raifo'
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE
LISTENER'S LURE
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Mr. Ingleside
Over Bemerton's
One Day and Another
Fireside and Sunshine
Character and Comedy
Old Lamps for New
The Hambledon Men
The Open Road
The Friendly Town
Her Infinite Variety
Good Company
The Gentlest Art
The Second Post
The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb
The Life of Charles Lamb
A Swan and Her Friends
A Wanderer in London
A Wanderer in Holland
A Wanderer in Paris
Highways and Byways in Sussex
Anne's Terrible Good Nature
The Slowcoach
and
The Pocket Edition of the Works ot
Charles Lamb
LISTENER'S LURE
AN OBLIQUE NARRATION
BY
E. V. LUCAS
NINTH EDITION
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
First Published {Crown Svo) . . September igob
Second Edition October igob
Third Edition November igob
Fourth Edition January igoj
Fifth Edition (Fcaf>. Szo) . . . September igo8
Sixth Edition October /goo
Seventh Edition October igio
Eighth Edition March ign
Ninth Edition ign
\\\
THE PEOPLE IN THE BOOK
Albourne, Dennis. A protege' of Mrs. Pink's. A journalist.
Arundel, Gurney. Squire of Winfield.
Arundel, Mrs. His wife.
Arundel, Cyril. Their son.
Arundel, Joan. Their daughter.
Bamside-Block, Mrs. A vicar's widow.
Bates, Nelly. A schoolfellow of Cynthia Hyde.
Beloe, Mrs. An old woman.
Bertha. A flower-girl.
Bok, Dr. Greeley. An American religionist.
Captain, A.
Cogan, Miss. A deranged lady.
Conran, Charles. Mrs. Pink's factotum.
Crask, Mr. Miss Fase's bank manager.
Cunningham, Mrs. Miss Mitt's employer.
Damp, Algernon. See Farrar.
Deuce. A fox-terrier.
Farrar, Algernon. Originally Algernon Damp, the friend of
Jack Frome.
Fase, Charlotte. Edith Graham's aunt.
Fielding, Miss Adelaide. Mrs. Pink's sister.
Frome, The Rev. Augustus. Rector of Winfield.
Frome, John Lindsay. His son.
Frome, Gwendolen Mary. His Daughter.
Giant, A.
GiGl. A French child.
Graham, Edith. Lynn Harberton's Ward.
Guide, A.
Harberton, Annie. Lynn Harberton's sister.
Harberton, Lynn, of Winfield. A literary dilettante. Guar-
dian of Edith Graham.
Harberton, Wordsworth. Lynn Harberton's brother.
Hennessy. See Ings.
v
LISTENER'S LURE
Hyde, Cynthia. Mrs. Pink's niece.
Hyde, Herbert Chisholm. Her husband.
Hyde, Arthur. Their eldest son.
Hyde, Dermot. Their second son.
Ings, Dr. Prescott. An American religionist (whose real name
is Hennessy).
Lark, Mr. A friend of Miss Fase.
Lenox, The Rev. Hercules. Miss Somerscale's fiance.
Margaret. Lynn Harberton's old nurse.
Mitt, Lydia. A governess.
Orton, Mr. A county gentleman.
Osborne, Enid. A little girl.
Partridge, Mr. A dowser.
Pedder, Job. Lynn Harberton's gardener.
Pember, Mr. Miss Fase's chemist.
Perivale, Mr. A young mystic.
1'imi'O. A clown.
Pink, The Rev. Wilberforce. A retired clergyman of the
Church of England.
Pink, Mrs. His wifa who lives apart from him. Edith
Graham's employer.
Pouly, pere. A bull-fighter.
Pouly ', fds. His son.
Radbone, Mr. Miss Fase's butcher.
Ring, Mrs. Mrs. Harberton's housekeeper.
Rodwell, Orme. Mrs. Pink's nephew. A literary youth.
Royce, Sir Herbert. Lynn Harberton's half-brother.
Somerscales, Eileen. An old schoolfellow of Edith Graham's.
Stunt. A spaniel.
Tootell, Mrs. An old woman.
TRIMBER, Mrs. Edith Graham's landlady at Winfield.
Wjllocks, Mr. A churchwarden.
The documents that follow belong to a period between September
/yoj and June iqo6.
LISTENERS LURE
FROML YNNHARBER TON, OF THE MANOR HOUSE,
WIN FIELD, GENTLEMAN, AND EDITOR OF THE
BOLT COURT EDITION OF BO SWELL'S "JOHN-
SON" {IN 12 VOLS.), TO EDITH GRAHAM, HIS
WARD AND AMANUENSIS, LODGING AT MRS.
TRIMBER'S, CHURCH COTTAGE, WINFIELD
(By Hand)
ist September 1905
Edith Dear,
I have something to tell you which I should
have the greatest pain and difficulty in saying in your
presence ; and so I write it instead. This is both
cowardly and sensible, like so many actions which
look well in biographies and are rewarded in the
world. Briefly, my dear child, the time has come for
you to leave Winfield and begin to live your own life.
For too long you have been living mine and Doctor
Johnson's. But now that the Doctor is edited and
finished, and I have no plan in my head for further
work, and no inclination to begin again until the
spring (if then), you must go away and be yourself.
We have been very happy ; but it was a happiness
A 1
LISTENER'S LURE
that could not last and probably should not. I am a
middle-aged, crotchety, self-protective bookworm and
idler ; you are young and enterprising and generous,
and the world needs you and you need the world.
So I am going to steel my heart and do what your
father would have wished, which is to find you a
post in London. The many other things I could
say and perhaps should say in so many words you
will find between each sentence of this very slowly-
written letter. Don't answer it. Just say that you
agree and we will begin the campaign.
Yours
L. H.
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
(By Hand)
Dear Guardian,
Your letter does not distress me so much as
you feared, because of course I knew it had to be. I
knew this was all too happy to last, but I wish you
would not say that it perhaps should not last. I
shall never agree with you about things like that ;
nothing shall make me meet unhappiness half-way
as you do. As you have no more use for me as
a secretary I must of course find something to do,
just as I should have to if we were not friends.
Please do not be unhappy about it, because you will
be sure to be interested in something else soon and
2
A TRAP FOR LYDIA MITT
begin all over again, and then you will want me
again. Wherever I am, you will only have to say
you want me, and I shall come. Do let us be happy
now, for the little while before we go away. You
do not say where you are going or for how long,
or what is to become of the Manor House and Mrs.
Ring and the servants and Deuce. You will tell me
at dinner, won't you ?
Yours
E. G.
P.S. Don't call yourself middle-aged. Thirty-
seven is not middle-aged ; or if it is, twenty-five must
be nearly so, and I hate to think that.
FROM THE "DAILY TELEGRAPH"
Wanted at once. Governess for two children.
Must be Lady. Music. Quiet refined home. Three
servants kept. Apply Mrs. C., "Belle Vue," Bed-
ford.
MISS CHARLOTTE EASE, EDITH GRAHAMS A UNT
ON THE MOTHER'S SIDE, TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Laurels
Grange-over-Sands
My dear Edith,
I am not, as you know, given either to asking
favours or offering advice, but I should like to oblige
LISTENER'S LURE
my neighbour Mrs. Wootton-Bassett, a very nice
cultured lady who took Miss Passmore's house fur-
nished for the summer, at much too low a figure, 1
think, only three guineas and the use of the tennis
things and all the wall fruit, and who is just going.
She is the widow of a poet at Bewdley who published
quite a number of volumes in his lifetime, but who
was the victim of a conspiracy among the critics and
so is not known, and her great passion is collecting
autographs. She has of course a great many of her
husband's, and one of Mrs. Alec Tweedie's, but she
wants to make her collection really representative,
and when I said that my niece assisted Mr. Harber-
ton, the editor of Boswell's Life of Johnson, which is a
book I could never get on with very well — so scrappy
and a little coarse in places, not at all nice employ-
ment for a young girl, I think — nothing would do
but I must write to you for Mr. Harberton's auto-
graph and any more that he could give. Mrs.
Wootton-Bassett, who naturally knows the habits
of literary men, says that he must of course get
several interesting letters from important authors by
every post. She particularly wants the autograph
of Mr. T. P. O'Connor, which she says she under-
stands is very hard to get. Will you do what you
can for me and I shall be greatly obliged. We shall
miss Mrs. Wootton-Bassett's society very much,
she is most intellectual and never travels without
several of the Temple Classics. She has given me
three of her husband's books, which I am sure I
4
DR. GREELEY BOK ENTERS
shall enjoy thoroughly, after the new housemaid
comes.
I must stop now or I shall miss the post.
Your loving
Aunt Charlotte
P.S. Mr. Lark has just come in with the sad news
that Mr. Saunders the lawyer has had a stroke.
You do not know him, but you will I am sure be
sorry. Such a nice kind lawyer too. I have heard
of people recovering completely from such visitations.
It is the third that is fatal, I am told. Perhaps Mr.
Saunders will be quite himself again soon, but as he
has had two strokes already I am rather doubtful.
We must hope for the best.
DR. GREELE Y BOK TO MRS. W1LBERFORCE PINK
Shakespeare Private Hotel
Bloomsbury Place, W.C.
My dear Madam,
I should crave your pardon for thus intruding
upon you were it not that I have an introduction
from our mutual friend Dr. Russell Mynde, whom I
consider to be one of the greatest forces in contem-
porary mentality, albeit I cannot see eye to eye with
him in every particular. Doubtless he has mentioned
my name to you, and I need therefore not introduce
5
LISTENER'S LURE
myself further, beyond saying that I am probably
the only Anglo-Saxon exponent of pure Confucianism
now before the public.
My career has been, I venture to think, not un-
interesting. I was born in a suburb of Chicago in
1857 of poor but intellectual parents, who were able
to get me a little schooling. Coming early under the
influence of that remarkable man, Wilbur H. Corn-
stock, I was spared many of the disillusions of boy-
hood and youth, and naturally gravitated to the
ministry. I was the pastor of the Silas L. Younker
Congregational Church at Chicago for some years
until I received a call to visit China as a missionary.
While there I became aware of the sanity and beauty
of the Confucian creed, and after a long and agonised
period of struggle I accepted it. It was then but a
natural step to wish to spread this serene and satis-
fying message to all and sundry, and after a success-
ful mission in my own country I am now preparing
for an English campaign, assisted by my friend
Washington Fig, who throws on the sheet scenes
of Chinese calm and happiness.
It was because I had heard so much of your in-
terest in the Truth, in whatever shape it may come,
and your influence in the more brainy and advanced
section of London society, that I felt I must at any
cost endeavour to gain your sympathy. My intro-
duction to the best English intellect would, I am
certain, be assured if I might be permitted to hold
my first meeting in your drawing-room.
6
LYNN ASKS FOR HELP
I shall give myself the honour of waiting upon
you to-morrow afternoon at 4.30 p.m.
Believe me, dear Madam
Yours in the Truth
Greeley Bok
LYNN HARBERTON TO MISS ADELAIDE
FIELDING, 17 VICARAGE GATE, KENSINGTON
The Manor House
Winfielu
Dear Friend,
I wonder if you could help me. But of
course you can, because to help is your tnitier.
Well, this is what I want. I want to find a position
in London for my ward Edith. My own literary
need of her is over, and I am not likely to have
more just yet as I have no present work and am
going away. Meanwhile Edith ought to live in
London for a while, if it is only to hear Beethoven
and to see how much wiser Winfield really is. But
as she cannot afford to do so either in pocket or
character as an idle person, she must have some
work found for her. So I turn naturally to you.
What do you suggest ? You know what she has
been doing for me. I hate to break habits, as you
know, and this closing of a joint task of some years
is a sad business ; but is there anything that is not
transitory — except your kindness? That goes on
for ever.
7
LISTENER'S LURE
This reminds me that though I don't often have
presents, one of the squire's little girls, Joan, who
has rather appropriated me as a lay uncle, gave me
something on my birthday last week which made me
think of you. It is a copy of an illuminated page of
a fifteenth-century book, — framed, to stand about on
one's desk or wherever it will catch the selfish eye, —
and the text runs : —
I shall pass through this world but once : any good thing
therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any
human being, let me not defer it, or neglect it, for I shall not
pass this way again.
There is no doubt that it was a fitting enough re-
minder for me, for I neglect and defer all the time.
While I am wondering whether a kindness is really
kind or not, the opportunity goes. But you have
no doubts.
Something that happened yesterday I think might
amuse you. I went to call on one of our old villagers,
a tenant of mine, who is chair-ridden but otherwise
all right. I noticed at once that he was brighter
than usual — I should -say, less lethargic. He sat
more erect, extended his hand with a freer gesture
for his ounce of tobacco, and where for many months
now he has languidly agreed with me as to the
weather, or at most recorded rather weakly a differ-
ing opinion, he contradicted me outright. It was
not so cold as yesterday, he affirmed, when I re-
marked that it was colder : not so cold — and this in
quite a firm voice. I read him a few paragraphs
8
LYNN GETS ADVICE
from the paper, listened to his comments, fished a
little for his news, but had to come away no wiser
as to the cause of this improvement in spirits — I
might also say, this access of pride. In the street
I met the doctor. "So old Dickson's gone," he
said; "eighty-six." "Has he?" I replied; "I
hadn't heard." " Yes ; early this morning." I
walked on, thinking about Dickson. And suddenly
I understood my old friend's reinvigoration. It was
a case of promotion. He had taken Dickson's place ;
he had become the oldest inhabitant.
Yours always
L. H.
MISS FIELDING TO LYNN HARBERTON
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington
Dear Lynn,
I am not convinced that you are doing the
wisest thing. If I know anything about you at all
I know that you will be unhappy directly you stop
working. You must have something to do : work is
your safety valve. There are men who can be idle
cheerfully and without doing any one or themselves
any harm ; but you are not like that. And what is
more, it will be worse for you to be idle without your
ward, who has probably become very necessary to
9
LISTENER'S LURE
you, as women always have to be to selfish men (and
I have no reason to suppose that you are any less
selfish than any one else).
This being the case I wish that before you decide
to send her here to fend for herself, you would
consider the possibility of coming too, taking rooms
near the Museum, say, and doing some work there
for a while. Edith can still help you and be in
London at the same time.
You make a mistake in thinking that London is
necessary for her in any way whatever. She is
quite as ready for life's crises as ever she will be.
Girls are. It is men who want to be taught and
broken in. And when you talk of her beginning to
lead her own life you make me laugh — as if any
woman who is helping a man is not leading her own
life. What other life have we ? What else can we
do? Is not that our fate? If I personally am not
engaged in it, it is only because of my father's folly
in leaving me too much money and my own folly in
being too particular about the man I was to help.
But I know perfectly well, however degrading the
thought may be, that that is the true destiny of
the sex, and I for one, though I may affect indigna-
tion, do not quarrel with it. Beethoven indeed !
Beethoven is only embroidery, although it masquer-
ades as the real stuff of life only too often in this idle
city. But she won't hear much Beethoven just now,
all the same, for he is out of date- Even Tchai-
kowsky is a little out of date too. We all have to
10
TO EVERY ONE A CAMERA OR TWO
talk Richard Strauss to-day — Domestic Symphonies
with realistic tone reproductions of babies sucking
their bottles. 1 wonder how your bearish Doctor
would have defined a Domestic Symphony !
Tell me what you think about my suggestion. If
it is impossible (and I may not, of course, know all
the facts), I can, I am sure, find Edith something at
once.
Your friend
Adelaide Fielding
I wish you would send me a photograph of your-
self. I feel that the one I have, taken when we
were all at Cromer in 1894, can no longer be repre-
sentative. Are you still clean-shaven ? I hope so.
Do you still set your face like a rock against the
blandishments of fashion? Of course you do. It
is quite useless to tell me that you never go to a
photographer. That excuse is dead and buried.
Photographers come to us now. I am as certain
that Edith has a camera as that I have not. Slip
a snapshot of Edith in too, that I may know her
before I meet her.
from the " witford herald"
Winfield Correspondence
Mr. James Death, who was thrown from his cart
last market day, on leaving the Pelham Arms, and
sustained three broken ribs, is doing well.
II
LISTENER'S LURE
Great regret is experienced in the village at the
intended departure of Mr. Harberton of the Manor
House, who is leaving on a prolonged visit to his
brother and sister at Algiers. Mr. Harberton has
endeared himself to all by his courtesy and kindliness,
and Winfield will not be the same until he returns.
Mr. Harberton has just completed his edition of
Boswell's immortal biography of the Great Lexico-
grapher, rare Ben Jonson, a task of which Winfield
may well be proud. Hitherto our only local author
has been Miss Nelly Turle, the gifted poetess, so
many of whose effusions may be read in the church-
yard ; but Mr. Harberton henceforward will bear
away the bell. In all warmth and sincerity we say
to him, in the words of the old Greek poet, " Vale !
Vale ! "
LYNN HARBERTON TO MISS FIELDING
The Manor House
Winfield
My Dear Friend,
It cannot be. I want Edith to go to London,
and to go alone. I am leaving almost directly on a
longish visit to my brother and sister at Algiers.
But even if I had not this determination I could not
contemplate a stay of any time in London. London
affects me disastrously. I have no spirits, no re-
12
LONDON THE LEVELLER
bound, after two days of it — even in May. And
London also dislikes me, or at least misunderstands
me. I am too low-spoken and slow for it. I have to
say everything twice or even three times. Waiters
disregard me ; shopkeepers consider me insignificant ;
Post-office clerks serve others first. London op-
presses me, robs me of individuality : in the phrase
of a friend of mine, makes me " so damned anony-
mous." I don't say I mind that, but I do resent
being just one of a white-faced hurrying crowd.
One feels it instantly on setting foot on St. Pancras
platform.
Now and then there is compensation — in seeing
others suffer too. The last time, for example, I
came to town, our squire travelled with me. The
squire is a big man here, of course, and when he
drives down the street there is a punctilious touching
of hats, and many of the younger and timider folk —
those that are not hardened to the world — experience
something of a tremor, a spasm of awe. I will not
say that at first, before I knew him, I was myself
completely free from some such emotion : just as I
still feel a desire to cry when I see a Royal personage
driving by in state.
Well, when the squire and I travelled to town
together on the occasion I am recalling, our station-
master himself opened the carriage door, obsequious
porters made an avenue for him to pass through (a
short one, it is true, for we have only two porters),
and the guard did all the cap-touching that is good
*3
LISTENER'S LURE
for a man on a bright spring morning. Meanwhile
I was left to carry my bag myself.
But at St. Pancras the balance was adjusted, for
the squire was a nonentity there, merely an elderly,
not very well dressed man, obviously from the
country, and the porters shouted " By your leave ! "
and a newspaper boy cannoned into him, and when
he left me and was climbing into his cab he looked
as much like every one else as if he were no squire
at all : or rather, he looked like a provincial up for
the day, which is worse. But down here, as I say,
he is a monarch, an emperor. It is not perhaps to
be wondered at that he and I leave home so seldom.
For you must not think that at Winfield I am not
a swell too. It is only when I am with the squire
that I am disregarded. We can all of us be a swell
to some one, if we really want to ; but I am a swell
without wanting it. You see I have a certain
number of pensioners here, and though my voice
is low, and I have no horse or motor car, and I
prefer a back door to a front one, and in this world
one is taken at one's own valuation, yet all the
same I am considered a swell far too much. It
is a great nuisance, for it prevents real inter-
course.
Just to take a small case. — There live near us two
bcautifully-brought-up little girls in white aprons
and clean print frocks, to whom I always want to
say something pleasant. But I can't, because when-
ever they see me coming they stand quite still in
14
THE POOR V. THE RICH
the middle of the lane until I am within range, and
then they curtsey. It is a very simple curtsey, a
bend of the white stockings with a hand at each side
of the print frock — a perfectly simple curtsey, without
any affectation — and yet it leaves me mute and un-
comfortable. Not quite mute perhaps, for I murmur
"Good morning," or possibly " Thank you" (I don't
really know what I say) ; but certainly uncomfort-
able and ashamed. I have a feeling that when one
receives the homage of a curtsey, one ought to make
a fitting reply, a sweep of the hat, a bow, "Your
servant, ma'am." But if I did anything of the kind
these nice little girls would be far more uncomfort-
able than I am ; and more, they would have an un-
pleasant feeling that I — who wish them nothing but
good things and merriment — were making fun of
their politeness. So there is nothing for it but to
grow inured and look condescending and superior
(which is what they expect and want), and realise
that really good intimate terms are not destined to
subsist between big houses and little ones. Punctilio
blocks the way.
I wonder if it is at all understood that the poor are
far more the enemies of socialism than the rich ; or
how should I put it to include myself? — the unedu-
cated are more the enemies of socialism than the
educated. For I suppose I am educated. At least
I can say " De mortuis " tactfully and "Verb
sap." on the right occasions.
If I were not afraid of hurting their mother's feel-
15
LISTENER'S LURE
ings, I would ask her, as far as I was concerned, to
tell her daughters to omit the curtsey. I cannot
feel worth it. " Honour where honour is due " is a
good maxim, and no honour is due to me from those
nice little sisters. The important thing is to teach
country children to honour • and respect old age.
The way that old people are treated by some village
children suggests that reverence for age is a purely
artificial growth, the primitive idea being contempt
and abuse and perhaps compulsory euthanasia. There
are some boys here who climb a tree that hangs
over a footpath near us, and, keeping silent as
birds, spit on the wayfarers beneath. (I can under-
stand the attraction : perhaps I can remember it !)
Their special victim is a very aged neighbour of ours
— one of my pensioners in fact. Although an octo-
genarian, she is full of vigour and activity and has
also not a little dignity, which makes the conduct of
these boys the more unnatural ; for usually boys
persecute only those who by making the mistake of
being feeble or stupid may be said, in our civilisa-
tion, to invite it. A village boy's eye for frailty and
lack of dignity is fiendishly accurate. But I fancy
the old lady has given her case away by wearing a
very wide-brimmed black straw hat, which lends her
a mushroom appearance. Any kind of unconven-
tional garment is an almost irresistible invitation to
the cruel side of a little boy's character.
I never meant to write so much but my pen ran
away Also I am happier for it — and by your own
16
FIRST GLIMPSE OF MRS. PINK
showing, for it is tantamount to a little of the desired
and necessary "work." But if I go on writing like
this you will begin to be sorry I ever asked you to do
anything. Please tell me what you have in store for
Edith, because I am impatient for her to begin. Once
I really make up my mind I am in a fret till I act.
Yours always
L. H.
MISS FIELDING TO LYNN HARBERTON
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington
Dear Lynn,
Very well. I have already found the very
thing for your Edith : to be a mixture of friend,
companion and secretary to my sister Mrs. Pink,
who, although seventy-three, is still convinced that
she can do the world some good by holding drawing-
room meetings, and distributing Rationalist tracts,
and feeding and clothing agnostic prophets ; and
therefore wants some one to hold her pen. She
lectures me in words a yard long which were not
invented when I was at school, and I pray for her,
and we are both the better for our own efforts ; so it
is all right. But she is the dearest woman I know,
and she is ready for Edith whenever she wants to
come ; and you need not worry about the salary
being too low or the work too heavy, because all her
servants ever since the beginning have died of in-
B 17
LISTENER'S LURE
activity and swollen Post-office-savings-books. Nor
need you fear that Edith's orthodoxy (if she is so
eccentric as to have any) will be disturbed, for my
sister's Voltaires, when all is said, are very circum-
spect dovelike creatures, although she is too simple
and sweet to suspect it. So that is settled.
You were a good boy to send the photographs : I
expected a great outburst of mock modesty. I like
your new face even better than fhe old, and am
delighted to see that you still abjure the moustache
and beard. It would have been terrible had you
a pointed beard : I suppose you have noticed that
men with pointed beards are always conceited and
self-protective ? But why have you gone grey over
the temple ? With your untroubled life ! And with
such a secretary ! My dear Lynn, she is beautiful.
I had no idea she was like that. I was thinking
rather of the serene intellectual type — Girton and
Ruskin, spectacles even, everything except charm.
And she is delightful, with quite a little mischief
even in this tiny picture. How you can trust her
to London I can't think. But you were always a
problem.
My dear friend, you will be bored to death after
a week of Algiers. Why don't you arrange to return
quickly and throw yourself into a more active life ?
I suppose I might as well suggest football as politics,
but there are other interests that can take one out
of oneself. What you need to do is to forget Lynn
Harberton for a while. Write a play and attend the
18
POSTILLION STREET, KENSINGTON
rehearsals : I should guess that that is as complete
a change as a country recluse can need. Have you
no parish councils ? If I were an autocrat I should
make a law preventing introspective moody men
from possessing private incomes. You should all
have spades and pickaxes instead, which reminds
me that you ought to take up gardening. That is
your best corrective. Stay at home and garden,
whatever Edith may do.
You will write to me now and then, won't you ?
And I will tell you what I think of Edith.
Your friend
Adelaide Fielding
P.S. If Edith does not care for the work at my
sister's Unsettlement (as I call it), I wish she would
stay with us here while she is looking about. We
are between Kensington Palace on the one side and
Church Street on the other — the only street I have
ever known in which postillions are still to be seen
all day long. I should like to have her here, if only
to see how she does her hair like that. I love it
over the ears with the little Leonardo hint.
MISS FASE TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Laurels
Grange-over-Sands
My dear Edith,
I am very glad to hear that you are leaving
Winfield for a while. As you know, I never ap-
19
LISTENER'S LURE
proved of your being so much with Mr. Harberton.
In my opinion he is too young to want an amanu-
ensis. When I was a girl there was no talk of
amanuenses, but people who wanted to write books
wrote them and said no more about it. I remember
our dear old doctor, of whom you have probably
heard your dear father tell — after he retired he wrote
a book, and a very good one too, on the probability
of those odd mounds outside the village, which turned
out to be a disused Fencible camp, being the graves
of ancient Britons, and he never wanted an amanu-
ensis or the constant company of a young girl. But
the world grows different every day.
It is not that I do not approve of Mr. Harberton,
who for all I know is a very nice man and was
chosen by your dear father to be your guardian,
although your dear father, clever man as he was and
the best gentleman gardener in Yorkshire, as every
one said, especially with sweet peas, was not always
a good judge of men ; but I do not like the new way
of girls being on such terms of intimacy with single
men, or indeed any men except their husbands, and
I am not sure that I quite like the way in which
some husbands and wives now behave in public, as
if they were schoolfellows rather than what they are
to each other. I like to see a wife leaning on her
husband's arm.
You must be very careful in London. I have
never been there, but I am told by Mr. Lark and
other friends here that it is a city of draughts and
20
MR. PEMBER'S ERRAND BOY
dangerous crossings. The best preventive of a cold
I have always found to be camphor-balls, if taken in
time, or later, ammoniated quinine. My neighbour
Mrs. Forty-Smith has been taking salicin with good
results, but one must be careful with new drugs. I
hope there are good chemists in London. I have
every confidence in our Mr. Pember here. Poor
man, he has lately had a great misfortune, having
been robbed by his errand boy to the extent of more
than two pounds. It is not so much the loss of
money, he said to me when I was in last, either on
Wednesday or Thursday, on Wednesday I think, but
the loss of trust in human nature. He had done so
much for this particular boy, taking him from a bad
home and treating him almost as one of the family.
Life is very difficult.
If I am to catch the night's post I must stop now.
Your loving
Aunt Charlotte
P.S. I have just asked Ellen and she says it was
on Wednesday that I went to Mr. Pember's. So I
was right after all.
LYNN HARBERTON TO MISS FIELDING
The Manor House
Winfield
Dear Miss Fielding,
No gardening, I think. I sometimes wonder
indeed whether I really want flowers at all ; whethei
21
LISTENER'S LURE
the pleasure which they bring is not lost in the
thought of their transitoriness and, through them,
the transitoriness of all things and the terrible swift
foot of time. The daffodils begin the lesson : one
day they are not, the next they are, and again they
are faded on their stalks ; then tulips ; then lupins
and delphiniums ; then sweet peas ; then lilies ; then
hollyhocks ; and so forth, through the year, all so
slow to come, then coming so eagerly, and dying just
as certainly afterwards. I hate to be reminded of the
passage of time, and in a garden of flowers one can
never escape from it. It is one of the charms of a
garden of grass and evergreens, that there for a while
one is allowed to hug the illusion that time tarries.
If old Job here (a sanctimonious rascal) were not my
master, and if I were not naturally so given to the
line of least resistance, I should have only grass and
evergreens ; but I cannot.
Of one thing I am certain, and that is that if ever,
I do move to another house it shall be a house with
a shrubbery, a real dark shrubbery.
No one who has not a shrubbery really knows what
the evening song of the blackbird and thrush can be —
especially, I think, the blackbird. The perfect con-
ditions are, perhaps, April, six o'clock, a shower's
last drops just pattering, and the sky yellow in the
west. Arnold's "wet, bird-haunted, English lawn"
must have had a shrubbery on the edge of it. Yet
no one seems to strive after the shrubbery any
longer. One reason for its neglect is, I imagine, that
22
GREEN THOUGHTS FOR GRANDSONS
the good shrubbery does not come to perfection in
the lifetime of its planter, or at any rate not until he
is full of years ; and we are more selfish than we used
to be — more inclined for rapid results. Planting a
green shade in which one's grandchildren may have
green thoughts is a pastime that has to a large ex-
tent gone out. Hence it is that houses with good
shrubberies must be old ; and to-day most houses
that one sees are new. The shrubbery belongs to the
days of Miss Austen. In one of her books — I forget
which — the impossibility of taking a house without
a shrubbery is insisted on. A house with a good
shrubbery is always a house old enough for Miss
Austen's characters to have lived in it ; which is
another point in its favour.
Here is another long letter all about anything but
Edith.
Yours
L. H.
MISS EILEEN SOMERSCALES [AN OLD SCHOOL-
FELLOW) TO EDITH GRAHAM
13 The Crescent
Bath
Dear Edith,
Your news is very interesting, and as usual
you are having good luck. To go to London is the
one thing I have always wanted, but mother of
course will not hear of it, and has even renewed the
lease of this house for another twenty-one years at
23
LISTENER'S LURE
the very moment when we might have got free and
taken things into our own hands. She has also given
up the Library subscription, because she says that the
set of Edna Lyall which Uncle Fred has sent her
will last for a year, by which time one of our West-
country newspapers is sure to have a cheap circu-
lating library of its own. This is very hard on me, but
mother does not think of that. I shall be glad to
have your London address if you care to continue to
correspond with one of us poor benighted provincials.
Yours ever
Eileen
EILEEN SOMERSCALES TO EDITH GRAHAM
13 The Crescent
Bath
My dear Edith,
I am afraid I wrote you rather a cross letter
yesterday, but I had one of my bad headaches and
things were looking rather black. Of course I am
glad you are going to London and I do so hope you
will be happy there.
Yours ever
Eileen
24
MORE ADVICE FOR LYNN
MISS FIELDING TO LYNN HARBERTON
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington
Dear Lynn,
Wait but another minute before deciding : for
I have another idea for you. You have always
grumbled about your house and your gardener and
the irksomeness of some of your neighbours. Very
well then — take this opportunity of leaving Winfield.
You are breaking your habits sufficiently by going
away for six months ; break them a little more by
leaving altogether, and instead of moping at Algiers
v 'which you will get to loathe, for there is nothing
better calculated to irritate and embitter a fastidious
man like you than the society of expatriated English
people) spend your time in house-hunting ; find a
house ; alter it to suit you ; furnish it ; and lay out
the garden afresh. There is a perfect occupation.
Meanwhile Edith can be undergoing her ridiculous
metropolitan noviciate, just as if you were fretting
in Africa, or wherever Algiers is. That scheme is
absurd for you if I know anything about you ; nor
do your brother and sister want you. You are the
kind of relation that loves and is loved better by
post and at a distance.
Your friend
Adelaide Fielding
25
LISTENER'S LURE
P.S. You are very eloquent about shrubberies, but
they are grubby places. Give me beds and borders
of flowers,— geraniums and lobelias and calceolarias
even, those nice bright things that every one sneers
at to-day but which always bring back my happiest
years to me.
LYNN HARBERTON TO MISS FIELDING
The Manor House
Win field
Dear Counsellor,
I would leave Winfield at once if I had any
kind of notion where to live instead. But bad as my
house is, I am used to it, and that is everything. If
I were to go blind, which is not an impossible fate
for one who has pored over so many books, I should
never be lost here.
The only way to get a house wholly to one's mind
is to build it,— and that means several horrible things,
the first of which is newness, to say nothing of the
difficulties of deciding on a plan, and, before the
plan, of an architect. I think I have more terror of
falling into the hands of an architect than of any
other bondage. I am continually wondering how
people who are going to build a house to live and die
in ever come to a decision about an architect at all.
It must be the hardest thing. I can understand the
26
THE CARAVAN PROBLEM
choice of a site : one can choose a site absolutely
and know that it is right. But the house? Why,
within a week after the last of the builders' men had
at last gone, you would see somewhere else the very
thing you had been wanting all the while — the gables
and chimneys, the quality of tile and brick, the
arrangement of windows and doors. Only persons
of great strength of mind or of very easy-going
nature can decide without a qualm on an architect.
I am sure I never could.
One of the odd things about architects — and this
makes another difficulty — is that better ones are so
constantly appearing. It seems as if only by post-
poning can one get the really satisfactory house.
That friend of William Morris who built his house in
an orchard without cutting down a tree — that is the
kind of man one thinks one wants. Or on the other
hand it is perhaps wiser to be utterly unmindful of
beauty altogether, like Halliwell-Phillipps, the Shake-
spearian, whom I used to know slightly, who bought
the side of a hill near Brighton and ordered enough
galvanised iron buildings to form the nucleus of a
habitation. After that, whenever he wanted to put
up a friend, or increase his space for other reasons,
he despatched a postcard ordering another room.
Possibly the guest and the room would travel from
town together, like a snail.
If only we had a climate, a caravan would be the
solution. I knew a pair of lovers who vowed to
spend their honeymoon in a caravan, and went so
27
LISTENER'S LURE
far as to have one built. It was a caravan of such
delicate splendour that were a sleeping gipsy to be
transported into it he would awake believing himself
in heaven, if gipsies have these pretty fancies. The
cabin of a royal yacht could hardly be more sumptu-
ously appointed. But the project broke down, the
loving pair went to Como or another of the prescribed
localities, and the caravan was idle.
The question then arose, what to do with it ? — a
question which always seems insistent with amateur
caravan-owners. For a long time it reposed, with a
plug in its distinguished chimney, in a field belonging
to a friend, whose children, as a great treat, were
allowed to play in it, but not (so cruelly unimaginative
are those in authority) to cook at the stove. And
then, when the winds and rains had stolen away its
fresh youth, it was sold, as all amateur caravans
eventually are, to a travelling photographer, who at
once filled one of the windows with red glass. Per-
haps photographers and gipsies are the only persons
who can really solve the caravan problem. For after
the question of winter-storing is settled there are the
difficulties of the horse and shelter at night. To live
in a caravan should probably remain one of the
inaccessible ideals. It is better so.
And so the philosophic mind, vexed by the dangers
attending any decision upon an architect, accepts
Kingsley's maxim that the external beauty of one's
own house matters nothing, since you are in it and
cannot see it, the really important thing being to
28
HUNTING THE HOUSE
have pleasant houses around you which you can see.
In other words it is the mission of good architects to
work entirely for our neighbours.
The same comment applies to pictures. A man
rarely looks at his own pictures : he takes them for
granted ; but the first thing he does on entering a
friend's house is to study his walls.
All the same, though I shall certainly never move
unless the squire evicts me with a battering ram, I
think there are few occupations more pleasant than
to look over country houses as if one meant to take
them ; or to look over them with a house-hunting
friend, as I did last week. We examined several
within a twenty mile radius of this village. All
were different, and, to me, impossible ; but my friend
chose them all in turn (it was the kind of day on
which every country house seems perfect to a towns-
man, as he is), and it was delightful to watch him
planning out the rooms and garden. These should
be his own suite ; here he would work ; there he
would put visitors ; here should be roses and there
sweetbriars and a lavender hedge. The lawn must
be made a little larger, for golf-croquet ; perhaps
that tree might go. In one of the gardens was a
ruined summer-house which he transformed instantly
into a working room with an Italian loggia above it.
My friend chose them all, I say, but he took none,
and so we may have the agreeable task all over
again in some other desirable quarter.
All the houses had spacious kitchen departments,
29
LISTENER'S LURE
brick ovens as well as ranges, wash-houses, dairies
and so forth, in the old-fashioned way. All had
stabling too, and it was very good to move about
on the cobbled stones amid the atmosphere of
honest horses, after the petrolised highways which
we had left outside. One returns to the past in an
old house empty more thoroughly than in an old
house occupied, however retrograde the occupants
may be. In the old house occupied there will cer
tainly be signs of the times — books, magazines,
pictures ; in the old house empty there are only
the ghosts of ancient dwellers, and all is spacious
and silent.
It occurred to me as we passed from room to
room and debated their potentialities, what an inter-
esting occupation for women of taste the advising
upon decoration and adaptabilities of houses must
be. Such work is rather out of Edith's line, or she
would be just the woman for it. She could fur-
nish her own house very comfortably, I am sure,
but no one else's. Nor could I. My idea of
furniture begins and ends with a fire, an arm-
chair, book-shelves, a writing table, envelopes of
all sizes up to a foot square, blue-black ink and
matches.
No, I shall stay at the Manor House till I am
carried out of it — "back to the land."
You are very good to be so much concerned about
me and my plans, although you run so badly to
pessimism. I really don't think it will hurt or irk
3°
UNCLEANLINESS AND GODLINESS
me to idle in Algiers a little ; and if I am bored, why
I can write to you.
Yours
L. H.
P.S. But I don't want to go.
P.S. 2. You are horribly practical in what you say
about shrubberies being dirty. So they are. But
to avoid a shrubbery after a summer shower is to
love one's clothes too much. Uncleanliness can be
next to godliness too. A wet shrubbery smells like
nothing else in the world. But I like your deter-
mined Victorian stand. Some one must have the
courage of the past or we shall cease to be a nation
altogether — with the Americanising and Continental-
ising that are now going on. Yet there are limits, I
imagine, even to your fidelity : I doubt if you would
care to see the revival of a frame of mind which
could admire or see nothing absurd in such a poem
is that which I copy here, or rather which I have
got Edith to copy for me (that being my way). I
came across it in a Keepsake, or Casque I of Getns,
or Friendship's Offering, belonging to the wonderful
eighteen-thirties, before any one had learned to laugh
again. Dickens and Thackeray were just coming, to
kill off Byronism ; but they were not yet. Here is
the jewel . I am omitting one stanza —
V
LISTENER'S LURE
THE FEMALE FRIEND
In this imperfect gloomy scene
Of complicated ill,
How rarely is a day serene,
The throbbing bosom still !
