LONDON LAVENDER

CHAPTER I

IN WHICH A NEW HOME IS FOUND AND THE STATUS OF ANTHROPOID APES IS CAREFULLY DETERMINED

Having once decided—very much against my will (such as it is)—to leave my old single rooms at Mrs. Duckie's, the question where to live was before us. Far enough away to make a good walk in fine weather, was a point on which Naomi insisted first of all, and, indeed, it was because Mrs. Duckie's house was too near Queen Anne's Gate that her hostility to it was so firm.

"It's no nearer than it was before we were married," I pointed out. "In fact, just the same distance."

"Yes," said Naomi, "and look how you suffered for want of exercise." (Did I?) "No, we must live farther away from it all. That's absolutely necessary."

By "it" she meant her father's house in particular; Pall Mall; and an area bounded by the Haymarket Theatre in the South, Kreisler and Casals in the North, and Bond Street in the West; but we were to be not so far as to be more than one and tenpence (the frugal young woman's limit, with twopence for the blackguard chauffeur) in a taxi; we were to have contiguity to an open space; nice rooms; and a comfortable landlady who could cook. For we agreed that we wanted no oven responsibilities of our own, although a chafing dish was to fortify the menu on occasion.

These were not very exacting conditions, and at 7 Primrose Terrace, close to Regent's Park, we found as complete an approximation as this vale of tears and disappointment is equal to offering, the rooms being large and just vacated by an old occupant with a very high standard of comfort: a self-protective gentleman of means whom the gods had, mercifully for us, visited with a nervous breakdown, making two years' travel in warmer climes an obligation. As that sententious amateur, Herbert Trist, says, "The art of life is to succeed a good tenant."

Our landlady is a twin—two sisters, the Misses Laura and Emma Packer, unmarried, very refined, fragile, and Victorian, who are assisted in the duties of the house by a worthy rotund woman named Mrs. Wiles. One of my earliest proceedings after becoming the tenant having been to take the steps necessary for election to a fellowship of the Zoological Society of London, you may judge of my satisfaction to learn that Mrs. Wiles' husband was no other than the head keeper of the ape house. Here was a friend at court who had it in his power to make even the Zoo more agreeable.

But, once again to prevent misunderstanding, let me remark that when we say ape—Mrs. Wiles and I—we mean ape and ape only. For there are, it seems, persons so lost to nice feelings and etymological exactitude that they speak of apes and monkeys indiscriminately as though they were the same, whereas, of course, monkeys are only monkeys—gibbering unreticent shameless travesties of the worst kind of man—while apes are without tails, and have a certain patient dignity, and lay serious claim to the attention of the theorizing biologist.

"No," said Mrs. Wiles, "not monkeys. Not Wiles. I don't say as how I am overjoiced when I meet a lady, as it might be Mrs. Johnson last evening, and after she has asked me what my husband does and I've told her he's an official in the employ of the Zoological Society, she says, 'Oh, a keeper, I suppose'; and when I say, severe like, 'A head keeper,' she says, as they all do, the same two things, sometimes one first and sometimes the other, but always the same—'Oh, I hope it's not the monkey house,' and 'Could you possibly give me two tickets for next Sunday afternoon?'"

Mrs. Wiles now and then stops for breath, although, like most Londoners, she talks without apparently using any, and this, on our first exchange of confidences on the matter, enabled me to ask why she thought the monkey-house query was always propounded.

"I don't know," she said, "but I suppose it's because to most people the Zoo is monkeys first and foremost. It's the monkeys they want to see. But Wiles has nothing to do with monkeys, nothing whatever. Wiles has charge of the apes. I won't go so far as to say I don't sometimes wish it was lions or elephants, but this I will say, that, good husband as Wiles is, I don't think I could live with him if it was monkeys pure and simple—although how anyone can call them pure and simple, I can't think. Apes are different, aren't they, sir? Wiles says that apes are the next things to us. Wiles says they have brains and beautiful natures; but what gives me most peace of mind is knowing that they haven't got tails. Tails would be too much, as I often tell him. I've got a bit of writing about it which Wiles found in a dictionary, and if you'll permit me, sir, I'll bring it round and show it to you to-morrow morning. I always keep it in the Bible, handy."

Mrs. Wiles unfolded it the next morning and I read aloud these words: "In common use the word ape extends to all the tribe of monkeys and baboons, but in the zoological sense" ("Ah!" said Mrs. Wiles, smoothing her apron) "it is restricted to those higher organized species of the Linnæan genus Simla, which are destitute of a tail, as the ourangs, chimpanzees, and gibbons."

"There!" she said triumphantly, when I had finished.

Our opportunities for conversation with Mrs. Wiles come after breakfast, for it is one of her duties to clear away. Wiles and she appear to live close by, and she moves between the two houses, first getting Wiles his breakfast, packing him off to his apes, and "redding up" her own home; then locking her door and "redding up" the Misses Packers'; then returning to prepare Wiles's and her own dinner; and in the late afternoon returning to the Misses Packers' to help them with theirs and ours. Wonderful creatures, women! There is nothing done by men to put in the balance against such steady undeviating dreary mule-work as women cheerfully perform. At least, not in England. On the Continent you get something like it, in the small hotels where a man does everything; but not here—not in the land of public-houses.

