Joking apart

“I wish that people wouldn’t write these ridiculous letters,” said Polly, laying aside a bundle of about eight closely written sheets. “It’s Octavia Sinclair. She says she is quite sure that I have forgotten her. I have not forgotten her in the least, only she doesn’t fill the whole of my landscape; it is so absurd that people should want to.”

“It is almost barbaric to want a landscape to remain the same always,” I agreed. “One runs up villa residences everywhere now, of course, and the place looks different; but the old earth is the same underneath, if people would only have the sense to understand.”

“Do you think I run up lots of villa residences?” Polly asked wistfully.

“I was trying to help you, dear, not to criticize,” I replied.

“You see,” Polly explained, “if you are making anything, no matter what, the pieces you are making it with don’t all stay in the same place. When the world was being made it would have been dreadful if all the mountains and countries had been made in succession and just stuck down one in front of the other, and if each tree and each animal had stayed where it was——”

“My dearest Polly,” I begged, “stop just one minute. You don’t see trees as men, walking, do you?”

“If you are going to be like the serious raconteur’s comic brother in the pantomime, I’ll stop,” she answered. “You must either follow me or stay at home. I see, in my mind’s eye, the Almighty evolving a perpetually changing order out of the chaos that occurs every day. You don’t make a world out of a hill, and then a tree, and then an ocean, stuck down like salt-cellars on the table. The sea is being made into rain to wash the ground into different shapes: the trees settle down into coal, or we cut them up to build things with, and we clear the ground for villa residences to hold the new people whom Providence sends. Sometimes there is an earthquake which throws up the dead whom we have forgotten and swallows up the living. It is all like a kaleidoscope making different patterns of the same bits.”

The door opened and Reginald looked in, decided that the moment was not for him, shrugged his shoulders, and went out.

“You can’t play a game with every one staying in the same place,” resumed Polly. “You can’t embroider if you don’t use first one thread and then another; you can’t paint a picture without adding new colours to the old ones; you can’t make music with one note; you can’t——”

“I’ve got that point, dear,” I said. “You can go on. You can’t make a hotel a lively place with only one guest. Yes?”

“I am not talking of enjoyment,” said Polly, “but of any work of construction. I am constructing my life, and even though I were a hermit (so you may dispose of your vulgarities about hotels and villas) I could still add new experiences to the old without being accused of infidelity.”

“But suppose you repented of your past experiences?” I suggested.

“I shouldn’t wish them undone,” said Polly calmly. “I should merely see them in a new light, and they would fall back into their place in the background of my life’s pattern.”

“Poor experiences! Alas! Octavia, my poor friend!” I murmured.

“I feel the same thing about men,” said Polly; “they are in the pattern too. Sex is merely a matter of colour in the threads.”

“Which is what colour?” I asked.

“They are both all colours,” she said; “that is why they make such a good picture together.”

“Well, what do you mean by saying that it is the same with men?” I asked. “What is the same?”

“I mean that it takes a great many men to make one husband, just as it takes a great many Octavia Sinclairs to make one person’s life,” she explained.

“How many husbands have you besides Reginald?” I asked with some hesitation.

“It is very difficult to be patient with you, Martha,” replied Polly. “I have only one husband, as you know, but he is compounded of all the men I ever met. When I meet a man who is bad-tempered, I weave the thread of his ill-temper beside that of Reginald’s amazing patience, and you can’t imagine how Reginald’s colours glow. When I meet another who admires what Reginald calls my waffle-headedness (which he dislikes, by the way), I enjoy a perfect orgy of waffle-headedness, and use it all up before Reginald comes back, and then he restores the balance on the other side, and there, again, we have proportion, which is the art of life. I know several men whose trousers are either perfectly creased or not folded at all, and between them I realize that Reginald’s are the nearest to the ideal trouser, showing thought for the temple of his spirit without the exaggerated anxieties of you, for instance, Martha. Wasn’t there some poet who spoke of ‘the need of a world of men for me’? The lady whom he mentioned there had lost her husband or her lover, or whoever he was, and she felt, I suppose, that it would take several men to replace him. Now I have not lost mine, and his beauty is immensely enhanced by the qualities of all the rest of his sex. As for embracing and that kind of thing, that is quite beside the mark. I dare say that if we were all in the garden of Eden I might occasionally salute the marbled brow of one or two of the most perfect, just to emphasize some point in what I was saying, or as the expression of some passing emotion; but the thing has got to mean so much more than Nature intended, that one doesn’t do it, and it is no special deprivation to me to do without.”

