a volume of his verses which is full of arresting things. Thomas Hardy, of course, has become poet altogether, and Maurice Hewlett seems to be that way inclined. But still I don’t tell you who wrote the lines just quoted: John Galsworthy.

R. H.

CII

VERENA RABY TO RICHARD HAVEN

MY DEAR RICHARD,—I have come to the conclusion that the immediate need is to get my will properly fixed up. If you won’t accept the responsibility of distributing money according to your own judgment I must make some definite bequests. I calculate that after relations and friends and certain dependants are provided for or remembered, there ought to be as much as £50,000 to leave for some specific useful purpose. It might go to build and endow alms-houses, it might form a benevolent fund of some kind. Please concentrate on this question, even though it tends towards that pernicious evil “interference.”

I am in momentary fear of losing Miss Power because her mother has been ill; but hope for the best. I don’t know what we should do without her.

V.

CIII

RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY

Now, Verena, you’re talking. The interest on £50,000 at five per cent, with income-tax at present rate deducted, would be, say, £1750. Well, you can do lots of things with £1750 a year.

Have you ever heard of the National Art Collections Fund? This is a society of amateurs of art who collect money in order to acquire for the nation pictures and drawings and sculptures which the nation ought not to miss but which it has no official means of purchasing. For although we have a National Gallery of the highest quality, the Treasury grant for buying new masterpieces for it is so small that, unless private enterprise assists, everything goes to America. How would you like your £1750 a year to assist the purchase of pictures for the nation—whether hung in London or elsewhere—for ever?

And then have you ever heard of the National Trust for the Preservation of Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty? This was founded by the late Octavia Hill with the purpose of acquiring for the nation, for ever, beauty spots and open spaces and old comely buildings. Isn’t that a good and humane idea? To preserve a piece of grass land, with all its trees intact, in the midst of a new building estate! All kinds of parks and commons and hill-tops are now inviolate through the activities of this Society. Would you like your money to strengthen their hands? No one with money to spare who followed Octavia Hill could go wrong.

That is enough for the present; but I will supply further hints.

You want stories, you say. Here is one which was told yesterday, at Mrs. Beldham’s, by a very attractive and humorous woman. We had been talking of jewels; apropos, I think, of Lady Crowborough’s pearl necklace which she took off and allowed me to hold. Nothing more exquisite than the temperature and texture of them could I imagine; only about twenty-five thousand pounds’ worth, that’s all. I wonder that the psychic quality of jewels has not appealed more to novelists, for there can be no doubt that they are curiously sympathetic. Pearls in particular, which grow the finer the more constantly and intimately they are worn by congenial wearers, but which languish and decline in lustre as their wearer loses health, and worn on some necks refuse to glow and shine at all. I can see a Hawthorney kind of story in which the living pearls of a dead mistress play a subtle part.

Anyway, we were talking about precious stones, and this Mrs. Dee told us her hard case. For she is the owner of some of the most beautiful emeralds that exist in this country: the owner, but she cannot get at them. They belonged, she said, to her Aunt Emily, and it was always understood that upon the death of that estimable and ageing lady they were to descend to her. It was, indeed, in the will. And so they would have done, had not the too officious layers-out neglected to remove them from the old lady’s neck.

“Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’,” said Mrs. Dee, “is a melancholy poem, but its sadness is as nothing compared with mine, when I sit beside Aunt Emily’s grave in the Finchley Road cemetery and think of all my jewels growing dim only six feet or so below me.”

R. H.

_P.S._—Behold to-day’s poem:—

Men say they know many things; But lo! they have taken wings, The arts and sciences, And a thousand appliances; The wind that blows Is all that anybody knows.

CIV

ROY BARRANCE TO HIS SISTER HAZEL

BEST OF BEANS,—I am having quite a good time here, after all. One of the carriage horses isn’t at all a bad hack and there’s some ripping country. At the end of Hargest Ridge there’s an old race-course which hasn’t been used for centuries, where you can gallop for miles. Aunt Verena looks perfectly fit but she has to keep still. She is awfully decent to me and really wants to set me on my feet. Why is it that Aunts and Uncles can be so much jollier and more sympathetic than fond parents? One of Nesta’s kids is here too—Lobbie—and we have a great rag every bed-time. Aunt Verena doesn’t seem to think that I am cut out for the Diplomatic Service. Perhaps not. Personally I should prefer to manage an estate. If it comes to the worst, there’s always the stage, but after the Stella incident the very thought of singing musical-comedy songs makes me shudder. There’s rather a nice Irish girl here, who reads to Aunt Verena, named Clemency Power. She was in a canteen in France during the War. I never met a Clemency before. She’s got a heavenly touch of brogue.

