AX BEERBGHh / - A STRAIGHT TALK a foot in the operation. But, while I have my share of judicial vindictiveness against crime, Im not going to talk the common judicial cant about brutality making a Better Man of the criminal. I havent the slightest doubt that I would thieve again at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile be so good as to listen to the evidence on the present charge. In the December after I was first cast ashore at Holyhead, I had to go down to Dorsetshire. In those days the more enterprising farm-laborers used still tojannually^ress themselves up in order to tickle the gentry into disbursing the money needed to supplement a local-minimum wage. They called themselves the Christmas Mummers, and performed a play entitled Snt George. As my education had been of the typical Irish kind, and the ideas on which I had been nourished were precisely the ideas that once in Tara's Hall were regarded as dangerous novelties, Snt George staggered me with the sense of being suddenly bumped up against a thing which lay centuries ahead of the time I had been born into. (Being, in point of fact, only a matter of five hundred years old, it would have the same effect to-day on the average London playgoer if it was produced 157 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND in a west end theatre.) The plot was simple. It is set forth in Thomas Hardy's " Return of the Native " ; but, as the people who read my books have no energy left over to cope with other authors, I must supply an outline of it myself. Entered, first of all, the English Knight, announc- ing his determination to fight and vanquish the Turkish Knight, a vastly superior swordsman, who promptly made mincemeat of him. After the Saracen had celebrated his victory in verse, and proclaimed himself the world's champion, entered Snt George, who, after some preliminary patriotic Hourishes, promptly made mincemeat of the Saracen to the blank amazement of an audience which included several retired army officers. Snt George, however, saved his face by the usual expe- dient of the victorious British general, attributing to Providence a result which by no polite stretch of casuistry could have been traced to the opera- tions of his own brain. But here the dramatist was confronted by another difficulty : there being no curtain to ring down, how were the two corpses to be got gracefully rid of? Entered therefore the Physician, and brought them both to life. (Any one objecting to this scene on the score of romantic improbability is hereby referred to the Royal 158 A STRAIGHT TALK College of Physicians, or to the directors of any accredited medical journal, who will hail with de- light this opportunity of proving once and for all that re-vitalisation is the child's-play of the Faculty.) Such then is the play that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in ^it dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like you must bless the original author : of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest ? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play a masterpiece. Nothing could have been easier for me (if I were some one else) than to perform my task in that God-rest-you-merry- gentlemen -may-nothing-you- dismay spirit which so grossly flatters the sensibili- ties of the average citizen by its assumption that he is sharp enough to be dismayed by what stares him in the face. Charles Dickens had lucid intervals in which he was vaguely conscious of the abuses around him ; but his spasmodic effort* to expose these brought him into contact with 159 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND realities so agonising to his highstrung literary nerves that he invariably sank back into debauches of unsocial optimism. Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses of the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in the social machine which had been working with tolerable smoothness under the prosaic guidance of Henry 8. The time was out of joint ; and the Swan, recognising that he was the last person to ever set it right, consoled himself by offering the world a soothing doctrine of despair. Not for m e, thank you, that Swansdown pillow. I refuse as flatly to fuddle myself in the shop of " W. Shakespeare, Druggist," as to stimulate myself with the juicy joints of " C. Dickens, Family Butcher."" Of these and suchlike pernicious establishments my patronage consists in weaving round the shop- door a barbed-wire entanglement of dialectic and then training my moral machine-guns on the customers. In this devilish function I have, as you know, ac- quired by practice a tremendous technical skill ; and but for the more or less innocent pride I take in showing off my accomplishment to all and sundry, I doubt whether even my iron nerves would be proof against the horrors that have impelled me to 160 A STRAIGHT TALK thus perfect myself. In my nonage 1 believed humanity could be reformed if only