Will not a beauteous landscape bright,
Or music's soothing sound
Console the heart — afford delight —
And throw sweet peace around?
They may — but never comfort lend
Like an accomplished female friend.
With such a friend the social hour
In sweetest pleasure glides :
There is in female charms a power
Which lastingly abides.
The fragrance of the blushing rose, —
Its tints, and splendid hue, —
Will, with the seasons, decompose
And pass, as flitting dew;
On firmer ties his joys depend
Who has a faithful female friend.
As orbs revolve, and years recede,
And seasons onward roll,
The fancy may on beauties feed
With discontented soul.
A thousand objects bright and fair
May for a moment shine,
Yet many a sigh, and many a tear
But mark their swift decline :
While lasting joys the man attend
Who has a polished female friend.
This poem, which I did not make up for you and
which is genuine enough, is another proof that if we
want to see the times reflected in literature we must
3?
THE DANGER OF FINISHING
go to the second and third rate writers. The best
writers contain all time, — they are in their own and
of it, but not exclusively of it.
Good-night again
L. H.
LYNN HARBERTON TO WORDSWORTH HARBER-
TON, HIS ELDER BROTHER, A MARTYR TO
ASTHMA, WHO LIVES DURING THE WINTER
MONTHS WITH HIS SISTER ANNIE IN THE
VILLA DELACROIX A T ALGIERS
The Manor House
Winfield
Dear Wordsworth,
I am all unsettled and have no plans except
to have none. The last revise of the last proof has
gone in, and the work of five years is finished. It is
a great mistake to finish anything : the wise man
would extenuate and extenuate even if he wrote only
a sentence a day, rather than put " Finis " to his
book. How long it will take me to collect enough
energy and purpose to begin another task of the
same magnitude — and only in a large and exacting
task could I be happy — I cannot tell. For one thing,
I am older now and fewer things seem worth while;
for another, I do not see any man for whom I could
work as I worked for the Doctor, who, no matter
what Annie may say, was worth it.
C 33
LISTENER'S LURE
Another circumstance that makes for restlessness
is the loss of Edith. She had of course to go, my
work being done ; and indeed I should have had to
open the cage anyway, for it was becoming a wicked
thing and a complete betrayal of trust to hold her
longer in this village ; although when you come to
essentials a village can offer as many as a city. But
she is too young to be kept to essentials : she is
entitled to a little vanity and embroidery. And of
course she has her life to live as well as I — if mine
can be called a life which is one long series of self-
indulgence in the artificial luxury of literary com-
position, the evasion of everything at all troublesome
that can be evaded, and the submersion of myself in
the personality of a dead dogmatist (better though,
Annie, than any living lion that ever I heard roar).
Edith is only twenty-five. She is not anti-social
as I am ; she has the quickest sympathies, so quick
that I tremble for her in a selfish world ; and it is
only fair to her that she should see men other than
myself — her Prospero and Caliban in one. Ferdinand
may be washed ashore any day ; but not here. The
coast of Winfield is guiltless of any such flotsam. So
she is going to London as the companion of an altru-
istic old Pagan lady of whom I know something and
like everything (sister of my old correspondent Miss
Fielding), and there she will have a chance of en-
larging her horizon, and correcting her standards,
and reducing my halo to the dimensions of a forage
cap — if indeed it does not disappear altogether.
34
GWENDOLEN AND THE RUCTIONS
And so, Edith gone and no work to my hand here,
I am going to do a desperate and unheard of thing :
I am coming to see Annie and you. I shall probably
start at once and come through France gradually
and then take a boat at Marseilles. I will telegraph
an address now and then.
Yours
Lynn
GWENDOLEN MARY FROME, ONLY DAUGHTER
OF THE REV. AUGUSTUS FROME, RECTOR OF
WINFIELD, TO HER BROTHER JOHN LINDSA Y
FROME OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD,
UNDERGRADUA TE
The Rectory
Winfield
Dear Jack,
This is just a short note to say that the
rottenest thing has happened. Mr. Harberton is
going away to stay with his brother and sister in
some idiotic foreign place, and Edith is going to
London to be companion to some one in Kensing-
ton, and what I'm going to do without her I don't
know.
The usual ructions are in full swing here as I write,
this week's butcher's bill being several thousand
pounds too much, and New Zealand meat at that—
or so the Rector says. I tried to soothe things a
little by making a mild joke to the effect that the
35
LISTENER'S LURE
more Canterbury lamb he ate the more fit he'd be
to be Archbishop of the same place ; but all I got
for my pains was the request to leave the room while
serious matters were being discussed between my
parents, unless I could refrain from my deplorable
habit of facetiousness.
But isn't it a bore about Edith? I don't know
how long it's going to last. I'm going to take on all
her old women while she's away, and that will be
something to do anyway, even though it's no fun.
But there's just nothing at all to look forward to,
because she's quite the most frightfully decent sort
I shall ever know, and now she's going.
Yours wretchedly
Gwen
JOHN LINDSA Y FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
Merton College
Oxford
Dear Edith,
I am so awfully sick about your going to
London that I don't know what to do. The only
thing I can think of is that you will be near Queen's
Club and able to see the match. You know I could
never write a letter for nuts, and I don't suppose
I ever shall, but I wanted to say that this London
business seems to me the most awful tosh, and
36
JACK'S RIPPING IDEA
Winfield will be just nothing at all without you. I
don't suppose there is anything I can do for you, but
if there is please tell me and I will do it.
I am
Your devoted friend
Jack Frome
P.S. I've just got an awfully ripping idea. Algy
Damp, who is my particular chum here, has got a
motor, and he often gets up to town for the day in
it. It's against the rules, of course, but that's all the
more fun. Well, my idea is that directly you are
all settled I shall come up with him and then we can
go out in the afternoon and have tea in one of those
Bond Street places or perhaps take you for a ride
round Richmond Park and back.
LYNN HARDERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Hotel Foyot
Paris
My dear Child,
I thought of staying here a while, but shall
go on to Fontainebleau instead as the weather is so
gorgeous. This morning, at lunch in the restaurant
here, whom should I find but my half-brother, Herbert,
just back from five years in the East. He goes to
England immediately, and I am giving him a letter
37
LISTENER'S LURE
to you. It is quite time you knew him. He and I,
as you know, do not hit it off as well as we might :
he is externally a little too destructive for me, and
I am probably too undecided for him ; but he is an
unusual man and better company than most, whether
you agree or disagree. He talks of settling down in
England now, but of course will not — the go-fever
burns too fiercely in his bones. How I envy him
crossing the Channel, the right way, to-morrow.
Yours
L. H.
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON, POSTE
RES TANTE, EON TA I NEB LEA U
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
Here I am in London. The house, which is
in Kensington Square, is one of the nicer kind of
houses where people have lived before, with a flavour
of your dear Miss Austen about it. My room looks
over the garden. It is all very quiet, but only a few
yards away there are 'buses and trains and cabs and
enormous shops with odd names, and in half an hour
I can be in the centre of the world, and in five
minutes in Kensington Gardens, unless I am run
over by a motor car on the way — which seems a very
likely end for me after the safety of Winfield roads.
38
MRS. PINK, SCEPTIC
Mrs. Pink is a very charming old lady, but she is
old only in years. Do you remember some lines you
showed me which Lowell wrote about Mrs. Procter,
beginning " I know a girl, she's eighty-two " ? Well,
Mrs. Pink is like that. One often thinks of old age
with a feeling of dread, but if one could grow old
like Mrs. Pink and her sister Miss Fielding, who
looked in this morning for a few minutes, one would
not mind how soon the white hairs came.
Mrs. Pink, although seventy-three, seems to be
wholly dedicated to new movements. She looks with
suspicion upon everything old, particularly the Church
of England. Every Sunday she has a drawing-room
meeting, at which a new philosopher unfolds a new
religion. She seems to have a particular weakness
for ex-priests. A large part of my duty will be to
carry on the correspondence with these mystics, most
of whom receive a fee for the meeting, and to send out
cards and so forth. Miss Fielding laughs at all this,
but the two sisters are very good-natured about their
differences. Miss Fielding says she simply has not
enough courage to call the Bible " interesting assorted
literature," even if she wanted to : she would be
afraid of being overheard above ; and Mrs. Pink says
" O, Addy, Addy, what has our intelligence been
given us for ? "
I think I shall be as happy here as I could be any-
where away from Winfield ; but I miss you horribly
whenever I am not busy.
I hope you will make a point of writing now and
39
LISTENER'S LURE
again to Mrs. Ring while you are away. Picture
postcards would do. Gwen, who is going to look
after the cottagers, will probably keep me informed
of how everything goes on. The person I am really
most sorry for is poor Deuce. I rather think I shall
try to get Jack to have him at Oxford.
I met the queerest little thing in the train coming
here — a Miss Mitt, whose father has just died and
who has therefore to earn her own living (like me
— although she has not been turned out by a cruel
guardian, as I have), and she has just got what
promises to be a very good situation as a governess
at Bedford. So we travelled together as far as that
town, and she had one of my hard-boiled eggs,
having brought nothing for herself except two small
biscuits. She is going to write to me now and then,
she says. I suppose you are too 1
Yours
Edith
M/SS EASE TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Laurels
Grange-over-Sands
My dear Edith,
What you tell me of your new home and
occupations fills me with misgivings. I do not at all
like your employer's interest in lecturers who know
more than the Bible, especially Americans. Life
40
BLUE PERSIANS AND ROME
has difficulties enough as it is without adding to
them. Even here in a little place like Grange we
have great perplexities, and to add to everything
else the best butcher in the town has just retired
and sold his business to a firm with hundreds of
branches who cannot give the individual attention
that Mr. Radbone used to. We shall all feel it, but
no one more than my poor Griselda, because her
little pieces of raw meat every morning (you know
that Blue Persians must have raw meat if they are
to keep in good health, and even then they are
delicate and lose their hair and are often ill through
swallowing it) were so carefully looked out for her
by Mrs. Radbone herself, a very nice woman, who
will now I feel sure find the time hang very heavily
on her hands. She talks of a small farm, and I hope
she will keep her husband up to it, but his ambition
seems to be to travel a little, and that I know will not
suit her at all, she being very corpulent and shy.
I hope you will be very careful to go to church
regularly in spite of Mrs. Pink. I understand there
is a large church quite near Kensington Square, but
Mr. Lark, who used to live in Highbury, has rather
distressed me by saying that Kensington is quite a
stronghold of Roman Catholics. I don't hold with
giving advice, but you must feel your way very
warily, my dear child, especially as you are I know
fond of music, and these people are so cunning that
they find out one's weaknesses at once. I gave up
painting in water colours in 1SS1 entirely owing to
41
LISTENER'S LURE
the interest which a young Roman Catholic lady
professed to take in my progress in that accomplish-
ment, but which was probably something much more
serious, for they are always hoping to make converts,
or perverts as I prefer to call them, to the Pope.
Those of us who have any artistic sense are so much
more precariously placed than the others.
I must stop now or I shall miss the post.
Your loving
Aunt Charlotte
P.S. I am sending you a few eggs which I have no
doubt your employer, who seems for all her mistaken
laxity to be a humane woman, will allow you to ask
the cook to boil. I think three and a quarter minutes
the exact time, but servants are very careless and
very often the water is not boiling when the egg is
dropped in (sometimes so carelessly that it breaks
and all its goodness escapes) or if it is, the egg puts
it off. Mr. Lark tells me that there are no really
fresh eggs in London, whatever the shopkeepers may
say. Life can be very hard.
S/R HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN HARBERTON
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Lynn,
I found your ward entertaining guests in
her Kensington menagerie. Two or three American
42
THE FOOLISH LONDONERS
prophets whose lucrative business it is to trim God
to their own size eyeing each other like rival wrest-
ling champions ; a literary youth or two ; and several
tea-drinking women. Mrs. Pink is sound at bottom
but too lenient to fools. It is amusing to see so old
a woman so tenacious of revolt. I talked a little with
her about it, but could get nothing but the phrase
" People must be taught to think " ; her idea being
that everything non- or anti-scriptural is necessarily
thoughtful. She is perhaps the oldest of that body
of women in London at this moment who accept
Bernard Shaw volubly and patronisingly without be-
ing in the least ready for him or really knowing what
his game is. For it is all Shaw now in these circles,
and it is chiefly women who fill his theatre, just as it
is chiefly women who fill the churches. But women
are always quick to get the machinery of modernity
although underneath they remain as primal as Eve.
I have asked Miss Graham to dine with me and
to go to a play. There is no chance of getting to
know her at Mrs. Pink's.
I find London a good deal changed. New buildings
everywhere and too many motor cars, and the foolish
•Londoners rather more foolish than of old. They
take their various kinds of measles so thoroughly,
the three varieties just now being Bridge, motoring
and eating. The worst thing about games is that
proficiency in them can be obtained only by the
neglect of everything else ; which means that gradu-
ally the brain ossifies in all other directions That
43
LISTENER'S LURE
is why really accomplished cricketers or billiard
players, huntsmen or Bridge players, can seldom talk
about anything else. The English seem to be unable
as a people to have a place for everything and every-
thing in its place.
Every one here is frivolous now. Scepticism and
cynicism are in the air, with a kind of desperate high
spirits and want of thought. They might all be
characters in one of their own musical comedies. I
notice it particularly, because when I was in England
last, it was during the Boer war, and things were
very gloomy. It was said that for every lieutenant who
died in that heroic struggle twenty girls in English
society went into mourning. But there is no mourning
now. People seem to have given up dying. One gets
an impression, among the smart lot, of perpetual spark-
ling motion. The rest however is drab and still enough.
I have taken rooms in a hotel in Jermyn Street,
convenient to Rowland Ward, who is going to make
a fine job of my skins.
Yours
H. R.
MISS MITT TO EDITH GRAHAM
c/o Mrs. Cunningham
Bellevue
Bedford
Dear Miss Graham,
I hope you reached London quite safely and
did not feel the want of the egg you so kindly gave
44
LYDIA MITT ENTRAPPED
me. There was no one to meet me and I had some
difficulty in rinding the house, but it is all right now
and I am very happy here. It is rather an enclosed
house, but my bedroom, which I share with the two
children, has a window looking over the roofs to the
top branches of a very beautiful tree, and I see this
as I dress.
The children are quite nice, although rather noisy,
and they wake up earlier than I should wish ; but I
think the happy voices of children make a very sweet
music even when one would rather be sleeping, don't
you ? As they have no nurse just now, the old
one having left and Mrs. Cunningham being anxious
to see how we can manage without another, I have
to help them dress, and look after them rather more
than I was expecting from her letter ; but I have
always been fond of children, and I cannot in my
first situation have too much experience, can I ?
I am a little troubled about one thing, and that
is the absence of a piano. It was distinctly under-
stood that my music should be allowed to go on, but
the old piano was sold quite recently, and as Mrs.
Cunningham cannot make up her mind what make
to try next, there is none. It means of course that
Maggie's lessons cannot be given, but Mrs. Cunning-
ham says that her head is so bad just now that per-
haps this is as well. Perhaps I can find some one
who has a piano on which I can practise on my
evenings out, although just now, and until there is
a nurse, I don't see much chance of having many,
45
LISTENER'S LURE
as Maggie is so nervous that some one must sit by
her bed while she goes to sleep. I should so prize
a letter from you, dear Miss Graham.
Yours most truly
Lydia Mitt
EDITH GRAHAM TO MISS MITT
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Miss Mitt,
Your letter made me unhappy because I am
afraid you have fallen into rather a selfish house
where they will take advantage of your good nature.
You really must not stay for more than the first
month unless Mrs. Cunningham gets a nurse and a
piano and you have far more time to yourself. It
makes me very unhappy to feel that while I am
happily placed here you are being overworked. Do
let me know that things are being made easier.
Yours sincerely
Edith Graham
EDITH GRAHAM TO JOHN LIN DBA Y FROME
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Jack,
It is very nice of you to be sorry about my
leaving Winfield. I like to be missed. But I shall
46
JACK ON HIS DEFENCE
be back before very long, as Mr. Harberton is certain
to want me to help him again. This change is no
more for me than one of your terms is for you, —
except that / shall probably do some work.
Now I want to ask you a favour — Will you have
Deuce? I can't leave him with Mrs. Ring because
she will only overfeed him and he will have no
exercise. As it is, she gives him tea, which is very
wrong ; and if he went to the Rectory he would have
rather a bad time with the other dogs and make
them very unhappy and jealous. So may I tell Mrs.
Ring to send him to you ? Then I shall know he is
in good hands.
Yours sincerely
Edith Graham
JOHN LINDSA Y FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
Merton College
Oxford
Dear Edith,
Of course I will have Deuce. But the rotten
rules of this college won't let us keep dogs in our
rooms, so he will have to be boarded out, but I shall
take him for walks every day and I shall see that the
people he is with are decent. That was rather a
nasty one about my not working. I have made a
resolution to work like b, like anything this term,
because you asked me to, and have hit on rather a
47
LISTENER'S LURE
dodgy way of reminding myself I am going to. It is
two cards, one stuck up on the looking-glass in my
bedroom and one on the inside of the door in my
other room, and on both of them I have printed the
words WORK FIRST, PLAY AFTERWARDS.
You see I see it whenever I shave or brush my hair,
and whenever I am going out. So don't ever say
any more that I'm a slacker.
I shall give Deuce a ripping time. You didn't say
anything in your letter about that splendid idea of
mine of coming to see you in Algy's car. I suppose
you were too busy thinking about Deuce. Algy says
that Kensington Square is just off the high road to
Richmond. So it will be very easy for us to take
you. The car is a fair snorter and we'll have you
there and back before you can say knife.
Your devoted friend
Jack Frome
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Barbizon
Dear,
Some day we must go to Fontainebleau
together— and in October, when it is brown and
yellow and gold and full of the scent of the Fall
and all the visitors have gone. It is splendid, but
splendid in a way quite different from our English
forests— Windsor, for example, or the New Forest.
43
LYNN AT BARBIZON
The first thing that one misses is the grass. Our
beautiful lawns in England have no counterpart
here. I remember that the first time I saw the
New Forest (I was ten) these lawns shocked me —
they seemed to be against the rules. A forest as
I understood it then was a dense mass of trees,
gloomy, terrible, almost impenetrable, black. Prob-
ably Grimm and Andersen were at the bottom of
this fancy. Open spaces of smooth sunny turf were
unfair, I remember thinking : just as in my first
experience of the underground railway in London
I was pained to catch now and then glimpses of the
sky.
I wish you were here, there is so much beauty to
share. And yet it is better as it is.
I write this at a table under a chestnut tree in the
garden of an odd little hotel, and every now and
then a chestnut falls. So far nothing is broken, but
the man at the next table to me has just had his soup
splashed all over him. We will stay at Barbizon to-
gether, one day, you and I. Indeed we might even
settle for a while, for Millet's house here is to let, and
I nearly took it this morning. I think I could work
there. Rousseau's house near by has become a little
church : he left it so in his will. Diaz' house is
almost opposite Millet's.
I remember walking in Wordsworth's garden at
Rydal Mount on a perfect Sunday afternoon in April
and remarking that if a man could not write poetry
there he could not write it anywhere (which was, of
D 49
LISTENER'S LURE
course, a very shallow thing to say. The same re-
mark has more point here — in this wonderful light —
as applied to painting. I never saw such light : we
have nothing like it in England. Our light, compared
with the light of Barbizon, is light under muslin, one
might say.
I went early this morning to see the heads of
Millet and Rousseau in bronze let into a rock close to
the village. I wish rather that Corot's had been the
other head, because Rousseau does not touch me as
Corot does ; but Corot belonged to Barbizon hardly
at all — Ville d'Avray was his home — although his is
the first name that springs to mind when the little
white village is mentioned (the white now splashed
with scarlet Virginia creeper). Corot, however,
would be furious if he thought that any one had
thought or suggested this — the simple generous crea-
ture, who said of himself and Rousseau, " Rousseau !
Ah yes, he is an eagle, while I, I am only a lark who
sings small sweet songs in a gray sky."
All day I have been thinking of this brave old
bachelor, painting steadily all his life in spite of every
kind of opposition at home and not much honour from
those who ought to have known. There is no story
of him that does not rejoice one, but best of all I like
that which tells how he handed over to Daumier,
another great artist, who had come on bad days and
feared eviction, the title deeds of his house. I like
too to think of him offering money to establish a
battery against the Prussians at Ville d'Avray and
50
A VICTORIAN SYBIL
remarking to a friend who visited his studio during
the war " That little picture will last as long as any
work of Bismarck's— and it will have harmed no
one." (I like to think it is the little view of the Seine
at Saint Cloud, just below Ville d'Avray, which hangs
in the study and every time we look at it lays
a cool soft hand on our foreheads.) And no story
has ever so infuriated me as that of a late English
railway millionaire having so many Corots that he
stacked scores of them with their faces to the wall
in his attics, neither seeing them himself nor making
it easy for others to see them. If ever there was an
indictment of wealth it is there. But one must not
get bitter in this air.
I hope you will see as much of Miss Fielding as
you can. She is a very remarkable woman — one
of the Victorian sybils, clear-sighted, clear-spoken,
humorous and very kind. Mrs. Pink amuses me a
good deal with her devotion to new causes. Between
this philanthropic old optimist and so shrewd a
student of life as her sister you ought to do well.
Don't let Herbert make you cynical ; but that is
impossible. And don't forget me.
Yours
L. H.
5i
LISTENER'S LURE
MISS MITT TO EDITH GRAHAM
c/o Mrs. Cunningham
Bellevue
Bedford
Dear Miss Graham,
How very kind of you to find time to write to
me. Please don't think that I am unhappy— I am
not at all. It is so splendid to be earning some
money and being really independent, and although
I am always very busy I don't think it ought to be
called overwork. I am very strong, you know, and
one is so much happier when one is busy. I confess
I should rather have liked a room to myself, but we
can't have everything, and I know of so many girls
that are really much more in need of a situation than
I was who cannot get anything for months ; whereas
I got this at once, without any trouble at all.
Just now it is a little difficult to get on with the
children's lessons, because the cook left suddenly on
Saturday, and as Mrs. Cunningham is not strong,
and the housemaid cannot cook at all, I have been
trying my hand. It is very lucky that I took a few
lessons before I left home. I find I can do really
rather well with simple things, and it makes me
laugh sometimes to think what funny duties I am
carrying out as a governess.
I am so glad to hear that you are happy. I don't
think I ever loved any face so much as yours. I was
looking at it for so long in the railway carriage
52
HERCULES PROPOSES
before you spoke, and I was hoping so much that
something would happen to make it possible for you
to speak to me. Do you know, dear Miss Graham,
I was even rather naughty, for I was trying to think
of some way of attracting your notice as if it was an
accident, but I could think only of dropping my
book, and I did not like to do that because you might
have rather a tender toe and it would have been so
dreadful if I had hurt it.
I have been writing this in my room, but there is
now no more candle to see by, so I must stop.
Yours very truly
Lydia Mitt
EILEEN SOMERSCALES TO EDITH GRAHAM
13 The Crescent
Bath
Dear Edith,
You will be interested to hear that Mr. Lenox
proposed to-night, after the concert, where he sang
" Twankydillo." Of course I have known for some
time that this was coming, but I did not expect it
just yet, least of all to-night, because I had been
rather cross with him for choosing a country song
like that, instead of something fine, but he said that
there was too much classical music in the programme
and the poorer part of the audience ought to have
something more lively. I was so vexed that I re-
53
LISTENER'S LURE
fused to play his accompaniment, and so the younger
Miss Fleeter played it, and very badly too ; and he
actually made the audience join in the chorus, which
I was glad to find they did only half-heartedly. How-
ever I let Mr. Lenox bring me home, and was really,
I am afraid, rather short with him, but he took no
notice, and suddenly stopped and said he had always
loved me and admired me, and would I be his wife ?
And he looked so white and worn that I forgot all
about "Twankydillo," and kissed his poor head as it
it was a little child's, and said yes.
I have not told mother yet. In fact she was in
bed when I got back. I am sitting up writing now,
because to sleep is quite out of the question. Hercules
is very kind, as you know, and he comes of a very
old family. His grandmother was related to the
Earl of Dacre. Of course I wish he wasn't a curate,
but one can't have everything. Only you can do that.
Do write me a letter saying you are very glad. I
have so few friends.
You seem to have all you want, and nothing but
pleasant flattering people round you. Mother gets
more trying every day, but perhaps my engagement
will make her happier. She will have to find a
companion, I suppose.
Yours ever
Eileen
P.S. Hercules, who is very odd in some ways,
through having had a Quaker grandmother I suppose
54
THE TERRIBLE TURKEY
has a prejudice against engagement rings ; but I shall
try to overcome that.
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
FONTAINEBLEAU
Dear Child,
I have had a ridiculous adventure. I walked
out this morning from Fontainebleau to a village
eight or nine miles away called Fleury-en-Biere
where there is a desolate chateau which I wanted
to see. The only way in seemed to be through a
farmyard, and this I took, and had got half-way
across, towards the desired gateway, when I was
stopped by a foe — an angry turkey. There is probably
a short way with angry turkeys, but I have not
learned it. I know more or less what to do if a bull
were to run at me, or a dog try to bite me ; but a
bird is different. There are no laws for dealing with
assailing birds. It is said that a swan if aroused to
attack a man can break his arm with one blow of its
wing, but I never heard of any prescribed line of
conduct for the man. Similarly with a turkey. A
turkey cannot do such damage as that, but what is
one to do but retreat lamely and in shame when a
turkey pursues you closely across a large farmyard
totally lacking cover, and now and then threatens to
bite or peck?
55
LISTENER'S LURE
No one came to the rescue. Had any one come
I learned afterwards, I should never have been able
to see the chateau. Slowly and painfully, waving
my stick, but horrified at the idea of feeling it hit
the bird, with terror breaking out damply all over me
I reached an open doorway and slid through it. The
turkey came too. Beyond I saw a high gate. I
backed to it and stood by it, holding the turkey with
a fixed glare. It stopped. I glared harder and felt
for the lower bar of the gate with my foot. The
turkey retreated a step, and I rose a step. It retreated
another, and I rose another, and then I turned to
scramble over. The turkey made no attempt to
follow, and I was within the courtyard of the chateau.
Everything was deserted and desolate. The great
house fills, or almost fills, one end of the court,
while stables and other offices and an imposing
gateway complete the square. All is in red brick,
rather ornately finished, and all is crumbling. The
chateau itself is surrounded by a moat, now dry
and filled with rank greenery, and to get into the
house I had to go round to the front and cross a
bridge. In front of the house stretches a park,
equally empty and forlorn, with a lake in the hollow.
Inside the state of things is not so bad. The
wainscotting is good, the windows keep their glass.
The kitchens are immense, with elaborate wash-
houses and larders and cellars all contiguous. Up-
stairs one walked more cautiously, for it seemed that
every door must give on an ancient French family
56
TRESPASSING, SEVEN FRANCS
at tambour work or cards. There were, however,
only mice and vacancy. It was all very strange and
a little eerie ; the sense of emptiness and dead owners
was too vivid.
The next thing was to get away, the trespass done,
and to get away without meeting the turkey. It
seemed as if the great gateway of the courtyard
which led to the road direct would be the best way,
but it turned out to be locked. None of the other
buildings contained a door that led anywhere, and in
the end there was nothing for it but to run the
blockade through the turkey's domain, the farmyard,
— as it were, the Dardanelles. Very gingerly I
descended from the gate and entered the doorway of
the farm. I glanced hastily round. The turkey was
on the other side, among a crowd of servile poultry,
probably telling them of his late conquest over man ;
but immediately in front of me, apparently awaiting
my appearance with the liveliest Interest, was a new
enemy, a stout farmer's wife talking to a chauffeur ;
and then I learned that the owner of the estate had
just arrived in his motor car, and had seen me from
the park moving before the windows, and had sent his
chauffeur to demand who I was. It cost five francs
to pacify the woman, and two, the man. I fancy
I came out in the report as an eccentric American
artist.
Good-night
L.
57
LISTENER'S LURE
MISS FIELDING TO LYNN HARBERTON
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington
Dear Exile,
Your ward has come and conquered. My sister
Victoria, who used to be thought of as a strong-
minded independent woman, already gives signs of
abdication. To me, who belong to the past, even if
I never fluttered and trembled and twittered quite
as much as was the rule, there is something almost
uncanny in this new, level-eyed, quick, self-possessed,
resolute, silent type of young woman who gets most
of the things she wants.
But Edith is not quite like that, because she is
diffident and sympathetic too. Also she does not
smoke, and that is getting to be one of the shortest
cuts to my diminishing and obsolete heart. I think
that if there is any occasion on which smoking would
be justified in a woman it is when she gives a cook
notice. I feel that if one could then light a pipe and
do the deed coolly between the puffs, it would be the
perfect way — unless of course it could be managed
by telephone. But otherwise I dislike intensely to
see them emitting clouds like so many clubmen.
But of course women are clubmen to-day. There
is a large building in Piccadilly where, I am told,
they swagger about for all the world like the real
thing. Why don't you give up ornamental literature
58
WOMAN'S DESTINY
and write some trenchant pamphlets to tell England
a few truths — not the least among them that there
will never be any hope for the country so long as its
girls try to be boys and its women men and work is
considered shameful ? Your musty old Doctor John-
son would have let them know it. I have no great
opinion of the modern young man, but I have less
of the modern young woman, with her slang, and
her Bridge, and her hockey, and her cigarettes.
Nature has arranged that there is only one thing
for a woman to do, and that is to be a mother. Every-
thing else she does is just an evasion. I used to deny
this, and even now it is against my wish to believe
it ; but I do believe it. I believe that every un-
married woman is a ridiculous or pathetic figure ;
I believe that every childless woman is a tragic
figure ; and both are outstaying their welcome in
Nature's house — are there only on sufferance. Women
no doubt can do useful social things — speak, agitate,
organise, and so forth ; but it is all beside the mark.
Their duty is to be mothers. How Nature and the
gods must laugh or weep at our frivolous efforts to
lose sight of this destiny. My sister's proselytising
zeal for example.
I am beginning to want to see two things again —
a lady and a mother. One mother, it is true, I can
see at any time, by just sending for my niece, Mrs.
Hyde, who is sweet and merry motherhood personi-
fied ; but there are no more accessible ladies. Women
in any number, girls, good fellows, " exquisitely
59
LISTENER'S LURE
gowned hostesses," but ladies have gone out. Or
are they all serving at Jay's ?
Of course we are very glad that you have no need
of Edith for the present, because we want her here,
but if I had been in your place I should have in-
vented a new book instantly in order to retain her
company — even if it had been another work on
Nelson. One of the nicest things about her is her
silent intelligence. No one could ever call her
"brainy," which is I think the worst of the new
words. In my poor sister's drawing-room they are
at present bending under "mentality," but that
monster never wanders my way. I represent the
old guard, and keep Tennyson on the drawing-room
table.
Good-bye for the present. My advice to you is to
cut short your visit to your brother and come back
and be human and obvious. Foreign lands are no
place for a man who is dissatisfied with himself and
perplexed as to his duty. All travel for pleasure is
expensive and unnecessary, but it is never so foolish
as when a sore head is your only companion. You
should give up being cleverer than other people : it
is a great mistake. There is a cry just now about
going back to the land. That is what you ought to
do, using "land" in its fullest sense.
This is the last time that I shall bore you with my
advice, so don't fear I am becoming a revivalist.
Your friend
Adelaide Fielding
60
WE MEET CYNTHIA HYDE
P.S. Edith's orthodoxy is all right. She has not
yet begun to say her prayers in bed ; and that is the
intermediate stage between simple faith and infidelity.
If she is snapped up by some vain London gentle-
man you will have no reason to complain, for it will
be largely through her five years' apprenticeship as a
listener to your gifted tongue. It is no use training
listeners in the country and sending them to this
capital of male selfishness, if you are going to grumble
when you lose them. I have watched her with male
talkers. Her ear is more powerful than many tongues.
MRS. PINK TO CYNTHIA HYDE, OF THE CORNER
HOUSE, LEATHERHEAD, WIFE OF HERBERT
C HIS HOLM HYDE, OF THE WOODS AND
FORES TSDEPAR TMENT, MRS. PINK'S NEPHE I V
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Cynthia,
I want you to come and tell me what you
think of Adelaide's nominee, Miss Graham. I have
my own opinion, which I will keep until I hear
yours. The mother died young and left her, an
only child, to the care of her father, a country vicar.
He seems to have died when Edith was about nine-
teen, after appointing a literary friend, a Mr. Har-
berton, who knows all about Dr. Johnson, as her
guardian. For the past few years she has lodged
in the village and has helped Mr. Harberton as an
61
LISTENER'S LURE
amanuensis. It was because his book was done,
and because he thought she ought to see more of
life, that she came to me. I like her immensely ;
no, love her. (How silly of me 1 I never meant to
say that, but I hate crossing things out and even
more I hate writing things over again. But when
you come, don't let my opinion affect yours.)
A most extraordinary man has just come to
London, an American, who after being for several
years a Congregational minister in Chicago gave up
everything to become a missionary in China, but
while there was himself converted to Confucianism.
He is now trying to win others to this most in-
teresting philosophy, and I have arranged a meeting
for him here on Sunday, the 23rd. I hope you will
come up for the day. His name is Dr. Greeley Bok.
(What a pity it is that one gets one's name so long
before one's walk in life is decided.) I enclose two
tickets for the meeting, but I suppose it is quite
useless to expect Herbert to come too ; so bring one
of the more intelligent members of your suite instead.
Yours affectionate
Aunt Victoria
lynn harderton to edith graham
FONTAINEBLEAU
Dear Child,
I have had rather an interesting experience.
I have met a giant. There is a fete in full swing
62
THE GIANT
in this town of many soldiers, and in wandering
through it I came suddenly upon a picture of a gren-
adier leaning against a lamp post and lighting his
cigar at the flame. Underneath it were the words
"The Tallest Private in the British Army." I paid
my ten centimes and entered. Others entered too,
and when there were enough of us the giant stoop-
ingly emerged from the back compartment and un-
folded himself to his ridiculous full height. His
face was unmistakably English and as unmistak-
ably the face of a very sick man — a large, dreary,
pale, loose face. His red tunic was a world too big
for him ; he was a giant only in height — a dwarf
could have knocked him down. On his head he
wore a bearskin, to add to the military illusion ;
and he got his hand up to the salute laboriously, as
though every muscle were stretched and limp. We
walked erect under his outstretched arm, dropped
coins in the tin box that he proffered with an im-
portunate rattle, and the show was over, — for all
except me. I could not let him go without a word,
and he asked me to come inside where it was warm,
and talk.
I followed him into the tiny compartment at the
back of the tent. He sank wearily into a chair,
threw away his bearskin, and sat there, a dejected
monster, with the stove between his knees. He
came from Lincolnshire, he said, and had never been
in the British army. He shivered over the stove
as he warmed his vast hands. We talked about
63
LISTENER'S LURE
Lincolnshire a little, and then of himself ; he said
that his life was a hell, especially on the road ; his
employer allowed him to walk out only furtively,
late at night and in lonely places, for a giant whose
inches are his fortune must not be seen free. He was
clearly in a late stage of consumption, as so many
giants are in this decadent day, and he would not
be sorry when the end came. After so many years
in a circumscribed caravan and a low-pitched tent,
the grave must appeal to him mainly as a place
where limbs can be stretched without let.
We parted good friends, and I have since been
back with a bottle and some English tobacco ; but
never has a gleam of life flitted across the bleak and
snowy regions of his face. It will not, I fear, be for
much longer that he gives the peasantry of France
a false idea of the size of Mr. Thomas Atkins. Death
has set his seal too unmistakably on his face. But
what a life ! He has not even enough spirit left to
mind whether or not he sees Lincolnshire any more.
He is as completely done as a man can be : a glaring
example of the unwisdom of being abnormal in this
trim world.
I have sent Mrs. Ring a postcard of Napoleon's
bedroom, coloured. I hope it won't stir her to make
any alterations in mine.
Good-night
L.
64
DR. BOK MEETS A CRITIC
CYNTHIA HYDE TO MRS. PINK
The Corner House
Leatherhead
My dear Aunt,
I was sorry I had to run away this afternoon
to catch my train, without saying good-bye. I don't
like your new prophet at all. I don't like him, and
I don't like what he said. I hope you will not en-
courage him to make a resort of Kensington Square ;
or if you do, I hope you will lock up the spoons. I
am very glad Herbert did not come with me, as I
am sure he would have been rude. Do take up
Christian Science or something nice and quiet and
refined. This great bull of a man revolts me, and
I can't bear to think of Chinese religion. The
Chinese have such horrible little eyes, one couldn't
possibly share their faith. Besides they despise
women, which is a shame, and worship their an-
cestors. You know perfectly well that I couldn't
worship mine. Just think of worshipping that
horrible man the Duke of Marlborough had to have
shot for copying despatches. He was my great-great-
grandfather, I believe. I think it is awful to en-
courage these unsettling Americans.
Your loving niece
Cynthia
e 65
LISTENER'S LURE
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN HARBERTON
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Lynn,
Edith interests me a good deal and amuses me
too. What I like so much about her is her refusal
to waste time— more than she must, I mean. By
taking most things for granted, or accepting them
quietly as if she did, she saves all the time that less
sensible women, and men too, lose in surprise and
resentment. Again, she never clucks. Most Lon-
doners cluck all the time, over their neighbours'
shortcomings or virtues : Edith takes them as they
come. The temptation to say What a nice man
so-and-so is ! and What a dear woman Mrs. Blank
is ! to which most of us fall, seems to leave her
untroubled. To her all men and women seem to
be equally desirable, and she never analyses their
merits. This might be called inhuman ; but Edith
is very human at heart, although the despair of
those who want their own views of men and women
to be shared absolutely by their friends. We all of
us say that we take people as we find them : but
Edith does it.
Yours
H. R.
66
NATURE'S CRUELTY
LYNN HARBERTON TO MISS ADELAIDE
FIELDING
FONTAINEBLEAU
Dear Mentor,
You say something in your letter about the
Back to the Land cry. It is a picturesque enough
rally, but if you lived in the country and saw the lives
which the labourers have" to pass you would be less
enthusiastic. One may deplore the steady drifting
of the boys to the towns ; but it is easily understood.
To reproduce the father's drudgery over again can-
not present any charm. In a town there is always a
possibility of a lucky chance leading to prosperity :
the books are full of meagre beginnings and illustrious
endings — Carnegies and Wilson Barretts and John
Burns' ; but there is no future for the farm lad who
sticks to the farm but a pound a week at the most
and rheumatism.
Your friend Nature is so cruel. She insists that
he who gives his services to the land shall be nothing
short of a slave. He must be of the land and of the
land only : he must think land and live land : and in
reward the land will get into his bones and cripple him.