The Misses Packer, our tutelary twins, although aware that in Mrs. Wiles they have a treasure, deprecate her volubility in our rooms. Like all consciously refined persons, they have no appreciation of character, and both Miss Laura and Miss Emma have separately apologized to us for their hireling's familiarity and hoped we will not allow her to impose upon our good nature. What is to be done with people like this?—and they are everywhere.

Miss Laura (who claims to be the older by half an hour, and has will power to justify the claim), although she has been in the lodging-house business for years and years, still affects to be ashamed of it. "I can't think what father would say if he could know what we were doing," is the burden of her life-song. "It's the last thing he would ever have wished his girls to do—keep a lodging-house." The paternal Packer, it seems, was related distantly but sufficiently to a City Sheriff, and himself was for many years a highly respected messenger in one of the older London banks. In their more daring moments his daughters have, I believe, referred to him quite easily as a banker, or at any rate have permitted the impression that he had charge of huge sums of money (as indeed he had) to go uncorrected, with the suggestion added that events were at last too much for him, and, owing to financial depression, due to vague causes, of which an iniquitous Government was the chief, he came upon heavy losses and poverty. For anyone may have a father who was a business failure; but no real lady would confess to springing from a bank messenger's loins.

Miss Emma, although less assertive than her sister (as becomes one born so long after), bleats a sympathetic chorus to the lament; and to her sister's amazement at what father would say could he only see his girls in their degrading situation, has been known to remark, "But who knows?—perhaps he does see us!" thus calling up a picture of the vigilant bank messenger at one of heaven's loopholes with but this drop of bitterness—his daughters' decline from perfect ladyhood—in an eternal cup of bliss.

They are, however, good women, the Packer sisters, and one of them cooks excellently, and if some of God's creatures have brains like dried peas and no imagination at all, the best of us are not so very wonderful.

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH THE FOUR GENTLEMEN ABOVE US OBTAIN THEIR CHARACTERS AND PRIMROSE TERRACE IS RUDELY DISTURBED

One of the first questions which I put to Mrs. Wiles referred very naturally to the other residents of the house. The twins had severally and collectively assured us that they offered hospitality to none but gentlemen, and that four of the nicest gentlemen living were at present under their roof; but the twins have no discrimination. To them a gentleman is a gentleman—that is to say, a trousered creature who lives on bacon, makes (compared with a lady) no trouble at all, and pays his rent. Mrs. Wiles has a more observant eye, and to her, therefore, I resorted for the finer shades. The house, it appears, has three floors and a basement. The first floor is ours; above are four rooms, two of which, at the back, belong to Mr. Lacey and the two in front to Mr. Furley; above these is the top floor with four more rooms, two of which in front belong to Mr. Carstairs and two at the back to Mr. Spanton.

Of all these, Mr. Carstairs most perplexes Mrs. Wiles, and Mr. Lacey most pleases her. Mr. Carstairs, whom she refers to as "a nermit," I occasionally see on the doorstep—a tall, stooping man, once handsome, with a face as profoundly sad as any of Mr. Wiles's charges. "He does nothing," says Mrs. Wiles. "Retired, I suppose. And no one ever comes to see him. But he's always polite and considerate."

What the gentleman has retired from, I gather, has been this many a day and night the question which has occupied the curiosity of the basement; since what is a basement without interest in floors? That there is a mystery is certain, for has he not those two damning provocations to suspicion—a profound reticence and an inner cupboard of which he keeps the key?

From what Naomi tells me of what Mrs. Wiles tells her, the desire of the basement and its particular friend, Miss Cole (who drops in pretty regularly for a cup of tea), to find the key of this cupboard left by accident in the lock amounts to a passion. If they only knew it, they are foolish; for compared with a closed cupboard, all the open cupboards in the world are negligible. Speculation is as much superior to certainty as anticipation to fruition.

Miss Cole, who is one of London's spinster rentiers, with so little life of her own that other people's lives take the first place in her thoughts, and enough of an income to make her envied by her carefully chosen friends—chosen, as is too often our way, because they are humbler and capable of envy—darkly hints at crime itself, her simple line of reasoning being that no honest person has secrets.

But Mrs. Wiles has no patience with such suggestions. "A secret he may have," she says, "but there's no harm in it, I'll be bound. But that Miss Cole always thinks the worst."

"Of course she does, poor woman," I said. "How would she get on if she didn't?" and was promptly rebuked by Naomi for my cynicism.

But Mrs. Wiles, who is an old campaigner, only laughed. "I believe you're right, sir," she said. "We're a funny lot, aren't we?"

And there, perhaps, is as true an epitaph as human nature could get.

Mr. Spanton, who has the next room to Mr. Carstairs, is a young gentleman who calls himself a Socialist. "But do you think," Mrs. Wiles asks earnestly, "that Socialists ought to have silk pyjamas? And his toilet requisites: like a lady's! But quite civil and pleasant spoken, although rather too particular about his things, and sharp with you if you dust the pictures and leave them crooked, as who that is yuman can help doing?"