“And suppose the threads of your pattern get restive,” I asked, “and won’t stay in their proper positions. Are you never confronted with a blazing flower of the tropics when you were at work on a daisy?”

“No,” she replied quite seriously; “but if I were, of course I should work it in somehow.”

“Does Reginald embroider on the same plan?” I asked after a pause.

“I expect not,” she answered; “because I don’t think that men are so wrapped up in themselves as we are—I don’t mean fond of themselves, I mean wrapped up. And another thing. I never think that there is much substance in my mind except what other people put in—and that, I admit, I develop very nicely—but Reginald has stuff of his own which he spins out of his inner consciousness, and which takes shape when it encounters facts. I don’t know whether that is the difference between other men and women, but I have an idea that if Moses had been a woman he would have come back from the wilderness rather bereft of ideas, and not having done any useful thinking at all. Perhaps his (or her) mind would have ‘turned on itself,’ as they say, and he (or she) would have been at loggerheads with all the fowls of the air. ‘There was a most impertinent vulture,’ the female Moses would have told the children of Israel, ‘who made a point of settling down first on whichever rock I had arranged to sit on. Of course if I had been a man he wouldn’t have dared. It has taken me forty years of intense thought to dodge him, but I believe I could manage it now if I went back.’”

“But Moses had no society, either, to help his great thoughts to take shape,” I said pettishly; “and when he did get back he was a kill-joy, and finally died of temper.”

“Well, my dear,” said Polly, “you find taking two children to the seaside quite as much as you can manage. I don’t know, I’m sure, what you would say to forty thousand, or whatever the number was whom Moses took. If you got through as well as he did you’d be lucky. And remember, he had to keep them amused for more than a month.”

Polly is like that; it is impossible to take any of her arguments to a logical conclusion. I tried to make her see that Reginald was very forbearing to find all his ideals of womanhood in her without seeking outside inspiration, and she said that “men were like that”; they had no ideals, and were prepared to take just anything and muddle along with it provided it fulfilled some of its purposes. “Have you ever watched them shopping?” she asked; “they never turn out a whole shop as we do. They say, vaguely looking round, ‘Is this all you have?’ and the girl, of course, grins and says, ‘Yes, it is the very best, and the other kinds are never asked for now’; and he says, ‘Oh, very well then, just send it up, will you, please,’ and he pays far too much for it. Now we, even when we have bought a thing, often see something else that would have done far better, and then we fret over it, or take steps to alter it. That is idealism.”

“Oh, Polly!” I remonstrated. “You make my head ache so. Do you mean that men are never discontented with their wives? And, besides, you said yourself that all the other men you saw only made you admire Reginald the more.”

“Martha, Martha,” said Polly, reprovingly. “You have that worst type of mind—if it can be called a mind—that labours a point until it breaks. Everything that I have said to you is perfectly true, but if you pick the whole of it to pieces you will find that none of the bits match, and that none of them are alike on both sides. Character study is not a science—it is an art; and you have to keep one eye closed very often while you work.”

“Anyhow,” I said, “to return to the original subject, Octavia Sinclair. What are you going to say to her?”

“Tell her not to be an ass,” said Polly.

“Is that your best way of making her understand that you ‘love her still the same?’” I inquired.

“Well, I don’t love her the same when she is an ass,” said Polly. “She was a duck when I loved her first. I tell her not to be an ass, because I can’t love her under that disguise. When she stops being an ass she will become a duck again—at least, I hope so—and if she is the same duck I shall find a nice pond for her in my heart; not necessarily the same pond, because that may be filled up by now—I forget—but one quite as good as the old, if not better. And if she has any sense, she will get out of it sometimes and walk about on the grass by herself.”

“I shall go home and write a chapter on ‘Fidelity,’” I warned her.

“It is not fidelity to your friends to put them into books,” she said severely.

“It is not worse than putting them into embroidery-frames,” I answered snappishly, “and then luring them into that monster hotel of yours, where you even forget their numbers, and don’t answer their bells.”

“Never mind, don’t let’s quarrel,” said Polly. “You repeat in your book what I say to you in confidence——”

“Not at all,” I assured her; “I am merely assimilating other people’s ideas in the elegant way you described just now as being the habit of women, and when they emerge again you won’t know your own. They will have taken life in an entirely original shape. I can’t spin new stuff out of nothing, as you say your husband does——”

The door opened, and the parlour-maid announced, “Mrs. Beehive and Mrs. Henry.”