I sometimes wonder if field work is a human being's
work at all— when I see the gnarled and creeping
things about here that are called old men and old
women, who ought to be upright and happy, but are
mournful and crooked and lacking both the oppor-
tunity and the power of enjoying the ameliorations
of civilisation.
67
LISTENER'S LURE
I hate machinery, but machinery would be better
than this ; and yet of course it is machinery that has
emptied the rural districts. Town life is bad enough,
with its crowded slums and fiercer struggle for ex-
istence ; but there at least you get society and dry
walls. You should see some of our cottages — such
picturesque little bits for the artist ! — on wet days.
And it is not only the labourers. I wonder at the
employers too. I stood the other day on a hill at
home, looking over the plain, while an old country-
man pointed out the boundaries of the farms beneath
us and told stories of present and past inhabitants
of some of the cottages,. His eighty-first birthday
was only a month ago ; he has worked on the same
farm for nearly sixty years, and he was born in the
cottage in which he now lives. Eighty-one years is
a long distance to send back a memory ; but his
makes the journey with little difficulty. So we stood
there, he and I, and picked out the dividing hedges
and discussed farmers dead and living. God-fearing
farmers — and otherwise ; gentle farmers — and other-
wise ; sober farmers — and otherwise ; but mostly
otherwise. "Wonderful hard drinking "—that was
the burden of most of his recollections.
As he talked I seemed to be a part of the life he
described, and to see inside those old houses at our
feet. I was conscious of the drawing-room, with the
horsehair sofas, the crocheted antimacassars, the
bright green carpets, the tall lamp with flowers
painted on it, the oleographs on the wall, the thick
68
UNDER THE WEATHER
tablecloth, the closed - from - Monday - to - Saturday
smell ; I was conscious of the little parlour with the
black kettle on the hob, the pipes and tobacco jars
on the mantelpiece, the gun hanging over it, the
grocer's almanack with its bright picture, the thread-
bareness of the carpet along the main routes of
thoroughfare, the black ceiling, the smell of last
night's smoke. . . .
And I seemed to understand so clearly why that
wonderful hard drinking had set in. The isolated
life, the meteorological reverses, one lot of crops
soaked until they are sodden, another baked dry, hay
ruined at the last minute, corn spoiled, cattle disease,
sheep rot, valuable horses falling lame, and so forth.
There is something so inexorable about the expenses
of a farm. No matter how bad the harvest, no
matter what wretched price the cattle and sheep
have fetched in the market, there the expenses are
just the same. Who can be surprised that farmers
take to the bottle? These are trials that call for
the fortitude of philosophers ; and farmers are only
farmers. A farmer who goes through adversity and
comes out the other side still sweet, that is a man to
take off one's hat to.
Think of an unsuccessful farmer on a wet day.
Imagine an unsuccessful farmer, middle-aged, with
no balance at his banker's, and all going wrong at
home, and his illusions dead, and the future one
stern frown, and the present a grey sheet of rain,
falling, falling, pitilessly. Great Heavens I wasn't
69
1
LISTENER'S LURE
alcohol invented for such a case ? You know the
German proverb about tobacco : " God first made
man, and then He made woman ; and then He felt
sorry for man and made tobacco." Well, equally
one might say He first made the land, and then He
made the agriculturalist, and then He felt sorry for
the agriculturalist and made wine. It was not until
the Flood that Noah exceeded.
I write this in a hotel at Fontainebleau. I am
very lonely. Good-night.
Yours
L. H.
MISS FASE TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Laurels
Grange-over-Sands
My dear Edith,
I have wanted to write to you for some time
on a very delicate subject, but have not been able to
bring myself to begin. But now I feel I must delay
no longer. I refer to the Heart. You are, dear,
living in a great city full of young men, and sooner or
later you will become an object of their admiration.
Although I do not hold with giving advice, yet I hope
you will be very careful. I do not say that you
should be so careful that you should never marry
at all. One can make gyave mistakes in that way,
70
CONCERNING EDITH'S HEART
very great mistakes. But you must search your
heart very narrowly before you say Yes to any one.
The natural tendency of a nicely brought-up girl is
always to say No, but of course, as she learns after-
wards, when alas ! it is too late, there are times when
she really meant the opposite. My dear child, do
not make this mistake. I have known lives made
permanently sad through it.
It is said that marriages are made in heaven, but
it is difficult to believe it of some. The Bank Manager
here, such a nice man, a Mr. Crask, has the utmost
unhappiness in his home life. I am sure there could
not be a more gentlemanly official than he is, and it
is a pleasure to ask for one's pass book, but no sooner
does he get upstairs than his troubles begin. I am
told that Mrs. Crask cannot forgive him for being
only a clerk. She married him under the impression
that he was a banker, and such is her nature that
she persecutes him day and night for her mistake.
I am told that he met her at Blackpool, where her
mother kept a boarding-house ; and though of course
there is nothing in your case that corresponds to hers,
I thought you ought to know about it.
On the other hand the senior curate here is one of
the most happily married men you could conceive of,
with a large family and a pony. His wife was the
daughter of a rich farmer in Derbyshire, and they
have the best cheese I ever tasted. She has a little
private income and a perfectly placid disposition.
But I wish she would buy better tea, for the Dorcas
7i
LISTENER'S LURE
meetings at her house are only half as pleasant as
they should be. The taste for China tea is not com-
mon, most people seeming to prefer the rough Indian
or Ceylon. At the last Dorcas meeting we began
to read aloud Sir Frederick Treves' travel book, The
Other Side of the Latiterti — such a charming work.
It would, I am sure, do your Mrs. Pink good.
I must now stop or I shall miss the post.
Your loving
Aunt Charlotte
P.S. You will not, I am sure, misunderstand that
remark about marriages being made in Heaven. Of
course I believe that all things are made in Heaven,
but some are for our chastisement and are too mys-
terious for us to comprehend, like Mrs. Crask's temper.
Poor Mr. Crask once called on me, in the morning,
on a question connected with my signature, and his
manners were most refined and gentle. He bowed
to me over a glass of sherry in a way that almost
put me out of countenance.
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
I am getting to know the family by degrees.
Mrs. Pink's niece by marriage, a Mrs. Hyde, called
72
FRY OR JACKSON?
to-day with two of her many boys. I liked her in-
stantly, and I hoped she liked me. She is abundant
in every way : large and easy in body, and large and
easy in mind. You I fancy would call her Shake-
spearian, and so should I if you had not come first
and made it look like copying, which is detestable.
I find that she has a reputation for saying deliciously
frank and natural things, and even in the hour I was
with her this morning I saw several spring to her
eyes and lips and fall back again at a prompting of
reserve. But I think I knew what they were. If
she had known that I knew what they were she
would have said them, but even Cynthias (her name
is Cynthia) have to be careful before their aunts' new
Companions. She is somewhere in the thirties, with
a complexion like milk and roses.
The dear thing, Miss Fielding tells me, collects
lovers as other people collect postage stamps or
autographs, and if there are none about she invents
them.
The two boys who came with her were Arthur
and Dermot. Dermot asked me at once if I preferred
Fry to Jackson. For the moment I thought he was
referring to chocolate, but he went on quickly to add
that they knew some one to whom Fry had given
a bat, and that saved me from a fatal error. It
also gave me a hint as to what I should say, and I
chose Fry instantly. This made us friends for life ;
although of course Fry can't bowl and Jackson can.
Arthur also is satisfied with me because I knew the
73
LISTENER'S LURE
name of a moth which he was carrying in a match-
box. So that is all right.
I have arranged about Deuce : Jack has him at
Oxford.
Good-night
Edith
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
i
FONTAINEBLEAU
Dear,
Just a scrap to-night. I do not say that Fon-
tainebleau is the perfect place to walk in : it is a little
too trim ; but it is good enough for me. It is a very
good place to be alone in, and just now I am glad to
be alone. I have been bored horribly at the hotel
this evening by two artists who could not think how
I could care for solitary walking. 1 was moved to an
unexpected pitch of argumentative eloquence. All in
a moment I saw why I cared for solitary walking,
and I told them so in one long, and, I don't doubt,
rather noisy paragraph. I assumed the character of
the contemplative vagabond, and, as near as I can
remember now, said this : That the true vagabond is
happiest alone. That there is absurdity in two men
walking together ; three— and the thing becomes
grotesque. Hazlitt was right in deprecating conver-
sation : the walker does not want to converse, except
74
THE NATURE OF THE VAGABOND
with nature and himself. I doubt even if Hazlitt's
exception in favour of a few words in anticipation of
the supper at the inn was really sound ; for food that
is articulately anticipated is rarely satisfying. No-
thing, I said, so robs a poulet of its divinity as to ex-
patiate on it in advance. Solitary, silent, sub-conscious
anticipations of the meal are wiser. The cultivated
vagabond will talk gladly with the denizens of the
country, with bagmen, gipsies, circus-men, pedlars ;
but almost the last thing he wishes to find at the inn
is another like himself. There are a hundred reasons
why he wishes to be alone : his sacred selfishness de-
mands it ; he came out for it, otherwise he would
have stayed in the city ; no one is quite worthy to
commune with him, every true vagabond being-
superior to every one else ; he detests having his
attention called to beautiful things, every true vaga-
bond being the first detector and judge of beautiful
things ; he does not want to agree, even less does he
want to disagree, for every true vagabond knows
best. And I concluded with this epigram : A com-
panion is a mistake in many ways, but chiefly be-
cause when he is with you you are not alone. Then
I said good-night and came up to write to you and go
to bed.
Good-night
L
75
LISTENER'S LURE
EILEEN SOMERSCALES TO EDITH GRAHAM
13 The Crescent
Bath
•
Dear Edith,
Your long letter about the Sunday afternoon
concert was very interesting. I had no idea that
anything but sacred music was allowed. How very
fortunate you are ! You seem just to open your
mouth for pleasant things to drop in, while I am tied
to this wretched dull invalids' town, and almost to
the house.
As for Sundays, I am afraid I must say good-bye
to them now and for ever. Hercules makes such a
point of my going to the evening service as well as
the morning, and he rather wants me to come for him
after school in the afternoon to walk home. I have
always felt that the one day in the week on which
engaged people in our class need not walk out to-
gether is Sunday ; but Hercules does not seem to
trouble about things like that. I never knew any one
so completely careless about what other people are
thinking.
I thought our engagement would make mother
happier, but when we are alone she grumbles more
than ever. Hercules is the only person who can keep
her happy, but of course he cannot be here very
much.
Yourj ever
Eileen
76
LITTLE MR. CONRAN
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
I think you will like to know what my duties
are. Here is a typical day. — I get up at eight and we
have breakfast at nine. After breakfast Mrs. Pink
reads her letters and we answer them. There are
always a great many, and we are usually about an
hour or two over it. Among them are pretty sure to
be one or two asking for money, and these Mrs. Pink
likes to examine before she does anything.
There is a funny little man, Mr. Conran, who calls
every morning at half-past ten for orders, just like the
butcher, whose sole duty it is to make inquiries about
the begging-letter writers. It is awful the number
that are not genuine. Mr. Conran is a very kind
little man, whose face gets sadder and sadder as he
finds out another and another impostor. Mrs. Pink
discovered him in an A.B.C. where he was sitting next
her one day when she was in a hurry and offered her
his cup of coffee and roll, saying he could wait as he
had time to spare. She liked his face so much that
they talked a little, and she gave him her card and
asked him to call. And the next thing he was get-
ting thirty shillings a week as her almoner and de-
tective. His real business is that of legal engrosser,
which leaves him plenty of time. He is a widower
77
LISTENER'S LURE
with no children, and he lives in one room in Gray's
Inn.
Soon after eleven Mrs. Pink goes out, and she likes
me to go too. We have lunch at one, and after that
until half-past four, when tea is brought in, I am
free, because Mrs. Pink either reads or goes to Com-
mittee meetings. She never pays calls, and no one
now expects her to, but there are few days on which
callers do not come here, and I am kept busy talking
and pouring out tea until six every afternoon.
Most of the callers talk fads, but we have some
interesting ones too, and three or four young men, the
nicest of whom is Mr. Albourne, a protege of Mrs.
Pink's. He is different from all the other young
men I have so far met. One of the pleasantest things
about him is his frank way of criticising himself.
He stands on one side, as it were, and sees himself
file by, and calls out impudent things to the proces-
sion. London is full of laughers, I find, but he is
the first to realise the truth that the best laugher
begins at home. He is on one of the weekly reviews,
but he does a good deal of work for other papers too
— little anonymous satirical articles and sometimes
verse.
Mrs. Pink, who knew his parents, offered to pay
for him to go either to Oxford or Cambridge, but he
said he would prefer two years in London, with
means to do nothing all the while, and she consented.
I think he was right. He has never published any
of his verse, but we have several of his poems (which
78
ENTER DENNIS ALBOURNE
he will not allow us to call poems) pasted into a
little book. I am copying two of them, representing
two of his principal moods, for you to read. You
will see that in one he believes in human nature's
sweetness and in the other he mocks at one of its
weaknesses : he is always swinging between these
two phases of mind— reverencing simplicity and
genuineness and mocking pretentiousness and affec-
tation. He is very delicate, a little inclined to be
consumptive I am afraid, and is probably the worst
dressed man, without being untidy, in the world
(worse than you). These are the poems : —
THE DIVINE IN THE COMMONPLACE
At the moment that Fate had set apart
For their meeting, they met ; and from heart to heart
A bond of sympathy straightway grew,
And one they became, who till then were two.
Had you asked his friends to tell you aught
Of the kind of fellow the girl had "caught," —
One would have called him "an honest soul,"
Another, "a very good sort on the whole,'
And all would assure you the man had naught
Of hidden depths, and they couldn't conceive
("But you can't account for a woman's whim!")
Whatever the girl could see in him.
Her friends would have answered much the same
Of the girl henceforward to bear his name :
"A plain, little, inoffensive thing,
Lucky to win a wedding ring ;
Pleasant enough, but tame as tame ; "
And try as they might they couldn't perceive
(" But a man's such a gullible character!")
Whatever her husband could see in her.
79
LISTENER'S LURE
Such would have been the wise world's speech ;-
While love transfigured each for each,
And she was his soul's mysterious star,
And he her wonderful Avatar.
This is the other : —
THE HIGHER ALTRUISM
The conduct of myself is — what?
A bagatelle, a trifle, not
A matter for persistent care,
But something which, when I can spare
A minute, may, perhaps be scanned
With profit. On the other hand,
The conduct of my friends, my neighbours,
Demands my best, untiring labours.
My ways, alas ! are fixed, were fixed
When God first took the trowel and mixed
The mud of which he fashioned man.
A part of the predestined plan,
Fate ties my hands ; I cannot move
Except in the appointed groove.
To grumble argues little wit ;
I see my weird and bow to it.
But none the less can I descry
My neighbour's faults with half an eye.
His little weaknesses I see,
And recommend the remedy,
And strive by every means to raise
My neighbour into wiser ways.
Nay, more, with other folk I run
His foibles over, one by one,
Till all believe each limitation
And pine for his regeneration.
So pure a joy is self-negation.
80
LONDON'S GOSSIPS
We have dinner at half-past seven, and after
dinner, if no one is here, I read to Mrs. Pink. We
have just finished Diana of the Crossways and are going
to begin One of Our Conquerors again. I say again,
because we tried it before Diana, and the first chapter
was fatal. So this time I am going to paraphrase
the first chapter and begin with the second. Mrs.
Pink's favourite poem seems to be "The Eloping
Angels" by William Watson. I don't think you
have read this ; but if you had you would at once
realise her revolutionary turn of mind. It is very
wonderful in any one so old, I think. Miss Fielding,
her sister, is greatly amused by it all, and never
omits to ask me just before she goes how my ortho-
doxy is getting on. She pretends to see my bump
of reverence diminishing day by day.
We go to bed at half-past ten ; or at least Mrs.
Pink does. I sit up an hour or so longer and write
to you or read. So you see it is a quiet and regular
life. I am as happy, I think, as I could be away
from Winfield. The only times when I feel really
miserable are when the fogs come. Kensington
Square seems to be peculiarly adapted to hold fogs.
They seem to treat it as a resting-place, to lie down
in and gain fresh strength.
One thing that shocks me and rather frightens
me too is the way that London gossips. In the
country we get into the way of thinking that London
is in earnest : that it seriously discusses statesman-
ship and art, literature and sociology, religion and
F 81
LISTENER'S LURE
music. But it is all a mistake. London only dis-
cusses people. However the conversations may begin,
even in this strenuous house, they end, in spite of
Mrs. Pink, in gossip about men and women, chiefly
women.
I like Sir Herbert Royce more and more, but it is
not easy to keep pace with him. He is very de-
structive. I suppose killing lions and tigers makes
men feel superior, and that leads to contemptuous-
ness. I wish he had not killed any, it seems to me
so dreadful to do anything to spoil such beautiful
pieces of life and strength : so unfair too to do it
with a gun. He says he quite agrees with me, but
to kill is second nature with him, and as it is against
the law to kill men in England, he has to kill big
game in Africa and India. If I thought he meant it
when he talks like this I should be very unhappy,
but it is only his humour, I am sure. For all his
cold talk he is much more thoughtfully kind than
any of the other men that come here.
Good-night
Edith
P.S. I don't mean that he is kinder than Mr.
Albourne, but more satisfactorily so. Mr. Albourne
gives one the impression that he could be kind even
to his own hurt ; but Sir Herbert would always be
strong too.
82
THE PERNICKETY PENSIONERS
GWENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
Dear old Thing,
I am afraid I am making the most awful mess
of your work here. For one thing the old women
don't like me so much as they liked you, of course ;
and then there is the drawback that I am the Rector's
daughter, which makes me a sort of policeman and
puts them rather on their guard. " I do 'ope Miss
Edith is coming back soon," they say most of the
time.
Mrs. Beloe is the worst. She really is a terror,
I can't do anything right for her. I took her some
beef-tea the other morning and heated it on the fire
and gave it to her. " Thank you, miss," she said,
" but Miss Edith never puts pepper in because she
knows that I can't take it, it makes me cough that
dreadful." Well, she didn't cough and she mopped
up the whole cupful, but I stood there just feeling
a rotten failure.
Mrs. Tootell has had a most awful tooth, and I
took her to old Weedon's on Thursday, the day that
the dentist comes, to have it out. All the way there
and all the way back she was whimpering, " Miss
Edith would have given me something to cure it,
Miss Edith would. She wouldn't let the brutes pull
83
LISTENER'S LURE
it out" — although the tooth was quite hollow and
breaking away. The dentist was very gentle and
quick, but she thinks and speaks of him still only as
" the brutes."
Father says it is very wrong of Mr. Harberton to
allow these old people enough to stay on in their
cottages when they are not earning anything. He
says the cottages are wanted for younger people, and
the old ones are bound to need more and more
attention which they cannot pay for, and they ought
to go on the parish. I suppose there is something
in it, but I quite agree with you about their horror
of going to the workhouse and the importance of
sticking to their own roofs as long as they can. Of
course what Winfield wants is some almshouses.
They would not mind going into them, and if they
were endowed like those at Rambourne everything
would be made easy for the old things.
A letter from Jack says he's working like a nigger :
but I bet that's all tommy rot. I know Jack better.
When I told father he said "The negro, my child,
is the laziest and most procrastinating creature on
God's earth." Jack also says that Deuce has been
biting one of the sillier Dons' leg, and every one is
delighted. Do write to me.
Yours ever
Gwen
THE ALMSHOUSE SOLUTION
EDITH GRAHAM TO GWENDOLEN FROME
(Fragment)
17A Kensington Square, W.
It is very good of you to look after my old
charges. They are rather a grumbling set I know,
but it isn't much fun to be old like that and full
of rheumatism. I am always surprised that they
grumble so little, not so much. But it isn't their
grumbling to me that I mind, it's their grumbling
to Mr. Harberton. He is always so weak and
they know just how to get round him. They tell
him he looks overworked. I believe that clever
women always tell men they look overworked. You
are quite right about the almshouses — that would be
splendid. It is the only form of charity about which
one feels quite happy, and it can be beautiful too if
you get a good architect. But I suppose they cost
a tremendous lot.
Always yours
Edith
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
8 Hare Court
The Temple
Dear Miss Graham,
I have received a circular inviting me to join
an American Success Club. A Success Club is a
35
LISTENER'S LURE
very clever idea, thoroughly American, and I want
Mrs. Pink to know about it. It seems to me a
little too much in her line, but don't say I said so.
The process is very simple, as these passages cut
from the circular will show you.
Perhaps you are ambitious and eager to make an effort to
win success, but lack confidence in your ability, or do not know
just how to commence. You perhaps feel that you possess
natural talent and ability, and if you only had some one to
encourage and direct you in the right channel of thought, you
could take up your work with renewed energy and increased
hope and make a success of it. This is where a membership in
this Club would help you, for it would supply the missing link
between you and success, through the assisting influence of the
Mentalism of every member. You would at once become a link
with the other members, in the chain that moves the machinery
of success. Their combined mental strength would be united
with yours and before such a mighty force all obstacles would
give way. . . .
Thoughts are things, and Mentalism is the subtle force by
which thoughts are intelligently conveyed from one to another.
The concentrating and centralising of this great force by thou-
sands of minds, upon a special subject at a certain hour, always
creates the condition desired. . . .
Each member of the Club is instructed in the use of the
Law of Mentalism, so that he may by its use create for himself
and for others the elements of success. While every man and
woman possessing a knowledge of this law can assist himself
or herself to success, still they can have that assistance increased
a thousandfold, if they are also in harmony with, and receive
the mental help and influence from a thousand people who are
already attaining success. Then if that number is increased to
ten thousand, the success will be increased in a corresponding
ratio. The mental vibrations of one member are strengthened
by those of all the members of the club. Every member will
use his mental Force to help you, and you in return will send
out your mental vibrations to unite with theirs and help them.
86
THE ENGLISH FAILURE CLUB
As they become more successful, your success will increase, for
you will all become as one great mind and think with one
accord.
Isn't that clever? The inventor of such a notion
ought to be on The Times; perhaps he is. I am offered,
for a dollar, two months' concentrated American
mentalism on any affair I may have in hand. As
my affairs are all literary I am not accepting, or in
the result I might find myself writing like Matthew
Arnold's friend the Reverend E. P. Roe or even Lew
Wallace — the most successful American authors, 1
believe. But it has given me an idea. What do
you think of an English Failure Club? The Failures
will combine to think steadily of the new book or
play upon which one of those successful men who
cannot make a mistake is at present engaged ; and
by our concentrated mentalism get merit — and un-
popularity — into it. Terms free.
Yours sincerely
D. A.
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
H6tel Dv Soleil
Avignon
Dear,
I have been to another fair, or rather I found
myself suddenly surrounded by fair at this place and
87
LISTENER'S LURE
surrendered to it. It was the usual thing save for
two incidents which perhaps are worth describing
to you. One was the demeanour of a young
woman who confessed to the possession of three
legs, and indeed was unmistakably the owner of
that number on the picture outside, each one as
robust and identifiable a leg as those wooden models
on which hosiers display lace stockings, or as the
legendary Manxman's. Having set myself the task
of evading no single booth, I went in and was im-
mensely taken with the calm self-possession and
modesty with which the Phenomenon displayed her
draped treasures. It was no small achievement
under a fire of sceptical criticism by a dozen caustic
wits. She was rather pretty, and quite young, and
there she sat, without the faintest tinge of emotion,
until they began to show signs of exhaustion. Then
" Merci, messieurs ! " she said very sweetly, and
dropped the curtain, and we filed out. After all,
when one has three legs and can make money by
the gift one can afford to be tolerant. But it is odd
and rather hard when the wrong person blushes, and
that person oneself. I felt somehow as if I had
been peeping over some one's shoulder to read a
private letter and had been caught doing it.
The other incident was connected with a round-
about. My vow of thoroughness did not include
riding on a revolving pig or rabbit, but I looked with
a good deal of amusement at those that did. The
correct thing is for an observer to provide himself
88
TENDER-HEART AND THE GRISETTE
with long rolls of coloured paper and to throw these
over the young woman he likes best as she whirls
by. Every girl on this roundabout had an admirer,
and several of them were covered with votive
streamers ; every girl except one, a little plump solid
thing of about seventeen, wearing deep mourning,
who could win no notice whatever. Round she went
and round, and each time was still uncomplimented
and more visibly mortified at such a public confession
of failure. And so what do you think I did ? I
bought some rolls of paper and very deftly got two
over her shoulders just before the ride was over. A
sight for some of our neighbours, Mrs. Clayton-Bush
for example : Mr. Lynn Harberton, the Winfield
recluse and editor of Boswell, among the grisettes !
Before she could dismount I had disappeared into
the crowd and so escaped whatever sequel such
advances may have.
Good-night
L.
GWENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
Dear old Edith,
We go on missing you awfully. Why ever
did you go away? The place is absurd without
either you or Mr. Harberton, and his garden is a
89
LISTENER'S LURE
perfect disgrace. Father does what he can to make
Job work, but, as you know, the old scamp wants
continual looking after. The house is all right
inside, except that it's empty, but Mrs. Ring has no
power over Job, whose one mission in life, father
says, is to exhaust our patience. The drive is full
of weeds, and nothing is done that ought to be done.
We don't know what to do, and it is really rather
serious with such a ripping garden as Mr. Har-
berton's. Of course Job ought to be sacked, but then
Mr. Harberton would never allow that. All he says
when he is spoken to about it is " All in the Lord's
good time," which is a terrific facer for father, who
doesn't know what to reply. That's the worst of
being a clergyman, they are always being had by
the people who pretend to be religious. Don't you
think you might write to Mr. Harberton about it?
Yours ever
GWEN
THE REV. WILBERFORCE PINK TO EDITH
GRAHAM
c/o Dr. Knackfuss
Rauheim, Germany
Dear Miss Graham,
You will be surprised to receive a letter in
unfamiliar handwriting, but let me say at once that
I am only partially a stranger to you, having heard
of you from my poor wife Mrs. Pink, whose unhappy
90
THE REV. WILBERFORCE PINK
life you are, I trust, to be enabled to lighten and
rectify. The state of my own health, as you have
probably by this time heard, makes it imperative for
me to live out of England, in resorts whither Mrs.
Pink refuses to accompany me — on the fantastic
plea that she has work to do in the great city and
no time in which to study her physical well-being.
The world undoubtedly grows madder every day,
for never before, I am convinced, can a lady have
preferred the mischievous task of unsettling the
minds of others (which is in its nakedness the upshot
of my deluded wife's philanderings with agnosticism),
to accompanying her husband on his painful but
necessary search for bodily ease.
I appeal to you, Miss Graham, whom I have con-
ceived of as a very sensible Christian woman, to do
everything in your power to restore health to Mrs.
Pink's mind. You will oblige me by seeing that a
copy of the Scriptures is always placed in her room,
however often she may repulse it, and I should be
happier in mind if I had your assurance that she
was reducing her customary amount of flesh food.
At present I am living on a German mountain side
in a single garment of flannel, barefooted and bare-
headed in all weathers, and eating only cheese and
farinaceous dishes. When I am a little stronger I
shall perhaps be able to return as near home as a
Devonshire watering place, where it will, I trust, be
possible for you to visit me by one of the day excur-
sions in order that I may instruct you further con-
91
LISTENER'S LURE
cerning my unhappy wife's spiritual and bodily
regeneration. Meanwhile, believe me to be, in strict
confidence,
Yours cordially
WlLBER FORCE PlNK
MRS. PINK TO THE REV. WILBERFORCE PINK
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Wilberforce,
Please do not worry Miss Graham with your
anxiety about my welfare, spiritual or bodily. I am
very well. Miss Graham is a very dear girl who
has come to be companion to me, and me only, and
I cannot have her troubled by details of your
hypochondria.
V. P.
P.S. Miss Graham did not show me your letter or
tell me of it ; but I chanced to see the envelope on the
breakfast table, and I know how history repeats itself
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Le Cheval Noir
NlMES
My dear Child,
I thought you would like to hear about a
Course Provencale which I saw this Sunday afternoon
in the old Roman arena here. A Course Provencale
92
THE POULY QUADRILLE
is merely a muffled tame version of a bull fight, a
bull fight with the buttons on, an Easter Monday
review instead of a battle ; but if, as a man in this
hotel who has seen scores of bull fights in Spain
assures me, there is only one moment in the real
thing — the entrance of the bull — one can taste that as
well at a Course Provencale as at Madrid. I had that
moment five times repeated. There are, however,
bulls and bulls, and I can never believe that the
minute and ingratiating cattle of the Provencal
arena are worthy representatives of the noble beasts
that too seldom destroy the toreadors of Spain.
Nevertheless, though the bulls of Provence hardly
exceed the stature of a Kerry cow, or the nurse in
Peter Pan, we had our thrills now and then ; for, as
it happens, a very small bull can make a very large
bull-fighter run quite as fast as if a herd of buffalo
snorted at his heels.
According to the bills ours was to be a Grande
Course Provenqale avec le Concoars de Poulyfils, Pouly
fere, et leur quadrille, qui travailleront cinq superbes
taureaux. The company was to consist of the Poulys
— Pouly fils, chef, and Pouly pere, sous-chef, — and
of LAiglon, sauteur d la perche, Clarion, banderillo,
Sawnur, saut pe'rilleux, and Gras, sauteur attaqueur.
The performance, the bills also stated, was to begin
at three o'clock precisely, and at half-past one
Pouly fils, Pouly pere, and their quadrille, accom-
panied by a band, were to make a triumphant progress
through the town.
93
LISTENER'S LURE
I had forgotten this part of the programme, and
was therefore the more surprised, on turning a
corner after lunch, to come upon two cabs full of
bull-fighters, and a waggonette packed to the utter-
most with instruments of brass and men blowing
them. A bull -fighter in a cab is as bizarre a
sight as you need look for, especially in Nimes, for
nothing in Nimes is so shabby as a cab and nothing
so splendid as a bull-fighter. There was also the
contrast of size, the Nimes cab being very small and
the Nimes bull-fighter very large, — an enormous
fellow, dazzling in scarlet and purple and gold and
intensely pink stockings : on this broiling Sunday
afternoon a wanton addition to heat that was already
almost insupportable.
The cabs were stationary before the Cafe du Sport,
and the two Poulys and their companions leaned
back in their seats and smoked lazily, gathering in
homage with bold roving eyes. Young men pressed
forward to shake the heroes by the hand ; I saw one
offer the burning end of his cigarette for L'Aiglon to
take a light from, and, the offer being accepted, tremble
beneath the honour. It was a great moment.
And yet there was one unhappy being in the huge
crowd. Pouly pere was unhappy, and I felt sorry
for him. Pouly pire wore the look of one who,
after years with the key turned, and the chain up,
and the bolts shot well home, and untroubled sleep,
had heard the younger generation knocking at the
door and had perforce opened to it. There was the
94
FATHER AND SON
bitter fact on all the bills : — Pouly fils, chef, Pouly
pere, sous-chef. We who lead ordinary humdrum
English lives, with never a bull from January to
December, can have no idea what it must be for a
hero of the arena (even the Provencal arena) to find
himself growing old and ceding his triumphs to his
son. Pouly pere had been travailling bulls while
his son was in the cradle. That warm Provencal
applause, mingled with full-flavoured Provencal wit,
had come to be part of his life, and now — Pouly
fils, chef Pouly pere, sous-chef I It was probably at
his father's ample knee that Pouly fils learned his
picturesque profession. Paternal pride no doubt
counts for something on the other side ; but to be
subordinate to one's own son — that must be hard !
And Pouly pere looked by no means past his prime ;
he was immense, with a neck that he might have
appropriated from the most magnificent of his
victims. His eye was bright ; his admirers were
many. But it was Pouly fils who rode in the first
cab and whom the young men were jostling each
other to shake by the hand.
After a slight difficulty, based on a misunderstand-
ing of heroic status, concerning the payment for the
refreshment of one of the lesser heroes — a hero just
on the debatable line between the condition of some-
times paying for oneself and the condition of always
being paid for — the procession moved away, to the
accompaniment of a too familiar air by F>izet ; and
the crowd melted into the arena.
95
LISTENER'S LURE
I wandered into the arena too ; a crumbling relic
of the Roman occupation of the Midi, yet, though
crumbling, good for hundreds of years still ; a beauti-
ful example of the accuracy of the Roman mason's
art, with the huge stones, cut to the nicest angles,
laid one upon the other without mortar. That was
the way to build ; the Latin races always understood
the art, and understand it still.
By degrees the western half of the arena filled,
fathers and mothers and little children in the better
seats, and elsewhere soldiers, idlers, and boys. The
sun blazed on the white stone of the Roman masons ;
the sky was intensely blue ; the boys whistled the
eternal Carmen. At three o'clock a bugle sounded,
the eastern doors were flung open, and, again to the
strains of the Toreador's song, in marched the brave
men. Although they were merely playing at danger,
and their adversaries were so trifling and their affec-
tations so absurd, they impressed me strangely.
They carried it off, you see, having no self-conscious-
ness, none of that terror of appearing ridiculous
which freezes an Englishman. I assure you that
when those six glittering figures marched in, with
their brilliant cloaks on their shoulders and careless
Southern insolence in their mien, I found myself
thrilling to a new emotion. Really it was rather
splendid.
Right across the arena they came, while the people
clamoured and cheered. Then pausing before the
dais, they bowed, and flung their cloaks with a fine
96
POULY PERE'S TRIUMPH
abandon to fortunate occupants of the front seats,
who (with pride also) spread them over the railing :
all except Pouly fils — he flung his to the bugler on
the dais. There was a brief lull while they provided
themselves with pale pink cloths and took up their
places here and there in the arena. The bugle
sounded again. The moment was coming.
The spectators stiffened a little (I was conscious of
it) all round the building, as a smaller gate at the far
end was thrown open. We waited nearly a minute,
and then in trotted (trotted !) a blunt-nosed little
bull with wide horns and a wandering, inquiring,
even ingratiating, eye. If it had only rushed in or
paused at the threshold with an air of arrogance
its size would have been a matter apart ; but to trot
in and to be no bigger than a St. Bernard ! The
pity of it ! It was as though one had seen with one's
own eyes the mountain bring forth the mouse.
Pouly ftere, however, was above such regrets.
One course and one only lies open to that simple
mind when a bull enters an arena ; he has to perform
a particular feat of his own, of which his son shall
never deprive him. No sooner was the bull well in
the midst than Pouly pere prepared for his achieve-
ment. He seized a long pole, striped like a barber's,
and hurried to meet the bull. Not divining his odd
intention, "Do they harry them with poles?" I
asked myself. But no ; Pouly pere's purpose was
more original, more pacific. Having shouted suffi-
ciently to annoy and attract the bull, he awaited its
g 97
LISTENER'S LURE
rush upon him, and then, as it reached him,
grounded the pole, leaped lightly over its charging
body, and fled to the barricade, a figure of delight
and triumph. The spectators cheered to the full,
and Pouly/<?r£, quivering with satisfaction, bowed to
us all. He had performed his great feat ; he had
drawn first applause ; he was not so old, so useless,
after all.
The real business now began. One after the other
the members of the quadrille waved cloths in the
bull's face, and, running backwards as he charged,
lured him right to the barricade, which they then
vaulted, leaving him enraged and bewildered on the
other side. If only the hint could be communicated
to these little creatures that if they ran straight they
would get the man ! But waver they will, following
always the divagations of the cloth ; and therein lie
the man's advantage and safety. The Course was
like that all the time ; furious but unsustained and
impotent charges on the part of the bulls, and con-
tinual and sometimes quite unjustifiable leaps over
the barrier on the part of the heroes. The irritation
of the bulls was very trivial ; they were not hurt at
all, and little harm was done. The whole Humane
Society might visit the spectacle en bloc and be un-
troubled by the discomfiture of the bull, although the
impact of the entertainment on themselves might
perhaps provide material for reflection. In the
South, however, the effect of spectacles on the spec-
tator is not a prominent subject for thought.
98
THE CONQUERING HERO
To return to the bulls' injuries — beyond two
fugitive pricks as the ba?idelliras entered their
shoulders, and one more when the ribbon was
momentarily fixed between them, they were not
asked to suffer, except in dignity ; and they made six
fat men perform sufficient feats of activity to adjust
the balance.
Pouly fils was by far the most capable of the com-
pany : his eye was steadier, his nerve stronger, he
jumped the barricade as seldom as possible. Indeed,
now and then, as he stood with firmly planted feet in
the middle of the arena, avoiding the rushes of the
bull merely by movements of his body, it was im-
possible not to admire him. I shall never forget his
expression of triumphant content, and the proud con-
trolling gesture with which he raised his left hand on
the completion of each feat, the artiste's signal to
the spectators to take him at his own valuation.
Pouly fils reserved to himself the right of all the
most dramatic moments ; but the pole-jump — that he
left to his father. There were five bulls altogether,
and Pouly fiere jumped over all. But I fear that a
touch of ridicule (which possibly he did not perceive
— I hope not — ) crept into the applause as he de-
scended to earth after his fifth flight. Yet a slight
compensation came to him. At the end a little body
of roughs laid hands on Pouly fils to carry him from
the arena in what was intended to be a conquering
march, but which, owing to defective handling, was
merely uncomfortable for Pouly and grotesque to
99
LISTENER'S LURE
every one else. Pouly pere, stepping mincingly be-
hind (compelled to a short step by the air from Car-
men), watched his son's struggles with a saturnine
expression which I seemed to understand. As one
grows older it is the more easy to find oneself on the
side of the fathers.
Good-night, dear child
L.
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
8 Hare Court
The Temple
Dear Miss Graham,
I am sending you Lavengro, but you ought not
to have worried because you had not read it. Every-
thing in time. I used to be troubled about things
like that, once ; but never again. There is a certain
kind of snob who is always throwing up his hands
and clicking his tongue because one has not read this
and that. Let him stew.
I had the other evening to fly to the rescue of an
honest man who had become a target through mak-
ing the confession that he had never read Villette.
Had he been older in knowledge of the world he
would probably have pretended that he had read it ;
but he was young and sincere, and he confessed to a
total ignorance of Charlotte Bronte. A chorus of
ioo
NEVER TOO LATE TO DISCOVER
astonishment and blame followed, beneath which he
grew irritated. I had to reassure him by insisting
that to be ashamed of not knowing a certain book is
an emotion falsely based. As a matter of fact one is
in a far better position than one's accusers, if the
book is a good one : for whereas they have read it,
you have the joy all before you.
I remember the laughter of superiority that rang
out a few years ago when a certain critic wrote an
article to draw attention to a charming essay he had
just found in Dr. John Brown's Horce Subsecivce. He
was then perhaps thirty-five, and Majorie Fleming,
her poetry, her humour and her sweetness, had only
just been revealed to him. But why should he have
known her earlier ? He knew a thousand books that
his triumphant critics did not. I like these belated
discoveries. They indicate that one is still young
somewhere, since it is only the young that explore.