The Misses Packer evidently have a very soft place in their hearts for Mr. Spanton. "Such a fastidious gentleman, and of the best family. You can tell that by the places where he gets his clothes. All his hosiery from Bond Street itself, and Miss Cole, who is often in the West End of an afternoon, tells us that she has seen the shop, and the Royal arms are over it. How such a gentleman can talk about the country as he does, and take such an interest in the poor, is a marvel; but Miss Cole, who has a friend in the household at Buckingham Palace and hears all kinds of things, says that Socialism is quite a hobby with some of the aristocrats now. And look at Lady Warwick! Such a beautiful place as she has—Warwick Castle, where we went once with our dear father in a char-à-banc from Birmingham, when we were visiting his sister there. And Guy's Cliff, too, you know. And another day we were at Stratford-on-Avon and saw Miss Corelli's house. Such lovely window-boxes; and there, to think that Lady Warwick should be a Socialist!"

"Mr. Furley, in the first floor front, has a funny business," says Mrs. Wiles. "You'd never guess what it is. I gave Wiles three guesses and he didn't get near it—at least not nearer than conducting a matrimonial agency. He's a cinema gentleman. He makes picture plays for the theatres. Many's the ticket he's given Wiles and me to see his pieces free in the Tottenham Court Road. I love the cinema plays, especially the sad ones, but Wiles is all for the comics. It's funny we should have a cinema gentleman here now, isn't it, because before he came his rooms were occupied by a gentleman who wrote a real play—I mean a play for a real theatre. He gave us tickets too. Isn't that a coincidence—two gentlemen running who were able and willing to give tickets? I often tell people of it and laugh. It wasn't a bad play, either," Mrs. Wiles continued, "although there was rather too much talk in it and it ended unhappily. At any rate it didn't end with wedding bells, as I hold plays should."

When, however, I pointed out to her that life rarely ended there, but in a manner of speaking only began there—her own life, for example—she was forced to confess I was right.

"I never thought of that before," she said, but quickly added, with admirable sagacity, "Still, that's life, and plays are plays; and they've nothing whatever to do with each other, have they?

"But the nicest gentleman here," she went on, "is Mr. Lacey. Always full of his jokes, and so kind. Mr. Furley is kind too, but he doesn't think. Mr. Lacey's kindness is special to yourself, if you know what I mean. And you should see his rooms—they're just like a museum, and if I dare to lift so much as a piece of crumpled-up paper he's all over me. The things he calls me, you'd be astonished; but so different from Mr. Spanton. Mr. Spanton cuts, but Mr. Lacey says them in such a way that I only laugh; and yet if a stranger that didn't know his ways were to hear, they'd think it awful. The language! In a Court of Law they'd nearly hang him for it. But there, there's few things we say or do, I often think, as wouldn't get the rope round our necks in a Court of Law if the right kind of barrister gentleman asked the questions. It makes me shiver reading the cross-examinations."

How long she would have continued, I cannot say, had she not been interrupted by the sound of voices in the street, which proceeded from a comedy storm in which the part of Boreas was played by her hero, the first-floor-back. For Mr. Lacey, although normally genial and out for fun, has in reserve for injustice a hurricane temper which he keeps in some cave of the winds within his brain. It was this that we now witnessed in action from our open window. An organist, who was English and who had but one leg, had been playing for a few minutes to a delighted audience of children. The tune was "Every nice girl loves a sailor," which is, I believe, old, but as sound in melody as the sentiment which it conveys is sound in fact. Then suddenly a policeman had arrived and waved the musician to a less select neighbourhood. Lacey, who appears to have been watching from the door step, was in the theatre of war in a moment. From our private box we could hear everything.

"Why do you send this man away?" Lacey had evidently asked.

The policeman said that he had been requested by residents not to allow street music thereabouts.

"When?" Mr. Lacey inquired.

"Oh, at different times."

"Not this morning?"

"No."

"Very well, then, give the man his chance."

"It couldn't be done," said the policeman.

"It shall be done," said Lacey. "If anyone is to be arrested let it be me," and he told the organ-grinder to continue.

At this moment a resident came out of the opposite house, and, ignoring Lacey entirely, requested the constable to move the music on.

This was meat and drink to Lacey. He turned his back on the organ and the officer and settled down to action with the householder.

Why, might he ask, was the music to be moved on?

Because the householder objected to it.

Was anyone in the house ill?

No.

And what was the householder's objections?

Such things were a nuisance and should not be permitted.

Had the householder noticed that the man had but one leg?

He had: but that was the man's affair. It had nothing to do with the case. He might, on the contrary, be a centipede for all the householder cared. The case merely was that Primrose Terrace was a quiet part, with rents accordingly, and one expected with reason to be exempt from organs.