it were intelli- gently preached at for a sufficiently long period. This first fine careless rapture I could no more recapture, at my age, than I could recapture .hoopingcough or nettlerash. One by one, I have flung all political nostra overboard, till there remain only dynamite and scientific breeding. My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism : I believe in the future ; but this only makes the present which I foresee as going strong for a couple of million of years or so all the more excruciating by contrast. For casting into dramatic form a compendium of my indictments of the present from a purely political standpoint, the old play of Snt George occurred to me as having exactly the framework I needed. In the person of the Turkish Knight I could embody that howling chaos which does duty among us for a body -politic. The English Knight would accordingly be the Liberal Party, whose efforts (whenever it is in favor with the electorate) to reduce chaos to order by emulating in foreign politics the blackguardism of a Metternich or Bismarck, and in home politics the spirited attitu- dinisings of a Garibaldi or Cavor, are foredoomed 161 M A CHRISTMAS GARLAND to the failure which its inherent oldmaidishness must always win for the Liberal Party in all under- takings whatsoever. Snt George is, of course, myself. But here my very aptitude in controversy tripped me up as playwright. Owing to my nack of going straight to the root of the matter in hand and substituting, before you can say Jack Robinson, a truth for every fallacy and a natural law for every convention, the scene of Snt George (Bernard Shawls victory over the Turkish Knight came out too short for theatrical purposes. I calculated that the play as it stood would not occupy more than five hours in performance. I therefore departed from the original scheme so far as to provide the Turkish Knight with three attendant monsters, severally named the Good, the Beyootiful, and the Ter-rew, and representing in themselves the current forms of Religion, Art, and Science. These three Snt George successively challenges, tackles, and flattens out the first as lunacy, the second as harlotry, the third as witch- craft. But even so the play would not be long enough had I not padded a good deal of buffoon- ery into the scene where the five corpses are brought back to life. The restorative Physician symbolises that 162 A STRAIGHT TALK irresistible force of human stupidity by which the rottenest and basest institutions are enabled to thrive in the teeth of the logic that has demolished them. Thus, for the author, the close of the play is essentially tragic. But what is death to him is fun to you, and my buffooneries wont offend any of you. Bah ! 1&3 M 3 FOND HEARTS ASKEW By M**R*CE H*WL*TT FOND HEARTS ASKEW To WILLIAM ROBERTSON NICOLL SAGE AND REVEREND AND A TRUE KNIGHT THIS ROMAUNT OF DAYS EDVARDIAN PROLOGUE. r /^OO strong 1 a wine, belike, for some stomachs, for there's honey in it, and a dibbet of gore, zvith other condiments. Yet Mistress Clio (with zvhom, some say, Mistress Thalia, that sweet hoyden) brewed it : she, not I, who do but hand the cup round by her warrant and good favour. Her guests, not mine, you shall take it or leave it spill it untasted or quaff a bellyful. Of a hospitable temper, she whose page I am ; but a great lady, over self-sure to be dudgeoned by wry faces in the refectory. As for the little sister (if she did have finger in the concoction) no fear of offence there ! I dare vow, who know somewhat the fashion of her, she will but trill a pretty titter or so at your (jualms. 167 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND BENEDICTUS BENEDICAT. I cry you mercy for a lacuna at the outset. I know not what had knitted and blackened the brows of certain two speeding eastward through London, enhansomed, on the night of the feast of St. Box: alter, Geoffrey Dizzard, called "The Honourable," lieu-tenant in the Guards of Edward the Peace Getter ; altera, the Lady Angelica Plantagenet, to him affianced. Devil take the cause of the bicker : enough that they were at sulks. Kerens for a sight of the girl ! Johannes Sargent, that swift giant from the New World, had already flung her on canvas, with a brace of sisters. She outstands there, a virgin poplar-tall ; hair like ravelled flax and coiffed in the fashion of the period; neck like a giraffe's ; lips shaped for kissing rather than smiling ; eyes like a giraffe's again ; breasts like a boy's, and something of a dressed-up boy in the total aspect of her. She has arms a trifle long even for such height as hers ; fingers very long, too, with red-pink nails trimmed to a point. She looks out slantwise, conscious of her beauty, and perhaps of certain other things. Fire under that ice, I conjecture red corpuscles rampant behind 168 FOND HEARTS ASKEW that meek white mask of hers. " Forsitan in hoc anno pulcherrima debutantium " is the verdict of a contemporary journal. For "forsitan " read "certe."" No slur, that, on the rest of the bevy. Very much as Johannes had seen her did she appear now to the cits, as the cabriolet swung past them. Paramount there, she was still more paramount here. Yet this Geoffrey was not ill- looking. In the secret journal of Mary Jane, serving-wench in the palace of Geoffrey's father (who gat his barony by beer) note is made of his "lovely blue eyes ; complexion like a blush rose ; hands like a girl's ; lips like a girl's again ; yellow curls close cropped ; and for moustachio (so young is he yet) such a shadow as amber might cast on water." Here, had I my will, I would limn you Mary Jane herself, that parched nymph. Time urges, though. The cabrioleteer thrashes his horse (me with it) to a canter, and plunges into Soho. Some wagon athwart the path gives pause. Angelica, looking about her, bites lip. For this is the street of Wardour, wherein (say all the chronicles most absolutely) she and Geoffrey had first met and plit their troth. 169 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND " Methinks, 11 cries she, loud and clear to the wagoner, and pointing finger at Geoffrey, " the Devil must be between your shafts, to make a mock of me in this conjunction, the which is truly of his own doing."" "Sweet madam," says Geoffrey (who was also called " The Ready 11 ), " shall I help harness you at his side ? Though, for my part, I doubt "'twere supererogant, in that he buckled you to his service or ever the priest dipped you. 11 A bitter jest, this ; and the thought of it still tingled on the girl's cheek and clawed her heart when Geoffrey handed her down at the portico of Drury Lane Theatre. A new pantomime was a- foot. Geoffrey's father (that bluff red baron) had chartered a box, was already there with his lady and others. Lily among peonies, Angelica sat brooding, her eyes fastened on the stage, Geoffrey behind her chair, brooding by the same token. Presto, he saw a flood of pink rush up her shoulders to her ears. The " principal boy " had just skipped on to the stage. No boy at all (God be witness), but one Mistress Tina Vandeleur, very apt in masquerade, and seeming true boy enough to the 170 FOND HEARTS ASKEW guileless. Stout of leg, light-footed, with a tricksy plume to his cap, and the swagger of one who would beard the Saints for a wager, this Aladdin was just such a galliard as Angelica had often fondled in her dreams. He lept straight into the closet of her heart, and " Deus ! " she cried, " maugre my maiden- hood, I will follow those pretty heels round the earth ! " Cried Geoffrey " Yea ! and will not I presently string his ham to save your panting ? " " Tacete ! " cried the groundlings. A moment after, Geoffrey forgot his spleen. Cupid had noosed him bound him tight to the Widow Twankey. This was a woman most unlike to Angelica: poplar-tall, I grant you; but elm-wide into the bargain ; deep-voiced, robustious, and puffed bravely out with hot vital essences. Seemed so to Geoffrey, at least, who had no smattering of theatres and knew not his cynosure to be none other than Master Willie Joffers, prime buffo of the day. Like Angelica, he had had fond visions ; and lo here, the very lady of them ! Says he to Angelica, " I am heartset on this widow." 171 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND " By so much the better ! " she laughs. " I to my peacock, you to your peahen, with a God- speed from each to other." How to snare the birds ? A pretty problem : the fowling was like to be delicate. So hale a strutter as Aladdin could not lack for bonamies. " Will he deign me ? " wondered meek Angelica. " This widow," thought Geoffrey, " is belike no widow at all, but a modest wife with a yea for no man but her lord." Head to head they took counsel, cudgelled their wits for some proper vantage. Of a sudden, Geoffrey clapped hand to thigh. Student of Boccaccio, Heveletius, and other sages, he had the clue in his palm. A whisper from him, a nod from Angelica, and the twain withdrew from the box into the corridor without. There, back to back, they disrobed swiftly, each tossing to other every garment as it was doffed. Then a flurried toilet, and a difficult, for the man especially ; but hotness of desire breeds dexterity. When they turned and faced each other, Angelica was such a boy as Aladdin would not spurn as page, Geoffrey such a girl as the widow might well covet as body-maid. 172 FOND HEARTS ASKEW Out they hied under the stars, and sought way to the postern whereby the mummers would come when their work were done. Thereat they stationed themselves in shadow. A bitter night, with a lather of snow on the cobbles ; but they were heedless of that : love and their dancing hearts warmed them. They waited long. Strings of muffled figures began to file out, but never an one like to Aladdin or the Widow. Midnight tolled. Had these two had wind of the ambuscado and crept out by another door ? Nay, patience ! At last ! A figure showed in the doorway a figure cloaked womanly, but topped with face of Aladdin. Trousered Angelica, with a cry, darted forth from the shadow. To Mistress Vandeleur's eyes she was as truly man as was Mistress Vandeleur to hers. Thus confronted, Mistress Vandeleur shrank back, blushing hot. " Nay ! " laughs Angelica, clipping her by the wrists. " Cold boy, you shall not so easily slip me. A pretty girl you make, Aladdin ; but love pierces such disguise as a rapier might pierce lard." " Madman ! Unhandle me ! " screams the actress. 