A fairly well-known writer burst into my room the
other day. " I say," he cried, " I've been reading a
perfectly gorgeous thing. The Book of Job. Listen
to this." And he began to read. This critic knew
all about Stevenson and Omar Khayyam, and per-
haps he only came to the Book of Job now because
some enterprising publisher had issued it with suf-
ficiently wide margins. But at once he had found
it good — much better than he could perhaps have
known had it ever been his task work at school.
The joy of returning to a book and recognising the
familiar landmarks as they rise up is a great joy too ;
IOI
LISTENER'S LURE
but it is not every one that can read a book more than
once ; and fewer can read it more than twice. I have
an elderly friend who reads Paradise Lost every Christ-
mas Day. Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice seventeen
times. I have read Mr. Collins's letter and the visit
to Rosings seventeen times, but not the whole novel.
Poetry, of course, one reads again and again.
Indeed, one has to, for only thus can one really
extract its honey. One is older every day, different
every day (although by ever so little) : hence one
brings to each reading a slightly changed mind. He
is a very poor reader who does not make a discovery
every time he picks up a book of good poetry. I
made one the other day. In my bedroom in a
friend's house was an edition of Blake, and in it I
found the "Auguries of Innocence." What a mag-
nificent thing : —
A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage ;
A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell through all its regions.
A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state ;
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be beloved by men.
I had known the opening couplet all my life, but I
did not know (though I might have guessed) from
what beautiful mind it sprang.
Tell me when you have finished Lavengro and you
shall have The Romany Rye.
Yours sincerely
Dennis Albourne
102
MR. ORME RODWELL ARRIVES
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
I loved that story about the poor little thing
on the roundabout. You were a dear.
One of Mrs. Pink's nephews has arrived. He is
a literary man and has been living in Pisa for some
months, writing a book on Giotto. He came to call
yesterday afternoon, and stayed to dinner. Mrs. Pink
left all the entertaining to me, being frankly out
of tune with Mr. Rodwell (that's his name, Orme
Rodwell), and also much engrossed by a new scheme
for a typists' union which shall endeavour to keep the
price of typing to a fair figure. Mr. Rodwell put
his foot in it early in the evening by defending the
practice of going to the cheapest market, no matter
how cheap. It seems that his MS. of the Giotto
book, which is very badly written, is being typed
somewhere in Peckham at sevenpence a thousand
words. When I tell you that Mrs. Pink's idea is to
fix the rate at one-and-threepence, you will have a
notion of her expression. Mr. Rodwell was quite
cheerful about it. He had seen the advertisement
in The Athentzum, he said, and it was not for him to
suggest to the typist that she should ask more. It
was then that Mrs. Pink relapsed into silence, and
so I had the gifted creature to myself all the evening.
He stayed till eleven, and when I retired he was
103
LISTENER'S LURE
making himself very comfortable near a syphon. I
always tell Mrs. Pink either that her cigars are too
good or that she should allow her guests only one
each. But the dear old thing only laughs (as indeed
she ought — I know I should be very unhappy if she
made any change). Before I tore myself away Mr.
Orme Rodwell had given me something more than
the outline of his interesting career, from leaving
Oxford to the present day, when he is ornamental
and clubbable on four hundred a year, with the addi-
tion of what he can make by his beautiful gold-
mounted fountain-pen. Need I add that he is not
slender?
This morning came his Preludes and Interludes,
with a neat inscription " To the Gracious Listener
of Kensington Square, with the too Talkative Author's
Penitence and Homage." " I felt sure that Orme
would send you his little pipings," was Mrs. Pink's
remark on seeing the parcel in the hall. Cynthia,
who came in with her to lunch (as she always does
and will when there is a packet for me in the hall),
smiled her adorable mischievous smile. When she
read the inscription on the fly-leaf she laughed. " O
you Listeners," she said. "/ never listened to
Herbert, did I, aunt? Herbert had to listen tome.
But the young men to-day have got to do all the
talking themselves. In my time they had ears and
a sense of inferiority : now they have tongues and
temperaments." Then she offered me a pound of
Instantanee if I could say truthfully that Mr. Rod-
104
MRS. PINK SENTENTIOUS
well had not referred to his temperament once last
night, and of course I lost it.
I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Pink is not a widow,
as I had supposed. Her husband is a wealthy re-
tired clergyman who enjoys the life of an invalid at
various health-resorts. They agreed to differ some
years ago, and both to go their own way. " Never
marry a man who is fond of physic," is Mrs. Pink's
solemn advice to me. " But better still, my dear,
don't marry at all."
Yours
Edith
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN BARBER TO N
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Lynn,
Don't worry about Rodwell. He will do no
harm. He may fall in love, but it will not be with
your ward but with himself-as-he-fancies-he-would-
be-under-the- influence- of- what- he- conceives- to-be-a-
passion-for-her. Do I make it clear? I know that
kind. There is no chance of her loving him in re-
turn, I am convinced. If there were I might feel
some concern, knowing that he would never go
through with an engagement ; but there is none.
Rodwell is the ordinary snobbish self-protective
University product of middle- class family, with a
i°5
LISTENER'S LURE
weakness for the tables of the wealthy. Being a
bachelor, he has taken thousands of people in to
dinner, but none out. He is quite a type. I have
dined at half a dozen houses and have met his kind
at all, doing himself very well and passing correct
but limited judgments on his betters. He would like
the rose but has to be content only with its imita-
tion ; it is comic to see him pathetically panting after
the correct thing. Too many of us spend our lives
in this pursuit ; but some of us have a few other
interests too : Rodwell does nothing else. You need
not, I repeat, worry about him. Edith is far too
clear-sighted, and he far too fond of Orme Rodwell.
She will not marry a tame cat.
No, the man who might cause Edith some unhap-
piness is a protege of Mrs. Pink's named Albourne.
He is far more dangerous, because he has imagina-
tion and a mind, and, what is much worse, ill health
and therefore a touch of pathos. Directly a man who
looks as if he did not know what to take for a cough
or how to tie his necktie comes into contact with an
unselfish girl, you have to look out. That is my ex-
perience. There is just that kind of helplessness
and loneliness about this youth that so often does
the mischief : a curious suggestion of a mystery too,
which intrigues me a good deal. He is clever:
writes rather discerning stuff; and knows where the
best pictures and music may be found.
Women are so confoundedly disappointing. They
will marry the wrong men : they do it quite as often
1 06
THE DOUBLE LIFE
as men marry the wrong women. With all her
good sense and discrimination Edith is quite capable
of throwing herself away on Albourne. I suppose
women have naturally no discrimination. They
choose not from reason but tendency. They incline
towards a man ; and the mischief is done. Albourne
is kind and thoughtful ; but his steps are too short,
his ambitions too parochial. Edith is a bit of a high
stepper.
I suppose she is destined to marry some writing
man : I see the crown of martyrdom hovering con-
tinually over her head. Well, she will probably kiss
her rod, as is the splendid manner of women ; but I
am sorry. All literary husbands are polygamists :
they have their real wives and their book wives too.
That is why they are not satisfactory. When taking
a holiday from pen and ink they may be so much
more amusing or attractive or thoughtful than other
men as to make it quite worth while to have married
them ; but the door of the Zenana is never locked
and at any moment they may be in it again.
Yours
H. R.
MRS. PINK TO CYNTHIA HYDE
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Cynthia,
I hope you will be able to come to dinner on
Thursday as a most interesting man will be there —
107
LISTENER'S LURE
an American who has come from New York with an
introduction to me and to whom I hope to give a
good start. He is exceedingly eloquent, and preaches
a most beautiful and comforting doctrine raised in
a serene atmosphere to a high level far above the
clash of creeds. His name is Dr. Prescott Ings, and
he was brought up to be a monk but escaped from
the monastery and is now married to a wealthy
Danish lady, a seeker after truth like himself.
Your affectionate
Aunt Victoria
DR. GREELE Y BOK TO MRS. PINK
The Shakespeare Private Hotel
Bloomsbury Place W.C.
My dear Mrs. Pink,
You have been so kind to me that I feel I
must not avoid, even at the risk of being misunder-
stood, the performance of an act which may look
like petty jealousy but which is really dictated solely
by a sense of duty not unmixed with gratitude and
affection. Briefly I wish not so much to warn you
as to put you on your guard against Mr. {not Dr.)
Prescott Ings, who has, I have learned, called on
you with an introduction. If I were to tell you all
I know, I could convince you in two minutes that
1 08
WHEN PROPHETS DISAGREE
Mr. Ings (whose real name is Hennessy) is not a
sincere seeker after truth, but an adventurer prepared
to adopt any means likely to bring him notoriety and
a following. I implore you to think again before
you decide to give him the freedom of your drawing-
room — that most coveted of honours. Apart alto-
gether from the man's insincerity, there is the danger
of his eloquence completely undoing any good that
I, with my inferior gifts and possibly less superfici-
ally-attractive message, may have done ; for if there
is one thing more opposed than another to Confuci-
anism it is the collection of odds and ends stolen
from other men by Hennessy and called a creed.
You will I know read this letter in the spirit in
which it was written. Believe me, dear Madam
Yours in all sincerity
Greeley Bok
N.B. I feel that the time is rapidly growing ripe
for a second discourse from me to the inquirers
who patronised me by listening so attentively to my
first. To strike the second blow as soon after the
first as may be has always been my method. It is
the second and third blows that tell.
G. B.
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LISTENER'S LURE
EDITH GRAHAM TO HER WINFIELD LANDLADY
MRS. TRIMBER
17A Kensington Square W.
My Dear Mrs. Trimber,
I hope you and Mr. Trimber and Johnny are
quite well. Will you do me a very great kindness ?
I want, for a friend of mine here who has a terrible
cough, a bottle of your mother's famous remedy.
Could you let me have it almost at once ? I enclose
a postal order for half a crown, the change out of
which, when you have taken for the postage too, is
for Johnny's money box.
I often wish I could see you. There is no bread
in London like yours, and no such jam either.
Yours sincerely
Edith Graham
MRS. TRIMBER TO EDITH GRAHAM
Church Cottage
Winfield
Dear Miss Edith,
I send the bottle at once, as we had one in
the house against the winter. But I have sent to
mother's for another and so you can have this. I
am sending also some jam and a loaf of bread so
that you may not forget the taste. I often say I
wish Miss Edith would come back again, and my
no
LYNN SAILS
husband he often says the same. Your room is
always all ready for you, for I can't bear the thought
of letting to any one else, and thank heaven we have
no need to just now, with my husband earning such
good money. Johnny sends you his respects and
he has now one and ninepence halfpenny in his box.
I am yours respectfully
Ellen Trimber
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
(Telegram)
Address Poste Restante Palermo Write at once.
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Hotel Rouget de Lisle
Marseilles
Dear Child,
This will be my last letter for some little
while, as I am crossing to Algiers, not by the regular
passenger boat but by an English tramp with a
berth to spare. I thought it would be more interest-
ing and less formal. We shall put in at Palermo
to unload some cargo, and stay there a day or so.
I will post something to you at Palermo in a lew
days.
ill
LISTENER'S LURE
You seem to be horribly involved in the machinery
of literature. No sooner do I detach myself from
you, with all my cobwebs, than you fall among
young writing lions in London. You must be very
careful, for we are a selfish tribe, and, however we
may begin, always lead the conversation back to
ourselves. The sympathy of women is our life-blood,
Edith.
I have much more to say, but have left myself
no time to say it.
Yours
L.
P.S. I telegraphed to you to-day to write to
Palermo. After that, address Villa Delacroix, Algiers
LYNN HARBERTON TO SIR HERBERT ROYCE
Hotel Rouget de Lisle
Marseilles
Dear Herbert,
Your letter about Albourne disquieted me
horribly. For Heaven's sake don't let Edith make
a mistake like that. She must not marry a writing
man, or if she does it must not be Albourne. The
whole set at Mrs. Pink's seem to be incorrigibly
literary. Your practical cosmopolitan mind ought to
correct this influence.
I am going to Algiers slowly, in a cargo boat,
112
THE KINGFISHERS' FRIEND
stopping at Palermo. If you have anything to tell
me telegraph it to Poste Restante, Palermo : after
that write to Wordsworth's for some time.
Great haste
L. H.
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
8 Hare Court
The Temple
Dear Miss Graham,
You were an angel to send me that cough
mixture. I am better already.
I have written another piece of verse — not lyrical
(I guess my lyrical period, never very warm or rich,
is over) but satirical.
We all begin by being lyrical.
Time passes, and we grow satirical.
— There's an impromptu statement of life.
It came about in this way. I read in a paper that
a man in the Midlands boasts that he has shot no
fewer than fifty-three kingfishers. Now this is just
awful, Miss Graham. Have you ever seen a king-
fisher, I wonder. You must be quick if you haven't,
for soon there will be none left. It is the most
exquisite sight. I saw my last as I was leaning
over a bridge across the Rother, in Sussex : a flash
H 113
LISTENER'S LURE
of burning blue. The flight of other birds may be
more classically beautiful : a swift's, for instance, or
gulls seen from a cliff, like Beachy Head, over a
grey sea ; or a flock of white pigeons against a
thunder-cloud ; or a hawk soaring. But the king-
fisher is a jewel, the only jewel bird we have.
Well, I worked myself up into a state of fury, and
there emerged this : —
HALCYON SPORT
Ere Progress yet to guns had led,
A man, to kill his prey,
Had need of qualities of head
That now have little play,
When any fool can pull a trigger
And shoot his tiger, bird, or nigger;
And more, in his benightedness,
When slaying called for wit,
A fowler slew no bird unless
Some stomach needed it :
Whatever flew and was not food
Might fly unharmed and raise its brood.
The world grew wiser, and at last
The double-barrel came,
And with it the iconoclast
Who kills in Learning's name,
And now alas! for whatsoe'er
Of feathered life is labelled ' ' rare."
For we, who glory in a state
Knlightened and humane,
Who of the cult of beauty prate,
And prate and prate again,
We merely praise : we do not strive
To keep our lovely things alive I
114
THE CLOTHES OF THE CHURCH
The flashing spirit of the weir,
The river's brightest gem —
Can no one hold our Halcyons dear
Enough to fight for them?
That any one permitted be,
Unlashed, to slaughter fifty-three I
D. A.
EILEEN SOMERSCALES TO EDITH GRAHAM
(Fragment)
13 The Crescent
Bath
Hercules is of course a dear, but I cannot
make him see how much nicer he would look if he
would go to a better tailor and not be so narrow-
minded. Of course curates' clothes are determined
for them, but I am sure I have seen some curates
who look more like gentlemen than others. Hercules
says these things don't matter, and that if one is a
curate one ought to look like a curate before any-
thing else. I feel quite sure that that handsome
Mr. Wing-Lindsell, who was a curate at St. Peter's
in Eaton Square before he went to Crossways near
you, always wore a tall hat ; but Hercules will stick
to his soft felt hat, which now that it is old is so
horribly like a Dissenting Minister's. You know
how those people try to look like real clergymen.
"5
LISTENER'S LURE
I heard some people talking in the Pump Room
the other day about a really fashionable tailor for
the Church, somewhere in London, who has an
illustrated catalogue. Do you think you could find
out the address and send the catalogue anonymously
to Hercules ? That might have an effect on him.
His address is c/o Mrs. Lammie, 4 Bladud's Lane,
Bath. I hope this is not asking too much, but of
course I know that your time must be fully occupied
with concerts and other amusements in addition to
your work. But I don't often ask favours.
Yours ever
Eileen
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
I go to see poor old Margaret at the Hospital
twice a week. The nurse says there is no hope for
her, and I think she knows it, but she is very brave
and patient. She lies there all day and never com-
plains. You are still Master Lynn to her. I did
not like going at first, for there is something very
dreadful to me about the idea of a hospital — rows
and rows of poor creatures in pain. The smell of dis-
infectants fills me with a kind of sinking fear long
before I really get into the ward. But I am getting
over that now, and directly the patients begin to
116
BERTHA'S BLOKE
cease to be strangers it is easier, even though they
are no less ill. Several of them are dying.
I know quite a lot now, because it often happens
that Margaret has to be left for a little, and so I go
away to other beds and then come back again. There
is a most engaging girl near her, a flower girl, who
talks excruciating Cockney talk and has some dread-
ful internal complaint from which she cannot re-
cover. She calls out the most embarrassing things
to me. The other day she said, " If you was ill,
miss, like me, I know the fellers would all come
round you like flies." Nothing will make her be-
lieve that I am not engaged. " Now do tell me what
he's like, there's a lovey," she says in the most en-
dearing eager way. " Is 'is 'air curly ? My bloke's
curls a fair treat."
It is dreadful to think of these poor doomed
creatures. And they lie there so quiet and dumb
under the strokes of ill fortune, while the cab-
whistles and street cries and London's rumble
come through the walls to tell them of what is lost.
It is that that makes me so sad — to think of what
they are missing and will never know again. Yet I
suppose one has to be quite well to realise this
fully :— they are all so tired with illness and pain
that their senses are deadened and they think rather
of the blessedness of ending it all.
But not my flower girl. She is full of interest in
life still. I have to buy my flowers always at the
same place — in Oxford Circus — because it is there
117
LISTENER'S LURE
that her sister sits : a woman much older than her-
self, with a large family, one of whom is usually
with her sucking a penny. Think of sucking a
penny ! I told her about it one day, but she
only laughed and said, " Bless your 'eart, miss, that
don't 'urt Londoners." Bertha (that is my flower
girl's name) always asks me who was there, and
what kind of flowers were being sold, and how her
sister seemed to be doing. And I have to tell her
about new things in London — motor 'buses, and
what plays are on, and who is at the Pavilion. I
know all kinds of things about Music Halls I should
never have known but to tell her. She used to go
to the Middlesex every Saturday night with her
bloke. It's only threepence, it seems. "That's the
plice for fun," she says. But she will go no more
and her bloke never comes to see her.
I wanted to go and find him and urge him to
come, but she said no. " He knows," she said, " but
'e can't stick illness. It's all right, miss. Don't
you worry about me." It is rather beautiful, isn't
it, that having lost her bloke and all he stood for for
ever, she should so cheerfully set herself to think
only of mine ! Human beings can be most wonder-
fully sweet. For most of the little meannesses there
seems to be some odd kindness to put in the other
scale.
Good-night
Edith
118
THE INCOMPLETE MOTORISTS
EDITH GRAHAM TO JOHN LINDSA Y FROME
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Jack,
I was sorry to be so inhospitable when you
came with your friend this afternoon, but you see
that I am not my own mistress at all, but Mrs.
Pink's servant, and she wanted me all the time. If
you want me to go out with you you must give me
longer notice, and even then I don't promise to do so,
for I want to keep out of motor cars as long as I can,
and I am sure you ought not to come away from Ox-
ford like this. What is it that your two placards say,
in your rooms ? And how about Deuce's daily walk ?
But it was very kind of you to come, all the same,
only I would rather you were working.
Yours sincerely
Edith Graham
GWENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfiei.d
Dear old Edith,
The news is that Miss Cogan has now gone
completely dotty and has a nurse all the time, but she
is just as sweet as ever to me. At the present moment
119
LISTENER'S LURE
she is at Scarborough, and her sister with her family
are at the cottage, and Miss Cogan keeps writing to
father by almost every post to ask him to do all kinds
of odd things. I copy the beginning of a letter that
came this morning :
Will you kindly see that my sister has a perfectly clean bed
and clean bedroom and an open stove in the room and clean
persons to wait upon her and light and warm clothing both by
day and night and also a clean warm rug for her own use and
plenty of fish and good food. Also that she has good society
every day and her own dear children's company.
It is part of Miss Cogan's madness to believe that
all the world is dirty ; that is why there is so much
about cleanness in the letter.
Just before she was taken away she asked father
to tea, and he went, and he found the room all covered
with little placards. One said, " To read sermons from
manuscript is a great mistake," and another " Should
clergymen have their own shooting? Our Lord had
none." Father was awfully tickled by that, and in a
really good temper, for him, for about two days.
All your old cats are pretty well and particularly
shirty. I feel like a criminal when I make my
rounds, the crime being that I am not Miss Edith.
Yours ever
Gwen
120
PROVIDENCE AND THE PUNSTER
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
8 Hare Court
The Temple
Dear Miss Graham,
Do you think you would be able to come to
Kew with me on Saturday or Sunday afternoon ?
There is a very wonderful orchid I want you to see,
and it is now at its best. We can get there very
quickly from Gloucester Road.
I called yesterday on the Rowans, and picked up a
piece of very useful information, rather oddly. " Do
you know," Phyllis said very gravely, " that you can't
shoot a hippopotamus with a lead bullet. The lead
just flattens on the skin or goes a little way into it.
You can shoot a hippopotamus only with a platinum
bullet. Platinum is much more expensive than gold."
She had got all this, I suppose, from a miscellaneous
lesson and (like a good journalist) had at once made
the knowledge her own and was passing it on as an
original discovery.
One thing that is very certain is that no oppor-
tunist whose learning is of the hand to mouth order
ever has to wait long for a chance to make his
impression. Just as the man who prepares his im-
promptu jokes beforehand will always have a way
made clear for him to bring them in, even elaborate
and out-of-the-way puns (Providence indeed makes
things very easy for the punster : here, at any rate),
so does the Autolycus type of savant always get his
121
LISTENER'S LURE
openings. That very evening I chanced to meet a
big-game hunter, who had recently returned from
Africa with scores of skins, and I was able quite neg-
ligently and naturally to ask if he had found his way
with a platinum bullet under the skin of a "hippo."
(Instinct told me to say "hippo.") He became quite
human at once and told me enough odd things for
three essays. I shall try it on Royce one day.
I picked up a nice old book this morning on a
stall in Farringdon Street. It is called A Thousand
Notable Things; or, Various Subjects disclosedfrom the
Secrets of Nature and Art : an eighteenth-century fore-
runner of Enquire Within. I copy an odd piece of
advice concerning the cuckoo :
If you mark where your right foot doth stand at the first time
that you do hear the cuckow, and then grave or take up the
earth under the same ; wheresoever the same is sprinkled about,
there will no fleas breed. I know it hath proved true.
The book teems with other secrets not less surprising
and valuable. Here are two :
Put two or more quick mice in a long or deep earthen pot,
and set the same night unto a fire made of ash wood ; when the
pot begins to be hot, the mice therein will chirp or make a
noise, whereat all the mice that are nigh them will run towards
them, and so will leap into the fire, as though they should come
to help their poor imprisoned friends and neighbours. The
cause whereof Mizaldus ascribes to the smoke of the ash wood.
To keep all sorts of flowers almost in their perfect lustre all
the year. Take an earthen glazed pot, with a close cover, air
it well in the sun, then fill it with half spring water and half
verjuice, and put a little bay salt into it, that may sprinkle over
the bottom ; put in your flowers with their long stalks half,
122
EYES FOR THE CLEAR-SIGHTED
blown, the stalks downward, and let the liquor cover the rest
an inch or more ; close up the vessel, and set it in a warm place,
where no frost may get at it. When you take them out wash
them in fair water, and hold them before a gentle fire, and they
will open and spread in their proper colours.
Let me know about Kew, won't you ?
Yours sincerely
Dennis Albourne
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
This afternoon has been dedicated to culture.
Mr. Rodwell came to lunch and then took me to
some picture galleries. " I am going to show you
a master of whom probably you have never heard,"
he said as we walked into a little room filled with
water colour drawings by — whom do you think?
George Clausen. I did not say that you had two
of Clausen's best pictures on your walls, but let Mr.
Rodwell take me from drawing to drawing and tell
me why they were good — all in a high voice which
soon made us the centre of attention, especially as
in praising one man Mr. Rodwell always contrives
to damage several others, some of whom were very
likely in the room. Then we went to the New
English Art Club and the merits of Orpen and John
123
LISTENER'S LURE
were exposed to me. Orpen is not even a name at
Winfield, Mr. Rodwell conjectured, and instantly I
saw the little red chalk drawing of a mother bathing
a baby, which hangs over your desk. That is one
of the amusing things about the cultured Londoners
— they have, as Mr. Albourne says, no " extra-mural
imagination." They still look on the provinces as
the wilderness and believe that no good thing can
exist there. Whereas it is we who really buy their
books and their paintings and go to see their plays.
Good-night
Edith
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Grand Hotel
Palermo
Dear Child,
Here we are, all safe but tumbled about. It
was rough and cold, but one perfect thing which I
shall never forget happened on the voyage. A school
of porpoises : so beautiful and swift. I don't know
at what rate they were actually going, but the effect
was one of bewildering yet perfectly-controlled and
joyous swiftness. The swiftness of the motor car is
cruel, remorseless ; but the celerities of these beauti-
ful fish were happy and safe. I lay face downwards
over the bows of the vessel for the few minutes
124
THE CAPTAIN ON ART
they were with us, and missed not one of their
marvellous evolutions. After this I feel I have
nothing to learn either of speed or gusto.
You may go to the ant for silent admonishings
against sloth ; you may go to the cod for its liver,
and to the foot of the calf for jelly ; but for swiftness
allied to perfect beauty, swiftness essential, such
swiftness as a liberated soul enjoys in dreams, the
hightest swiftness one need ever wish for (even if it
is not actually the swiftest) — for this one must go to
the porpoise.
The captain turned out to be a very good fellow,
full of natural education and extraordinarily quick
to take a point. His Philistinism was unalterable
but admirable. I jotted down one of our conversa-
tions on Art directly it was finished. It began by
his remark that there was nothing to see in Rome.
" But there are pictures at Rome," I said. " Yes,"
he replied, "yes. You know what they are, I sup-
pose ? Over in that corner the Virgin and Child :
and in that the Child and the Virgin, and in between
'em Christ on the Crost. Miles of them. And it's
the same all over Italy. My taste, sir, isn't for what
they call Masters. Give me a picture of a landscape,
or a ship at sea, or the photographs in the illustriated
papers. Why, some of them photos is beautiful."
I made a note of two or three other of his remarks
or stories. He is a great reader, but he has not
allowed the written word of others to influence the
spoken word of himself. " I wish you'd lend me
125
LISTENER'S LURE
one ot them Taunchies," he said to me. I was
utterly bowled out until he went on to describe
them as the white paper- covered books I had bought
at Marseilles. He meant Tauchnitz, and his own
variant was I think better.
He has a pleasant sardonic way. It seems that
our engineers, who are notoriously never satisfied
with their food, had grumbled so much on the
voyage to Marseilles that it was decided to let them
henceforward cater for themselves, on what is called
the weekly system, and not come to the cabin at all.
At our first dinner the captain, laying down his soup
spoon for a moment, looked across the table at the
mate with a grim smile playing over his weather-
tanned face. " I wonder what those engineers are
eating to-day," he said, and then after a pause, —
"peacock, I reckon."
Yours
L
G WENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
Dearest Edith,
The most extraordinary thing has happened.
You know I told you about old Job and his lazy
pigheadedness? Well, he has suddenly become
126
JOB'S CONVERSION
busy and civil and the garden is beginning to look
like itself. And what do you think the reason is ?
Old Job is converted. He went to a revivalist meet-
ing last week with his niece, and he came back a
perfect lamb. And now he's as mild as milk and we
hear him singing the Glory Song all day long over
the wall. It's perfectly awful the sounds he makes,
but there's no doubt that it's doing your garden
good. So you needn't worry about it any more just
yet. Job came up this morning with a melon and
asked if mother would accept of it, and he went
away groaning out " That will be glory for me."
Yours
Gwen
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
Before I go to bed I must tell you a delicious
thing. A new prophet, an escaped monk, has come
to England with an introduction to Mrs. Pink.
Wishing to know something more of him before
he was entrusted with the freedom of the drawing-
room pulpit, she asked him to dinner to-night. She
is delighted with him, of course, and has been talking
of his eloquence and sincerity and the beauty of his
127
LISTENER'S LURE
message long after women of seventy-two ought to
be in bed ; but I have my doubts.
And this is why. In the bad quarter of an hour
before dinner he was talking to me. Beginning with
the proximity of Deny and Tom's, and whether or
not Kensington Square was rheumatic, he rapidly
switched off to his own affairs and told me that no
remark had so touched him as Emmanuel Kant's
confession that two things there were that filled him
with awe— the starry heavens and man's moral law.
This seemed to me abrupt but sound enough, although
too shoppy perhaps for a dinner party.
The dinner came, and during a sudden lull after
the entree (chickens' livers and mushrooms, which
we always have) I heard the ex-monk's voice re-
marking to his partner, Cynthia Hyde, that there
were two things which filled him with awe — the
starry heavens and man's moral law. " Yes, indeed,"
she said, wondering (if I know anything about her)
whether any of her boys had caught a cold during
the day.
After the men came into the drawing-room Mr.
Albourne sat by me. " So that's the latest prophet,"
he said. " He's been talking to me like one of the
fellows in the Park. Have you had any?" I told
him I had. "And do you agree with him about
those two things ? " he added. "What two things?"
" The starry heavens and man's moral law ? " Then
we both laughed.
And now Mrs. Pink, just as I was leaving her
128
THE VIRTUE OF THE UNTEMPTED
room, called out, "O my dear, did you hear that
wonderful quotation which Dr. Prescott Ings used,
about the starry heavens and man's moral law?"
He is to preach, I mean discourse, on Sunday
week, in spite of the opposition of Dr. Greeley Bok
our other American at the moment, whose special
line is the philosophy of Confucius and its suitability
for English inquiring and restless hearts. Miss
Fielding, who is also speculating a little with her
spare money, says, " Every fresh creed means a rise
in New Testaments " ; and I hope she is right.
Good-night
Edith
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO EDITH GRAHAM
(Fragment)
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Of course you are having much too easy and
comfortable a life, but it won't hurt you. It would
be utterly harmful to many girls of your age to be
so fortunate, but not to you. There is something
almost diabolical about your detachment. You
will never I hope claim any credit for your merits.
People who are not tempted deserve no praise : it
was for them that virtue was agreed to be its own
I 129
LISTENER'S LURE
reward. Now, if I am good it is something, be-
cause my nature is twisted and I am given to violent
outbreaks of temper and misanthropical fury ; but if
you are good it is nothing, because with you to be
good is to take the line of least resistance. I am
not sure you ought not, by a really imaginative
judge, to be punished for your goodness and re-
warded for some outburst of impatience or unkind-
ness which it would need any amount of courage on
your part to accomplish. But I don't blame you for
your goodness, Edith.
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Grand Hotel
Palermo
My Dear Child,
It is Sunday evening and I write this in
a very noisy cafe. I have been sharing a Sicilian
holiday with some gusto. I am sleeping on land
till we leave on Tuesday morning. There is nothing
like land.
"My day among the dead was passed": for I
spent an hour of this bright Sunday in the cata-
combs here among thousands of defunct Palermitans
— a most curious experience. It is a regular resort
on Sundays, just as a cemetery is with us. You go
up the hill to the house of the Capuchins and there
130
THE DESICCATED DEAD
descend into the earth into long passages lined with
coffins. A monk holding a taper guides you. The
passages were originally of good width, but the press
of coffins on either side has so narrowed them that
in places we had to walk in single file. The captain
came with me ; indeed it was he who planned the
expedition. The coffins are not oak, like those in
England, but flimsy boxes with a glass side or lid to
permit a sight of the body within. Above the coffins,
which were piled higher than our heads, the walls
are lined with the skeletons and bodies of monks,
strapped once into an upright position, but now for
the most part fantastically awry. So, for hundreds
of yards. Such catacombs are not uncommon, but
the peculiarity of these at Palermo is that the bodies
are dressed as in life. Once it was the custom every
All Souls' Day for the relatives to renew the clothing,
but the practice has lapsed, and a thick layer of
dust now whitens all the folds. The effect is grisly
and forbidding, and, to those to whom the order of
an English cemetery is familiar, impious. The dignity
of death has vanished.
The monks wear a brown roped cassock, but the
bodies in the coffins, being of all classes, are in every
conceivable variety of crumbling attire : here a dig-
nitary of the church grinning beneath a cap of white
satin with a cross of gold : here a young girl : here a
nun with crossed hands : here a Sicilian peasant
woman : here a fisherman : here a child : every-
where dead Palermitans struck down in all stages of
131
LISTENER'S LURE
life and all made grotesque by clothes. One never
realised before how necessary to clothes is movement ;
how unnecessary to death are clothes. I recall par-
ticularly two brave young fellows lying side by side
ridiculous in stiff linen collars.
Sometimes a coffin contains a portrait of the ruin
within when in the pride of the flesh. The name
and date are on each, some belonging to the present
decade, some carrying one back nearly two centuries
— but all equally of the past. For the most part
there is no attempt at arrangement — indeed the place
is a miracle of neglect — but one dark passage is
stored with young girls wearing the virgin's crown,
and some of their photographs look sadly back at you
with sweet Southern eyes. And above them is the
everlasting line of cassocked monks — hideously, com-
ically askew and rickety.
Our guide, who had a small but useful store of
English, enjoyed a red letter day : he told us personal
anecdotes of certain of the more recent bodies — the
business of this man, and the income of that, and
led us rapturously to a mummified baby which had
been embellished by her bereaved parents with two
glass eyes as nearly as possible of the same shade.
He showed us also a giant monk, and related the
story of an eccentric old maid who was in the
habit of visiting the catacombs every day, and there
taking her constitutional walk. From end to end
she would pace, tapping with her finger (as our
Doctor touched posts) all skulls within reach. One
132
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP
morning a skull dropped from its body as her finger
struck it, and falling on the pavement began to roll,
and rolled on and on along the vault until it had
rolled the old woman's wits away, and she left the
convent raving and died the same afternoon. " In
ze skull," explained the monk gleefully, " a rat — a
rat in ze skull making it to roll."
Then suddenly he bade us halt at a part of the
catacombs where the corpses were singularly de-
stitute of superficial interest. His eyes brightened,
his frame quivered, his hand shook : the man was
wonderfully wrought to a high pitch of excitement.
I never saw any one so thrilled with pride and exulta-
tion. We waited till the puzzle should be explained.
Then in a voice tremulous with emotion and triumph,
and pointing the while at a poor withered body
dressed unpretentiously in dirty rags, he exclaimed
as he drew himself to his full five feet four inches,
"Zis, zis was my gran'father."
It is now midnight and I am very tired.
Good-night
L.
S/R HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN HARBERTON
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Lynn,
I walked a little way this evening from Mrs.
Pink's with the most repulsive of her prophets — an
133
LISTENER'S LURE
American named Bok who preaches a muddy form of
self-gratification under the name of Confucianism.
He pretends to have been to China, but I should
guess has not been nearer that land than the joss-
houses of San Francisco. He plied me with ques-
tions as to your ward so artfully disguised that I
detected the game and told him she was Mrs.
Pink's adopted daughter and heiress. I fancy he
took the bait, for he is only half clever. We shall
see.
Since I left London these people have discovered
eating. There are restaurants everywhere now, all
pretentious and bad. To spend money on elaborate
meals in great rooms where scores of other people,
chiefly Jews, are doing the same is perhaps the most
foolish act an Englishman can perform ; but it has
been decreed and must be carried on. One wonders
who are the hotel proprietor and milliner of
genius who make the laws which govern London
smart society. The word goes out that this horror
is to be worn, and ruinous meals eaten in public, and
there is no appeal. I dined at a restaurant recently
with the Patersons. It is called the best here, but
we were treated like dirt immediately the wine
waiter discovered that we preferred claret to cham-
pagne. Respect is now given only to champagne
drinkers : there are no palates in London restaurants.
The Patersons were so excited at being in a restaur-
ant at all that they submitted to anything ; and our
meal, which cost Paterson an absurd sum, as I could
134
LYNN'S BROTHER DIES
not help seeing, was a disgrace. But the folly will
go on.
Yours
H. R.
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
SS. Vanessa, Palermo
We are just sailing. I have had a telegram
from my sister to say that my brother Arthur has
died suddenly in India. He seems to have been
overworking, and then over-exerting himself in the
heat on his holiday, and this laid him open to an
attack of fever from which he could not rally. He
was my twin, which brings it home to me all the
more — added to the fact that I was often far too
quick and impatient with him.
How I shall get through these hours of voyage to
Algiers in a cramped ship I do not know. I shall
have to talk to you on paper, my dear.
L.
EDITH GRAHAM TO L YNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
I have had a proposal, and I think I can with
a clear conscience enclose the gentleman's letter. I
135
LISTENER'S LURE
do not feel I am violating any canon of good taste
by doing so. I need not say how I replied.
In haste to catch the post.
Edith
DR. GREELEY BOK TO EDITH GRAHAM
(Enclosed in Edith's letter to her guardian)
The Shakespeare Private Hotel
Bloomsbury Place W.C.
My dear Miss Graham,
It will probably come as no surprise to you
when I say that I have for some time entertained for
you a stronger feeling than one of mere friendship or
even admiration. Man, even intellectual man, is a
dependent creature, and for such work as mine — the
spread of a philosophy so calm and austere as that
of Confucius, in a city like London, so filled with
feverish pleasure-loving and self-confident people, a
partner of equal mentality to one's own to cheer and
soothe one is in the highest degree a necessity.
Some men can fight alone, others require a cup-
bearer. I am one of these last ; and I ask you if
you will be my cup-bearer.
One thing I ought perhaps to tell you, as I value
candour above almost all the virtues of the second
degree. I have a wife still living in America. But
although I respect and cherish her, any love that I
136
DR. BOK ROMANTIC
once felt for her has completely disappeared. When
I married I was only twenty-two, a callow youth in
the grip of superstitions. Since then I have de-
veloped in all directions ; my view of life is totally
different ; my conception of my own duty is dif-
ferent ; and I have exchanged the sentimental pre-
judices and cowardices which here and in America
we call religion for the true wisdom of the East. It
might indeed be argued with reason that my wife is
already a widow, since the Greeley Bok that married
her has utterly ceased to exist. But I shall not
put forward such a plea. I should instead obtain a
divorce as swiftly as might be— which in our country
is not difficult — and allow her a generous income.
Dear Miss Graham, pray excuse this long paren-
thesis, but I wish there to be no misunderstanding
between us. I ask you for your hand because I be-
lieve that no woman could so help me in my mission
as you. In return I offer you my love and admira-
tion and a heart of unsullied loyalty. I have never
met a lady who so impressed me with her intelli-
gence, sympathy and womanliness combined. Take
time to think over what I say ; but if my letter is no
surprise to you, and you acquiesce at once, would you
be willing to stand at my side during my address
next Sunday afternoon ? That would be such a
beautiful way of intimating to our friends that we
were to carry on the work together.