"Very well," said Lacey. "Then understand that I too reside in Primrose Terrace and I like organs. If a sufficient number of unimaginative blockheads like yourself, who live here, decide against organs you can have a notice prohibiting them put up at the end of the street, like the other self-protective snobs all over London. But until you do, the organs shall come here, I promise you that. And you, constable," he said, turning to the policeman, "understand that I, a resident in Primrose Terrace, wish to hear street music."

"But I can't take orders from private persons," said the policeman.

"Good," said Mr. Lacey. "That's just what I wanted you to say. I shall now make it my business to see your inspector and inform him that you take orders from private persons for harrying the poor, but refuse them for encouraging the poor. Then we shall see where we are."

And, so saying, he handed the organ-grinder a shilling and walked off to the police station.

That is Lacey. Right or wrong, that is Lacey. But, as a matter of fact, fundamentally he is always right—although his idea of Tightness and Society's idea do not agree.

I need hardly say that the result of Lacey's visit to the police station was the speedy erection of a notice-board forbidding street music; for he is rarely successful in his crusades. But the crusade is the thing: not the result of it.

CHAPTER III

IN WHICH A VISIT IS PAID TO A RED-HAIRED LADY AND CERTAIN MEMBERS OF LONDON'S FOREIGN POPULATION ARE ENUMERATED

Armed with a message of introduction from Mrs. Wiles, I called on Mr. Wiles at his place of business. He is to be found under the New Ape House. You knock on the closed door opposite the King's Nepal exhibits, and as you stand there waiting for it to be opened the contemptible monkey house and the shameless prismatic mandril are on your left. By and by steps are heard on a stone passage and Mr. Wiles or his mate opens the door.

"Are you Mr. Wiles?" I asked.

He said he was, and I told him that I was Mr. Falconer, and our alliance was completed. Some friendships are made beforehand, and this was one of them.

He showed me his kitchen, where the food of these delicate exotic creatures is prepared, and then he led me to the little warm room where Barbara holds her court. She herself opened the door for us—a young clinging ourang-outang, red as Rufus, with quick sad eyes and restless hands and arms that could strangle a bull. These arms she flung round Mr. Wiles's neck and he carried her to the window.

"Wouldn't do for the missis to see too much of this," he said. "Women don't understand it. She's a brick, my missis, but, bless your heart, she'd carry on a treat if she found me and Barbara like this. The rum thing," he went on, "is that Barbara's a woman too. In fact, you can't be long in these Gardens without finding out how much alike we all are—us and them. As for babies, why, they ought to be here; and lots of grown-up people too. Makes you think a bit, you know." He lowered his voice. "It makes you think too much, almost. What I ask myself is this, What is a soul? Because, here's Barbara, here, hasn't got one, and I have; and as far as I can see, the only difference between us, after clothes, is that she can't talk and I can. But knowing! there's nothing she doesn't know and nothing she doesn't feel. She's as understanding as a Christian and much more affectionate than many of them. What I ask myself sometimes is, Why is Barbara in a cage and all these people out and about? or, Why aren't I in a cage and Barbara paying a bob to see me? It wants a bit of thinking. It isn't enough just to say, Because I'm a man and Barbara's an ourang-outang; because, who was it called me a man and Barbara an ourang-outang? Why, man did. That is to say, it's all going his way. But what do you suppose ourang-outangs call us? Ah! Suppose"—he lowered his voice to a whisper—"suppose ourang-outangs call themselves men and us apes! Wouldn't that be terrible? But nobody knows. Not even Dr. Chalmers Mitchell knows."

Barbara meanwhile sat absolutely motionless save that her eyes roved and her great jaws worked a little. It was enough for her that she was in Mr. Wiles's arms and he in hers.

"Look at her now," Mr. Wiles continued; "she's taking it all in. She knows what I'm saying. And another thing. The best in the land come to see her. The King and Queen are often here. Great scholars come, artists, authors. And they all make a fuss of her such as they wouldn't make of any human being outside their own families, and not them often. That's odd, isn't it? Makes you think there's something more in apes than you bargained for.

"The trouble is," he went on, "they're so delicate, ourang-outangs, and so are chimpanzees; in fact, all the larger apes. First it's bronchitis and then it's pneumonia. I've had so many pass through my hands—all dead now. Barbara's doing fairly well, but I dread the winter. I dare say you've heard of the famous performing chimpanzee—Consul? Seen him, perhaps? It might surprise you to know that there have been twenty-six Consuls since he first appeared. The public think it's the original one, but it's not. Twenty-six."

Whatever else I may have to do later in the day I manage to get to the Zoo for a little while every fine morning. Only thus can one obtain real intimacy with any of its inhabitants, whether they have souls or not. Only thus could I have become so close a friend of the wombat, that engaging stupid Australian with his broad, blunt, good-natured face. As the wombat lives on the north bank of the turgid dyke called the Regent's Canal, into which apathetic but sanguine Londoners drop bait all day with never a bite, and nursemaids drop surreptitious love-letters when they have read them a sufficient number of times, it is upon him that I pay one of my first calls, since it is by the Albert Road gate that I enter this attractive sanctuary: passing on my way Owls' Terrace, the solemn occupants of which are either reflecting so sagely upon life (far more sagely than anybody in Primrose Terrace) or are merely pretending to, no one will ever know which.