Tell me all about things and how the home-barometer reads. Is it still “Stormy”?—Yours till Hell freezes,

ROY

CV

RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY

MY DEAR, with a view to getting assistance towards the solution of the great testamentary problem, I went yesterday to see Bemerton the bookseller and inquire about the literature of charity (for, as that witty cleric, the late Dean Beeching, wrote:—

It all comes out of the books I read And it all goes into the books I write

—or, more accurately, the letters I write, for I have never touched authorship proper) and he produced from those inexhaustible shelves a report on alms-houses and kindred endowments published in 1829 under the title _The Endowed Charities of the City of London_. This exceedingly formidable tome I am going to peruse and send you the results; and really I don’t think I could do a more disinterested thing, for none of your money is coming to me, and it consists of nearly eight-hundred double-column pages of the kind of small type into which the Editor of the _Times_ puts the letters of the most insignificant of his correspondents.

Bemerton, by the way, told me a very nice ghost story which, when I can find an hour or two, I am going to write out for you. It was told him by a distinguished Orientalist, and he believes it and I should like to.

There’s a threat of Prohibition coming to England too, but I hope against it. There is too much of “Thou shalt not” in the world. If people were trusted more, there would probably be less excess and folly. So far as I can gather from those who know America, one effect—and by no means a desirable one—of the dry enactment is to increase trickery and mendacity. The illicit sale of alcoholic beverages still goes on, but as it is illegal it must be done secretly and lies must be told to cover it. Personally I would rather think of a nation too convivially merry than of one systematically deceptive.

Omar should be arrayed against Prohibition at once:

A blessing, we should use it, should we not? And if a curse, why then Who set it there?

—that wants some answering. All the same, there are probably more people who would be better for less drink than those who would be improved by more; but the second class exists. I have met several of them.

One of the best commentaries on abstinence by compulsion is that of Walter Raleigh, the Professor of Literature. During the War there was a movement at Oxford to prevent Freshers’ Wines and keep all intoxicants out of the Colleges; and a petition to the Vice-Chancellor to this effect was signed by a large number of persons, chiefly in Holy Orders. Walter Raleigh, however, wouldn’t sign it, and this is part of the letter in which he gave his reasons:—

“I cannot think it wise to ask the resident members of the University to adopt rules drafted for them by a body of petitioners the bulk of whom are neither responsible for the discipline of the Colleges nor well acquainted with the life of the undergraduates.

“A certain amount of freedom to go wrong is essential in a University, where men are learning, not to obey, but to choose.

“Thousands of the men whose habits you censure have already died for their people and country. Virtually all have fought. Why is it, that when the greatest mystery of the Christian religion comes alive again before our eyes, so many of the authorized teachers of Christianity do not see it or understand it, but retire to the timid security of a prohibitive and negative virtue? Your petition is an insult to the men who have saved you and are saving you.”

—That’s pretty good, don’t you think?

R. H.

CVI

ANTOINETTE ROSSITER TO HER MOTHER

DEAREST MUMMY,—I hope you will come home soon. We are not having much fun, nurse is so stubbern. Topsy brought in a mole yesterday and you never saw such darling little hands as it has. Daddy has promised to have a coat made up for you if we get a thousand of them.

I wish you would write to nurse to say that I needn’t have cod liver oil. A telegram would be better and I will pay you back for it out of my money box.

Uncle Hugh has sent Cyril a toy theatre and we are going to do Midsummer Night’s Dream which Daddy says was by bacon. He won’t tell us what he means.

When you come home you will find a surprise in the garden. I mean you will if it comes up. We have sown Welcome in mignonette in the bed under your sitting-room window but there are such lots of slugs that we can’t count on it.

Daddy says that he is much more important than Aunt Verena.—Your loving

TONY

x x x x x x x x x x

CVII

NICHOLAS DEVOSE TO VERENA RABY

MY DEAREST SERENA,—I am sending a selection, and an easel with them. I suggest that you adopt the Japanese custom and change them periodically. The Japanese make each picture the King of the Wall for a week or so in turn, but I should like you to have a fresh one of my drawings on the easel every day—for the whole day. That is, of course, if you like them. I cannot tell you how happy I am to be allowed to do this. I feel that I am again in your life, but with perfect safety: vicariously, so to speak, but with the fullest fidelity too. Let some one advise me of safe arrival. I am sending you sixty picked things—so you must be well again in sixty days! But I daresay that if you did the picking you would make a totally different choice. One of the tragic things in an artist’s life—and I don’t mean by artist only a painter—is the tendency of people to admire what he thinks his least worthy efforts.