173 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND "No madman 1, as well you know," answers Angelica, " but a maid whom spurned love may yet madden. Kiss me on the lips ! " While they struggle, another figure fills the postern, and in an instant Angelica is torn aside by Master Willie Joffers (well versed, for all his mumming, in matters of chivalry). " Kisses for such coward lips?" cries he. "Nay, but a swinge to silence them ! " and would have struck trousered Angelica full on the mouth. But decollete Geoffrey Dizzard, crying at him "Sweet termagant, think not to baffle me by these airs of manhood ! " had sprung in the way and on his own nose received the blow. He staggered and, spurting blood, fell. Up go the buffo's hands, and " Now may the Saints whip me, 11 cries he, "for a tapster of girl's blood ! " and fled into the night, howling like a dog. Mistress Vandeleur had fled already. Down on her knees goes Angelica, to stanch Geoffrey's flux. Thus far, straight history. Apocrypha, all the rest : you shall pick your own sequel. As for instance, some say Geoffrey bled to the death, whereby stepped Master Joffers to the scaffold, 174 FOND HEARTS ASKEW and Angelica (the Vandeleur too, like as not) to a nunnery. Others have it he lived, thanks to nurse Angelica, who, thereon wed, suckled him twin Dizzards in due season. Joffers, they say, had wife already, else would have wed the Vandeleur, for sake of symmetry. 175 DICKENS By G**RGE M**RE DICKENS I HAD often wondered why when people talked to me of Tintoretto I always found myself thinking of Turgeneff. It seemed to me strange that I should think of Turgeneff instead of thinking of Tintoretto ; for at first sight nothing can be more far apart than the Slav mind and the Flemish. But one morning, some years ago, while I was musing by my fireplace in Victoria Street, Dolmetsch came to see me. He had a soiled roll of music under his left arm. I said, " How are you ? " He said, " I am well. And you ? " I said, " I, too, am well. What is that, my dear Dolmetsch, that you carry under your left arm ? " He answered, " It is a Mass by Palestrina." " Will you read me the score ? " I asked. I was afraid he would say no. But Dolmetsch is not one of those men who say no, and he read me the score. He did not read very well, but I had never heard it before, so when he finished I begged of him he would read it to me again. He said, "Very well, M**re, I will read it to you again."" I remember his exact words, 179 N 2 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND because they seemed to me at the time to be the sort of thing that only Dolmetsch could have said. It was a foggy morning in Victoria Street, and while Dolmetsch read again the first few bars, I thought how Renoir would have loved to paint in such an atmosphere the tops of the plane trees that flaccidly show above the wall of Buckingham Palace. . . . Why had I never been invited to Buckingham Palace ? I did not want to go there, but it would have been nice to have been asked. . . . How brave gaillard was Renoir, and how well he painted from that subfusc palette ! . . . My roving thoughts were caught back to the divine score which Arnold Dolmetsch was reading to me. How well placed they were, those semibreves ! Could anyone but Palestrina have placed them so nicely ? I wondered what girl Palestrina was courting when he conceived them. She must have been blonde, surely, and with narrow flanks. . . . There are moments when one does not think of girls, are there not, dear reader? And I swear to you that such a moment came to me while Dolmetsch mumbled the last two bars of that Mass. The notes were " do, la, sol, do, fa, do, sol, la," and as he 180 DICKENS mumbled them I sat upright and stared into space, for it had become suddenly plain to me why when people talked of Tintoretto I always found myself thinking of Turgeneff. I do not say that this story that I have told to you is a very good story, and I am afraid that I have not well told it. Some day, when I have time, I should like to re-write it. But meantime I let it stand, because without it you could not receive what is upmost in my thoughts, and which I wish you to share with me. With- out it, what I am yearning to say might seem to you a hard saying ; but now you will understand me. There never was a writer except Dickens. Perhaps you have never heard say of him ? No matter, till a few days past he was only a name to me. I remember that