After the wombat I visit the capuchin (or sapajou), whose peculiarity it is to be more like an old man seen through the wrong end of a telescope than any other monkey or ape will ever be, although it is the chimpanzee that has the credit of coming nighest to our perfect state. So it may, taken as a whole, but for human features, however wizened and poor, the capuchin (or sapajou) bears away the bell. According to the Zoo guide-book, the capuchin (or sapajou) differs from man principally in retaining his tail and possessing four more grinding teeth than even those of us who are lucky to keep the complement that Heaven allowed us.

I then cross the canal by the private half of the public bridge, where the visitor to the Zoo is separated from the common outsider by an iron railing which makes each look to the other far liker a wild beast than is pleasant in this neighbourhood, and so come to my gentle friends, the giraffes, those pathetic survivals from the past whom American ex-presidents and gallant big-game hunters generally are so eager to exterminate. How any thinking creature proud in the possession of an immortal soul can bring his finger to pull the trigger at such an innocent, beautiful, and liquid-eyed vegetarian as this I shall never have imagination enough to understand; but they do it continually, and evidently have no compunctions, for they are photographed afterwards with one foot on the victim's corpse.

And so past the island cave of the beaver, a creature upon whom no visitor's eye has ever rested, and who, for all the British public knows, may not be there at all, to the elephants, one of whom has been nodding his head against the bars and opening his inadequate mouth for buns ever since 1876, and will, I dare say, continue to do so for many years yet. How many buns he has eaten let the statistician compute. I have no doubt that if placed in a line touching each other they would extend from London to Adelaide in the usual manner.

After the elephant, who is all deliberate matter, I visit the otter, who is all nervous fluid and the merriest creature in the gardens, and so, by way of the magical lizards, come to Mr. Wiles and Barbara.

That is my short round. When there is more time I extend it to take in the gay little foreign birds with the pretty names, who live between the lizards and the bears, and who, with the lizards, seem to be almost more wonderful achievements on the part of the Creator than the elephant or giraffe. And I like also to look once again at the King Penguin and the Snow Leopards; but the lions and tigers I rarely visit, for I cannot bear the forlorn look in their eyes. It hurts me to think that it is partly my subscription that is keeping them here.

And coming out again into the world of men, it seems strange and unbelievable that anyone should choose to live anywhere but close to Regent's Park.

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH I AM FORBIDDEN TO BE IDLE AND THEREFORE FIND CONGENIAL EMPLOYMENT

Naomi was very firm about my finding an occupation. Men must do something, she said. As for herself, she intended to retain her various poor protégés, and to continue to visit her mother in Queen Anne's Gate every day, and probably lunch there; which made it the more important that I should have something to engage me.

"A man who has no employment is like a ship without a rudder," she said.

I replied that perhaps it was employment enough to be married to an epigrammatist. This being received without enthusiasm, I pointed out that I was executor to no fewer than three persons.

"All of whom are alive and extremely healthy," said Naomi.

"True," I answered, "but think how insecure is one's hold upon life. At any moment one of them may be crushed by a falling aeroplane and plunge me into affairs."

"'It's ill waiting for dead men's shoes,'" Naomi quoted, and at the totally new light which the proverb threw upon the attitude of the ordinary executor I broke down.

"How do you know," I asked, "that I am not writing a really valuable work on the Zoo? A philosophical treatise on apes?"

"You're not, are you?" she asked. Naomi for all her shrewdness has a childlike belief in certain things that she hears. A child could pull her leg.

"No," I said; "I am not. But I had thoughts of playing a little at writing. Wouldn't that satisfy you?"

She did not thoroughly kindle to it. "I hope you will write, dear," she said; "but that is only play anyway. And what would you write?"

"Well," I said, "supposing I was to write a book about you?"

Naomi was indignant. "About me? How could I make a book?"

"Very well then," I replied; "about us."

"But we are so uninteresting," she said. "We're so ordinary. Besides, I don't think, dear, you have—have you?—quite the novelist's gifts."

"Perhaps not," I said, "but you mustn't be a reviewer before I've begun. Anyway, mightn't I play a little at being a novelist, just for fun? I asked advice from quite a good man the other day and he said: 'When in doubt, to describe your neighbours is perhaps the second-best piece of counsel that one can give.' And that's not so very difficult. Mightn't I try that?"

"I'd love you to," she said, "only I want you to do something."

Then I made use of a cowardly argument: "When one has worked and then can afford to retire, one ought not to keep others out of a job."

Naomi, bless her, has no patience with this kind of talk. "If work is good for the soul," she said, "as I believe, one must work and let the work of others be their own affair. A pretty pass we should come to if the good men abstained from work because by so doing they were giving the loafers a better chance of taking it if they felt so inclined! But I don't want you to make any money," she added. "Something honorary and useful."

"Such as?" I asked.

"We'll find it," she said.