Your devoted servant
Greeley Bok
137
LISTENER'S LURE
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN HARBERTON
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Lynn,
I found Mrs. Pink in despair last evening. It
seems that her Confucian, under the impression that
Edith was her adopted daughter and heiress, has pro-
posed marriage, as I guessed he would, adding (which
I did not expect) the confession that he already pos-
sesses a wife in America, but offering very hand-
somely to divorce her instantly. This has completely
done for the old lady, whose sympathy with revolu-
tionists and revolt stops short of any low-bred action
— almost at action of any kind. She has of course
forbidden the Doctor the house, and I am to deliver
the decree of banishment. I believe she rather hoped
I should go on to offer to kick the prophet, as indeed
my general remarks upon him have entitled her to :
but I am subject to sudden and unexpected visits of
the devil of tolerance (who is part pity, part under-
standing, part interest in roguery and foolishness, and
largely doubt as to whether I have earned the right to
kick anything), and one of these visits coming just
then, I was harmless. As you once told Edith, my
bark is worse than my bite. Besides it was largely
my lie about Edith that caused him to misbehave —
if anything so natural as cupidity can be called mis-
behaving.
133
THE PROBLEM OF SELFISHNESS
Later. I saw the Doctor to-day and gave him his
notice to quit, which he took like a lamb, remarking
only, "You would understand better if you were as
poor as I am, and if you knew my wife." " My dear
man," I nearly said, " I understand perfectly as it
is," but I held my peace and went.
Yours
H. R.
EDITH GRAHAM TO SIR HERBERT ROYCE
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Sir Herbert,
I am glad you were kind to him. It was a
very horrid letter, I know, and he ought never to have
written it — but I am so very glad you were kind.
I should love to go to the theatre to-morrow night,
and Mrs. Pink says I may — anything you choose
will suit me.
I don't mind what you say about me, but I do so
wish you were not so eager to do away with all the
nice motives. It seems to me so horrible to lose
belief in human nature's sweetness. I am sure I
know many persons who are continually doing what
they think to be their duty without complaining,
though they would much rather be doing something
else, and that is unselfishness, isn't it? I suppose
you will prove it to be quite the reverse. In that
139
LISTENER'S LURE
case I shall say what Miss Fielding was saying this
morning when we were discussing it, and that is that
there are some truths that are not worth telling. Too
much self-indulgence in telling the truth, she says,
can be as undesirable as too much self-indulgence in
drink.
Yours sincerely
Edith Graham
OR ME ROD WELL TO EDITH GRAHAM
(Private)
Beauchef Hotel
Eastbourne
My Dear Miss Graham,
I have by this post written to my aunt to ask
her good services in promoting a new weekly review
to be called The Discerner, which I have planned more
with a thought to you than anything else. We have
talked so often about what a paper should be, and how
it should discover young writers and encourage them ;
and The Discerner is to do just that thing. But it is
useless to try to start it without money, and so I
have written to Mrs. Pink. It is quite likely that
her first impulse will be to answer the letter instantly
in the negative, because I have once or twice before
made somewhat similar requests ; but I was then
not really ready as I am now. I am older and riper
140
RODWELL GOES TO THE AUNT
now, and I have you as a Mentor and Muse ; and
this time I am convinced of success. So will you do
all you can to interest my aunt in The Discerner, for
though I have other rich friends she is the one whose
help I should most value.
I am
Your devoted servant
O. R.
OR ME ROD WELL TO MRS. PINK
Beauchef Hotel
Eastbourne
My dear Aunt Victoria,
It is with much reluctance that I approach
you as a beggar, but the responsibility belongs to
your constant and vivid interest in intellectual pro-
gress. You have often blamed me for occupying
too detached a position in a world in which, as you
say, every one must do something, however small, to
ameliorate the human lot : and I am now ready to
take you at your word and begin. I have been
working day and night for some time in drawing up
the policy of a new weekly review of life, politics,
literature and art, to be called The Discerner. That
was why I looked so fagged the other evening, as
you kindly remarked. I have even chosen my staff
of contributors and my business manager, and I
know of some good offices and good printers.
141
LISTENER'S LURE
All I now need is financial backing, and naturally
I come first to you, who are so near of kin and have
always been so kind to me. I have been into figures
with several friends who have had experience in such
matters, and it is pretty certain that ,£10,000 would
be sufficient to start on. Of course at first it is all
uphill work with a new paper of this character ; but
once the corner is turned it is all right. I under-
stand that the profits of the Spectator are anything
from ten to fifteen thousand a year. We should
not of course for a long time expect to be as popular
as the Spectator, but the public must in time come
round to new ideas and really arresting prose, and
if we can hold on long enough we must be all right.
I would have no bad writers on my staff. By the
way, I have decided to offer the sub-editorship to
Albourne, who will I know jump at it. So long as
I am accessible to overlook things and see the im-
portant people, his unfortunate lack of University
training won't seriously matter.
In addition to general supervision, the first leader,
and some of the notes, I should myself review an
important book every week and do all the dramatic
criticism. I was thinking of putting down my own
salary at ^750 to start with, and Albourne's at £200.
We estimate cost of paper and printing at ,£43 a
week and the revenue from advertisements at ^80 :
added to this there is the income from selling review
copies of books, and I am thinking of giving a
coloured caricature of some prominent man with
142
ORME RODWELL DUPLICATES
each number, the honour of being included to be
paid for at the rate of £50. Here is an excellent
new source of revenue, and I could probably get the
artist (I have my eye on a very good man, but a bit
of a waster and therefore very cheap) for about two
guineas a time. This will show you that I know
something about business and am not the poetical
dreamer you may have thought me.
I would have come to see you about this, but the
preliminaries have so exhausted me that I have gone
to Eastbourne for a little while to rest before the
work proper begins.
Believe me, dear Aunt Victoria
Your affectionate nephew
Orme Rodwell
ORME ROD WELL TO MISS FIELDING
(Private)
Beauchef Hotel
Eastbourne
My dear Aunt Adelaide,
It is with much reluctance that I approach
you as a beggar, but the responsibility belongs to
your extraordinary good sense and interest in in-
tellectual progress. You have often blamed me for
occupying too detached a position in a world in
143
LISTENER'S LURE
which, as you say, every one must do something, how-
ever small, to be independent : and I am now ready
to take you at your word and begin. I have been
working night and day for some time in drawing up
the policy of a new weekly review of life, politics,
literature and art, to be called The Discerner. That
is why, as you may have noticed, I was looking so
fagged on Sunday afternoon. I have even chosen
my staff of contributors and my business manager,
and I know of some good offices and good printers.
All I now need is financial backing, and naturally
I come first to you, who are so near of kin and have
always been so good in advising me. I have been
into figures with several friends who have had ex-
perience in such matters, and it is pretty certain
that ,£5000 would be sufficient to start on. Of
course at first it is all uphill work with a new paper
of this character ; but once the corner is turned it
is all right. I understand that the profits of the
Spectator are anything from ten to fifteen thousand
a year. We should not of course for a long time
expect to be as popular as the Spectator, but the
public must in time come round to new ideas and
really arresting prose, and if we can hold on long
enough we must be all right. I would have no
bad writers on my staff.
In addition to general supervision, the first leader,
and some of the notes, I should myself review an
important book every week and do all the dramatic
criticism. I was thinking of putting down my own
144
RODWELL'S THIRD STRING
salary at ,£750 to start with, and the sub-editor's at
j£2oa
We estimate cost of paper and printing at ,£43 a
week and the revenue from advertisements at ^80 ;
added to this there is the income from selling review
copies of books, and I am thinking of giving a
coloured caricature of some prominent man with
each number, the honour of being included to be
paid for at the rate of ,£50. Here is an excellent
new source of revenue, and I could probably get the
artist (I have my eye on a very good man, but a bit
of a waster, and therefore very cheap) for about two
guineas a time. This will show you that I know
something about business habits and am not the
poetical dreamer you may have thought me.
I would have come to see you about this, but the
preliminaries have so exhausted me that I am staying
at Eastbourne for a little while, to rest before the
work proper begins.
Believe me, dear Aunt Adelaide
Your affectionate nephew
Orme Rodwell
OR ME RODWELL TO SIR HERBERT ROYCE
Beauchef Hotel
Eastbourne
My dear Royce,
You will remember that we were discussing,
the other evening at my aunt's, the necessity for a
K 145
LISTENER'S LURE
new weekly review, one that had really made up
its mind on things and would speak it without fear
or favour : a forthright discriminating critic of life,
literature and art, that should avoid Henley's excesses
while exercising all his gifts of sympathy and help-
fulness to youthful genius ; hit hard without destroy-
ing for destruction's sake, as the Saturday has often
done ; and while steering clear of the Spectator's
Pharisaic rectitude, preserve the best English tradi-
tions of fair play and decency. Such a paper, you
were saying, is the only one you would care to
support ; and I am therefore writing to ask you
if you will help to capitalise a weekly review,
planned absolutely on these lines, which I am pro-
jecting.
It is an opportunity I have long desired : indeed
I may say that I have silently and sub-consciously
been preparing all my life to edit such an organ. I
have hit on a perfect title for it — The Discerner.
I have gone into figures with a business man with
the utmost minuteness, and I find that ;£ 10,000 is
the sum one ought to have at one's back — not neces-
sarily all at once, but guaranteed — in order to give
the venture a real trial. Both my aunts, Mrs. Pink
and Miss Fielding, who are wealthy old women, will
probably be pleased to contribute handsomely, as I
am a great favourite with them, and after what you
were saying I don't doubt that you will too. I pro-
pose to invite Albourne to be my sub-editor : care-
fully watched, he should do well ; and I have a good
146
THE AUNT GOES FOR RODWELL
list of contributors. I will look in on you one
evening soon to talk it all over.
Yours sincerely
Orme Rodwell
MRS. PINK TO ORME ROD WELL
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Orme,
I hasten to let you know that I have no money
to invest in new papers. As it is, I live up to my
income, and there are many things I should like to
do for others that I am unable to undertake and
that would certainly come before helping to capi-
talise a new review. I can't understand why you
want to start a new paper. Why not join the staff
of the Saturday Review or the Spectator, or one of the
papers that now exist and which you are always
criticising, and make them better? But I should
not be much interested in your venture even if I
were richer, because I don't care for sixpenny things.
I don't think any paper ought to be more than a
penny. Some day I suppose they won't be. Sir
Herbert Royce says they would all be a halfpenny
at once, were it not that the House of Lords can
accommodate only a limited number of peers.
I wish you would try to get something useful to
do. I heard the other day of a vacancy for an
147
LISTENER'S LURE
educated man to act as general superintendent of
the Wanstead Communist Experiment. I wish you
would do something like that instead of frittering
your time away in clubs and drawing-rooms and re-
viewing foolish books as if they were wise ones.
Your affectionate
Aunt Victoria
MISS FIELDING TO OR ME ROD WELL
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington '
My dear Thomas (as I intend always to call you,
since you were named after my father), you surely
cannot think I should ever give you money for such
a purpose. If you were going to marry a nice girl
I might be able to transfer a little stock to you, or
rather to her, but I should never assist you in a
scheme for a new paper. "Discerner" indeed!
What you want to be is a wage-earner. As for this
modern fashion for discerning, I am very doubtful
about it — I have seen it lead to so much trouble. A
man who labels himself a discerner is certainly self
conscious beyond decency, and most probably a prig.
In the healthy time thirty and more years ago, when
I was your age, prigs were called prigs and treated
accordingly ; but now they seem to be as much petted
and encouraged as pet dogs,
148
THE CLUMSY PENITENT
As a matter of fact I don't trust your taste at all
Only last Sunday in my own drawing-room you dis-
missed Tennyson's poetry as " middle-class artistry,"
whatever that means, and the book by that unfortu-
nate young man that died — Dawson or Dowson —
which you left in the hall and called a work of genius,
seems to me the most deplorable twaddle. I neither
believe in your discerning nor your business acumen,
which looks to me very like sweating, and I would
rather send a cheque to General Booth — if it weren't
for the disastrous effect of his Penitent Form on my
poor parlourmaid Winch, who has done nothing but
break Dresden figures ever since she was saved.
I am none the less
Your affectionate aunt
Adelaide Fielding
P.S. I never thought you a poetical dreamer.
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO OR ME ROD WELL
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Rodvvell,
You have made a great mistake in thinking
I wanted to invest money in any new papers. My
interest in your conversation on the perfect way in
journalism was purely academic.
Forgive my frankness when I say that I have no
149
LISTENER'S LURE
belief in your capacity as an editor and too much
opinion of Albourne's personality to wish to see it
subjected to yours. He is of the open world and you
are of the University and the Club, and you would
quarrel fatally over the first leading article. Please
do not misunderstand me, for though what I say may-
have the sound of brutal candour it is at bottom the
truest kindness.
If you really cared for any of the things that I
want to see forwarded I might be more sympathetic,
but I don't see in you any real enthusiasm for any-
thing but good form and phrase making ; and these
have never done any good and never will. All pro-
gress comes from bad form and blunt speech.
No paper was ever any good in which the writers
merely desired to be clever. Cleverness fills no voids.
There is only one thing to do in this life and that is
to mean something. What is the matter with you
is that you don't mean anything. You have no pur-
pose. You leave off every evening just where you
began. Such men can't edit papers. No, you must
go on as happily as you can finding new adjectives
for Old Masters and young decadents : that is your
work. But don't throw away other people's money
on a scheme that is as certain of failure as you and
I are certain of death.
Yours sincerely
Herbert Royce
i;o
THE INSCRUTABILE
LYNN HARDERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
Dear Child,
I am here at last, after the mournfullest
voyage. I almost wonder they did not heave me
overboard for a Jonah. I find my brother and sister
in the lowest spirits too ; but the sun will shine
again.
I can think of nothing but the whole disheartening
business of permature death. Here was a man whom
every one liked, unselfish, helpful, the friendly adviser
of half a dozen families, investor of their money and
so forth— a man who was valuable in the social
scheme beyond most. And he is struck down in a
moment, while parasites, and back-biters, and clogs-
on-the-wheel like our Winfield friends Burton and
Wilbraham, have robust health. But of course it
is useless to look for reason in such matters. We
are permitted brains enough to devise the telescope
and the microscope, the telegraph and the camera,
and to write Hamlet and Rudin and the Ode on Inti-
mations of Immortality ; but when it comes to the only
really interesting discoveries there are, we are just
baffled blockheads, and are fobbed off with a text
about babes and sucklings. I give it up. To make
as decent a show as a gentleman as one can, to defer
and neglect kindness as little as possible : that is the
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LISTENER'S LURE
beginning and end of my religion. I am not one of
those who can see in every disaster and bereavement
some new manifestation of loving control. My sister
Annie can, and it is beautiful to know it, but I simply
don't possess that kind of mind.
L. H.
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
8 Hare Court
The Temple
Dear Miss Graham,
Just a line, to copy out for you a delicious
fragment of a story which little Enid Osborne (aged
seven) was telling herself aloud this afternoon, as she
walked up and down the room. Osborne and I hid
behind the Chrotticle to disarm her suspicions, as she
hates to be listened to, and indeed stops at once. I
took down the phrases exactly as she spoke them.
Pretty good for seven years old, I think : but it comes
largely of having a literary father and no brothers
and sisters to normalise her.
You must imagine that a husband and wife are
talking, the parents of course of the fascinating
heroine, who is always the same in these romances
— a little beautiful girl dressed in pink. Just as the
heroines of older feminine novelists so often are the
authors themselves as they would like to have been,
so is Enid's heroine Enid. This is the passage.
The father speaks first : —
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NURSERY REALISM
" I think it is ridiculous of you to have dismissed cook. You
know perfectly well that I can't put up with the parlourmaid's
cooking."
"Well, I thought you said we were very poor."
"Rubbish. I daresay I could lay my hands on a million.
That ought to carry us on for a few months. And if I can't, I'll
write some articles and make lots of money."
So he handed her twelve shillings to be laid out in writing-
pads, ink and pens, and then he sat down to write his articles.
To his surprise, however, the editors to whom he sent them
would not pay anything for them but charged him a pound for
reading them.
There is an idea there for editors whose papers
won't otherwise turn the corner. We must get it
laid before Rodwell.
Yours
D. A.
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
My dear Child,
We are going to be more cheerful now, but I
have had to set down some of my thoughts on paper
by way of clearing the path to that end. It is rather
odd that although I am getting on for thirty-eight I
have never realised death before. It means, I sup-
pose, that when my parents died I was too young
to reason it out. Arthur's death, however, has set
Mortality at my elbow. I cannot shake it off.
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LISTENER'S LURE
Those are the real divisions of life — before we are
brought face to face with death, and after we know
that we too have to die. The discovery of our
own mortality — or rather the discovery that we are
not after all to be immortal — is the true beginning
of the end. Put in another way, the discovery that
we have to die is the discovery that youth has left
us, that the fine free charter has been withdrawn
and that now and henceforward we are responsible,
self-dependent. For so long we had been insisting
upon our irresponsibility. We had claimed, like the
dog, a first bite ; like the cricketer, a trial ball ;
nothing was to count just yet : every one was to
be called upon to produce enough charity to cover
all our offences, and some pretty temper was ready
did they take any other view. You can hardly blame
us, for the tradition of youthful irresponsibility is
very old, very honourable. England fosters it in a
thousand ways, and at the universities. Proverbial
philosophy is on our side too, insisting that young
blood shall have its day, that it is ill looking for old
heads on young shoulders ; and so forth.
But the fact is greater than all ; and suddenly the
sound of the scythe is heard very near at hand, and
all is changed. We know now that we too have to
die, that we too are normal, unexceptional, after all.
The amnesty is withdrawn. We learned it, say, last
night ; and to-day our sight, once so casual, is
microscopic. What an air of artificiality certain
recent high spirits wear — almost we can believe them
154
OUR MANY DEATHS
rouged ! And a great portion of our happy-go-lucky
detachment has surely been a waste of time — rather
a vicious waste too, it may be. Worse than all, life,
that a week ago was so long, has shrunk to startlingly
poor dimensions.
At the back of most young men's minds — even
the young men who are to an outside observer
hopelessly in the machine — is the thought, not per-
haps expressed but present, " When I really begin
. . ." Then, like Lear, they will do " such things."
That they are to be rich is beyond question. We
are always to be rich. We all believe in miracles.
I remember that at school we used to lay each
other terrific wagers, running into thousands, millions
sometimes, "to be paid in manhood." Not a boy
but believed himself safe to discharge such liabilities.
I for one was in no doubt.
I speak of the death of youth, and yet youth dies
not one death but many. Every early friend that is
left to us— every early enemy too if we have any
(and I believe very little in enemies) — nourishes one
of youth's little lives. "To the last he called me
Charley. I have none to call me Charley now " —
so wrote Lamb on the death of Randal Norris. On
that day died almost the last of Elia's youth, and he
was then fifty-two. I have a middle-aged cousin
(Henry Ellis I mean : I don't think you ever saw
him) towards whom to this moment I always feel
like a small boy ; probably I always shall. Not
even in middle- age, not even after one has found
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LISTENER'S LURE
them out, does one quite lose, in the presence of
uncles and aunts, the ancient childish feeling. They
also conserve our youth.
With the discovery that we are not immortal a
change comes over all. We may keep the same
front to the world, or nearly so, for human nature
has vast powers of recovery ; but in the watches of
the night and in the lonely places our hearts will
falter. We know now ; before we had only suspected,
and spurned the suspicion. The thought of death
may not be always in mind, but it will be within
call, just round the corner. The softest whistle will
bring it at the run, alert, servile, efficient — so soft that
sometimes it will mistake a sigh for the signal.
It has come to me late, as I said, this realisation
of mortality ; although I suppose that the fact that
one has so many thoughts about it all at one's fingers'
end is proof that one has sub-consciously meditated
upon it much. (This sub-conscious meditation is a
very curious thing. Is it done at night ? Do we
think as we sleep, and cover the seriousness of our
thoughts with a veneer of imbecile dreaming to pre-
serve the secret ? Perhaps there is no such thing as
improvisation — one has been for years preparing
oneself beneath the stupors of the night for every
emergency.) To most persons I fancy the idea of
mortality appeals with full force in the middle
thirties : the duration of the first grand irresponsible
period corresponding nearly exactly to that of a
human generation — thirty-three years.
156
THE MERRY WEDDING BELLS
Perhaps if I had not been thinking exclusively of Dr.
Johnson for so long I should have realised it earlier ;
although nothing in this life can happen until the
hour strikes. Heaven knows there is a sufficient
supply of admonition to youth, pressed down and
running over, to render him wise as the serpent ;
and yet every one must make his own discoveries.
It is not counsellors but facts that perform the
awakening feat. And even certain facts that we
might have supposed powerful in the extreme do
not effect it. Marriage, one would say, is a fact that
should give pause, if any crisis can. But does it?
We marry long before the awakening age, and
seldom does that sacrament evoke the menace, the
foreboding. Society has agreed that we shall marry
light-heartedly ; the thought that every child is yet
another sentient human being subject to ills and
frustrations, regrets and doubts, and finally to the
conqueror too, never penetrates our complacent
heads. It seems that only a surgical instrument
can get such knowledge into the skull of youth. A
scythe. Knowledge of the seriousness of marriage,
the irrevocablcness of it, comes later, with all the
other crowding discoveries ; but not until the end
has begun. At first a wife is but a sharer of life's
fun and irresponsibilities ; children are jolly little
beggars, more expensive, perhaps, than kittens and
puppies, and more to be considered when in distress,
but otherwise not seriously to occupy the mind.
Marriage is, in fact, merely a good-humoured rati.
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LISTENER'S LURE
fication of the youth of two persons rather than the
awakening of either. It starts as a compact of
pleasure, in spite of the church, of Dr. Ibsen and
Mr. Hardy. As a high road to the great discovery of
the beginning of the end it hardly counts, although
when the discovery has come it may be a terrible
fortifier. The awakener I suspect is almost invari-
ably the Reaper himself.
My dear child, what a serious letter. Well, I don't
often bother you in this way and it has done me
good. I am like the great Tartarin : he had to talk
in order to think ; and I have been writing in order
to comfort myself a little.
Good-night
L.
ANNIE HARBERTON, LYNNS SISTER, TO
CYNTHIA HYDE
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
Dear Cynthia,
I wonder if you remember me the least little
bit. I am Annie Harberton and we were at school
together at Eastbourne. Please remember me if you
can, because I remember you so well and am so glad
for the chance which enables me to revive our friend-
158
OLD SCHOOLFELLOWS
ship. Perhaps it will call me to mind better than
anything else if I say that when we acted As You
Like It I was Orlando to your Rosalind. Now you
must remember, because it was I who fell over the
footlights and hurt Mr. Palmer the music-master
so badly. I have heard of you again in the most
curious way — through my brother Lynn, who is
now staying with us and who is the guardian of
Miss Graham, your aunt's secretary and companion.
She has told him in her letters so much about
you, and he has told us. Of course I knew it was
you at once, having heard of your marriage to Mr.
Hyde and retaining his name in a corner of my
brain these past fifteen years in the odd way one
does.
Marriage has not come to me, but I do not
grumble about it, being very happy here in looking
after my brother. We are delighted to have Lynn
with us, although he arrived very gloomy under sad
circumstances, our youngest brother having just died
in India. Much of Lynn's heart is I fear in his
library at Winfield, and most of his time seems to be
spent in wondering to what dull author he will give
up the next five years of his life as he gave up the
last five to that very grubby person Dr. Johnson ;
but he is very nice and we love to have him with us
again.
If you have time to spare from your boys and other
duties to write me a line I should be so very grateful.
Particularly I want to hear about Miss Graham, foi
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LISTENER'S LURE
my brother Lynn says very little and what he does is
not very enlightening.
I am, dear Cynthia
Yours affectionately
Annie Harberton
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
A rather ridiculous thing has happened. Two
polar bears suddenly drew up in a motor car at this
door some time ago, and a minute later I was in-
formed that some visitors were waiting to see me.
On going downstairs I found that the bears had re-
solved themselves into Jack Frome and his Oxford
friend Algernon Damp, and they had run up for the
day (as indeed Jack had threatened they would, but I
had not taken him very seriously) and were proposing
to rush me round Richmond Park or anywhere else I
liked. I did not go, and they returned to their furs
and Oxford ; but ever since I have been receiving
books and flowers in a mysterious way, and as one
of the books is 77/1? Complete Motorist I cannot help
feeling that Mr. Damp must be the kind benefactor.
Jack's allowance would not run to orchids anyway.
But as there is no name I cannot stop them.
That is not all. Mr. Rodwell has begun to lend
160
TO KNOW ONESELF A PAWN
me books, as you said he would : or rather to give me
books. His parcels come with some of the regularity
of the bread or the milk. Is there any real need for
me to read Pater ? I don't mind the anonymous
contributions, because that is the end of them ; but
Mr. Rodwell comes round to know what I think of
his pet authors, and that can be very trying.
I do hope you are beginning to see the future a
little more clearly and meditating a new work.
Good-night
Edith
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN HARBERTON
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Lynn,
It is very sad about poor Arthur. But I have
given up dreading death. I am quite honest when
I say that I never go to sleep without quite reconcil-
ing myself to never waking again ; and this stupid
world is so badly managed (a young man like Arthur
being allowed to die, a bright, helpful, useful creature,
every one's friend), that I simply cannot believe in a
better. If there were a better there would be more
indications of it here : or so my sceptical mind
argues. I don't trust Providence a yard.
What you say in your letter to Edith, which she
L 161
LISTENER'S LURE
has let me read, is very true. For myself, I first
realised death when poor Janet died, and I have
been dying ever since. We die with others — in part
— undoubtedly.
The second division of life, after death begins, is
a sad business. I have been in it for some years
(did you realise I was fifty-one ?). One of the saddest
things in it is the impossibility, or at least unlikeli-
hood, of making new friends. We discover gradually
but surely that the last friend that a man makes is
his wife. It is not that we meet no one to whom
we are affectionately drawn ; but that we hesitate to
give our love with the old careless freedom. We
have grown critical, and so have they. It may also
involve us in too much emotion : we must be pro-
tected. For we have noticed that where we love we
suffer or are liable to suffer : death, illness, or disaster
occurring to any of our dear ones would hurt us,
and we want to be as secure as possible, as free
from grief. Security is what we need ; we are old
enough to appreciate it ; it is our due. Security.
Have we not given of ourselves very abundantly in
the past? It is the time of reward, of harvest, now.
So we no longer let our tendrils twine blindly as
they used, in the old days, before we knew we had
to die, round this heart and that ; we clip them and
restrain them. We have learnt the hard truth that
every new love makes another loophole in our armour
through which the arrows of Fate may find a way.
Again, we have fixed habits ; and so have our new
162
THE SELF-PROTECTOR
acquaintance. Perhaps if we alone were thus handi-
capped we might strike up one of those old inti-
macies ; the other might give way to us. But serious
sacrifices are too much to ask at this late day. An
interest in a young man may now and again over-
take us, or we may be the object of admiration and
even imitation by some pleasant boy ; but there is
no permanency there : friends must stay in their
own generation. And so we make no new friends.
We discover that the reason of the special aptitude
of youth to make friends is due to the fact that
youth is trustful. Only by being trustful can one
discover whether a friend is worthy or no ; for a
friend is one to whom one may confess ill of oneself
without fear. With us trustfulness is giving way to
suspicion. We have given up the luxury of con-
fession.
If there are no tracts for the middle-aged it is not
because the middle-aged are perfect, for the beginning
of the end brings many dangers. Youth was liable
enough to err, but youth also was malleable, im-
pressionable ; it could be played upon. But we, we
are growing cool and hard. We are like to become
calculating, and what is more horrible than that?
We were selfish enough before, Heaven knows, but
we are like to be selfish now in a more elaborate
way.
There, that's enough of that. I grow cynical I
will go and see Edith.
My advice to you is to smoke more Those
163
LISTENER'S LURE
cigarettes of yours are useless. You should smoke a
pipe and you would soon leave off grieving over
much. The antidote to sorrow is to fill another
pipe.
Give Annie and Wordsworth my love.
H. R.
CYNTHIA HYDE TO ANNIE HARBERTON
The Corner House
Leatherhead
My dear Annie,
How very odd that you and I should come
together again like this ; and how very dear of you
to write at once. Of course I remember you. There
is no one who was at Eastbourne that 1 remember
better, and no one that I know anything of to-day
except Nelly Bates, who by one of those curious
chances married the vicar of this town and whom
I therefore have to see far too often. Do you re-
member her? She always took pepsine at meals
(as she still does) and left the room at the annual
concert because she thought "The Bedouin's Love
Song " too outspoken.
I have been trying to picture you as you now are,
in your Eastern home, but it is very difficult. I
know so little geography. Do send me a photograph.
I send you, you will see, quite a lot. I have written
the names under each of the boys. Dermot the
eldest is fourteen, Ivan is only eighteen months.
164
MRS. HYDE AND THE SEX
Edith Graham is a dear. It is impossible to think
of my aunt's home without her in it, although she
has been there only a few weeks. She is also chang-
ing the character of the house a good deal, for it
was previously a meeting place only for philosophers
and frumps, and now the young men are remember-
ing that they know Mrs. Pink and ought to call now
and then ; and when a young man of the present day
pays a call it means something, I can assure you.
Edith's willingness to listen to them and be bored by
them might in another girl be called flirtation, but
in her it is nothing but the wish to be friendly and
kindly, and the absence of the ordinary girl's tendency
to become artificial whenever a man addresses her.
To Edith at present men and women seem to be
equally fellow creatures, neither being more danger-
ous than the other.
If I had any girls 1 would try to bring them up to
have the same feeling ; but such things are possible
only as long as you can keep children to yourself,
and I haven't any girls, and, to be quite frank, don't
want any. I am afraid of them.
Do you ever come to England ? You must come
to see us when you do.
Yours sincerely
Cynthia Hyde
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LISTENER'S LURE
LYNN HARBERTON TO MISS FIELDING
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
Dear Friend,
Having nothing to do, I get philosophic, and
think and think and think small philosophy all day
long. This morning discovering that the very last
remnant of edge had finally departed from my two
razors, I sent Yussuf to my brother's room to tell
the sad story, and he returned with a selection of
six shining weapons all in perfect condition. And
as I shaved luxuriously I asked myself how it is
that some of us never contrive to possess such good
things as others do? "Wherever I visit," a plain-
tive lady calling on my sister (for there are afternoon
callers even in Africa) sighed the other day, " I find
better butter than we can get at home. How is it?"
I share her gentle wonder. How is it ? Soap, too —
why have other people so often nicer soap ? And
books ? All the books that I really want are not
in booksellers' catalogues, but on other persons'
shelves. I called on a friend in the country just
before I came away to this alien shore, and he
seemed to have around the walls of one room all
the books I have ever really wanted. I came home
again and almost wished for a fire to destroy all my
poor attempts at a library in order that I might
begin again properly — except that people tell me
that one never gets all the money for which a house
1 66
A GLOSS ON TOUCHSTONE
is insured. To begin again properly— is not that
human nature's most constant and pathetic wish?
" A poor thing but mine own," said Touchstone,
and the formula has passed into the language. But
more often such possession, even among those that
quote the fool of the forest with most unction, causes
contempt or dissatisfaction rather than pride. Touch-
stone expressed not the general opinion but the
philosophic, which is far removed from the general.
The philosopher saying "A poor thing but mine
own " unites critical acumen with stoical cheerfulness,
clear sight with acceptance of the fact, recognition
of defect with determination to make the best of it.
But most of us are born envious and rarely value
what is familiar : hence " A poor thing because our
own " is the most natural attitude.
As a matter of fact I am coming to the belief that
it is a mistake to have the best at all. Touchstone's
attitude is more sensible. The reasons for my belief
are two : one is that directly you have the best of
anything you have closed an avenue to enjoyment —
the enjoyment of waiting for a wish to be realised ;
the other is that one becomes sorry for those persons
whom one sees stumbling along with the inferior
article. Perhaps the perfect way is to have access
to the best, when you need it, as a Londoner has,
for example, with books, in the British Museum
Reading Room ; and go along cheerfully with the
poor things that are your own.
But sorrow for others can often be misplaced. Last
167
LISTENER'S LURE
summer an old friend of mine came to spend a day
in the country, and as we were to drive to the hills,
where there is a view, she brought her field glasses
with her. For some years I had done the best I
could with just such an ordinary pair, but last summer
I became the owner of one of those miraculous
prismatic binoculars with a foreign name that
bring the horizon to one's feet. I felt wretched as I
watched our friend's pathetic devotion to her old
battered pair. I pressed my new ones upon her.
She took them, made a pretence of understanding
the patents with which they bristle, and returned to
her own with visible relief. All my sympathy had
been wasted. It very often is.
One comes to the question, Has any one the best ?
Has the King? Has Mr. Pierpont Morgan? Had
Madame Humbert? Is there a single household
anywhere that can really laugh at the tenth com-
mandment ?
I was thinking to-day that a very satisfying epi-
taph for a man would be just the two words
" He discriminated."
Discrimination is one of the rarest of gifts, as any
author knows who reads the favourable reviews of
his book. But the two words would carry so much
meaning in life as well as literature. By the way,
the Hindoos have a saying, " He who discriminates
is the father of his father." Isn't that good? It is,
I fancy, very much the secret of one's coldness in
1 68
LYNN AS FAIRY GODMOTHER
the company of Americans, that they so rarely dis-
criminate. A few have done so supremely well-
Emerson and Lowell and Henry James for example — •
but I mean the Americans one meets, the Americans
who stay in the London hotels and Bloomsbury
boarding-houses and do England and Europe. To
these, geese are almost always swans, and swans
peacocks.
At the same time if I were a fairy godmother
beside the cradle of a child for whom I wished happi-
ness, I think I should hesitate long before I offered
the gift of discrimination. It does not make for the
greatest happiness either in yourself, in the people
whom you meet, or in the people who so much want
to meet you. Nor should I offer the gift of wit.
A comfortable easy-going obviousness : that would
be my contribution. I would leave discrimination
to be given by that malicious creature whose invita-
tion to the christening had been forgotten.
Yours
L. H.
MES. PINK TO MISS FIELDING
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Addy,
I want you to make an exception and be so
kind as to come to-morrow afternoon to hear a most
169
LISTENER'S LURE
remarkable and interesting young man deliver an
address on the Song of Solomon. He is quite ortho-
dox, you need have no fears, and he has a most
wonderful voice. He recites the Song of Solomon
chapter by chapter to a pianola accompaniment which
he plays himself, and after each chapter he expounds
the true meaning of the verses. He used to do
Omar Khayyam in the same way. It is all most
thrilling and makes that part of the Bible quite a
new and living thing. I hope you will come, as he
is very young and diffident and I want to encourage
the poor boy as much as possible.
Your loving
Vic
MRS. PINK TO MISS FIELDING
17A Kensington Square W.
Dearest Addy,
Just a line to say that it was certainly rather
different from what I expected, and I forgive you,
but I don't think there was any need for you to go
out in the middle like that. It was so very marked
and early Victorian. I am afraid that poor Mr.
Perivale was hurt.
Yours
Vic
170
A SISTER TAKES STEPS
MISS FIELDING TO MRS. PINK
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington
Dearest Vic,
I meant it to be marked. One must make
a protest sometimes. I will do a great deal for you,
but no more drawing-room mystics. I never heard
anything so brazenly indelicate in my life, and I
hope I never shall. I was almost ashamed of my
own sister. The only grain of satisfaction that I
brought away was that Edith had a headache and
was lying down all the time. Do, dear, if you must
have these meetings, keep to sober new religions or
else supply your guests with fans.
Your loving
Adelaide
EDITH GRAHAM TO CYNTHIA HYDE
17A Kensington Square W.
My dear Cynthia,
Do come up and try to comfort Mrs. Pink.
Yesterday seems to have been something of a tragedy
Fortunately I was out of it, being upstairs with a bad
headache, but from what I can gather Mr. Perivale's
manner and exposition of the Song of Solomon were
more Oriental than Kensingtonian, and several people
171
LISTENER'S LURE
left in the middle, headed by Miss Fielding, who had
come much against her will. There also seems to
have been a little difficulty about Mr. Perivale's fee
afterwards, and altogether Mrs. Pink is quite upset
and discouraged, and talks of having no more meet-
ings at all. Of course she must not go on feeling
like that or she would have nothing to live for.
Come up as soon as you can.
Yours
Edith
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
My dear Child,
It is no good urging me to work. I shall
work right enough when the time comes ; and to a
certain extent I am working now, for never a day —
hardly an hour — passes in which I do not hit upon
some vastly superior way of doing everything I have
done hitherto and rewriting all my best sentences.
I am just beginning to see how that critical introduc-
tion on the Doctor ought to have been written. As
a matter of fact no one is ever really ready to do
anything. One does it, not because the time has
come, but because too much time has gone, and it is
human (and very English) to grow tired of preparing.
I sometimes wonder if I shall ever do anything
172
THE TREMENDOUS GIBBON
consecutive any more, l have had a rather agree-
able letter from a publisher suggesting a book of
essays on whatever themes please me, at whatever
length I like ; but the prospect is rather forbidding.
An essayist is responsible for his words to an extent
that forbids any kind of light-heartedness, and for
the music of his prose too. Writing notes and pre-
cise introductions has knocked all the music out of
me ; and I feel to-day as if I could get it back only
by efforts whose self-consciousness would be far too
apparent. But we shall see. The essay is of course
the only thing I could write here, away from books
and regular habits. How I envy those men who can
tell a tale.
I am very lazy here in the sun. I sit about for
most of the day, and watch the people and the sea,
and read Gibbon. I had not read Gibbon for twenty
years, and he is quite twenty years better than he
was. But what a task for one man to carry through
and never to flag for an instant ! It makes me
ashamed of ever having suggested that my Johnson
was a considerable and exhausting feat.
Good-night
L. K
P.S. I am not always as modest and self-depreci-
atory as you affirm. Yesterday morning, for example,
I wrote something which I admired so much that I
suddenly began to fear I must have softening of the
brain.
173
LISTENER'S LURE
EDITH GRAHAM TO CYNTHIA HYDE
17A Kensington Square W.
My dear Cynthia,
I am horribly afraid that Mr. Damp is one
of the susceptible people, for he actually came along
to-day, in his car, and left a vellum-bound copy of
Omar Khayyam. I did not see him, and shall not ;
but what am I to do ?
I thought the Omar fashion was over, but I sup-
pose that Mr. Damp has only just come to it. I more
than suspect that the other books and flowers that
come so often are from him too ; but I cannot very
well ask him. Sir Herbert Royce knows a tribe in
some out of the way South Sea island where the
young men's sole idea of courtship is to leave bunches
of a certain kind of grass outside the huts of the
ladies of their choice ; which is rather a nice comment,
he says, on our originality and the refinements of
what we call our complex civilisation. But they
draw the line at Omar, he says : they are their own
Omars, whereas we are merely always getting ready
to begin to be Omars and learning the quatrains first,
I suppose I ought to send the book back now that
I know for certain it is Mr. Damp's. Do tell me
what to do.