when I was a young man in Paris, I read a praise of him in some journal ; but in those days I was kneeling at other altars, 1 was scrubbing other doorsteps. ... So has it been ever since ; always a false god, always the wrong doorstep. I am sick of the smell of the incense I have swung to this and that false god Zola, Yeats, et tmis ces autres. I am angry to have got housemaid's knee, because I got it on 181 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND doorsteps that led to nowhere. There is but one doorstep worth scrubbing. The doorstep of Charles Dickens. . . . Did he write many books ? I know not, it does not greatly matter, he wrote the " Pickwick Papers " ; that suffices. I have read as yet but one chapter, describing a Christmas party in a country house. Strange that anyone should have essayed to write about anything but that ! Christmas I see it now is the only moment in which men and women are really alive, are really worth writing about. At other seasons they do not exist for the purpose of art. I spit on all seasons except Christmas. . . Is he not in all fiction the great- est figure, this Mr. Wardell, this old " squire " rosy-cheeked, who entertains this Christmas party at his house ? He is more truthful, he is more significant, than any figure in Balzac. He is better than all Balzac's figures rolled into one. . . I used to kneel on that doorstep. Balzac wrote many books. But now it behoves me to ask my- self whether he ever wrote a good book. One knows that he used to write for fifteen hours at a stretch, gulping down coffee all the while. But it does not follow that the coffee was good, nor does it follow that what he wrote was good. The 182 DICKENS Comedie Humaine is all chicory. . . I had wished for some years to say this, I am glad (Favoir debarrasse ma poitrine de qa. To have described divinely a Christmas party is something, but it is not everything. The dis- engaging of the erotic motive is everything, is the only touchstone. If while that is being done we are soothed into a trance, a nebulous delirium of the nerves, then we know the novelist to be a supreme novelist. If we retain consciousness, he is not supreme, and to be less than supreme in art is ^o^ notjexist. . . Dickens disengages the erotic motive through two figures, Mr. Winkle, a sportman, and Miss Arabella, "a young lady with fur-topped boots."" They go skating, he helps her over a stile. Can one not well see her ? She steps over the stile and her shin defines itself through her balbriggan stocking. She is a knock-kneed girl, and she looks at Mr. Winkle with that sensual regard that sometimes comes when the wind is north-west. Yes, it is a north- west wind that is blowing over this landscape that Hals or Winchoven might have painted no, Winchoven would have fumbled it with rose- madder, but Hals would have done it well. Hals would have approved would he not ? the pollard 183 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND aspens, these pollard aspens deciduous and wistful, which the rime makes glistening. That field, how well ploughed it is, and are they not like petticoats, those clouds low-hanging ? Yes, Hals would have stated them well, but only Manet could have stated the slope of the thighs of the girl how does she call herself ? Arabella it is a so hard name to remember as she steps across the stile. Manet would have found pleasure in her cheeks also. They are a little chapped with the north-west wind that makes the pollard aspens to quiver. How adorable a thing it is, a girl's nose that the north-west wind renders red ! We may tire of it sometimes, because we sometimes tire of all things, but Winkle does not know this. Is Arabella his mistress ? If she is not, she has been, or at any rate she will be. How full she is of temperament, is she not ? Her shoulder-blades seem a little carelessly modelled, but how good they are in intention ! How well placed that smut on her left cheek ! Strange thoughts of her surge up vaguely in me as I watch her thoughts that I cannot express in English. . . Elle est plus vieille que les roches entre lesquelles elle s'est assise ; comme le vampire elle a ete frequemment morte, et a appris les 184 DICKENS secrets du tombeau ; et s'est plongee dans des mers profondes, et conserve autour d'elle leur jour mine; et, comme Lede, etait mere d'Helene de Troie, et, comme Sainte-Anne, mere de Maria ; et tout cela n'a ete pour elle que. . . . I desist, for not through French can be expressed the thoughts that surge in me. French is a stale language. So are all the European languages, one can say in them nothing fresh. . . . The stalest of them all is Erse. . . . Deep down in my heart a sudden voice whispers me that there is only one land wherein art may reveal herself once more. Of what avail to await her anywhere else than in Mexico ? Only there can the apocalypse happen. I will take a ticket for Mexico, I will buy a Mexican grammar, I will be a Mexican. . . . On a hillside, or