Chance, as so often happens, took the matter into its hands and settled it; for an evening or so later we met at a party a gentleman who had given his life to the search for, and reproduction of, old English songs and dances, several of which were rendered by a troop of London girls that he brought with him, and these melodies were so simple and fresh and charming that, although no musician, I was completely captured. In conversation with him afterwards, we learned that he was in need of assistance in forming and managing a society for the systematic encouragement and performance of these things, and at Naomi's suggestion I offered my services. So I am now an honorary secretary, one of those bustling diplomatic persons whom reporters always describe as courteous and indefatigable.

The duties connected with the launching of this Society, together with such desultory private desk-work as it amuses me to do, ought to satisfy anyone. They convince me at any rate that no one is in such danger of overwork as that man of more or less amiable disposition who gives it out that he has retired.

I don't pretend to understand the full value of folk-music or to be able to distinguish between the mixolydian and the dorian mode, and so forth; but I do know this, that there are no sweeter songs for young voices, or merrier and more innocent measures for young feet, and that the more we can catch of the spirit of the early days when English music had these pure and happy characteristics the better for all of us.

A very little music is ordinarily enough for me; and though I do not say that an evening at the Opera, especially when the Russians are dancing, or an afternoon at Queen's Hall now and then, is not very welcome, I would not too often be found at either. Sophisticated self-conscious music makes me too old, and the world too old, and its enigmas too difficult, and all that is best too fugitive. But these ancient English songs of an unthinking peasantry do not trouble the waters; they make for joy.

It seems to me that essential melody never reached a more exquisite purity than in "Mowing the Barley," and I often wonder what Society would say if, without any warning, when they were all securely in their seats at the Opera, in their best clothes, and had finished ascertaining who their immediate neighbours were, and who occupied the boxes, the curtain rose, not upon the voluptuous passion of La Bohème, or the civilized ache of Louise, or the barbaric excesses of Scheherazade, but upon a company of youths and children and maidens singing this lovely song. After the first shock of surprise, anxious searching of influential countenances and bewildered references to the programme, might they not settle down to the profoundest content? And as song gave way to dance, and dance to song—"Blow away the Morning Dew" to "Laudnum Bunches," and "Dargason" to "The Keys of Heaven," and "I'm Seventeen come Sunday" to "Lord Rendal"—might they not experience a feeling wholly new in that building and wholly pleasurable? For there is nothing like a plunge into the simple life now and then.

And yet—I don't know. It might be dangerous. These songs are too fascinating: Mayfair would be decimated. There is one of them so infectious in its melody, so irresistible in its appeal, that it should be rigidly excluded from the programme. The Italian's La Bohème, which sets so many of our stately dames in a quiver, is quite safe compared with this concise English treatment of the same theme. For "The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies" has the very seeds of revolt and escape in it. Here is the first verse:

There were three gip-sies a-come to my door, And
down-stairs ran this a la dy, O!
    One sang high an an-oth-er sang low And the
oth er sang bon-ny, bon-ny Bis cay, O!

Then she pulled off her silk finished gown
And put on hose of leather, O!
The ragged, ragged rags about our door—
She's gone with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O.

It was late last night, when my lord came home,
Inquiring for his a-lady, O!
The servants said, on every hand:
"She's gone with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O."

There's a new version of La Bohème for you, and no less provocative! I do not hear Caruso in it; but Caruso is not all.

His lordship at last overtakes the rebel:

"What makes you leave your house and land?
What makes you leave your money, O?
What makes you leave your new wedded lord,
To go with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O?"

And what says she? She has heard the call of the road:

"What care I for my house and my land?
What care I for my money, O?
What care I for my new wedded lord?
I'm off with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O."

For the most part, however, these old English songs which we want to see popularized are less intoxicating. Their tunes are not those of the pied piper who would upset the family, but more serene and sweet, like the music of birds by a running stream. And the words are emotion remembered in tranquillity. This exquisite "Mowing the Barley," for example, is as artless a love-ballad as ever was written, in which the least romantic character in English life is transfigured into a hero. A lawyer, in short. I wonder that in the Temple they ever sing anything else, so proud should this ditty make them. It begins:

Law-yer he went out one day, A for to take his plea-sure, And
who should he spy but some fair pret-ty maid,
    So hand-some and so clev er? Where

are you go-ing to, my pret-ty maid,
    Where are you go-ing my hon ney? Go-ing
o-ver the hills, kind sir, she said,
    To my fa-ther a-mow-ing the bar ley

Rhymes, you see, don't matter much in our kind of song. We hate pedantry; and we hate everything that sets up the slightest obstacle between the singer and the listener.

The lawyer said no more that day, but the next he rode forth again, and though at first she gave him the slip (for she thought him like all lawyers, true to type) he

Caught her round the middle so small,
And on his horse he placed her.

The legal courting then began

"Hold up your cheeks, my fair pretty maid,
    Hold up your cheeks, my honey,
That I may give you a fair pretty kiss,
    And a handful of golden money."

The fair pretty maid at first refused, for she suspected the honesty of his intentions; but after he had talked a little more, and more ardently,

She quite forgot the barley field,
And left her father a-mowing.