Edith
174
MOTRIN' AND THE HEART
EDITH GRAHAM TO CYNTHIA HYDE
17A Kensington Square W.
My dear Cynthia,
The flowers and books were Mr. Damp's after
all, as I always guessed. This morning brought a
really magnificent bouquet, with a note in which he
said that he proposed to call in the afternoon on a
matter of some importance, and at four o'clock the
poor youth appeared, so very much like his name and
wearing a new kind of collar. He was so kind and
uneasy that I could hardly keep from stroking his
head ; and I believe it would have been the best
thing to have done, because he would have been so
concerned at any displacement of his hair that all his
other troubles would have gone straight to the back-
ground. But instead I sat and listened, having a
pretty sure notion of what was coming.
He began with " motrin' " and asked me if I pre-
ferred a Fiat or a Mercedes. Having no views, but
rather shrinking from the decision of the word Fiat,
I said I liked the sound of Mercedes because it re-
minded me of Spain and the sun and castanets, and
he said at once that that was the next car he should
buy. Then he asked me what colour upholstery I
liked best, because it seems you buy the car naked
and have it dressed to your own taste. I said a deep
dark green, and he instantly agreed with me and
said that it should be so ; and as he did so brightened
'75
LISTENER'S LURE
so cheerfully that I felt I must be firm once for all,
because it was getting to be beyond a doubt that
Mercedes was to have the task of conveying Mr. and
Mrs. Damp on their honeymoon.
And so I asked him why he wanted my opinion to
take the place of his own, and gradually he told me,
and then quite unmistakably I made him understand
that it could not be. He was very much upset for
some time, and walked about the room, and said
that I had punctured him beyond repair, and he
should take to record cutting at Monte Carlo and
probably be killed on the Corniche.
And then he sat down again and terrified me by
beginning to look brighter once more. He went on
nervously brightening for some minutes, and saying
nothing, and then with many asides and hesitations
made the suggestion that it was perhaps not himself
that I objected to but the idea of being called by
so unhappy a name as Mrs. Damp. Before I could
deny this, he hurried to his great project of changing
his name, which he was, he said, prepared to do at
any moment if only he could decide upon a better ;
but there were so many to choose from that he
could never make up his mind. Would I choose for
him? he continued. He would take only too giadly
any name I liked.
Dear Cynthia, do I deserve to have had such a
second attack ? I was unable to say anything for a
moment, he looked so eager and pathetic, and then
what I thought was a happy idea struck me and I
176
THE TELEGRAPHISTS
said I believed that a rule that was often followed
in such cases was to take one's mother's maiden
name. His face fell instantly and I knew that I had
blundered ; for it seems that his mother was a Miss
Fish.
I don't know what I should have done — for he
had no laughter in him, and laughter was of course
the only possible remedy — had not the door opened
to admit three callers. Poor Mr. Damp at once took
his leave, and for the time being I was free again.
Yours
Edith
JOHN LINDSA 7 FROME TO ALGERNON DAMP
(Telegram)
Call letter cheek and action blackguardly. No
real sportsman poaches other sportsman's preserves.
Please return my field glasses.
Frome
ALGERNON DAMP TO JOHN LINDSA Y FROME
(Telegram)
Don't be ass. Can't do such things by rule.
Badly punctured anyway. Don't want abuse from
pals. Am returning rotten glasses.
Damp
m 177
LISTENER'S LURE
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
8 Hare Court
The Temple
I had to go into the country yesterday, to South-
ampton, to see the artist who is going to illustrate
my topographical essay, and after I had finished with
him and had had dinner, I went to see a travelling
circus ; and there, Miss Graham, at last, I met a
great man.
Great men are few in any case, and we are so
much too apt to look for them in the wrong places —
in Parliament for example — that we are in danger of
missing some even of those that do exist. Now not
only did I find a great man, but I discovered a great
secret too. I discovered how to spend a holiday.
The secret is that our holidays should rest not only
our minds and bodies but our characters too. Take,
for example, a good man. His goodness wants a
holiday as much as his poor weary head or his
exhausted body. I wonder if he should not rest it
by becoming for three weeks a bad man. Instead
of sitting quietly on the pier, as he now does, he
might pick a pocket or two. On returning from a
sail in a boat he could furtively bore a hole in it. In
his hotel he could mix up the boots, turn out the
electric light and decamp without paying his bill.
Such expenditure as his holiday involved might be
met with a forged cheque. On returning to town all
178
THE PERFECT HOLIDAY
the errors of the three weeks could be rectified ; the
handkerchiefs and purses returned to his victims on
the pier ; provision made for the survivors of those
who had been drowned when the boat filled and
sank ; and so forth. But that is not the point. The
point is that he would have had a complete holiday.
Similarly a wicked man should rest his wickedness
and devote his month at Brighton to good works.
I do not, I must confess, see, in England, any period
of prosperity for my plan ; but it is sound, none the
less. Perhaps the nearest practicable advice to it
that one dares to give is that on a holiday we should
endeavour to change the conditions of our life in
every way as completely as possible. Only thus can
a holiday be, for those of us who are active and rest-
less in mind, a genuine rest. For it is not idleness
that such require, but a change of employment.
For myself, who am neither good nor bad, and
therefore have neither goodness nor badness to rest,
the best holiday would be some occupation in the
open air of an exciting or continually engrossing char-
acter, as utterly opposed to the ordinary routine of
driving a pen as could be devised. And I think I
have found it. I believe that a perfect holiday would
be to join a travelling circus for a week or so as a
utility man.
This discovery came upon me in a flash at South-
ampton as I watched the performance. During one
turn— it was that hoary bare-backed jockey act in
which the rider sits on the horse's tail and rocks his
179
LISTENER'S LURE
arms, and of which I tired permanently thirty years
ago — I read in the programme the announcement of
the circus's immediate intentions, and it was then
that the desirability of such a life made itself felt —
desirability at any rate to a weary literary hack who
wished to forget his trade and himself in a certain
absorbing Bohemian strenuousness. For on the next
day there were to be two performances and a grand
procession at Winchester ; and the next day at Bas-
ingstoke ; and the next day at Farnham, and so forth
— always the two performances and always (weather
permitting) the grand procession of triumphal cars
through the principal streets at noon.
What a life ! Everything in it but sleep, so far
as I can see. Popularity, applause, naphtha lamps,
might and muscle ; the contiguity of wild beasts ;
tigers, tigers, burning bright in the watches of the
night ; acquaintance with clowns ; proximity to
dazzling equestriennes : — all inspiring reverence and
wonder in small boys. What a life ! And wages,
too, honestly earned, and perhaps now and then some
food and drink. Perhaps a word from Lord John
himself: not necessarily friendly, but a word from
a lord.
So I felt as I read the programme, quite content to
be just a menial hand. But then came the great man,
Pimpo, and I saw that I must aim higher.
I may say at once that Pimpo was the busiest
clown I have ever seen, and the most versatile. The
ordinary clown, it is true, may now and then be de-
180
PIMPO THE VERSATILE
tected by the observant — and all of us are observant
in a circus — within the clothes of the ring-master, or
among the gentlemen who stand at the entrance
with white gloves and applaud the ladies ; while his
appearance, devoid of humour, among the troupe of
acrobats who leap over elephants, is not uncommon.
But Pimpo never divested himself of his character as
a laughter maker, whatever his role might be. And
he had more roles than I can remember. We saw
him first as a clown and clown only, winning bottles
of wine from the ring-master by a series of adroit
sophisms. He was then, as I say, a clown only : a
good one, it is true, but no more. He came next
with a tea-tray and essayed to loop the loop on it,
on this occasion proving himself to be a finished acro-
bat. A troupe of jumping dogs soon after entered ;
and who should be their trainer and exhibitor but
Pimpo ? Later came the great attraction of the
evening, if the size of type on the bills is an indica-
tion : a " Horde of Forest-bred Siberian Bears." In
strolled the horde, very tame and mild, three in
number, and sat at a desk and drank milk from a
bottle and rode on a toy roundabout — all under the
direction of whom? Pimpo. (There is no doubt
about his name, for it was on his back.)
Here was versatility enough, one would think ;
but Pimpo had other views. Only a few minutes
passed before he was again in our midst as a wire-
walker, doing things in mid-air that I could not do
on the ground and putting to shame his three com-
1S1
LISTENER'S LURE
panions, who performed as it were on crutches beside
him. And then a final entry, as impresario to a
couple of elephants whose special talent was shaving
each other and extinguishing a house on fire. That
was an evening's work of some magnitude alone ;
but Pimpo did not merely put his various beasts
through their tricks and nothing else : he jested
incessantly until the little boys' laughter was as
steadily recurrent as the roar of the surge ; he
tumbled ; and once, threatening to fight the ring-
master, he took off twenty waistcoats.
The elephants gone, and the burning house extin-
guished, the circus men began to tear up the seats,
and loosen the tent-ropes, and prepare for the march
on Winchester. I waited a little to watch them, and
then turned away towards my inn. As I did so I
caught sight of a sturdy fellow with a chalked face
carrying a truss of hay towards the elephants' tent.
It was Pimpo, beginning his night's work.
"There," I said to myself, "goes a great man. It
is he I would be for a fortnight, — that would be a
holiday indeed."
Yours
D. A.
JOHN LINDSAY FROME TO ALGERNON DAMP
(Telegram)
Don't address telegrams Frome or others open
them. Address John Lindsay Frome in full. Still
182
LYNN'S CHRISTMAS PRESENTS
' think you acted vilely. Glasses not rotten and not
here yet.
Frome
LYNN HARDERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
My dear Child,
I am leaving all the Christmas presents to
you, and enclose a blank cheque for them. I want
Joan to have a watch. She is quite old enough, or
if not quite, the watch may just make the difference.
A silver one, but good. I want Cyril to have a star
map (I think it is called a Planetarium) and a good
astronomy book with it. The younger ones might
have books, if the new children's books are not any
worse than usual. Perhaps there is a new illustrated
Andersen or Grimm. But don't get them anything
funny. I leave it to you, as also the whiskey and
tea and so forth for the old folks. Get a Shetland
shawl for Mrs. Ring and for Job a woollen waist-
coat — rather smart, just for fun. He will pretend
not to like it, and will secretly burst with pride.
Gwen might have a nice piece of old paste.
I want a few books that I see in the advertise-
ments : York Powell's Origines Islandicce, which I
seem to have missed ; Walter Raleigh's Blake ; W. P.
Ker's Medieval Literature ; a book on the horse by
183
LISTENER'S LURE
that curious man Ridgeway ; Birrell's In the Name of
the Bodleian ; F. W. Bain's new fairy tale ; Lang's
new poems ; and the new Life of Charles Lamb
by some one, I forget the name, who according to
one of the reviews thinks Dr. Parr was a Tory.
Well, there have been worse mistakes.
Get for Miss Fielding a large plain silver paper
knife and have the enclosed slip of writing engraved
on it in facsimile. 1
Your own present will come to you direct from
Paris. Please like it very much. The man swore
to send it to you in time for Christmas. And here
are my best Christmas wishes, my dear.
L.
P.S. We go across to Nice for Christmas week.
Hotel Splendide is, I am afraid, the address.
JOHN LINDSA Y FRO ME TO ALGERNON DAMP
(Telegram)
Please send name and address of new tobacco.
Not for me but pater. Still consider conduct low.
Glasses here. You have my putter too. Please
return at once.
Frome
1 The enclosure was Boswell's record of Mr. Edwards' con-
fession of failure to Dr. Johnson: "I have tried too, in my
time, to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness
was always breaking in."
E. V. L.
184
A LETTER TO A LITTLE GIRL
ALGERNON DAMP TO JOHN LINDSA Y FROME
(Telegram)
Oblivion Mixture 41 Cork Street. Keep opinion
to yourself. Have enough to worry me. Life blank.
Damp
LYNN HARBERTON TO JOAN ARUNDEL THE
YOUNGEST DAUGHTER OF GURNEY ARUN-
DEL, SQUIRE OF WINFIELD
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
My dear Joan,
I believe I said I would write to you directly
I got here, and I have been here for weeks and
weeks and have written not a word. But I can-
not let Father Christmas find me with a broken
promise to a little girl on my conscience, or he will
be too angry with me. A broken promise to a great
man in riding breeches, like your father, for example,
wouldn't matter, or a broken promise to a lady in a
long rustling silk dress, like your mother on Christ-
mas night, wouldn't matter, because they happen
every day ; but a broken promise to a little girl, even
a little girl who sometimes bites her nails and
doesn't like rice pudding — that would be awful.
I don't suppose any two places could be more un-
like each other than Winfield and Algiers. To begin
185
LISTENER'S LURE
with, here there is the sea. My bedroom looks over
the sea. It is quite blue — much bluer than your
best sash. Then there are the people. They are
browny-black — much browny-blacker even than' some
little girls' hands can be. I don't say that there are
no black people in Winfield ; but that is a matter of
"What, no soap?" and here the people are black
by nature. Of course there are many white ones —
English and French — but the natives are black, with
beautiful white linen clothes. I go into the market
every day for a little while just to see the costumes.
Next there is the weather. Here we have a strong
sun all day and many of us wear blue spectacles to
rest our eyes from the glare : you are perhaps skat-
ing on the Long Pond, or snowballing each other and
poor Tibbies (it's a great shame to snowball Tibbies
just because he is a little bit odd, and yet tempting,
I suppose, and it's true that he likes it when you do
it). I don't know what would happen if I took a
pair of skates into the market here : there would be
a crowd round them in no time, just as there is in
London when a horse falls, or as there would be in
Rudstone market-place next Thursday if your father
blacked his face and went to it in an Arab turban.
By the way, why shouldn't he? I think I will bring
home a turban with me when I come. (O, let it be
soon !) Or a fez. I think a fez would suit his curious
style of beauty.
One great disappointment I have had. You re-
member "My beautiful, my beautiful," the poem
1 86
THE MAHOMETANS' LOSS
about the Arab steed? Well, I remember it too,
and all my life have wanted to see an Arab steed and
pat it and admire it and gaze into its mild and
understanding eye ; but the Arab steeds here are
just as poor and lean and uninteresting as they can
be — almost like the caravan horses of the gipsies that
your father, the old Tory, tries so hard to keep off
the Common, and (I am glad to say) can't. You may
tell him if you like that I am giving careful particu-
lars of the position of the Common (and his chicken
yard) to a number of Arabs here who think of
emigrating to England and taking up the gipsy
business.
Another difference between Winfield and Algiers
is that here there is no Christmas, except for the
French and English visitors. The religion here is
Mahometan, which means that Christmas Day is
no different from any other day. The pretty story
of the Star and the Three Kings, and the little Christ
being born in the stable of Bethlehem all among
the cattle and horses, has no meaning here at all,
nor anywhere in this huge continent of Africa, or
even Asia, except where missionaries have carried it.
These people worship a great soldier named Mahomet,
who was very wise and knew all about the nature of
men and women, but whose birth is not celebrated
by cards and presents at all. I think it is much
prettier when a religion begins with a baby and has
presents in it at Christmas. The baby makes a
children's festival like Christmas so natural. But
187
LISTENER'S LURE
here, and in the East generally, children are children
for a very short time, and many girls are married
before they are as old as you.
Another difference between Algiers and Winfield
is that there is no Job. There are public gardens,
but no garden like mine or yours, with thrushes
and titmice and crusty old gardeners. I miss Job
horribly. But then I believe I miss everything
horribly, even your disrespectful ways. Will you
never realise that I am quite a venerable old man ?
I am very lazy here. I will tell you what I do.
I am awakened by Yussuf coming into the room
with coffee. Yussuf is an Arab boy, who had a
tremendous idea of going to England to be happy
as a footman there, until I told him about the horrid
nature of the little English girl and the kind of life
she leads her nurse and her uncles, and now he is
wiser and does not want to go at all. Then I go for
a short walk on what Dr. Mitchell calls an empty
stummick, and afterwards have some breakfast, which
is more coffee and a roll and some fruit, and then
perhaps I write a little (but no one will read it), and
then I go to the market, and look in at a Club where
there are men playing Bridge, and glance at the
papers, and then it is time for lunch, and after lunch
I read and talk to my brother and sister and perhaps
walk out again ; and then the sun sets, and then it
is time for dinner, and so we get through the day.
There are a few children here that I know, all of
whom can talk French better than you ever will, but
188
THE THREE WARNINGS
that I fancy is because they are French children.
They call me Monsieur Arbertong, which is rather
pretty I think, although when Mr. Weedon at the
Post Office drops my " H," I shiver. How is that ?
" Lynn " they call " Lean," which was appropriate
enough once, but now that I am doing nothing but
be lazy is getting to be horribly wrong.
Now I must stop. You ought to have this letter
just before Christmas Day, and at the same time a
parcel will I hope come to you from London, where
Miss Graham is doing my shopping for me. I shan't
tell you what I am sending you for a present, because
that spoils the excitement, but I will give you a hint
by writing down three pieces of advice and you can
guess which of them applies to it.
i. Don't ever forget to feed it.
2. Be sure it is only the best butter.
3. Don't turn the handle too fast.
Give every one my love and a Christmas message
in very good French.
Your loving uncle
Lean Arbertong
P.S. Take care that it is very good French, or I
shall be very cross. I am sure to hear about it.
1S9
LISTENER'S LURE
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Hotel Splendide
Nice
My dear Child,
We came over here for Christmas, and
whether to go back I have not yet decided. Prob-
ably I shall, as my brother and sister seem to want
me.
The concierge here has the most charming little
daughter, Gigi, and she came in last evening after
dinner to tell us all about her Christmas presents.
Le P'tit Jesus, she said, had been very kind ; he had
sent her a little pair of shoes. Red shoes, just what
she wanted. But, oh dear ! when she came to try
them on they were too small. Gigi's mother, how-
ever, soon put the matter right. She took the shoes,
and went to Le P'tit Jesus with them, and asked him
to change them. And Le P'tit Jesus did it at once,
made no trouble about it at all. Look ! — and Gigi
drew back her frock that we might see this wonderful
present.
I thought of this little scene as I came out of
the church this morning. Just inside the door is a
figure of the Magdalen with this beautiful inscription
beneath: "Douce avocate des pechcurs penitents";
and as I came out I was confronted by a lofty and
very impressive Calvary. Under the freakish law of
association which governs minds, my thoughts flew
190
THE TWO FRIENDS
to Gigi, and I asked myself, Since it is Le P'tit Jesus
who sends the presents, and the Magdalen who
makes sweet intercession for sinners, what place in
the Latin countries does the crucified Christ hold ?
The infant Jesus on his mother's breast is familiar
to every one : he gives red shoes to Gigi, and there
is not a child but has a tenderness for him ; but how
do the children bridge the gulf between the baby in
Mary's arms and this wan figure on the Cross ? Or
do they bridge it at all ?
Christ, indeed, I imagine, though Calvarys abound,
has never been the real friend of the Latin races. It
is to a woman that they carry their troubles, to
Mary the Mother, or to that other Mary. This is
a very human exchange, very natural to nations in
whom the child persists so much longer than with us.
Yours
L. H.
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
Seacombe, Devonshire
Dear Miss Graham,
I found a charming poem about St. Martin
(who has always been one of my favourites among
the saints) in a French paper this morning, signed
Edmond Heracourt, and I tried my hand at a trans-
191
LISTENER'S LURE
lation. I wonder if you will like it. It is seasonable
anyway — or should be, but the weather here is like
midsummer.
CHARITY
Because so bitter was the rain,
Saint Martin tore his cloak in twain,
And gave the beggar half of it
To cover him and ease his pain.
But being now himself ill clad,
The Saint's own case no less was sad.
So piteously cold the night ;
Though glad at heart he was, right glad.
Thus, singing, on his way he passed,
While Satan, grim and overcast,
Vowing the Saint should rue his deed,
Released the cruel Northern blast.
Away it sprang with shriek and roar,
And buffeted the Saint full sore,
Yet never wished he for his cloak ;
So Satan bade the deluge pour.
Huge hail-stones joined in the attack,
And dealt Saint Martin many a thwack,
" My poor old head ! " he smiling said,
Yet never wished his cape were back.
"He must, he shall," cried Satan, "know
Regret for such an act," and lo,
E'en as he spoke the world was dark
With fog and frost and whirling snow.
Saint Martin, struggling toward his goal,
Mused thoughtfully, " Poor soul! poor soul I
What use to him was half a cloak ?
I should have given him the whole."
192
EDITH'S CHRISTMAS
The cold grew terrible to bear,
The birds fell frozen in the air :
"Fall thou," said Satan, "on the ice,
Fall thou asleep, and perish there."
He fell, and slept, despite the storm,
And dreamed he saw the Christ Child's form
Wrapped in the half the beggar took,
And seeing Him, was warm, so warm.
Dear Miss Graham, that is my Christmas present to
you, with the best wishes in the world.
Yours sincerely
Dennis Albourne
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
December 25, 1905
My dear Guardian,
It is the most beautiful pendant I ever saw.
How could you be so extravagant ! Sir Herbert is
amazed at you. " I never thought he had such
taste," he said, "or the sense to go to Carder's."
So you ought to be very happy — to have made me so
proud and pleased that I don't know what to do, and
to have astonished a man of the world like your
brother. I had some other presents, but none gave
me such pleasure as this. Mrs. Pink's was a set
of Jane Austen. I do so hope you liked the book I
N 193
LISTENER'S LURE
sent you. You are such a difficult person to give a
present to.
Yours so happily
Edith
JOHN LINDSA Y FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
My dear Edith,
I am most awfully floored by hearing from
Algy that he has been to see you and has asked you
a very important question. I am most frightfully
sorry to think that it was through me that you should
have got to know Damp, and that any friend of mine
should do such a low thing as to propose to any
one like that, when he knew all along that — I mean
before he really knew you at all or had any right to.
But I suppose it did not matter as you said no so
quickly.
You see, Edith, I always hoped that I might one
day be able to ask you to marry me, and it is awful
to feel now that I have nothing to offer you at all.
I don't even know what I am going to do, and my
allowance is just no good at all. Of course I can't
ask you to wait for me. It would be jolly mean to
do so. And I haven't made a decent meal for days.
I don't care for anything at all except looking after
194
THE TELEGRAPHISTS AGAIN
Deuce. And there's nothing to look forward to at
Oxford either, for I don't see how I can ever speak
to Algy again after what he's done, and he is the only
man I know who has a motor.
It's the first time he has ever been a bounder.
Well, I won't bother you any more with this
scrawl.
Your devoted friend
Jack Frome
JOHN LINDSA Y FROME TO ALGERNON DAMP
(Telegram)
Where's my putter. My life blank too. No future.
Writing E. G. what I think of you. Post putter at
once. Can't play with pater's.
Frome
ALGERNON DAMP TO JOHN LINDSAY FROME
(Telegram)
Know nothing of putter and care less. Jolly low
trick write Miss G. about me. Thought you gentle-
man once.
Damp
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LISTENER'S LURE
EDITH GRAHAM TO JOHN LINDSA Y FROME
17A Kensington Square W.
My poor Jack,
You must not be unhappy. Why do you all
think of nothing but marrying? We used to be so
jolly together, and now you are spoiling it. In any
case I couldn't let you marry me, because I am years
older, and wives must not be older than their husbands.
Don't think about it any more but begin to eat
again and make it up with Mr. Damp at once,
because he has done no harm. Surely you know the
saying " It's all fair in love and war." Don't ever
call him a bounder : he was most considerate and
polite. So if I were you I should ask myself to his
house for a few days, and go for some good rides, and
perhaps you and I could go to a matinee together.
And please think of me always as your affectionate
friend
Edith Graham
JOHN LINDSAY FROME TO ALGERNON DAMP
(Telegram)
Quite see your position. Sorry so blind before.
May I come January for week. Let dead past bury
dead. Have clinking new putter.
Frome
196
RECONCILIATION
ALGERNON DAMP TO JOHN LINDSA Y FROME
(Telegram)
Yes if really sympathetic. Must have sympathy.
Heart broken. Buying new car a ripper. Come
fetch you if you like.
Damp
JOHN LINDSA Y FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
My very dear Edith,
Thank you awfully for your perfectly ripping
letter. I telegraphed to Algy at once, and it is all
right, and I am getting quite a good pecker again.
I won't worry you any more, but I will look on you
as the rippingest sister that any man ever had.
Yours always
Jack
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
Hotel Splendide
Nice
My dear Child,
You could not have sent me a more congenial
present than Idlehurst ; but I can't think how I
197
LISTENER'S LURE
could have missed it so long. It seems to have been
out some time. I like it better than anything new
I can remember for many years. The older I get,
the more I feel that this is the only kind of book
that one ought to write — except biography. I suppose
the only literary tasks for the reflective man are
biography and autobiography.
But I doubt if you should have sent it to me if
you really want me to stay in exile. It has brought
Winfield so near again, and if Winfield is near I
must go back.
That is my home of love. If I have strayed,
Like one that wanders I return again.
And yet is it my home of love? It was once; but
now, for all its beckoning, I do not see the windows
lighted as warmly as I could have wished, or the
door open, or the right figure of welcome on the
step.
Well, I get maudlin here, sentimental and very
old. You have no idea how old I am. I walk on
crutches and children mock my grey hairs. At least
that is what I imagine they are doing for I cannot
understand their southern slang. How can I take
an interest in slang at eighty-five ? And yet accord-
ing to any one else's computation I am only thirty-
seven and a half, and Sir Binglcy Whipple, M.P., who
is staying in this hotel, assured me yesterday that I
had the ball at my feet. He seems to have caught
sight of my name in The Times Supplement, with
198
ALBOURNE SETS FORTH
suitable adjectives affixed. I believe sometimes that
reviews are written solely in the interests of the
diner-out.
That is rather a joke about Herbert and Cartier.
I have noticed that few things so irritate those who
set up to know everything as the discovery that a
friend has some gift the existence of which they had
never suspected. Such surprises come from under-
rating the foe, which is at the bottom of many of
the mistakes in life as well as in war. Herbert is
a very wise man, but he will commit the error of
despising others, and the very instant that one begins
to despise one ceases to understand. But he is a dear
fellow.
Good-night
L.
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
8 Hare Court
The Temple
My dear Miss Graham,
I am going away to walk for a week or so to
get some health into me. Shall I bore you if I write
a letter now and then about the day's adventures?
Only to Wiltshire. Another man will be with me
part of the time, I think, and with him a dog, a
spaniel, so there will be company. I am very much
199
LISTENER'S LURE
perplexed about one thing and another, and nothing
but the open air can help me. Please tell Mrs. Pink.
Yours sincerely
D A.
OR ME ROD WELL TO EDITH GRAHAM
400 Queen Anne's Mansions
S.W.
My dear Ladv,
You are at once so sensible and sensitive that
you probably divined the contents of this letter
before you broke the seal. It is too late in the
world's history for a man and woman of our intelli-
gence to waste time over the conventional machinery
of courtship. We are too civilised, you and I. And
so I say briefly and directly, will you be my wife ?
I have not much to offer you ; but I have expecta-
tions, and it's not in nature that my aunt Mrs. Pink,
whose heir I have every reason to believe I shall be,
can live very much longer. At present I am poor,
but I have many plans, including the scenario of a
comedy which cannot, I am told by discerning friends,
fail to be a great success ; and though to make
money by the efforts of mummers is not an ideal
way, yet no one but a fool despises money or refuses
it in whatever guise it may arrive.
I have never met a woman who seemed to me so
200
RODWELL ALL ON FIRE
full of instinct as yourself, and there is no quality
more to be prized in your sex. A witty woman is
anathema to me, a beautiful woman (not that you
are not beautiful, but beauty is secondary with you)
is a snare, but a wise woman with charm is
perfection.
I believe, after long consideration and much quiet
and amused observation of the world, that there is
no rock on which to build the fragile edifice which
we call marriage sounder than mutual admiration.
Passion quickly dies and may be succeeded by ennui,
but the mutual admiration of intellect and instinct
is trustworthy and will endure. These gifts we
both have. I can bring poetry and fancy and, I
venture to think, wit into our life ; you, your wonder-
ful womanliness. My sense of humour fortified by
your instinct should be of the greatest value on the
stage. The success of Shaw's facetiousness is an
indication of how little an audience really wants or
understands of the best ; but we will educate them,
you and I.
May I ask for a telegraphic reply to this letter.
I shall, as one says, be all on fire until I hear from
you.
Your admiring servant slave
Orme Rodwell
20 i
LISTENER'S LURE
EDITH GRAHAM TO ORME RODWELL
(Telegram)
Quite impossible. Graham
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Guardian,
I hasten to tell you that you were quite right
about Mr. Rodwell. His proposal came this morning,
by the first post, on very superior note paper. I don't
think I ought to send you the letter, but I don't think
there is any harm in quoting a sentence or two of it.
"It is too late in the world's history for a man and
woman of our intelligence to waste time over the
conventional machinery of courtship." And " My
sense of humour fortified by your instinct should be
of the greatest value on the stage " — for he wants to
be a dramatist. Comedy, of course. (It is very odd,
but all the people in London talk about their sense
of humour. You may shout at any man just now
that he has no moral sense, and he will be de-
lighted and purr ; but if you only whisper that he is
deficient in a sense of humour his face goes black
with rage.) But the worst thing in Mr. Rod well's
letter was his suggestion that he would be rich when
202
SIR HERBERT ON TRAVEL
Mrs. Pink dies, and that she cannot last long. He
asked for a telegraphic reply and I sent him one. So
there is another episode closed.
We have lost Mr. Albourne for a time. He has
been a good deal run down lately through a bad
cough and doing too much, and possibly worry of some
kind, and has gone away on a walking tour. He is
not at all strong — in fact very frail, I think, and has
probably no idea how to take care of himself.
There is no other news.
Good-night
Edith
S/R HERBERT ROYCE TO DENNIS ALBOURNE
Morton's Hotel
Jeemyn Street
Dear Albourne,
I am sorry to hear you are seedy. Stay away
as long as you can and take things as easily as you
can. If you are hard up, you might allow me to be
your banker : it's so long since I lent any one any
money that I begin to want to do so again, just to
know again what usury feels like.
Why don't you meditate upon a book of personal
irresponsible travel, while you walk? You could do
it, I think, and it wants doing. Borrow is, of course,
203
LISTENER'S LURE
the man. When I was last in Africa, I had only five
books with me, and one was Lavengro. Boswell was
another, Palgrave's Golden Treasury another, The
Egoist another and Shakespeare, in vilely small print,
the last, or first. There can never be another Borrow,
but there may still be fine books of the road. Dif-
ficulties of course are not few. Not only are the
conditions of existence becoming more formal, and
such impulses as drove Borrow out into the world
rarer and more difficult to obey, but the globe itself
is contracting. The wider world is known and
docketed, and every English road that one would
turn down has just had its mystery and freshness
stolen from it by some clay-souled motorist. The
footpaths remain, it is true, but where is the road ?
The footpath is for shy moods, the road for romance.
So long as motorists rush in where men of tempera-
ment are meditating setting a tentative foot, so long
will the spirit of Lavengro be mute. I cannot imagine
Borrow setting out with his knapsack and stick to-
day : indeed, I cannot imagine Borrow living in this
day at all. He seems to me to belong to a more re-
mote past than many an earlier man — than Dryden
and Pope, for example. As for Horace Walpole,
one might meet him any day ; but Borrow is pre
historic.
A large part of the world, of course, still remains
but one can no longer be the first to travel in it. To
be the first — I believe that much of the secret lies
there. Your romantic wanderer is such a shy bird.
204
BORROW THE LAWLESS
so easily daunted, that often if he can't be the first he
won't play at all.
The spirit of Borrow is growing increasingly rare
too : his independence, his rebelliousness, his care-
lessness of comforts, his disregard of to-morrow.
He had no ties, or at any rate he allowed no ties
to hamper him. English literature has no other
author so free and lawless. The ordinary writer
of a book of travel to-day knows when he will start,
where he is going, and when he must return. Other
people's holidays (that dull consideration) may de-
pend on his return. Borrow's way was the ri<^ht
way : to throw, as it were, the laces over one's boot's
neck. But who does it now? Who could do it for
more than a few days ? I can, it is true ; but then
I can't write. The words Poste restante never entered
into Borrow's life, whereas most modern wanderers
are riveted to them.
Mr. Meredith, I believe, could have written a
wonderful first-person-singular romance of the road,
as distinct in its way as Lavengro, if he had wanted
to. Both men are intellectual aristocrats ; both are
humorists and lovers of the green earth ; both are
fascinated by the human comedy. But that is the
end of the resemblance. Borrow had no Olympian
wit ; no delight in the comic drama of sex and poor
human nature's disasters ; no eye for a Countess or
a Clara Middleton ; no time to be bothered by the
doubts of a Willoughby. Mr. Meredith, had he
lacked these engaging interests (but it is not of course
205
LISTENER'S LURE
really thinkable), would have written, I fancy, only
romances of adventurers. Evan Haj-rington is often
no more : the humours of the road are thick in it.
Harry Richmond, when Harry is among gipsies and
in the German principality with his sublime father,
is within hailing distance of Lavengro. Through the
books of both blows a royal wind. Literary artists
can produce atmosphere ; but only the great writers
can create a gale.
I wish Mr. Meredith had given us even some first-
person-singular travels of his own. How good they
would be ! He certainly could have written the
best go-as-you-please narrative of romantic humours
of any one of our time ; and Stevenson, I imagine, the
next. Stevenson, indeed, did it in a small way twice
— in his Inland Voyage, and better still in his Travels
with a Donkey ; but he did not dip far enough in the
business, and he was too civilised, too much the
literary artist. But the Travels with a Donkey will be
read, I always think, as long as anything its author
wrote ; much longer than his stories.
I wish that Hazlitt had been in a position to
wander, and write about it. He would not have
been the ideal traveller— he carried too many pre-
judices and heats in his knapsack— but he would
have been a very readable one. What sinewy re-
cords would have come from his pen, of towns and
scenery, of bagmen and innkeepers ! Cobbett, who
was not unlike Hazlitt in many respects, might,
had he taken agriculture and politics a little less
206
JOAN APPLIES THE MATCH
seriously, have made the Rural Rides a vastly fine
thing. And it is a thousand pities that Arthur
Young, with all his instinct for travel and his oppor-
tunities, had so few juices. He actually calls the
French a dull people — the French of the country, too !
The nearest modern thing to Borrow that I know,
but totally distinct, and owing, I am convinced,
nothing to it — is Hudson's Purple Land. You know
this, I expect : if not, you should read it at once. It
is the real thing.
Let me hear how you get on, and that you grow
stronger.
Yours sincerely
Herbert Royce
JOAN ARUNDEL TO LYNN HARBERTON
Lee Park
Wingfield
Dear Uncle Lynn,
I hope you are quite well. Thank you for
your splendid long letter. We all miss you very
much, and Edith too, and Phyllis and I both think
that the nicest thing for you to do would be to marry
Edith and then she would come back from London
and we should all be happy again. Please do, dear
Uncle Lynn. I am sure Edith would.
Your loving niece
Joan Arundel
207
LISTENER'S LURE
P.S. Please write again because Cyril wants the
stamp.
ANNIE HARBERTON TO CYNTHIA HYDE
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
Dear Cynthia,
We are more than a little troubled about my
brother Lynn. He mopes and broods and wants
to go home, and yet does not go home, and tries to
write a little and does not write. I should put his
unsettlement down to the charge of the literary
temperament were it not for a word or two which
he lets fall now and then, and his feverish interest
in the arrival of letters. As the only person who
writes to him is Miss Graham, it is not difficult to
put two and two together. But is the answer four ?
I mean does she love him too ? This is what we
want to know.
Poor Lynn is so diffident, and lacking in initiative,
and self-effacing, that he is quite capable out of some
foolish Quixotic whim of standing by and allowing
his life to be spoiled. I should not describe him
as a marrying man ; but at the same time he would
make a very good husband in the hands of the right
woman. We believe Miss Graham to be right, and
at any rate he has known her long enough not to
208
STUNT'S ADVENTURE
make any foolish mistake about his own feelings,
except that middle-aged men can be quite as foolish
as young and old ones. I don't know what you can
do in this matter, but you at any rate are on the
spot and you know Edith and are in her confidence —
as much I suppose as any one ever is in the con-
fidence of a young woman. Won't you let me have
a line saying what you think about it, just in-
stinctively ?
Yours sincerely
Annie Harberton
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Bear
Devizes
My dear Miss Graham,
I must tell you of a splendid thing which
happened to Stunt (my friend's dog) — or rather
which did not happen to Stunt. It was at Lam-
bourne, in Berkshire, where we had walked from
Wantage — along the Icknield Way as far as the
White Horse. The incident is a perfect example of
the unexpected, of surprise.
Lambourne is in Berkshire, a quiet village entirely
surrounded by racehorses. We came to the inn
at a reasonable hour, descending from White Horse
Hill in a storm of wind and rain. My friend gave
O 209
LISTENER'S LURE
Stunt to the ostler and saw that he was made com-
fortable with straw and water, and soon we were
before a good dinner and were telling the landlord
to be sure to let the dog be well fed too.
And here the surprise begins. The landlord, it
seems, forgot all about Stunt until he was shutting
up his house at midnight, long after we were asleep.
He then, being a humane man, hastened to mix a
mess of food and take it out to the dog with many
apologies. When, however, he reached the stables,
of which there are many, he could not find him ;
either he overlooked the stall altogether or Stunt
was under the straw too tired to rouse himself. This
put the good man into a fright. "The dog," he
told himself, "mad for food, has broken his chain
and run away. The gentleman will be furious ; very
likely he will run me through. What shall I do ?
What shall I do ? " So we may figure him soliloquis-
ing, when his heart gave a bound of delight as he
caught sight of a dog furtively moving in the shadow
of the house, near the rubbish heap. This, I may
say at once, was not Stunt, but an immoral predatory
dog of the village, who, although of respectable
appearance and wearing a collar, was yet of lurching
and thievish tendencies and bad conscience, and had
come to see what he could steal. Judge, then, of
his astonishment and dismay when he found himself
wooed with soft words, led to a warm and comfortable
stable, coaxed gently into the straw, and then fed
with a generous dish of meat and biscuit and gravy.
210
THE SENSE OF HUMOUR
I doubt if the history of surprise holds a better
example. To come as a thief in the night, and find
oneself being placed in the seat of respect — that is
an experience which falls to few of us.
The next morning, it is true, saw justice done,
with the arrival of the ostler in a pair of heavy boots :
but even then the honours remained with the dog,
for the landlord did not see it kicked out, but only
running for its life afterwards, and conceiving it
to be our dog again escaping, gave personal chase
(although a corpulent fellow) for some fifty yards
or so, calling on the passers-by for help. He then
abandoned the pursuit, and after a short interview
with the ostler assumed an air of dignity which
promised ill for that night-prowler when next it
wandered near his foot.