beside some grey pool, gazing out across those plains poor and arid, I will await the first pale showings of the new dawn. , 185 EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT AN IMITATION OF MEREDITH EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT * IN the heart of insular Cosmos, remote by some scores of leagues of Hodge-trod arable or pastoral, not more than a snuff-pinch for gaping tourist nostrils accustomed to inhalation of prairie winds, but enough for perspective, from those marginal sands, trident-scraped, we are to fancy, by a helmeted Dame Abstract familiarly profiled on discs of current bronze price of a loaf for humbler maws disdainful of Gallic side-dishes for the titillation of choicer palates stands Clash- thought Park, a house of some pretension, men- tioned at Runnymede, with the spreading exception of wings given to it in later times by Daedalean masters not to be baulked of billiards or traps for Terpsichore, and owned for 1 It were not, as a general rule, well to republish after a man's death the skit you made of his work while he lived. Meredith, however, was so transcendent that such skits must ever be harmless, arid so lasting will his fame be that they can never lose what freshness they may have had at first. So 1 have put this thing in with the others, making improve- ments that were needed. M. B. A CHRISTMAS GARLAND unbroken generations by a healthy line of pro- creant Clashthoughts, to the undoing of collateral branches eager for the birth of a female. Pas- sengers through cushioned space, flying top- speed or dallying with obscure stations not alighted at apparently, have had it pointed out to them as beheld dimly for a privileged instant before they sink back behind crackling barrier of instructive paper with a "Thank you, Sir,"" or "Madam,"" as the case may be. Guide-books praise it. I conceive they shall be studied for a cock-shy of rainbow epithets slashed in at the target of Landed Gentry, premonitorily. The tintinnabulation^ enough. Periodical footings of Clashthoughts into Mayfair or the Tyrol, sig- nalled by the slide from its mast of a crested index of Aeolian caprice, blazon of their presence, give the curious a right to spin through the halls and galleries under a cackle of housekeeper guideship scramble for a chuck of the dainties, dog fashion. There is something to be said for the ropers twist. Wisdom skips. It is recorded that the goblins of this same Lady Wisdom were all agog one Christmas morning between the doors of the house and the village church, which crouches on the outskirt of 190 EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT the park, with something of a lodge in its look, you might say, more than of celestial twinkles, even with Christmas hoar-frost bleaching the grey of it in sunlight, as one sees imaged on seasonable missives for amity in the trays marked " sixpence and upwards," here and there, on the counters of barter. Be sure these goblins made obeisance to Sir Peter Clashthought, as he passed by, starched beacon of squirearchy, wife on arm, sons to heel. After him, certain members of the household rose-chapped males and females, bearing books of worship. The pack of goblins glance up the drive with nudging elbows and whisperings of " Where is daughter Euphemia ? Where Sir Rebus, her affianced ? " Oft they scamper for a peep through the windows of the house. They throng the sill of the library, ears acock and eyelids twittering admiration of a prospect. Euphemia was in view of them essence of her. Sir Rebus was at her side. Nothing slips the goblins. " Nymph in the Heavy Dragoons " was Mrs. Cryptic-Sparkler's famous definition of her. The County took it for final an uncut gem with a fleck in the heart of it. Euphemia condoned the 191 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND imagery. She had breadth. Heels that spread ample curves over the ground she stood on, and hands that might floor you with a clench of them, were hers. Grey eyes looked out lucid and fearless under swelling temples that were lost in a ruffling copse of hair. Her nose was virginal, with hints of the Iron Duke at most angles. Square chin, cleft centrally, gave her throat the look of a tower with a gun protrudent at top. She was dressed for church evidently, but seemed no slave to Time. Her bonnet was pushed well back from her head, and she was fingering the rib- bons. One saw she was a woman. She inspired deference. " Forefinger for Shepherd^ Crook " was what Mrs. Cryptic-Sparkler had said of Sir Rebus. It shall stand at that. " You have Prayer Book ? " he queried. She nodded. Juno catches the connubial trick. " Hymns ? " " Ancient and Modern." " I may share with you ?" " I know by heart. Parrots sing."" " Philomel carols," he bent to her. " Complaints spoil a festival. 