And now—the end is perfect—

And now she is the Lawyer's wife,
And dearly the Lawyer loves her;
They live in a happy content of life,
And well in the station above her.

No one who has ever heard a company of fresh young voices lilting out this beautiful piece of rural idealism—for I take it that it is no small thing for a country girl to catch a lawyer, that terrible person who knows everyone's business and arranges for distraints and evictions as well as the making of wills and the lending of money—has ever known music at its very spring.

Such is "Mowing the Barley," which I always think our best song, but there is not one of the many hundreds which our indefatigable Director has collected and scored that has not a certain charm. And you can understand that I am proud to be able to help him in his organized effort to find still more, with new dances too, wherever they are still remembered, and to get enthusiasts to sing and dance them.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH WE FIND LOVERS OF TWO KINDS AND MEET WITH A POIGNANT INVENTION

"What we want," the Director said, "in particular, is young men and young women to be enthusiastic about these songs and dances and get them spread about;" and lunching with Naomi at her father's, and finding there Dollie Heathcote and with him the young woman to whom, after various flirtations with others, he has become engaged, I endeavoured to kindle them. But to little purpose. Dollie, like all young men with good education and no particular bent, is just now, having given up his mild liaison with the law, thinking of selling motor-cars, and to such a character folk-song and dance has no more attraction than a nut-food luncheon to a company promoter. His line of music is that purveyed at the Gaiety and the Halls; and all he would say in commendation of our simple pleasures was that if we could do anything half as good as "In the Shadows" we might count on him to whistle it. His fiancée, a Miss Ann Ingleside, was hardly more promising as regards the songs, but was quite willing to come to one of the dance classes and see if it was good enough fun to go on with; and that is something gained.

Why these young people should be engaged is not patent to the ordinary observer, for each seems to be an adept at independence, and they give no signs of tenderness or even affection. But among the leisured classes the devout lover has gone out. They were talking at lunch about the afternoon's plans. Dollie was for a matinee; Ann for a hockey final at Richmond. They were selfish enough to refuse each to give way to the other, but not sufficiently detached to wish to be alone. Such conflicts naturally end in victory for the stronger, since there is no spontaneous giving way, and of course that was Ann. So Heathcote had to forego his matinee. Personally I think I would like to see some colourable imitation of turtle-doving come in again. It was very silly, no doubt, for young couples to be so publicly fond, and yet it was rather pretty too; whereas the new ostentation of cool self-sufficiency can be almost ugly.

Yet there are still the profounder tendernesses. Let me tell you a story:

The man had become very ill—could hardly move from where he lay; and she, who loved him, and was to have married him, and spent all her waking hours in thinking what she could do for him, persuaded him to have a telephone installed and brought to his bedside so that he and she could talk, and he could talk with others, too. Every night he rang her up and they had a long conversation; many times in the day also. Nothing, as it happened, could have saved his life, but this modern device lightened his last weeks.

His death, although it blasted her hopes, made no difference to her devotion. She merely installed his memory in the place of his rich personality and loved that. He, almost more than ever, was her standard. What he would have liked, she did; what he would have disliked, she left undone. Although dead, he swayed her utterly; and under his dominion she was equable and gentle, although broken at heart. She took all things as they came, since how could anything matter now that everything that mattered was over?

One perplexity only had power to trouble her, and that was the wonder, the amazement, the horror, not only that so much knowledge and kindliness and sympathy and all that made for the world's good and happiness should be so wantonly extinguished; but that no touch of the vanished hand should be permitted to the one soul (now left behind) with whom his soul had been fused. This she could neither understand nor forgive. Religious she had never been in the ordinary sense, although such religion as must sway a true idealistic lover was hers; but now she broke even from such slender ties as had held her to orthodoxy. She threw off the creed of her parents as naturally and simply as if it were a borrowed garment, and sank into her sorrow, which was also her solace, without another thought of here or hereafter.

So it went on for a year or so, during which time his house had remained empty, save for a caretaker—for she (who was rich) could not bear that anyone else should live there—and his room exactly as he had died in it.

One evening she dined out. Her next neighbour on one side was a young American engineer, and in their conversation they came in time to the topic of invention and the curious aptitude for inventiveness shown by the American race. It was a case, said the engineer, of supply following demand: all Americans required time-and-labour-saving appliances, and they obtained them. Where servants abounded and there was no servant problem, as in England and on the Continent, the need for such contrivances was not acute. And so on. The conversation thus begun reached at last specific inventions, and the engineer told of a remarkable one which had come under his notice just before he left New York.

"You will probably not believe me," he said; "the thing sounds incredible; but then who would have believed once that there could be a telegraph, and still less a telephone? Who would have believed that the camera would ever be anything but a dream? I will tell you what this is. It is a machine in which you insert a portion, no matter how small, of a telephone wire, and by turning a handle you compel this piece of wire to give back every message that has ever passed over it."

She held her heart. "This really exists?" she forced herself to ask.