Yours
D. A.
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
(Fragment)
What you say of this new chatter about the
sense of humour is very interesting. I had noticed
the subject growing in the papers. But humorists
leave it alone, just as healthy people do not talk
about their health. Show me a man who claims to
possess a sense of humour and I will show you a
bore.
211
LISTENER'S LURE
DRRMOT HYDE TO HIS MOTHER CYNTHIA HYDE
c/o Mrs. Pink
17A Kensington Square W.
My dear Mother,
This is an awfully decent house to stay in.
Miss Graham and I have made a theatre and last
night we had a performence. Aunt Victoria, Sir
Herbert Royce and Mr. Conran and the servants
were the audience. We played a scene in the life of
Sir Herbert, where he killed the lion before it killed
him. Miss Graham painted the scenery, which was
cheifly sunset in Africa, all red, with palm trees.
There was no talk in this scene, only roaring. Miss
Graham worked the lion and I worked Sir Herbert,
and I did the roaring. It was very sucessful.
Then we did a scene in the life of Mr. Conran,
with talking. I wrote it myself. In the first act
he and Aunt Victoria walking together under an
umberella in London meet a beggar. It was really
the same figure that had been Sir Herbert, only
with rags and dirt on it. The beggar asked them
for money, and Aunt Victoria was going to give
him some, but Mr. Conran said in a terrible firm
voice "No, Madam. It cannot be. It cannot be.
I smell an imposter." Miss Graham read the words
while I moved the figures. Then the beggar, who
was Irish, with a broge which Miss Graham did
awfully decently, told Mr. Conran he was a mean
212
"THE INNOCENT SPINX"
sneak and he would go to the suspicous man's hell,
and Aunt Victoria said " No, No ! No, No ! ", but
Mr. Conran said he would chance it and asked the
beggar's name and address. The beggar ran off and
that was the end of Act I.
In Act II somehow or other Mr. Conran had dis-
covered the beggar's address, and the scene is his
drawing-room, where he is eating a most tremendous
whack and drinking expensive champangs, a new
bottle every minute, when Mr. Conran and a police-
man suddenly come in and take him to prison. In
the third act Aunt Victoria disguised as a gaoler's
daughter visits him and gives him money and a
ticket of leave.
To-morrow I am going to the Natural History
Museum to see the protective coloured birds and
things. Please don't let me come home yet.
I am your affectionate son
Dermot Hyde
P.S. I have told Miss Graham that you and
father call her the Innocent Spinx.
EDITH GRAHAM TO G WENDOLEN FROME
17A Kensington Square W.
My dear Gwen,
Mrs. Pink asks me to say she would be very
glad if you would come here for a week's visit, when
Jack comes down to stay with Mr. Damp. I hope
213
LISTENER'S LURE
you will. I will give you as much time as I can
and every afternoon.
Yours always
Edith
MISS FASE TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Laurels
Grange-over-Sands
My dear Edith,
I write to you to know if you will be so good
as to work some little thing for our church bazaar,
where I have a stall with two other ladies, Miss Cole,
whom I daresay you will remember as my neighbour,
at The Laburnams, on the other side to Miss Pass-
more, and a very pleasant neighbour too, except foi
a little clog that will bark in the night and ought to
be treated with more severity, and Mrs. Bamside-
Block, the widow of the late vicar, who still lives on
here to be near her husband's grave, which is a very
handsome one, in Aberdeen granite, with an inscrip-
tion from her own pen that some of the parishioners
think rather too extreme in its praise, but which only
a very cultivated and well-read woman could have
written. The Blocks are indeed a very old and
gifted family, one of the oldest in England I believe ;
but of course that docs not really matter because
Mrs. Bamside- Block would have taken the name
from her husband. She was herself I believe a Miss
Birdie, but I know very little about her except that
214
FOR THE CHURCH
her father invented something of world-wide fame
but I forget what it was — either a patent wire-mat-
tress, I think, or perhaps it was a new method of
filing bills. Anyhow his daughter is a clever woman
and quite the intellectual leader here among our
regular residents. She goes to the Oxford Summer
meeting of the University Extension movement every
summer, and Mr. Churton Collins himself once stayed
in her house here and was most entertaining, she
told me afterwards, on the subject of the Merstham
tunnel murder and coincidences in general, keeping
them up till nearly midnight.
Of course, my dear, I know you are very busy
most of the day, but I thought you might have a little
time to yourself after lunch and in the evening, and I
know it would be a pleasure to you to work something
for our church. The vicar is such a dear hardworking
man, with a constant thorn in the side in the shape
of a thriftless son who has never done anything but
waste his time and his father's money since he left
Oxford, and we want little simple useful things such
as egg coseys, although I doubt if there is any way
of keeping an egg hot except in hot water, and that of
course makes it hard even although you crack the top,
or kettle holders, or doyleys, or table centres, or night-
dress bags, or toilets, or watch pockets. But of course
dear if you are too busy you must not trouble at all.
I must now stop if I am to catch the post.
Your loving
Aunt Charlotte
215
LISTENER'S LURE
P.S. From what you have told me of Mrs. Pink
I fear it is useless to ask her for any help except per-
haps a few old things for the Rummage Sale. We
should be glad of anything we could get, and it is so
much pleasanter of course to know something of the
people who wore the clothes before they were left off.
I am sure we could feel quite safe with anything of
Mrs. Pink's.
CYNTHIA HYDE TO ANNIE HARBERTON
The Corner House
Leatherhead
My dear Annie,
You ask a very difficult thing. Edith is at
once so frank and so secretive ; but then, as you say,
they all are. We all are. I suppose it is part of our
armour, and Heaven knows some of us want all the
armour we can get. Of one thing I am certain, and
that is all in your favour— no one else has won any
place in her heart. My aunt's house is beginning to
be overrun with men with souls and temperaments
and futures, and Edith listens to them all, and they
all go away idealising and idolising her ; but although
she has had a proposal or two already, I feel as sure
as I can be that she does not love one of them, not
even the ugliest or least suitable. Still you never
216
THE AGE OF A WIFE
can tell with these quiet ones. But I am going to
begin to find out. I am going to be as cunning as a
serpent and discover everything. When one is Hear-
ing forty one is entitled to do a little match-making.
The best of them all is Sir Herbert Royce, whom
I love. How he feels about Edith I can only guess,
but he is fifty, just twice her age, and that is too
much. I was reading a French book the other day
which says that a wife should be half her husband's
age with seven years added : rather a nice idea, I
think. (It makes me too old for Sir Herbert though.)
I have caught him looking at Edith rather intently
now and then, and he takes her to the theatre. But
I am afraid she is too young to see his great merits as
I can. I think he is a little bit of a bully (although
he is your half-brother), and that is rather attractive.
Yours sincerely
Cynthia Hyde
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Norfolk Arms
Arundel
My dear Miss Graham,
My friend went to London this morning, so I
have been alone. I have just written these lines in
commemoration of an incident of the day.
217
LISTENER'S LURE
As I walked over the Common,
All in the sweet cool air,
The sky was a benediction
And everything was fair,
Till I saw that most un-christian sight,
A clergyman debonair
Lolling back on the cushions
Of a dashing carriage and pair.
And all the joy of the morning
Suddenly passed away,
The sky that had been so friendly
Turned to a chilling grey,
And not till a swearing gipsy I met,
Helping his child to play,
Could I put together the pieces
And mend the broken day.
Few poems are so truthful as this. I have set
down exactly what occurred ; but I don't say that I
have carried the moral quite far enough.
Yours
D. A.
G WENDOLEN FROME TO MRS. FROME
17A Kensington Square W.
My dear Mothie,
I am here all right, although it was no joke
coming from St. Pancras. We rushed into a howl-
ing fog at Kentish Town and were two hours getting
across London in a cab. It is an awfully nice house
218
GWEN DISCOVERS KENSINGTON
and Mrs. Pink is a perfect dear. Edith is a most
wonderful manager, everything seems to be done by
her. What Mrs. Pink will do when Mr. Harberton
wants her again I can't imagine. Last night we
were very quiet, but this evening I am going to the
theatre with Jack and his friend Mr. Damp and in
the afternoon to a picture gallery with Edith. She
is out now with Mrs. Pink, and I am writing in my
room, which looks out on the square.
No more now, except love.
Your loving
G.
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Wood's' Edge
Newtimber, Sussex
My dear Miss Graham,
I have had a very interesting experience. I
have become a Dowser. A Dowser is not a member
of a new religion, tell Mrs. Pink, but a water-diviner,
one who detects the presence of springs with a
divining rod.
I came upon the Ortons, on Saturday morning,
wild with excitement over the approaching visit of
the Dowser, the old well having gone dry or bad,
and a new one being imperative. I will tell you the
whole story faithfully, because it is really remarkable,
219
LISTENER'S LURE
and brings me nearer to magic than I ever expected
or hoped my very materialistic nature could approach.
At eleven o'clock the Dowser, Mr. Partridge, came
— a large, heavy man, with a weak but kindly mouth,
soft eyes, a beard, and a pocket bulging with hazel
twigs : nothing of witchcraft about him. We crowded
round — a dozen of us, counting the children —
and worshipped, and the wizard, very naturally, was
not a little embarrassed. However, he bade us
good morning, and gathering the universe into a
glance, pronounced it a favourable day. The sun
shone, and the air was clean and fresh, though there
was no wind. Then he looked at the field more
narrowly, and, indicating the part where a spring
was most likely to be found, led the way. We
followed. Of those of us who were grown up, I
might here mention that two were wholly sceptics
and wishful to remain so, and three were unbelievers
and hopeful of conversion. I count myself among
the three.
Mr. Partridge began by selecting from his store one
of the stouter rods, the rod being in reality a forked
twig of hazel in the shape of a long letter " V."
After cherishing it in his hands for a few moments,
he grasped both ends tightly, his palms being upwards,
his arms pressed against his sides, and the point
of the " V " thrust outwards horizontally, at right
angles to his body. He then walked slowly over the
grass, gazing intently upon the tip of the twig, and
taking short steps. Orton, the chief of the sceptics,
220
A RUSTIC WIZARD
declares that the diviner's lips were moving as
though in the repetition of some incantation. But
I did not observe that, although I was watching him
— as were all of us — most intently.
At about the seventh step the point of the rod
began to rise in his hands, at the next step it became
quite vertical ; thus remaining for some two yards,
after which it fell again. A few paces farther the
diviner turned round and began to walk back over
the same ground, and as he did so the rod rose at the
precise spot where it had fallen on his first passage,
grew upright again, and fell at the place where it
had first risen. " There's a spring here," said Mr.
Partridge quietly. We looked at each other a little
puzzled. Nothing was, of course, proved, but an
uncanny influence seemed to be stirring. The wizard
tried with another, a finer twig, which he held with
his finger tips. The results were the same, except
that this rod seemed more subtly susceptible. " Now
I am on the spring," he said, as the twig began to
rise ; " Now I am off it," as the twig was again
depressed.
Mr. Partridge then walked off to trace the course
of the stream under the grass, and we closed into a
noisy group to discuss the wonder — or the fraud.
Tests were devised. Orton was for blindfolding ;
Bridges, Orton's brother-in-law, after showing how
a V-shaped twig may be mechanically raised by
pressure, was for holding the wizard's hands, or fix-
ing them apart with a bar of wood. When Mr.
221
LISTENER'S LURE
Partridge came back he was told of our plans, and
laughingly assented. He pretended to no magic, he
assured us : he was as much mystified as we were ;
but there was the fact ! During several years'
practice at divination, he had never made a mistake
yet, and many wells had been sunk on the evidence of
the rod. An old Sussex villager first led him to try his
hand, and he soon became peculiarly sensitive. His
whole body told him when he was over water ; his
arms became numb, and, after an hour's seeking he
was tired out, exhausted. To show us how powerful
was this force, he chose another twig, and, gripping
it tightly, held it over the spring, saying that with
all his might he would strive to repress it. The twig
struggled and kicked in his grasp, and in its
determination to rise broke on both sides, while
the sweat stood out on the wizard's forehead. The
tests were then applied, and in every case the rod
triumphed.
By this time the party was divided into factions.
The two sceptics were becoming unpopular. Why,
they were asked, if he makes no money out of it,
and seeks no fame — for modesty and a retiring
disposition were patent in the man — why should he
wish to deceive? Where is the use of employing
fraud ? To which the answer was that the reasons
for imposture are often obscure, and, to the honest
mind, inadequate.
On Mr. Partridge's return he provided rods for a
few of us, but very little success was recorded. A.t
222
ALBOURNE DOWSES
first I was as much a failure as the rest, although
I got the wizard to hold my wrists as I walked, and
to adjust the rod in my fingers. He seemed, however,
more hopeful than I, and told me to try again care-
fully, first warming the twig — making it, as it were,
a part of myself. I therefore removed from the rest
of the party, who were now standing at a spot some
distance from the place where water was first de-
tected, and nourished the rod as though it were a
wounded bird. Then, holding it lightly in my finger
tips, I paced slowly over the grass in the manner of
the diviner. I passed the spot where the rod had in
his hands begun to rise, without any manifestation,
and was becoming again despondent, when precisely
in the middle of the stream, as he had judged it, the
twig rose. A shiver ran through me, the thing was
so unexpected and yet so desired, and, withal, so
fraught with mystery. I retraced my steps, and the
twig rose again, exactly in the same spot. I had no
feeling of numbness but an absolute inability to con-
trol the movement of the twig. It rose on every
occasion without assistance from me. Then I shut
my eyes and approached the place from varying
distances, and each time the twig rose at the same
spot. From that moment I was a believer in the
rod. I could have kissed it.
Satisfied with the experiment, I called the others.
The scoffers grew in eloquence, but the Dowser was
interested. He watched the twig as I went over the
ground again, and he was satisfied. " It rises now,
223
LISTENER'S LURE
he explained in answer to my question why it was
influenced only in the middle of the stream, " because
it is there that the spring is most marked. In a few
days," he added, " you ought to become as sensitive
as me." I was thrilled with these words : so near
Nature's heart, so near ! But the scoffers only
laughed the more, and to put my success to the test
I was dispatched to a far corner of the field, while a
new spring was discovered by Mr. Partridge. I was
then to be called and shown vaguely the direction in
which to walk, and to find the spring if I could. All
this was done, and the diviner's twig and my twig
tallied. Then it was I who discovered water two
hundred yards away, and the diviner who followed.
Again the twigs tallied. At this point Bridges
weakened a little, and the remaining two unbelievers
who wished to become convinced became convinced —
convinced, like myself, not that there was water be-
neath our feet at these spots, though that was, of
course, the presumption, but that a certain mysterious
force, not human, was at work.
That ended the experiments. The water-diviner
was perceptibly fagged, and over a glass of beer he
told us stories of the successful wells that had been
sunk in the neighbourhood, and the mistakes of
other men, which the rod had been, in his hands,
the means of rectifying. He ended by repeating his
statement that the whole thing was a marvel to
him, and advising me to persevere. I mean to. So
you see what my destiny is : no more journalism,
224
MR. DAMP RECOVERING
no more Fleet Street, but the life of the simple but
successful Dowser.
Yours
D. A.
G WENDOLEN FROME TO MRS. FROME
17A Kensington Square W.
Dearest Mothie,
We have been to the theatre twice — once to the
St. James's and once to the Imperial. I don't know
which I like best, George Waller or Lewis Alexander.
I think perhaps George Waller is handsomer, but
Lewis Alexander has such a wonderful voice.
I don't know how I shall ever settle down at
Winfield again.
I have also been to a motor show with Mr. Damp
and Jack. Mr. Damp was very kind, and he asked
me my advice as to what car he should buy next and
how it should be upholstered. I was never much
interested in motor cars before, but I can see the
fascination now. Mr. Damp is taking us a long
drive to-morrow, as Edith has to be busy. We shall
very likely have lunch at Burford Bridge, if it is fine.
Mr. Damp's chauffeur is most amusing, but he hardly
ever gets a chance to drive at all, what with? Mr.
Damp and Jack both wanting to. I have a very
beautiful illustrated edition of Omar Khayyam, which
P 225
LISTENER'S LURE
I think you will like to see, exactly like one that
Edith has.
I enclose picture postcards of George Waller and
Lewis Alexander.
With ever so much love
G.
EDITH GRAHAM TO CYNTHIA HYDE
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Cynthia,
I telegraphed you to come up about Mr.
Albourne. Mrs. Pink is in despair, and I thought
you were the one soul she w8uld like to talk to about
it all. A letter came this morning saying that he is
married, and has indeed been married for some time.
He does not explain, but there can be very little
doubt that his marriage is one of which he is rather
ashamed. I expect he was sorry for some girl and
married her out of chivalry. He admits he made
a great mistake and that they have lived apart for
some time and are not likely to do anything else.
He meant to keep it all a secret— but says that he
has been feeling for some time that he ought to tell
Mrs. Pink as he cannot bear any suggestion of false
pretences in his dealings with her. Mrs. Pink is
very unhappy about it, and so am I. Sir Herbert
looked in this afternoon and Mrs. Pink told him all
226
EXIT A POSSIBILITY
about it and he went off to find Mr. Albourne and
cheer him up by saying that it would make no differ-
ence here ; but I suppose it must make a little
difference. Everything that happens in life always
seems to make some little difference. It is one of
the sad things that a little change keeps creeping
in : nothing ever remains quite the same or can be
repeated exactly. I shall be so glad to see you to-
morrow.
Yours
Edith
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN HARDER TON
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Lynn,
Circumstances over which we have no control
have settled the Albourne difficulty. The young
fool turns out to be married already. He married
his landlady's daughter, that astute person having
discerned the ass beneath the poet's skin and played
her cards accordingly. Or so I deduce from Al-
bourne's story. He saw quickly that he had been
duped, but it was then too late ; and then he met
with Edith and for a while allowed himself to enjoy
the illusion of being free and her lover. In such
men conscience never dies, it is only now and then
227
LISTENER'S LURE
very sleepy ; and waking up one day recently, Al-
bourne's insisted on its unhappy servant making a
clean breast of the error to Mrs. Pink, his benefac-
tress. He has now gone to discover America for a
newspaper, and Mr. Rodwell is himself again.
But Edith will, as I have said, have none of that
gentleman. Mr. Rodwell can take care of himself:
he knows his way about and has never lacked a meal
yet, or made a mistake out of Quixotry. I am heartily
glad for Edith's sake that Albourne committed his
folly and has disappeared ; for I fancy that his fidelity
to her, and the thought of his solitary life and sick
body, were beginning to do their fell work. It would
have been a misfortune had she married him.
At one time of her life almost every clean-minded
girl seems to be a little fascinated by the idea of
sacrificing herself for a dependent man. It is the
first tumbling expression of the desire to mother.
Men can have something of the same feeling too,
selfish though they are. Many a young man quite
genuinely believes that he would like his wife to be
an invalid, so that he may nurse her and nurse her ;
but that kind of aspiration does not persist.
Pity is answerable for almost as many marriages
as love; but the state cannot thrive on it. It is
wrong. Once the glow of self-satisfaction has died
out of the pityer, contempt has a way of coming in.
I don't think Edith is like that ; but for a healthy
frank girl, as she is, with her quick sense of life, to
marry an artificial weakling is against Nature, and I
228
UNFORTUNATE MISS SOMERSCALES
have never known Nature forget an obligation. Of
course in the unreal literary and artistic and argu-
mentative circle in which Albourne lives, and of
which Edith is getting so many glimpses, Nature is
robbed of some of her vigour ; but she sees her duty
with clear vision even there, and does it.
Albourne is a good fellow and a very clever one,
but Edith is worth a thousand of him. He is one
of the men who want everything ; she is steady and
reasonable in her demands upon life. Women, as a
whole, expect far less than men. You are something
of an Albourne yourself, and want far too much, but
you would be a fairer husband than he.
Yours
H. R.
EILEEN SOMERSCALES TO EDITH GRAHAM
13 The Crescent
Bath
Dear Edith,
I have just heard that Gwendolen Frome has
been staying with you in London, and I am wonder-
ing if you intend to ask me. I had no idea that
amanuenses were allowed to entertain, but of course
your position is different from every one else's, and
always will be. Gwendolen Frome is another of
those lucky people who can do as they like, and
229
LISTENER'S LURE
nothing is so true as the text about giving more
riches to the rich and taking away from the poor
that which they have. I am always trying to get
Hercules to preach about this and tell the congrega-
tion a few home truths, but he does not see it at all
and goes on with the kind texts. He says church is
not the place for finding fault with strong wrong-
doers, but for helping simple and sincere souls who
want to do right ; or at any rate, that he is not the
one to criticise the others.
Of course, as you can see, a man who takes such
a view of himself as this is always getting imposed
upon, from the vicar downwards, and Hercules has
to do far too many things and comes home tired
out. His poor feet suffer most, for he doesn't care
for cycling and walks everywhere, and he has very
tender feet, and though I have found a hardening
solution for him to use they do not seem to get
better. I believe postmen and waiters have the same
difficulty.
Hercules also has an idea that he can write, and
he sits up late at night working at a history of St.
Saviour's and its principal vicars. This seems to me
very unnecessary because he will be sure to get a
living somewhere else some day and he does not
really belong here ; but he says that clergymen
ought to know all about their churches, and as the
vicar is interested only in hunting and shooting
Hercules must do it for him
I could have come to London for a week so easily
230
MR. DAMP AND THE POLICE
this month, because Mother had an old friend stay-
ing here, but it is now impossible, for we are alone
together again and she is more dependent on me than
ever. I have to read the Morning Post to her now
every day, all through, because she thinks her eyes
are going wrong, but that is all fancy. Hercules
reads it sometimes, but he cannot be here always,
though I know he would love to be.
Yours ever
Eileen
GWENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
Dear old Edith,
What do you think ? I have had a visit from
Algy Mr. Damp. He suddenly appeared this after-
noon in his car, having ridden all the way from London
without stopping except to give his name and address
to policemen. He started before it was light and was
caught five times before he was here. And all be-
cause he loves me. Isn't that devotion ? It is better
than the good news from Aix to Ghent. He said
that he couldn't rest until he had seen me and asked
me if I would marry him. I didn't know what to
say, because although I like him all right, it is so
jolly sudden, and so jolly soon after what Jack told
231
LISTENER'S LURE
me about Algy and you. I couldn't say that to Algy,
of course, but I was thinking of it all the time.
He seems to have his surname most awfully on
his mind, and it certainly is rather a rotten one. He
said he wanted to change it, only there were so
many others to choose from he couldn't make up
his mind, and I rather jumped at that and said I
would give him an answer if he would wait for two
weeks and then come again with a new name.
After a long time of misery he agreed to this, but
made me promise to help him to find a name. Do
tell me of a good one, there's a darling Edith. I
never could think of things like that ; and I don't
really think I ought to, because in a kind of way it
makes me say yes all the time.
Your loving
Gwen
P.S. Just as I was sticking this up Father came
in, and I asked him (without letting him know, of
course, why I wanted to know) how people went to
work to change their names — how they found new
ones, I mean. He said that a very common way is
to take one's mother's maiden name. I shall tell
Algy this. I can't think why he never thought of
it himself.
232
LAUGHTER IN COURT
FROM THE "BROADSHIRE WEEKLY POST"
Before the Tilton Bench, on Thursday, Algernon
Damp, 14 Lancaster Gate, London, W., who did not
appear, was charged with driving a motor car at the
rate of thirty-one miles an hour over a measured
distance of 440 yards. P.C. Ryley, who gave evidence
as to speed, testified that when the defendant was
acquainted with his offence he made use of an ob-
jectionable word. Pressed as to the nature of the
word, witness said it was " Chestnuts " ! The de-
fendant had previously been stopped twice on the
same day, and had already been fined at other courts.
Mr. Beresford, who appeared for the defendant, said
that his client pleaded guilty ; he had no defence
except that he was in a hurry. Speaking entirely on
his own responsibility, Mr. Beresford added that per-
haps it might weigh with the Bench if he explained
that his client was hastening upon a very tender
errand. They all knew what it was to be young and
eager (Laughter). Having said that, he would leave
the matter in their Worships' hands. ,£5 and costs.
GWENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
Dear old Edith,
I wrote to Algy about Father's idea, but he
replied at once that it won't do at all, for some reason
233
LISTENER'S LURE
or other which he doesn't give. Isn't it awful? I
wish you would tell me which of the names in the
list below you like best. I got them from an archery
programme which I found.
Elton-Lee
Bampfield-Cogan
Nott-Bower
Brookes-King
(I rather fancy double names.) Or these : —
Berens
Naden
Legh
Gordon
(Father, who I asked about this, again without
letting him know why, says that most people who
change their names call themselves Gordon)
Glennie
Dodington
Prince
Hansard
Redmayne
Do you like any of these ? They are all better
than Mrs. Damp anyway.
Yours
Gwen
How about Alexander ? Or Waller ?
234
CHOOSING A NAME
G WENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
Dear Edith,
Algy has written to know what I think of
Sandow as a name ? Of course it is impossible,
isn't it ? I am at my wit's end. Do help me.
Gwen
EDITH GRAHAM TO GWENDOLEN FROME '
17A Kensington Square W.
Dear Gwen,
I think all your names are too elaborate.
You want something very simple, I think. Why
don't you choose one beginning with F and then
you won't have to change your initial.
Yours
Edith
CYNTHIA HYDE TO ANNIE HARBERTON
The Corner House
Leatherhead
Dear Annie,
If it is any one it is Sir Herbert Royce.
There was a possibility once that it might be Mr
235
LISTENER'S LURE
Albourne, a protege of my aunt's, but that is all off
now, even if it were ever on.
Really she is rather a minx. She fills me with
admiration and despair. Admiration of her quiet
self-sufficiency and composure, as she sits there,
looking earnestly with her sympathetic brown eyes at
whoever is talking, and thinking of Heaven knows
what, and just by sheer attentive listening, or what
they think is attentive listening, making dull men sen-
sible, and sensible men eloquent. Always about them-
selves, of course. She makes me feel out of date,
with my foolish obsolete tongue always wanting to
say something itself and thus give myself away.
Your brother had better come home if he wants
his ward. And I wish he would, because Sir
Herbert, who used to be so interesting when he talked
to me, now won't look at me any longer, although I
try so hard to hold my tongue and listen and listen
and listen 1
Yours
Cynthia
GWENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
Winfield
Dear Edith,
What a perfectly ripping idea about beginning
with F, but I can't think of anything. I want to
236
SIR HERBERT TRIUMPHANT
tell Algy to try and think, but I can't without
giving the show away, can I ? He is to come again
on Tuesday. I am going to try the Directory.
Yours
Gwen
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN HARBERTON
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Dear Lynn,
I think you ought to know as soon as any one
that to-day I asked your ward to be my wife, and she
consented. I never thought to marry again, but she
is so much superior in sense and charm to all women
I have lately met that I decline to admit any incon-
sistency. It simply means that for a long time I
have known only the shadows of women. Whether
or not I have carried by assault a garrison which you
were proposing to starve out, I do not know ; but if
I have, you must not complain, for all is fair in love
and war, and no one has had such opportunities as
yourself. I will not say any more as you will be
certainly hearing from Edith.
Yours
H. R.
237
LISTENER'S LURE
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
(This letter was never posted)
My dear dear Guardian,
I have done a very decisive thing : I have told
Sir Herbert I will marry him. Perhaps I ought
first to have asked you if I might, but there was not
time. He put the question in a rush and I answered
it in a rush ; and we shall be very happy. I have
made Herbert promise that when he settles down it
shall be in a house near Winfield, so that we shall
all see each other very often. Do send me a word
saying that you are glad about this.
Your devoted
Edith
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
(This letter was never posted)
My dear Child,
I have just had a letter from Herbert which
has made me very unhappy. I know him so much
better than you, and cannot therefore avoid mis-
givings as to the future. I know how direct and
forcible he is, and how devoted he is to the fact, but
he is impulsive and masterful, and he will want you
to be just clay in his hands after the first intoxication
238
A DARK WEEK
of passion is past. You are not the woman to love
so blindly and meekly as to like that. Some women
might, undoubtedly ; but not you. I don't want to
make you unhappy : all I want in the world is your
happiness ; but I cannot help telling you how I, who
know you both so well, feel about this engagement,
and asking you both to wait a little longer before
you make your compact irrevocable. It is not much
to ask : if you are sure you are right, it is no hard-
ship at all ; if you are in any doubt, you will thank
me. I cannot write more as I am not well to-day.
A little fever, I think. Good-night, my dear child.
Yours always
L. H.
(A few days elapse)
EDITH GRAHAM TO SIR HERBERT ROYCE
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
I am so very unhappy that I could not wait
to see you at home but had to come here. And now
you are out. I have to say a very hard thing, and
that is that I have discovered I do not love you. I
admire you, I respect you, I like to listen to you and
be with you and see through your eyes, but I do not
love you, and I have just learned that I never can
love you because I love some one else. You will
239
LISTENER'S LURE
think I should have told you this last week ; but I
could not because I did not know it then. I had
never really thought about it until you asked me to
marry you, and it is in my distress since over my
answer to that question and fear of the future that the
knowledge has come to me. I do not know whether
he loves me or not, but I know that I love him. My
dear dear friend, will you forgive me. I am so
grieved and so ashamed to have misled you like this,
and you have been so good and so kind.
E.G.
EDITH GRAHAM TO CYNTHIA HYDE
17A Kensington Square W.
My very dear Cynthia,
Why, O why, did you choose this week of
all weeks in which to go away — for I need you so
seriously ? I have never wanted a confidante before,
but now I want one terribly — so long as it is you. I
am utterly perplexed and wretched. Sir Herbert
asked me last week to be his wife, and I said yes,
but now I know it is all wrong and impossible. I
have hardly slept for three nights, thinking of it
and seeing the mistake so clearly.
The fact is, as I know now, I do not love him.
For a little while he carried me off my feet with
his rush of new ideas, and strong ways, and under-
240
LOVE'S DISGUISE
standing ways, and I grew to admire him immensely
and find him the best company. And at last I
thought it was love. But it was never love quite :
it was excitement, a kind of fascination (and even
resentment), dependence, all kinds of things ; but
it wasn't love. I can see that now. I can see also
that the type of man I should love is very different,
quite as much, if not more, in need of me than I
of him : with a quieter, more intricate mind.
Of course I ought to have told him at once, but
for one thing he had to go away to Scotland, and
for another I wanted to be sure. It might have just
been a passing mood. So I went on hoping and
hoping all might come right, but knowing in my
heart that I had make a mistake and it must be
cleared up directly.
I wrote to Mr. Harberton at once, but I could not
send the letter. It seemed so terribly cruel some-
how to tell him who was so far away and so lonely
of my happiness and plans for a future in which
he and his work, that I have always helped in and
believed in, would have no place. He has not
written to me, although I know that Sir Herbert
told him the news.
Just now I am troubled day and night by this
thought about selfishness. All our individual happi-
ness looks like selfishness. Sir Herbert says that
it is all right that we should be selfish. He says
that it is only selfishness which sends the world round
at all : that it is Nature's motive power, and that
Q 241
LISTENER'S LURE
human beings are incapable of unselfishness ; and
when I point to examples of unselfishness he proves
at once that they are really nothing but self-indul-
gence in virtue or asceticism instead of what we
call excess and pleasure. Did it ever seem to you
that people can be self-indulgent in self-denial ? It
is a horribly confusing thought, if one has been
brought up as I was. I suppose future generations
will be able to accept it naturally enough.
I am writing this to you because it is a relief to
me to express myself and make my position clear
to myself (words seem to bring assurance), rather
than because I want advice, even if you could answer
this quickly, which you cannot. I don't much
believe in women asking advice. Men seem to do
so with success, but I never heard of a woman
taking any advice but her own. Yet I do believe
in telling one's difficulties. But, O Cynthia, I wish
you were at home so that I could come to you.
I got through the week somehow till three o'clock
to-day and then I could not stand it any longer.
Sir Herbert was coming to-morrow, he had told me,
but I could not wait. I started off to his hotel as
fast as a hansom would take me, and then stopped
it and walked, feeling absolutely sure I could walk
faster. He had not come back yet, but his man let
me go into his sitting room to write a letter, and I
just told him as kindly and quickly as I could that I
took back my answer of the week before. But, O
Cynthia, I had to do a dreadful thing. I had to tell
242
END OF AN EPISODE
him that I loved some one else. I had not absolutely
known it till last night — not really known it, but the
certainty came upon me like a flash and just settled
everything ; because whether that other loves me
or not, I love him and I cannot marry any one else.
When I called it a dreadful thing to tell Sir Herbert
that, I don't mean an unwomanly thing, but such
a cruel thing to have to say, after his kindness, and
doubly cruel because by just saying it I instantly
got back so much peace of mind. It is terrible at
what cost to others a great part of our happiness,
or at least self-satisfaction, is purchased.
Do come to town directly you return.
Yours
E.G.
S/R HERBERT ROYCE TO EDITH GRAHAM
Morton's Hotel
Jermyn Street
Edith, my dear Edith, it must be as you say.
If you had said only that you did not love me I
would have made you love me ; but when you say
you love some one else there is nothing for me to do
except to make everything as easy for you as I can,
and that I will do. Never again say you are
ashamed : it was not your doing. We cannot help
these things. God send that every one might find
out their mistake as quickly as you have done 1
H. R.
243
LISTENER'S LURE
ANNIE HARBERTON TO CYNTHIA HYDE
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
My dear Cynthia,
We are in great distress about my brother
Lynn. He received a letter two days ago from Sir
Herbert Royce saying that he was engaged to Edith,
and Lynn, who was at first quite dazed, is now
seriously ill and at times delirious. He cannot sleep
at all but talks incessantly of Edith in such a way as
to leave no doubt of what his feelings are and why
he is ill. Can nothing be done ?
It would be the most unhappy marriage. Herbert
is a fine character but very overbearing and exacting.
He wants all coats to be cut to his measure, and his
restlessness would kill any ordinary wife in a year.
Edith may be under his glamour now, but that will
soon go and she will find herself in chains. But
won't you see her and try and find out something?
She may so easily have been impulsive and already
be repenting it. It is a little significant, my brother
thinks, that she has not written to Lynn : he seems
to see some hope there. The doctor says that if
Lynn gets worse, Edith ought to come out.
Yours in great anxiety
Annie Harberton
244
MRS. HYDE PLAYS FATE
CYNTHIA HYDE TO ANNIE HARBERTON
(Telegram)
Broken off. Send your brother home.
Cynthia
CYNTHIA HYDE TO ANNIE HARBERTON
The Corner House
Leatherhead
My dear Annie,
Your lettei followed me about for a day or so,
or I should perhaps have been able to telegraph the
good news sooner ; but I don't know that for certain.
I had a letter from Edith which decided me to run
up to town at once, and it was after that that I was
able to telegraph, or rather during our talk — for I
said " Excuse me a moment, I have forgotten to
telephone to Herbert" (my Herbert I mean), which
was a fib, and I rushed out to the post office in
Young Street and telegraphed to you, and then went
back to hear the rest.
The dear thing was frightfully unhappy, but I
think she deserved it a little. One must not be so
nice to every one, you know. It doesn't do. Either
it means that you don't marry at all, or you find
yourself in the hands of a strong masterful man
245
LISTENER'S LURE
like Sir Herbert, whom I love all the same, although
his stones of big game shooting have an awful effect
on our household, and poor Herbert's (I mean my
Herbert again : there ought to be a law against
men having the same name) poor Herbert's fur coat.
I caught Dermot in it the other day, of course wrong
side out, being struck by Jack with an assegai. He
was pig-sticking, he said ; and then there was an
awful smell of burning and I found them barbecu-
ing it. Herbert doesn't know yet.
Now that she is calm again, Edith knows — as she
always did know, underneath— that she loves your
brother Lynn, and has never loved any one else.
Why he sent her to London instead of marrying her,
I shall never understand. I cannot think what men
are made of. They have now simply lost six months
of this miserably short life — and all because he had
not a little more of Sir Herbert's courage or im-
patience. I hope he is on his way here now. He
cannot come too soon if my poor aunt is to get any
more work out of her secretary, who is putting the
wrong letters into the wrong envelopes from morning
till night.
It all makes me very happy to think that I have
been married so long, and have five boys and a
husband to think for, instead of having to think
about my own affairs. That is the secret.
Yours affectionately
Cynthia
246
THE DIPLOMATIST AT DRAUGHTS
GWENDOLEN FROME TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Rectory
WlNFIELD
Dear Edith,
Algy came yesterday afternoon covered with
mud. He had a list of six names which he fancies,
and one of them luckily begins with F and is not
bad — Farrar. Algy was so very much in love after
all this long and harassing time that I couldn't say
anything but yes. But when he went to see Father
and Mother about it, they insisted on our not really
being engaged for a year, which is a pretty rotten
long time.
Algy stayed the night and played draughts with
Mother, and was beaten every time, and she likes
him ; so that is so much to the good. Every now and
then we heard screams of laughter coming from the
kitchen, where the chauffeur was having his supper,
and quite early this morning I heard what I thought
was the car and jumped out of bed and ran to the
window, and there were Ellen and Fanny going for
a ride. It might so easily have been me if Father
was not so old fashioned and cautious. I'm sure
that Algy really loves me, and if he does there's a
whole year of our life wasted.
Yours
Gwen
247
LISTENER'S LURE
P.S. Algernon's single doubt is his mother, whose
only son he is and who cannot bear to lose him.
When I told Father this he said he doubted if it was
a real trouble. " A mother," he said, " who would
die with the least possible concern to her son would
choose the moment when he became engaged."
ANNIE HARBERTON TO CYNTHIA HYDE
Villa Delacroix
Algiers
Dear Cynthia,
Your telegram made me so happy. Lynn had
already begun to mend before it came, one to the
same effect from Herbert having preceded it. He is
getting strong very rapidly, although he still cannot
sleep, and he will sail by the first steamer. I am all
impatience for your letter.
Yours affectionately and very gratefully
Annie Harberton
(A few days elapse)
248
A DISSUASIVE PROPOSAL
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
(By hand)
Grand Hotel
Charing Cross
Dear Child,
I came back this morning and am at the
Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square. I could not stay
away any longer, hearing nothing of you direct and
so much from others. I wrote you a letter after
Herbert told me about it, but I could not send it, and
now that I have heard from Herbert once more I
have come myself instead of writing again.
I want to warn you, dear Child, dear Edith, that
this is quite a different kind of letter from any that
I have written you before, and that very likely you
will be much happier if you don't read any farther ;
but I had to write it : the need has been growing
stronger every day until I can put it off no longer.
What I want to say is : Do you care enough for
me for us to marry and go through this queer world
together? I used to think that I should never put
this question to any woman, having no need of any
that I met, and indeed shrinking from imposing upon
any fellow creature so unsatisfactory a mass of whims
and tangents and self-mistrust as I am. And then I
249
LISTENER'S LURE
began to want you, Edith. It was largely why I
went away and sent you to London : that I wished
to examine myself narrowly and see what I really
desired and how much independence I really pos-
sessed, and also to give you a chance of thinking of
me at a distance. Absence makes the sight grow
clearer.