N. D.

CVIII

CLEMENCY POWER TO PATRICIA POWER

ANGEL PAT,—I am so sorry about Herself. Of course I’ll come directly, if it’s necessary. I have told Miss Raby and she agrees. Let me have a telegram anyhow directly you get this. I’ll tell you a secret, Pat. I have an admirer, and at any moment he may sue for my hand! Or such is my unmaidenly guess. It’s this plaguey Kerry voice of mine. Every one says sweet things about it, but for this boy—Miss Raby’s nephew who has been staying here—it’s been too much entirely. That he will propose I feel certain and I wish he wouldn’t. I was bothered enough in France, but one doesn’t take War proposals seriously, especially when the men are away from their own country. But this boy is as eager as a trout stream.—Yours,

CLEM.

CIX

RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY

DEAR VERENA, I now send you some notes collected from the perusal of the gigantic volume on the Endowed Charities of London as they were examined by a commission early in the last century. It is a monument to the public-spirited dead. In London the benefactions run chiefly to free schools, alms-houses, subsidized sermons and doles of bread and coal—“sea coal,” as it is usually called. Now and then there is an original touch, as when one Gilbert Keate gave to the parish of St. Dunstan’s in the East—you know, the church with the lovely spire built on flying buttresses—“£60, to be lent gratis, yearly, during the space of four years, to three young men inhabitants of this parish (one of them to be of the Dolphin precinct), by the vestry, to each £20 on good security, by bond for repayment at four years’ end, as the inhabitants in vestry should think fit.”

Samuel Wilson did even better, his will, dated October 27th, 1766, containing this clause: “And my mind and will further is, that the said sum of twenty thousand pounds, or whatever sum be so paid by my said executors to the said chamberlain, shall be and remain as a perpetual fund, to be lent to young men who have been set up one year, or not more than two years, in some trade or manufacture, in the city of London, or within three miles thereof, and can give satisfactory security for the repayment of the money so lent to them; ... and further my mind and will is, that no part of this money shall be lent to an alehouse keeper, a distiller or vendor of distilled liquors.”

That seems to me to be a very excellent disposition of money; but probably it is not in your line. The Corporation of London was appointed to manage the charity, but as a rule these rich City men left their money to their Chartered Companies for distribution. Where alms-houses, for example, are built and endowed there must obviously be some organization to carry them on; and the City Companies, who are commonly supposed to devote their time to eating and drinking, really exist largely for this admirable purpose. So do churchwardens; carrying round the plate is but a small part of their duties.

Here is a pretty compliment, to take the taste of all that away:—

If I were a rose at your window, Happiest rose of its crew, Every blossom I bore would bend inward: They’d know where the sunshine grew.

A letter from an old friend making his first long voyage reaches me to-day from Aden. He says, “Why don’t artists oftener paint circular pictures? Nothing could be more beautiful than the views of water and sky, and now and then of scenery or buildings, that I have been getting through my porthole. I would almost go so far as to say that round pictures are the only ones—at any rate of the open air. You should get one of the Galleries to arrange a Porthole Exhibition and start the fashion.”—Good night,

R. H.

_P.S._—Here is the latest definition of appendicitis. “The thing you have the day before your doctor buys a Rolls-Royce.”

CX

HAZEL BARRANCE TO VERENA RABY

DEAR AUNT VERENA,—Since Roy has come back from his visit, I seem to know so much more about you. I don’t mean that he tells us anything, but he answers questions. I want to thank you for your kindness to him, which was just what he was needing to pull him together, because father never has time to take any real interest in him and is impatient too. Fathers and sons so often, it seems to me, are the last people who ought to meet. Mothers and daughters can hit it off badly enough and misunderstand each other thoroughly, but I don’t think there is so much real hostility between them as between those others. I don’t think hostility is the word; it is a kind of rivalry, particularly as the mother usually takes the boy’s side. Anyway, if you are going to be as much interested in poor old Roy as he says, I am sure he will buck up and do something worth while, because he has lots of ability and makes friends too. In fact, when it comes to the other sex he makes them too easily. His chief trouble is that he had just enough Army life to unsettle him and not enough to give him discipline. The War came for him at the wrong time: he ought to have been younger and escaped it or older and have gone properly into it.