11 192 EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT He waved hand to the door. " Lady, your father has started." " He knows the adage. Copy-books instil it." " Inexorable truth in it." " We may dodge the scythe." " To be choked with the sands ? " She flashed a smile. " I would not," he said, " that my Euphemia were late for the Absolution." She cast eyes to the carpet. He caught them at the rebound. " It snows," she murmured, swimming to the window. " A flake, no more. The season claims it." " I have thin boots." " Another pair ? " " My maid buttons. She is at church." " My fingers ? " " Ten on each." " Five," he corrected. " Buttons." " I beg your pardon." She saw opportunity. She swam to the bell- rope and grasped it for a tinkle. The action spread feminine curves to her lover's eyes. He was a man. Obsequiousness loomed in the doorway. Its 193 o A CHRISTMAS GARLAND mistress flashed an order for port two glasses. Sir Rebus sprang a pair of eyebrows on her. Suspicion slid down the banisters of his mind, trailing a blue ribbon. Inebriates were one of his hobbies. For an instant she was sunset. " Medicinal,"" she murmured. " Forgive me, Madam. A glass, certainly. 'Twill warm us for worshipping." The wine appeared, seemed to blink owlishly through the facets of its decanter, like some hoary captive dragged forth into light after years of subterraneous darkness something querulous in the sudden liberation of it. Or say that it gleamed benignant from its tray, steady-borne by the hands of reverence, as one has seen Infallibility pass with uplifting of jewelled fingers through genuflexions to the Balcony. Port has this in it : that it compels obeisance, master of us ; as opposed to brother and sister wines wooing us with a coy flush in the gold of them to a cursory tope or harlequin leap shimmering up the veins with a sly wink at us through eyelets. Hussy vintages swim to a cosset. We go to Port, mark you ! Sir Rebus sipped with an affectionate twirl of thumb at the glass's stem. He said " One scents the cobwebs." 194 EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT " Catches in them," Euphemia flung at him. " I take you. Bacchus laughs in the web. 1 * " Unspun but for Pallas." " A lady's jealousy." " Forethought, rather." " Brewed in the paternal pate. Grant it ! " " For a spring in accoutrements." Sir Rebus inclined gravely. Port precludes prolongment of the riposte. She replenished glasses. Deprecation yielded. " A step," she said, " and we are in time for the First Lesson." " This," he agreed, is a wine." "There are blasphemies in posture. One should sit to it." " Perhaps." He sank to commodious throne of leather indicated by her finger. Again she filled for him. "This time, no heel-taps," she was imperative. " The Litany demands basis." " True." He drained, not repelling the decanter placed at his elbow. " It is a wine," he presently repeated with a rolling tongue over it. " Laid down by my great-grandfather. Cloistral." 195 A CHRISTMAS GARLAND "Strange," he said, examining the stopper, " no date. Antediluvian. Sound, though." He drew out his note-book. " The senses he wrote, " are internecine. They shall have learned esprit de corps before they enslave us" This was one of his happiest flings to general from particular. " Visual distraction cries havoc to ultimate delicacy of palate" would but have pinned us a butterfly best a-hover; nor even so should we have had truth of why the aphorist, closing note-book and nestling back of head against that of chair, closed eyes also. As by some such law as lurks in meteorological toy for our guidance in climes close-knit with Irony for bewilderment, making egress of old woman synchronise inevitably with old man's ingress, or the other way about, the force that closed the aphorisfs eye-lids parted his lips in degree according. Thus had Euphemia, erect on hearth-rug, a cavern to gaze down into. Out- works of fortifying ivory cast but denser shadows into the inexplorable. The solitudes here grew murmurous. To and fro through secret passages in the recesses leading up deviously to lesser twin caverns of nose above, the gnomes Morphean went about their business, whispering at first, but 196 EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT presently bold to wind horns in unison Roland- wise, not less. Euphemia had an ear for it; whim also to construe lord and master relaxed but reboant and soaring above the verbal to harmonic truths of abstract or transcendental, to be hummed subsequently by privileged female audience of one bent on a hook-or-crook plucking out of pith for salvation. She caught tablets pendent at her girdle. " How long" queried her stilus, " has our sex had humour f Jael hammered." She might have hitched speculation further. But Mother Earth, white-mantled, called to her. Casting eye of caution at recumbence, she paddled across the carpet and anon swam out over the snow. Pagan young womanhood, six foot of it, spanned eight miles before luncheon. 197 PRISTBD IX GREAT BRITAIN BY RICIMKR CLAY ASD SONS. LIMITED, BRUNSWICK STREKT, STAMFORD STRKKT, S.K. I, AN1> BUSQAY, SUFFOLK. A 000 058 247 8