How you are thinking of me I do not know ; but
these months have taught me, Edith, that I love you,
worship you, and have no useful life but with you.
There is nothing I would not do to make you happy
if you would come to me, and I know that you would
by your nearness make me stronger. And yet if you
take my advice you will say no, because I am not
really fit for you ; there must be other men who
could make you happier and give you more of what
you ought to have. You see what I am like. I offer
myself with one hand and pull myself back with the
other ; and that is my way in most things. And yet
I love you continually, and want nothing but you in
this world — your heart and your mind and your eyes.
The terrible thing, Edith, is that if you say no —
and how can you say anything else? — I have lost
you completely. Because we could not go on as we
were of old, so happily, over the Doctor, in my study
at Winfield. It is this thought that turns my blood
cold and stops my heart suddenly at all kinds of odd
places, and always in the small hours.
The boy is waiting for an answer, but you may be
out. If you are, will you telegraph directly you come
250
WE BREATHE AGAIN
in? Whatever you say, I shall just look in on you
for a minute this afternoon.
Edith dear, I am your loving lover whatever
happens.
L.
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
(By hand)
To think that you are here, and why ! It
makes me so ashamed, so happy. You ought to be
cross with me for being so fickle, and instead you
come rushing back to say you love me. How can I
say I love you, and how could you believe it if I did ?
O, I am so humiliated to have misread my feelings
as I did ; it seems to me so little, so petty. I have
always so admired constancy, so desired to make up
my own mind and not change it, and here I am all
fickleness at the first opportunity ! I daren't meet my
own face in the glass.
But I do love you and I do know that I love you
and shall always love you. But perhaps 1 am not
the woman you are thinking : I am so much older
now : I have lived years in the past two weeks. Do
come quickly and see.
Edith
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LISTENER'S LURE
LYNN HARBERTON TO EDITH GRAHAM
(By hand)
Grand Hotel
Charing Cross
My precious Child, I must just send you this
line. O how foolish I have been. And yet have I ?
Isn't it better to believe that a thing happens only
when it must, and that if we had anticipated this
joy we might not have been ready for it ? Edith,
my darling, my sweet sweet woman, I will reach
your house at half past three if I can live so long.
Don't say things like those about yourself: don't think
them. It so often happens that we have to be mis-
taken before we can be right.
L.
LYNN HARBERTON TO ANNIE HARBERTON
Grand Hotel
Charing Cross
My dear Annie,
You may possibly have guessed the cause of
my restlessness during the past few weeks I was
with you. I can now complete the story by saying
that to-day I asked Edith to marry me and she said
252
LYNN REACHES HARBOUR
yes. She is possibly making the mistake of her life,
but she refuses to think so. I shall stay here for
a few days and then go to Winfield and begin to
prepare the Manor House for its mistress, because
we both feel that knowing each other so well it
would be absurd to be engaged for a minute longer
than is necessary. The wedding cannot be before
June, because Edith refuses to leave Mrs. Pink until
then, the old lady being not at all well and requiring
help in some elaborate scheme that cannot be com-
pleted quickly ; and though I should like her to come
at once, her decision to stay on is just one of the
things that I most admire in her.
As for the wedding itself, it will be the simplest
thing possible. For my own part I should prefer
jumping over a stick, or some such rite, but I sup-
pose Frome must have his couple of guineas and the
villagers their rice. All life is compromise.
You and Wordsworth have been very good and
patient with me, and I feel a beast to have imposed
so much moodiness and jumpiness on you for so
long. But that is over now. Henceforth I am all
quietude, and steady as the polar star.
Your loving brother
Lynn
253
LISTENER'S LURE
LYNN HARBERTON TO JOAN ARUNDEL
Grand Hotel
Charing Cross
My dear Joan,
What do you think I am going to do? You
see from the postmark and the very uninteresting
stamp (for which poor Cyril won't give a thank you,
I know, and how he'll curl his proud pirate-captain's
lip !) that I have come back to London. And why
do you think I have come back ? Because you told
me to.
Here beginneth Dramatic Dialogue
Joan. "O Mother, just listen, Uncle Lynn says I
told him to come back. I didn't, did I ?"
Mother. "I don't remember dear. Did you?
What did you say in your letter to him?"
Joan. " I forget. O no, I just said that Phyllis
and me wished he would marry Edith."
Mother. "Did you say that, darling? . . . Did you
. . .? But you shouldn't. . . . How very interesting.
. . . Gurney ! Gurney ! "
Squire (very cross, from behind The Times). " Well,
what is it ?"
Mother. "What do you think? Lynn Harberton
is going to marry Edith Graham."
Squire. " Nonsense ! "
Mother. " Yes, he is."
Squire. " How do you know ?"
Mother. " I do know. He has told Joan."
254
THE NEWS BROKEN
Joan. " O Mother, how can you say so ?— he hasn't."
Squire. "Well, all I can say is she's a silly girl
throwing herself away on that "
Mother and Joan (together, very angry and loyal).
" Shhhhhh ! "
Here endeth Dramatic Dialogue
There, that tells not only my story but your story.
I am coming back directly, partly to get ready the
house for your aunt (she will be your aunt now), but
chiefly because my boxes are full of queer things from
Algiers for all of you, including something for your
bad-tempered father.
Your devoted oncle
Lean Arbertong
SIR HERBERT ROYCE TO LYNN HARBERTON
Hotel Liverpool
Rue Castiglione
Paris
Dear Lynn,
She is yours, was yours all the time. Love
her well— she is worth it ; and love is the best. Love
her well, love her unceasingly, forget yourself and
spoil her. No good woman was ever the worse for
being spoilt. As for me, I am off to the Zambesi
again.
H. R.
255
LISTENER'S LURE
MISS FIELDING TO LYNN HARBERTON
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington
My dear Friend,
I am very glad to hear the news. Being an
old maid full of curiosity (I think, by the way, you
ought to have more : it is the best antiseptic) I have
naturally seen a great deal of marriage ; and I don't
think yours will be a failure. The success of marriage,
I have noticed, depends to a great extent on the
rapidity with which one learns whether one is to
spoil or to be spoiled, and one's acceptance of the
situation. Women of course do not want spoiling
as much as men, and they are better spoilers ; but
many a girl who began her courtship with what
seemed to be justifiable visions of tireless loving
hands and eyes by her sofa, has had to supply those
comforts herself to her husband, by his.
Another frequent cause of unhappiness between
husband and wife is a change in the husband's
circumstances. A man who marries in obscurity and
then becomes rich or famous or emerges into some
kind of prominence very often finds that his wife
cannot go with him. They married on terms that
have not been carried out. But you are old enough
to have thought about things long enough to know
how you are likely to develop. You are indeed, I
think, more fixed than most persons ; and of Edith
256
TO EXPECT UNHAPPINESS
I have no fears, unless you encourage your intro-
spective habits and leave her out in the cold. That
is the danger you have to guard against.
If you ever have any children I implore you to
bring them up to expect misery. Half the trouble
in the world comes from the idea that we are intended
to be happy. If I had children I should drive the
opposite notion into them, and then every happy
moment that came to them would be pure joy instead
of a source of uneasiness as it now is.
Your friend
Adelaide Fielding
P.S. In the summer, if you will ask me, I should
like to come to Winfield for a few days and sit in
your garden before all the flowers give way to
shrubbery.
MISS FASE TO EDITH GRAHAM
The Laurels
Grange-over-Sands
My dear Edith,
I am so glad to hear of your engagement.
Of course it would have been very nice if it had been
Sir Herbert Royce instead of Mr. Harberton, because
then you would have been Lady Royce, and a title
always seems to me a distinguished thing even in
fc 257
LISTENER'S LURE
these times when so many are given to quite vulgar
people. There is a knight who takes a house here
every summer, and I can assure you that the friends
who come to see him for week ends are most odious,
and the livery his groom wears is not nearly so neat
as our doctor's. He was I believe a mayor, or a
brewer, or perhaps both, and once as he drove past
this house he threw his cigar end at Griselda. But
I am very glad about your marriage, because although
doubtless there must always be single women in
England, with the number of women so much in
advance of men, yet I have always prayed that you
would not be one of them, because I know how good
and happy a wife you will be.
I am sure Mr. Harberton is a very fortunate man,
much more fortunate than he deserves, I think,
considering how long he has known you and how he
might have asked you any time these past five years
and you not too young even then. But, as Mr.
Willocks, the churchwarden, who is a very wise and
often witty man, says, we have to wait the Almighty's
appointed hour and not until His clock strikes can
we do anything, and so I suppose it is all right.
All the same I blame Mr. Harberton for shilly-shally-
ing and not knowing his mind, with all your happi-
ness at stake.
Poor Mr. Willocks, he has had much trouble
lately, his only son having been injured severely at
a football match at school. I can't think how they
can allow football to be played. Cricket I can under-
258
MISS FASE'S SECRET
stand, although I read in a paper the other day that
a butcher in Australia — or was it New Zealand ? —
had been so severely stunned by a cricket ball hitting
him on the temple that he had lost his memory and
had no recollection whatever of who or what he was.
Arthur Willocks was not so badly hurt as that, but
he is likely to be in bed for at least two weeks, and
as Mrs. Willocks has been a sufferer from insomnia
for years it is very sad. She has tried everything
without success, but a gentleman who lectured here
last week on Hygiene for the Home, a most in-
teresting lecture, and who stayed at the Willocks',
recommended her to try a hammock instead of a bed,
and they are having one put up now, and that may
work wonders. I am sure I hope it will, if only for
poor Mr. Willocks' sake.
Now that it is all settled I can tell you, dear, a
secret. You may have wondered why I have never
asked you to stay with me. It was not I can assure
you because I did not want you, for I have wanted
to see you exceedingly, as how could I help wanting
to see my own dear sister's only daughter, but be-
cause of young Bernard Falkiner, the vicar's son,
who will not do any work, but leads an idle life here
and is a hopeless ne'er-do-well, I fear, and such a grief
to his poor parents. I could not bring myself to ask
you here while he was about, for he is so very hand-
some and charming, with all his wild and dreadful
ways, that I had a premonition you would be attracted
by him, and that would be so disastrous That
259
LISTENER'S LURE
was the only reason, my dear. Now that you are an
engaged woman I do so hope you will come soon.
There is not much excitement to offer you, but the air
is very good, and the view of the Bay is very pretty
from my sitting-room, and I have such a number of
flowers in the garden, sharing a gardener as I do with
Miss Passmore and Miss Cole, two days a week each
and quite cheap. I get books regularly from the
railway library, so that you would have plenty to read,
and there is often an interesting lecture at the Hall,
and some very nice people live here, among them Mr.
Greatorex, who having been to Italy knows all about
pictures and has a most interesting collection of
photographs of foreign places which he is always so
pleased and ready to show. Poor man, we have all
seen them so often that when a stranger comes his
happiness knows no bounds. So do come, dear, as
soon as you can manage it, for just as long as you
like, only you must let me have good notice.
I want to give you a very nice present. We have
such an excellent shop here, kept by a most enter-
prising and worthy man, a Mr. Mister. It is a very
awkward name, isn't it? It always seems so absurd
to say " Mr." twice. I have told him about your en-
gagement and he is most interested and is going to
get a selection of anything you like for me to choose
from. So will you please say which of the following
articles you most fancy? —
Butter dish.
Egg stand.
260
THE TASMANIAN BUTCHER
Cruet.
Salt cellars and knife and fork rests.
Salad bowl with fork and spoon.
Biscuit box.
I should like to give you something you were con-
stantly using, although I hope you won't call it by
my name, as some young people here do with their
wedding presents. It is very disconcerting to be
asked to pass Aunt Emily instead of the mustard, or
to be offered Uncle James and finds it holds biscuits.
Mr. Mister very strongly recommends a new kind of
coal-scuttle, which he calls a perdoneum, but I am
sure Mr. Harberton has coal-scuttles enough. It is
one of the drawbacks of marrying a man firmly
established in his own house that people have such
difficulty in choosing presents.
I must stop now or I shall miss the post.
Your affectionate
Aunt Charlotte
P.S. I have just remembered that the butcher
who lost his memory was living in Tasmania. I
hope he has got it back now, poor man ; although if
I were a butcher I am sure I should like to forget it.
Of course I don't say for certain you would have
liked Bernard Falkiner, but I had the most serious
presentiment and it is a dark fascinating kind of
handsomeness.
261
LISTENER'S LURE
LYNN HARBERTON TO ADELAIDE FIELDING
The Manor House
Winfield
Dear Friend,
Your letter was so full of good sense that I
wonder there was nothing extra to pay on it. I feel
that I must make haste to answer it, our wedding
day being so near at hand, or it will not be answered
at all. Because, as of course you know, it is only
the unmarried who write letters. At any rate, good
letters. Notes of course are within the compass
even of a Henry VIII : but letters, long letters with
stuff to them, — for these you must go to the un-
attached. All the best letter-writers have been
bachelors. At any rate Cowper, Walpole, Lamb,
Gray, and Keats were bachelors, and it would be
hard to find their superiors in the art ; while Byron
might almost come under the same heading so far as
the restriction of the marriage tie was concerned,
and he wrote good letters too. Better still there is
Edward FitzGerald, who I think may be included
among the bachelors in spite of Bernard Barton's
daughter bearing his name.
Looking at this little group again I notice that not
only were they bachelors but also to a considerable
extent recluses. Cowper, Gray, and FitzGerald were
thorough recluses, Lamb was very nearly one,
Keats dwelt much apart, and Walpole, for all his
262
BACHELORS AND THE POST
frivolities and flirtations with society, was a lonely
man. Byron too. So that we find that the best
letter-writers not only were bachelors but recluses or
semi-recluses also. This, when one comes to think
of it, is natural enough. The man much in affairs,
beset by friends and acquaintances, has little time
to think of anything to say in letters, and no time to
write them ; moreover it is not until one is with-
drawn to some little distance from one's corre-
spondent that the need or impulse to write is likely
to come. We do not write letters to the easily
accessible ; notes merely, if at all.
It is also reasonable enough that a bachelor,
whether or not a recluse, should write a good letter,
for so many of the hindrances that come between a
man who has a wife and other responsibilities are
not his. He can sit at his desk as long as he likes ;
he can be late for meals. So, it is true, can a
husband, but not a good husband ; which leads to the
reflection that only bad husbands write good letters.
Being a good husband is occupation enough. Where
the bachelor is writing letters, the good husband, I
suppose, is writing cheques.
And there are other reasons for the pre-eminence
of the unattached in this art. The mind of the
bachelor is more elastic, has longer hours of liberty.
He also has time for flirtations and sympathetic
interests and friends. Flirtations and friends are
needful for good letters : husbands have few friends
and of course no flirtations.
263
LISTENER'S LURE
So you will expect no more letters from me Such
expressions of good will as I have a mind to send
you will drop naturally into Edith's postscripts, or
be forgotten. "Lynn sends his love" — that will
be the epitaph of our dead correspondence.
It is rather interesting to find this additional count
in the indictment of marriage — that it kills letter-
writing. I have not examined the correspondence
of any married letter-writer to see to what extent
his matter and manner deteriorated after he took a
wife : but no doubt, unless he was a bad husband,
the search would reveal lamentable differences.
With exceptions, of course : the principal being
perhaps Stevenson ; who was, however, exceptional
throughout. When I use the phrase, "the best
letter-writers," I mean, of course, the best literary
letter-writers. Of the really best letter-writers we
know nothing ; they have always been obscure, non-
literary, and therefore are not published. After all,
letters ought not to be published. It is quite on the
cards that the more publishable a letter is, the less a
letter it is ; which disqualifies Lamb and Cowper,
Gray and Keats, Walpole and FitzGerald instantly.
These, it might be held, wrote little epistolary essays,
self-consciously, and should stand in a class apart.
The question is, are the best letters, as distinct
from the best literary letters, also written by
bachelors ? I fancy that they are, only with a
change of sex. I fancy that when it comes to the
real letters, full of news and gossip, the best are
264
FOR EDITH'S ROOM
written by spinsters. (You see I am now getting
personal.) I would not say that married women
cannot write good letters, but for the most part they
wait until they are free — like Madame de Sevigne,
who was a widow at twenty-five, if I remember
rightly, and who wrote letters divinely for half a
century after.
And now I have to talk with an architect about a
new window opening into the garden from Edith's
own room ; and after he has gone, I am going to
drive to Witford to see about some Chippendale
furniture for the same elegant apartment.
So I must stop.
You observe why I stop? Because I am recalled
to the duties of one not actually married but about
to marry. Here is proof enough.
Yours (for the last time)
L. H.
MISS FIELDING TO LYNN HARBERTON
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington
Dear Lynn,
Since bachelors possess the earth and enjoy
its fulness, it is only right that they should make
some return. Let them go on writing the best
265
LISTENER'S LURE
letters. All the same, I don't despair of getting
many another good letter from you — and you a good
husband too !
Yours affectionately
Adelaide Fielding
P.S. A little ivory tea-caddy, which might easily
have held the leaves from which your thirsty Doctor's
seventeen cups were occasionally brewed, should
reach you in a day or two, and with it my love and
all good wishes for your and Edith's happiness.
EILEEN SOMERSCALES TO EDITH GRAHAM
13 The Crescent
Bath
Dear Edith,
And so it has come at last ! I have never
heard the postman's knock for weeks without saying
to myself " There is Edith's announcement of her
engagement to a millionaire," for there was never
any doubt in my mind as to your happy fate. Mr.
Harberton is not exactly a millionaire, perhaps, but
he has a large income and a beautiful house and you
can be married just as soon as you like. Mother
declines to be left till next Lady Day at the earliest,
and Hercules having very foolishly lent his brother
266
MRS. PINK DIES
some money is now poorer than ever. He has also
sprained his ankle playing football with his boys'
Club. But I hope you will be very happy, dear.
Yours ever
Eileen
(Three weeks elapse)
EDITH GRAHAM TO LYNN HARBERTON
17A Kensington Square W.
Dearest,
I have very sad news for you. Mrs. Pink is
dead. She was taken ill at four yesterday after-
noon and at five she died. This is how she would
have wished, having always hoped for the sudden
death that we are brought up to pray against. She
was conscious all the time, although in acute pain
about the heart, and she faced the end very bravely
and gave me a hundred little commissions between
her seizure and the arrival of the doctor who put
an end to all talking. All that she said was about
benefactions to all kinds of people. Even when
fighting for breath and strength to speak, her mind
was set entirely on three or four schemes which
have been occupying her lately. There can never
have been such a determined altruist. There ought
267
LISTENER'S LURE
to be a dispensation of immortality for the sweet
natures.
This means I suppose that I shall come back to
Winfield pretty soon. I shall stay here to help with
the dismantling of the house, which Mr. Hyde, who
is here now and is the executor, says has to be
begun directly after the funeral, and to be of any
use or comfort that I can to Miss Fielding ; and
then I shall come back.
Poor little Mr. Conran is inconsolable. I want
to take his head in my arms and wipe his poor
little red eyes, but I shan't. The strangest odd
people have been calling all day with flowers and
little messages of grief — pensioners of Mrs. Pink, of
some of whom she never told me anything.
Mr. Hyde and Cynthia are staying here till after
the funeral, so I shall be less depressed than I
might be.
Dear Heart, don't think you ought to come.
There is no need whatever, although I should love
it if you did. But I know how wretched a funeral
makes you, and Mrs. Pink would have hated your
wretchedness. One of the things she made me
promise at her bedside was not to wear any black
for her.
Good-night
Your
Edith
268
THE BEREAVED HUSBAND
THE REV. WILBERFORCE PINK TO EDITH
GRAHAM
Hotel Ritz
Homburg
Dear Miss Graham,
Your very sad letter has utterly prostrated me.
It found me on the point of starting for the new mud
baths at Teufels-bad where I had engaged rooms
for a month ; but I need hardly say that I at once
cancelled the arrangements and returned the ticket.
In my present condition of physical and mental
collapse I shall not venture to travel ; but at the
beginning of next week I shall hasten home with all
speed to do what is in my power in this period of
grief. The suddenness of my poor dear wife's end
moves me to tears whenever I think of it, depriving
her as it did of all opportunity of propitiating Heaven
by a humble recantation of much error. Not that I
greatly admire repentance at such a season, savour-
ing as it must of self-protection, which is perhaps the
least lovely of poor human nature's besetting faults.
I am writing to my dear wife's solicitors informing
them of my present address, and doubtless they will
communicate with me. It was however clearly under-
stood between us some years ago that I should be
spared the vexatious exactions of the duty of an
executor.
I am
Yours faithfully
WILBERFORCE PlNK
269
LISTENER'S LURE
MRS. PINK'S WILL, DATED FEBRUARY 16, 1906
(Extracts)
This is the last will and testament of me Victoria
Pink of 17a Kensington Square, London, W. I
hereby revoke all other wills that I may have pre-
viously made.
I appoint as executor my nephew Herbert Chisholm
Hyde and ask him to accept ,£500 for his trouble.
I bequeath all the copies of the Bible that may be
found in the house at the time of my death to my
husband Wilberforce Pink, feeling confident from the
dogged precariousness of his health that he will long
survive me.
To my only sister Adelaide Fielding I bequeath my
library of Rationalistic literature, not with any idea
that she wants it, but in the hope that she may from
time to time open a volume at random and chance
upon an enlightening passage. I leave also to my
sister Adelaide Fielding my cat Prynka.
To my nephew Herbert Chisholm Hyde I leave
five thousand pounds free of duty, the interest to be
employed by him as he thinks fit until his boys reach
the age of twenty-one. Each one as he comes of
age is to receive a fifth of the principal. Supposing
one or more not to survive, the sum is to be divided
equally among the remainder.
I leave to my niece Cynthia Hyde ^2000 free of
duty and whatever furniture, linen and household
270
LEGACIES
effects she may like. The rest, after all legacies have
been subtracted, is to be sold ; but before this is done
I wish my sister Adelaide Fielding, my niece Cynthia
Hyde and my friend Edith Graham to distribute
pictures and books or any other articles that they
think suitable as souvenirs to all my friends who
express a wish to possess something of the kind.
I leave to my nephew Thomas Orme Rodwell any
two pictures he may choose, and two thousand pounds
free of duty on the condition that he gives his solemn
promise never to start a newspaper that has not the
approval of my sister Adelaide Fielding and my friend
Sir Herbert Royce.
I leave to my friend Dennis Albourne the sum of
five thousand pounds free of duty which, although I
make no conditions, I should prefer him to leave
invested as it now is, touching only the interest ; and
I should like him, in so far as his impulsive and
humane nature will permit, to apply the interest to
his own maintenance and comforts, any payments
that he may care to make to others coming from his
own earnings. No literary man of character, I am
convinced ever did worse work for having a sure
^200 a year.
To my friend and helper Charles Conran I leave
five hundred pounds free of duty and any hundred
books he may choose from my shelves after my sister
Adelaide Fielding has made her choice.
To each of my servants in my employ at the time
of my death I leave one hundred pounds free of duty,
271
LISTENER'S LURE
and to each some personal article of my own as a
little souvenir of friendship.
To every waitress in the A. B.C. shop at Charing
Cross, where I often had lunch, I leave ^20 free of
duty.
I also leave to my friend Edith Graham for her
own use the furniture of my little study and a sum
of ^1000 free of duty.
I leave to my friend Edith Graham a sum of three
thousand pounds free of duty to be spent by her
in building and furnishing Almshouses at Winfield
for ten old persons of that parish, to be called the
Graham Trust ; and furthermore I leave a sum of ten
thousands pounds free of duty which may either
remain invested as it now is, or be reinvested in
some safe stock, to the said Edith Graham, the
interest to be employed by her in weekly doles to
the occupants of the Winfield almshouses and in the
maintenance of the buildings.
MISS MIT7 TO EDITH GRAHAM
c/o Mks. Cunningham
Bellevue
Bedford
Dear Miss Graham,
It was so very sweet of you to tell me about
your engagement. It is the one thing I have wished
272
" BELLE VUE" AT PRAYER
for you, — indeed I have done more than that, for I
have prayed for it for you too, and the two children
here, who know all about you, have prayed also,
not exactly that you might be married but that you
might be happy, which is going to be the same
thing. It would be so terrible if a beautiful woman
like you were not married, and I think the gentle-
man whom you love is the most fortunate of men.
I expect you will be so much occupied in your new
home and new life that you will not have any time
to write letters to any one as unimportant as I am,
but, dear Miss Graham, I am sure your kind heart
will never let you quite forget the little friend you
have been so kind to, who will never forget you.
Yours very truly
Lydia Mitt
EDITH GRAHAM TO MISS FIELDING
Church Cottage
WlNFIELD
My dear Miss Fielding,
I am sending you a letter from little Miss
Mitt which has made me cry. It seems so wrong
that I should be all tinglingly happy with love and
she should go on bravely slaving for that horrid
woman at Bedford. Don't you think we might give
her two little rooms by the gateway of the almshouse
S 273
LISTENER'S LURE
and make her the Lady Governor? I am so sure
that dear Mrs. Pink would have said yes, and I will
so gladly pay her salary out of my own money (for
I am now rich !). If you say you see no objection
I will arrange it all directly and get her here to help
us make our plans.
Yours always
Edith
P.S. Lynn sends his love.
MISS FIELDING TO EDITH GRAHAM
17 Vicarage Gate
Kensington
My dear Child,
Of course. She will be the best little Lady
Governor in England, and you will be able to go
with your husband all over the earth as often as you
like, leaving everything in her hands quite comfort-
ably. Meanwhile, having had some luck with an
investment, I have sent her a little anonymous
present, just for fun, with every circumstance of
secrecy so that she will never never know where it
comes from. I had better have kept it, for she will
probably spend it all on her employer.
Yours most lovingly
Adelaide Fielding
274
MAGNANIMITY PREVAILING
THE REV. WILBERFORCE PINK TO EDITH
GRAHAM
Grand Hotel
Matlock
After mature reflection, not unassisted by prayer,
Mr. Wilberforce Pink has decided that the better
part is mercy. He will therefore not institute pro-
ceedings for the annulment of his poor deluded
wife's will, although that it was made so largely
in favour of Miss Graham, a comparative stranger,
under unfortu7tate influence, is only too obvious to one
who, like Mr. Wilberforce Pink, had many and in-
timate opportunities of learning Mrs. Pink's character.
Although, however, Mr. Wilberforce Pink, partly
on account of the many infirmities which Heaven
with perplexing impartiality has thought fit to inflict
upon him, and partly from innate aversion from
causing pain, has decided not to put the law in
motion to protect his rights, he makes yet one more
appeal to Miss Graham to forgo voluntarily some
at least of the considerable benefits which her close
association with the late Mrs. Pink, when that lady's
intellect was below its average vigour, has diverted
into her possession.
Incidentally Mr. Wilberforce Pink would remark
that much personal experience in the old happy days
when he was an active clergyman, and many years
of careful sociological reading since, have convinced
him that the almshouse is one of the greatest mis-
275
LISTENER'S LURE
takes in public charity. It merely helps to impede
or undo the functions of the workhouse.
Mr. Wilberforce Pink will be at Matlock until the
27th, after which his address will be Salzo Maggiore,
where he hopes to derive as much benefit from the
baths as is possible to an invalid whose mind is
harassed by inconsiderate persons.
MISS MITT TO EDITH GRAHAM
c/o Mrs. Cunningham
Bellevue
Bedford
Dear Miss Graham,
Your letter has made me so happy I don't
know what to do. If there is one thing that I should
love more than any other it is to look after poor old
people. I don't think I ever told you that I have
quite a little knowledge of medicine, for my father
was a doctor, you know, and I used to help him in
his dispensary. This ought to be very useful in
sudden cases, oughtn't it?
The only thing that bothers me is leaving Mrs.
Cunningham, who has been so very kind to me and
has put me in the way of learning so much not only
about the care of children, but cooking too, and
many household matters. I was the most ignorant
creature when I came here, with only one little
276
LYDIA MITT'S WINDFALL
accomplishment, and that playing the piano, and
now I can do all kinds of things, even to blacklead-
ing the grates, really very nicely, Mrs. Cunningham
says.
How I am to give notice, I cannot think, as Mrs.
Cunningham is just now not well, and any kind of
shock, she says, might be very serious. It occurred
to me rather wickedly this morning that perhaps I
might have to run away, but of course I could not
do that and leave the poor children all uncared for,
as there is now no one but me to do anything for
them.
A most wonderful thing happened on Tuesday.
An envelope arrived addressed to me containing a
ten pound note. There was no letter with it, or any
writing whatever, and at first I thought it must have
been meant for Mrs. Cunningham, who thought so
too, but my name was written so clearly on the
envelope that there really couldn't be any doubt.
I got out with great difficulty on an errand for Mrs.
Cunningham, and managed to buy two or three
things that I was greatly in need of, as my wages
have been rather irregular lately owing to poor Mrs.
Cunningham's health. I should not mind that, were
it not for a few little things they are in want of at
home, and which I was counting on being able
to send them. But now it is all right, for I sent
them all the rest of the money at once, from the
nearest post office, and kept back only one pound
for my journey to Winfield when I can leave here.
277
LISTENER'S LURE
I think I shall try to have a good night to-night,
and then I shall feel able to give notice in the
morning. I have tried once or twice during the day,
since your kind letter came, but poor Mrs. Cunning-
ham has always had a spasm just as I came near her.
I can't think who can have sent the money, be-
cause I know no one in London, at least no one who
would be likely to send me money without saying
a good deal about it. The dreadful thought has
just occurred to me that perhaps a letter will follow
saying that this money was not really a present
at all, but was to be spent in some particular way.
Dear Miss Graham, that would be most terrible.
How I wish I had never thought this, because now
I know I shall not sleep, and then I shall not be at
all fit to be strong and determined in the morning.
But if a letter should come saying that the money
was not really mine, it would not be much good
because it is all gone now, except the money I have
in my box, and I am terrified that poor Mrs. Cun-
ningham may ask me to lend her some of that, as her
trustees are so very unbusinesslike and do not send
her remittances at all regularly, she tells me ; and if
she does, I do not know how I can refuse after all
her kindness.
But I must not trouble you with all my little
trifling worries when you are so busy getting your
new home ready and thinking about the almshouses.
Yours very truly and gratefully
Lydia Mitt
278
A HAND ACROSS THE SEA
DENNIS ALBOURNE TO EDITH GRAHAM
Mason's Hotel
West 78TH Street
New York
Dear Miss Graham (or perhaps I ought now to say
Dear Mrs. Harberton),
I have wanted to write to you for so long, and
several times I have begun a letter and then thrown
it away — not in despair at being unable to express
myself, but quite resignedly, feeling sure that you
understood, and that my silence did not matter, and
that when the time was ripe I should write quite
naturally and easily, as I am doing now. I want to
tell you that you are and have been the sweetest
thing that has ever come into my life : in fact, that
it is only the thought of you that keeps me going at
all. I know you well enough to feel sure that you
will accept this exactly as I offer it. My life has
gone horribly wrong and is not likely in the ordinary
course of things to get straight again, and you and I
are probably destined to move far apart ; but I can-
not any longer refrain, even if I ought to, from tell-
ing you that I have loved you, and do love you, and
shall love you whatever happens. I say, " even if I
ought to refrain," but that is foolish between you
and me : for you know, and I know, that love is not
our own making, and that I have as much right to
love you in the way in which I do love you as you
279
LISTENER'S LURE
have to love a flower or one of Andrea's Madonnas.
The only question is Should i tell you? but here
I am not my own master, because I began to tell
you my best secrets before I had been in your
presence for half an hour (do you remember?) and
even if that were not so I should tell you this, be-
cause I feel I have the right to give myself that joy.
So there it is, dear dear friend.
I shall be in America for at least four months
longer. After that I have no plans If my letters
home succeed I daresay I shall go to some other
country and write about that in the same way. Mrs.
Pink's generosity has made it possible for me to
do this. But wherever I am I shall have your face
before me, and if kind thoughts and devotion can
hedge one about with happiness and security, you
should be safe and happy indeed, whatever you may
do and wherever and with whomsoever you may be.
Yours always
D. A.
EDITH GRAHAM TO DENNIS ALBOURNE
(Fragment)
Church Cottage
Winfield
I am so glad you wrote. I thought you would :
the delay did not perplex me. Your letter made
280
THE CONSPIRATORS
me very sad and very proud and happy too. Proud
and happy because it is so beautiful to be loved
and to feel that one is of some use — sad because your
tone is so hopeless and I am so sorry for all that
has happened. But you know that.
(Two or three weeks elapse)
ALGERNON FARRAR TO GWENDOLEN FROME
Merton College
Oxford
My darling Gwen,
Miss Graham made me promise to write and
tell you all about it, or, as you jolly well know, I
wouldn't. Writing is not my line of country.
I will begin at the beginning, which was a letter
from Miss Graham asking me to take the motor to
Bedford on Thursday in time to meet her at the
station at 3 o'clock and be ready for a long run and
a lark. So there I was with my little lot, dead up
to time, and her train came in soon after, as near
as white steam can manage it, and she jumped into
the car with her traps and told me the whole story.
I suppose you know it, but as you've been away
from home so long perhaps you don't. Here goes,
anyway.
281
LISTENER'S LURE
There's a Miss Mitt, a little governess who has
been fearfully sweated without getting any screw
for ever so long, and who was so soft-headed or
soft-hearted that she daren't either give notice or
leave, although she was just dying to go to Win-
field to look after the almshouses they are building
there. And so the only thing to do was to kidnap
her. It seemed to me downright sportsmanlike of
Miss Graham to ask me to help. She would have
asked me to do it alone, she said, only the little
governess woman would have been so scared ; but
with her friend Miss Graham there it would be all
right.
So we tound out where the house was, and I
stopped the car under some trees in a quiet road
pretty near, and left Emmett with it, while Miss
Graham and I toddled off to carry out her plans.
First of all we had to go to a registry office and find
a servant, and Miss Graham got an old trot after
a good deal of messing about, and paid her a month's
wages in advance, and told her to go to the sweater's
house with her box that evening and say she had
been engaged and paid for. You see unless some-
thing of that kind had been done the little governess
woman wouldn't have stayed in the car a minute
after she found we weren't going back, being just
about as soft-headed as they make them. She'd
have just taken a flyer for the next hedge and
bucketed back to Bedford like a silly rabbit. Rather
daring of Miss Graham, wasn't it ?
282
THE GREAT ABDUCTION
And then we got a motoring hat and one or two
little things, and I took these to the car and left
Miss Graham outside the sweater's house.
Well, Miss Graham rang the bell, and it was
answered by Miss Mitt herself, all hot and untidy
from nigger work. How Miss Graham got her out
I don't know, but she persuaded her just to dust
herself a bit and walk to the end of the road, which
she did in spite of the sweater's whimperings inside
the parlour. And there was I just round the corner,
all ready, standing by the car. " We're going home
by road," Miss Graham said, "won't you get in a
moment? I don't suppose you've ever been in a
motor car." The little governess woman was all
of a tremble to get back, because she said there was
something in the oven, and the children would want
her, and the sweater wasn't well to-day ; but Miss
Graham made her get inside a moment, and I
whispered to Emmett that it was all right, and he
started the car off with a jump and let her rip.
All this while Miss Graham was telling the little
governess woman that she had left a note for the
sweater saying that she wouldn't be going back
again, and that we were off for Winfield, and all
about the servant we had engaged, and that if her
box wasn't sent on at once there would be a jolly
old row ; and after a while it was all right, although
Miss Mitt kept on saying she must go home to the
children. But by the time we got to Winfield, about
ten o'clock, she was all right and had asked a lot
283
LISTENER'S LURE
of questions about the machinery, which is always
a sign you've got 'em.
I left her there safe enough this morning, and
came back to Oxford with a beautiful yarn which
Jack and I made up together about a sudden call to
a sick relation, and although I'm gated for a week
it's all right. Jack's awfully disgusted he wasn't
told about it all and allowed to come too, but he's
got to work, you know, and as I haven't got any
brains it doesn't matter whether I do or not.
You darling Gwen \afew lines omitted\.
FROM THE "DAILY TELEGRAPH"
Wanted at once. Governess for two children.
Must be Lady. Music. Quiet refined home. Three
servants kept. Apply Mrs. C., "Belle Vue," Bed-
ford.
(A few weeks later)
FROM THE " WITFORD HERALD"
Winfield Correspondence
A pretty wedding was solemnised in the Parish
Church on Thursday last, when Mr. Lynn Harberton
of the Manor House, the well-known critic and
author, and Miss Edith Graham, his ward, also of
Winfield, were joined in holy matrimony. The
284
ORANGE BLOSSOMS
ceremony was performed by the Rev. Augustus
Frome, rector of Winfield, assisted by the Rev.
Hercules Lenox, of Bath. Mr. Wordsworth Har-
berton acted as best man, and the bridesmaids were
Miss Gwendolen Frome, Miss Eileen Somerscales
and the Misses Joan and Phyllis Arundel. The
bride's dress was of white Irish poplin, trimmed
with old lace (the gift of Miss Fielding). The brides-
maids, in simple wmte muslin made up over silk,
formed a charming bevy. The church, which was
prettily decorated by Mr. Job Pedder (gardener to
Lynn Harberton, Esq.), was filled with gentry and
villagers. The service was interspersed by the
hymns "Thine for ever" and "O perfect love,"
while at the close of the service Mendelssohn's
Wedding March was played. Mr. Aaron Pullinger
officiated at the organ with his customary skill,
while his sister, Miss Ruth Pullinger, efficiently led
the singing.
After the ceremony a reception was held in the
spacious house and beautiful grounds of Gurney
Arundel, Esq., which was numerously attended.
The happy couple left early for their honeymoon at
Fontainebleau. The pretty custom of showering
rose leaves was substituted for that of rice.
Among the wedding presents were the following : —
Miss Charlotte Fase Salad bowl with fork and
spoon.
Mr. Algernon Farrar Gold mounted eperne.
285
LISTENER'S LURE
Mrs. Herbert Hyde
Miss Eileen Somerscales
Mr. J. L. Frome
Miss Adelaide Fielding
Mr. Orme Rodwell
Miss Gwendolen Frome
Sir Herbert Royce
Miss Lydia Mitt
Rev. Hercules Lenox
Mrs. Trimber
Mr. Job Pedder
Warming pan.
Painted d'oyleys.
Sluggard's friend.
Ivory tea caddy.
The Inwardness of Giotto.
Cymric pendant.
Rembrandt etchings and
tiger skin rug.
Table centre.
English County Songs.
Mantelpiece ornaments.
Bible.
[Afatiy others omitted]
The wedding cake, which was made by Mr. Flower
of Witford, proved excellent eating.
THE BEGINNING
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