I was much more lucky, for I shall never regret a moment of my V.A.D. work. But I wish I could be busy again. So does nearly every girl I know. We all miss the War horribly; which sounds a callous and selfish thing to say, but isn’t really. It shows, however, that there must be something very wrong with our civilization if it needs a ghastly thing like that to give thousands and thousands of girls their only chance to be useful!—Your loving

HAZEL

_P.S._—A hospital nurse I know said a funny thing yesterday. She said that one of the tragedies of nursing is that the officer you restore to life is so seldom the officer you want to dine out with; and another tragedy is that that is what he can’t understand.

CXI

PATRICIA POWER TO CLEMENCY POWER

DEAREST CLEM,—Herself is herself again.

Your news is very exciting. Of course you were bound to have a proposal at Kington, because you have them everywhere. I rather like the sound of the boy. Do tell me some more about him and how you yourself feel. There seem to be no boys here, except the Luttrells and the Hills, and they are not very luscious; but there’s to be a dance at Kenmare and perhaps we shall see a new face or two then. O Lord for some new faces! (The maiden’s prayer.)

What about that Doctor out in France? Where does he come in? You mustn’t be a heart-breaker, you know, darling.

Dilly and Dally grow in beauty day by day and go on giving amazing supplies of milk. Old Biddy Sullivan has been drinking again. Mrs. O’Connor’s little girl the other day was overheard laying it down as a maxim, to her brother, that one should always tell the truth, not because it is right, but because “you can be sure your friends will find you out.” They do, don’t they?—Your loving and jealous

PAT

CXII

RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY

DEAR VERENA, I return to the Charity Book. Behold the case of Peter Symonds, which may, or may not, offer suggestions. “Peter Symonds, by will, dated 4th April, 1586, gave to the parson and churchwardens of All Saints, Lombard Street, yearly, for ever, £3, 2s. 8d., to be received of the churchwardens and socialty of the Company of Mercers, to be employed by the said parson and churchwardens in manner following, viz. to pay 30s. thereof yearly, on Good Friday, to the children of Christ’s Hospital, in London, on condition that the same children, or threescore of them at least, should, on the same Good Friday, in the morning, yearly, for ever, come into the said church of All Saints ... and he directed that the said parson and churchwardens should bestow 3s. 4d. in the purchase of good raisins, which should be divided in threescore parts, in paper, and one part given to each child; and he gave 16d. of the said £3, 2s. 8d. to the beadles of the hospital, who should come with the children.”

Peter Symonds was a man, and perhaps you would rather be guided by a woman. If so, observe the example of Margaret Sharles:—

“By will, dated 2nd September, 1600, Margaret Sharles bequeathed £20 unto such a learned man as her overseers should think good, to preach every week in the year, in the parish of Christ Church ... she also bequeathed to the vicar and churchwardens, £5 a year, to be employed for ever, towards the relief of the vicar, curate, clerk, and sexton by the discretion of the churchwardens there; she also gave unto and amongst her poor tenants within the said parish, £6 yearly, for ever, to be bestowed in manner following: £1, 6s. 8d. for a load of great coals; 16s. for a thousand billets, to be distributed amongst her said tenants, three days before Christmas, and the residue thereof to be spent upon a dinner for her said poor tenants on Christmas Day, at the sign of the Bell, in Newgate-market.”

Even better, for your purpose, is the example of Jane Shank:—

“By will, dated 7th July, 1795, Mrs. Jane Shank directed that the Painter-stainers’ Company should divide the interest on her fortune into twelve equal parts, and shall apply eleven-twelfth parts thereof in payment of pensions of £10 a year, to indigent blind women, and retain the remaining twelfth part as a compensation for their trouble and expenses. Jane Shank requested that the Company would advertise for proper objects of the charity in two morning and two evening papers, three times each, as often as any vacancies should happen; and she directed that the persons to be elected should be of the age of 61 years at the least, should have been blind three years, should be widows or unmarried, and unable to maintain themselves by any employment, should be in distressed circumstances, born in England, not in Wales or Ireland, have lived three years in their present parish, have no income for life above £10 a year, never having received alms of any parish or place, never having been a common beggar, and being of sober life and conversation.”

Jane, you see, was a forerunner of Sir Arthur Pearson of St. Dunstan’s, who would, I am sure, have no difficulty in recommending a suitable destination for any spare funds of your own.

But I must not weary you (or myself) with these testaments.

Here is a story that was told by my friend, Mrs. Torwood Leigh. Towards the end of the War she gave a party to an Officers’ mess stationed in the neighbourhood, and almost every guest exceeded. The next day, when they called to return thanks, each one in turn took her aside to apologize—for another!