"Actually," said the engineer. "But when I left home the inventor was in a difficulty. All the messages were coming out all right, but backwards. Naturally the reproduction would be from the most recent to the less recent. By writing down the words and then reversing them the investigator could of course get at what he was wanting—I may say that the invention is for the New York police—but my friend is convinced that he can devise some mechanical system of reversing at the time which will make the messages read forward as they should. Just think of the excitement of the detective, listening through all the voices and ordinary conversations on the wire for the one voice and the one sentence that will give him his long-desired clue!—But are you ill?"

"No, no," she said, although her face was a ghastly white, "no; it is nothing. The room is a little hot. Tell me some more about your inventive friend. Is he wealthy?"

"Indeed, no," said the engineer. "That is his trouble. If he had more money, or if he had some rich backers who believed in him, he might do wonders."

"I should like to help him," she said. "This kind of work interests me. Could you not cable him to come over and bring the thing with him? I would gladly finance him. I want some sporting outlet like that for my money."

"Cable?"

"Yes, cable. There are things that one does by impulse or not at all. The butler here will get you a form."

It was a few weeks later that she went to the empty house with an employee of the telephone company, and they extracted a foot of the precious wire. That night she held it in her trembling fingers and placed it in the machine. Then she carefully locked the door and drew the heavy curtain over it and carried the machine to the farthest corner of the room. There, with a sigh of relief and tense and almost terrible anticipation, she sat down and placed her ear to the receiver and began to turn the handle.

His voice sounded at once: "Are you there?" It was quite clear, so clear and unmistakable and actual that her hand paused on the handle and she bowed her throbbing head. She turned on. "Are you there?" the familiar tones repeated. And then the reply, "Yes, who is it?" in a woman's voice. Then he spoke again. "Ernest," he said. "Is it Helen?" Again her hand paused. Helen—that rubbishy little woman he had known all his life and was on such good terms with. She remembered now that she had been away when the telephone was installed and others had talked on it before her. It could not be helped: she had meant to be the first, but circumstances prevented. There must be many conversations before she came to her own; she would have to listen to them all. She turned on, and the laughing, chaffing conversation with this foolish little Helen person repeated itself out of the past now so tragic.

To other talks with other friends, and now and then with a tradesman, she had to listen; but at last came her own.

"Is that you?" she heard her own voice saying, knowing it was her own rather by instinct than by hearing. "Is that you? But I know it is. How distinctly you speak!"

"Yes, it's me"—and his soft vibrant laugh.

"How are you, dear?"

"Better, I hope."

"Have you missed me?"

"Missed you!"

And then the endearments, the confidences, the hopes and fears, the plans for the morrow, the plans for all life. As she listened the tears ran down her face, but still she turned on and on. Sometimes he was so hopeful and bright, and again so despairing.

She remembered the occasion of every word. Once she had dined out and had gone to the theatre. It was an engagement she could not well refuse. It was an amusing play and she was in good spirits. She rang him up between the acts and found him depressed. Hurrying home, she had settled down to talk to him at her ease. How it all came back to her now.

"Are you there, my dearest?"

"Yes, but oh, so tired, so old!"

"It is a bad day. Everyone has been complaining of tiredness to-day."

"You say that because you are kind. Just to comfort me. It's no use. I can see so clearly sometimes, I shall never get well—to-night I know it."

"My darling, no."

And then silence—complete, terrifying.

She had rung up without effect. He had fainted, she thought, and had dropped the receiver. She was in a fever of agony. She leaped into a cab and drove to his house. The nurse reassured her; he had begun to sob and did not want her to know it, and now he was asleep.

But there was no sleep for her that night. What if he were right—if he really knew? In her heart she feared that he did; with the rest of her she fought that fear.

As she listened, the tears ran down her face, but still she turned on and on. She sat there for hours before the last words came, the last he was ever to speak over the wire.

It was to make an appointment. He had rallied wonderfully at the end and was confident of recovery. She was to bring her modiste to his room at eleven o'clock the next morning with her patterns, that he might help in choosing her new dress. He had insisted on it—the dress she was to wear on his first outing.

"At eleven," he had said. "Mind you don't forget. But then you never forget anything. Good night once more, my sweet."

"Good night."

She had never seen him again alive. He died before the morning.

She put the machine away and looked out of the window. The sun had risen. The sky was on fire with the promise of a beautiful day. Worn out, she fell asleep; to wake—to what? To such awakening as there is for those who never forget anything.

* * * * * * *

Every night found her bending over the machine. She had learned now when not to listen. She had timed the reproduction absolutely, and, watch in hand, she waited until the other messages were done, and her own voice began. There was no condensing possible; one must either each time have every conversation or stop it. But how could she stop it before the end?

Locking the door and drawing the heavy curtain, she would sit down in the far corner and begin to turn. She knew just how fast to turn for others; so slowly for herself. When the watch gave her the signal she would begin to listen.

"Is that you? Is that you? But I know it is. How distinctly you speak!"

"Yes, it's me"—and the soft vibrant laugh.

"How are you, dear?"

"Better, I hope."

"Have you missed me?"

"Missed you!"