Over Bemerton's

CHAPTER VI

MR. BEMERTON CONFERS UPON ME
THE FREEDOM OF HIS TREASURY

I took an early opportunity of visiting Mr. Bemerton and introducing myself: not a difficult task with the Chinese treasure as a lever, while the way had been, of course, further paved by Mrs. Duckie, who, like most London matrons of her class, could pave the way to anything.

Mr. Bemerton is a kind-looking man of about sixty, a bachelor. He is very short, clean-shaven, with silver-rimmed spectacles and white hair. An alert and contented man. He has been in the second-hand book business, he tells me, all his life, having begun as an errand boy at Sotheby's. He set up for himself thirty years ago, and has done well enough, never rising quite to a first folio nor descending much to remainders, but maintaining a steady mean between these two extremes. He has probably never read through a whole volume in his life; but he knows something about most. He has a knack of dipping which had he been born an author instead of a bookseller might have made his fortune as a popular scholar and even now would qualify him for a librarianship almost anywhere. Libraries, however, he does not much esteem. People should own their books, he holds; but that, of course, is a counsel of perfection, or would be were it not for the multitude of reprints that are now to be had at the price of a cigar.

Mr. Bemerton's only sign of impatience or intolerance is displayed when he is reminded by customers of the cheapness of the modern reprint; but I must do him the justice to explain that it is not for an instant the result of any commercial self-protection on his part, for his soul is without clay, but the genuine distaste of the born explorer for a well-mapped country. What can become of book-hunting, he asks, if everything is reprinted in uniform binding for a shilling or sixpence? He does not often make an epigram—his mind is too candid—but he came near it when he said the other day that the test of a good book was that it was not reprintable in any series. "Let us pray," he said, "that the best things continue to drop through this net."

How a man who can afford a few shillings can read in a modern mechanical reprint an old book still accessible in its stout original honest paper and clear print, with the good smell of years about it, he fails to understand. "Do you know," he says, "that most of the books published to-day—and all the cheap ones—will have perished in less than a hundred years? The paper will fall to pieces."

I should say that not the least interesting part of his shop is the case in which he keeps those books which are too good to be reprinted for a shilling. What are they? Not for anything would I divulge their titles; but we know, he and I. The time has come for book-lovers to keep secrets.

Mr. Bemerton has had his triumphs; but he does not want them. He wants to progress smoothly in the middle way. Yet he has discovered two or three valuable MSS. which brought him some hundreds of pounds from English collectors and would, had he been willing to sell them to America, have produced ten times as much: and among his regular customers was Mr. Gladstone, who, when he was at No. 10 Downing Street during his last term of office as Premier, often looked in and always found something. It was almost impossible for a book to carry no association for that swooping, pouncing brain. He either knew it, or knew of it, or had always wanted to know it.

It was Mr. Gladstone who made the suggestion to Mr. Bemerton that booksellers should open at night. "The time for second-hand book-shops," he said, "is after one's work, not during one's work. I should like to stroll round this way after the House rose, even in the small hours of the morning, and spend a quarter of an hour by your shelves. So would most of the Members of both Houses. It would pay you."

"If you will announce it, sir, in a speech, I will do so," said Mr. Bemerton, and the great man laughed.

The last book that Mr. Gladstone bought was Hartley Coleridge's Northern Worthies. "A good book," said he, "but it might have been better. Hartley would have written better had he been his father's grandson instead of son. He was too near."

Mr. Bemerton ventured to suggest that perhaps he was too near Wordsworth also. "Oh no," said Mr. Gladstone. "He parodied him, and once he stole a leg of mutton from his larder, for a joke. That shows that Wordsworth could do him no harm."

Mr. Gladstone is Mr. Bemerton's trump card, but he tells me that Carlyle came in once, but once only. He bought Evelyn's Life of Mrs. Godolphin in Pickering's edition—to give, he said, to a foolish young woman; and he arranged with Mr. Bemerton to have it bound with the editor's introduction omitted. Mr. Bemerton says that after leaving the shop Carlyle returned to make certain that his instructions were understood. "Be sure to cut out the pipe-lights!" were his exact words. Rather hard on Samuel of Oxford.

Another customer was Mr. Locker-Lampson, who liked books to be slender and pocketable, but whose taste was a little too fastidious for Mr. Bemerton's shelves. Mr. Bemerton treasures an autograph copy of Patchwork which its author sent him.

Mr. Bemerton is assisted by his niece, Miss Ruth Wagstaff, and, according to Mrs. Duckie, it is well that he is, for as he gets older and less anxious the bookseller grows more soft-hearted and (Miss Wagstaff's phrase) soft-headed. "Plenty of soft-heartedness and soft-headedness about her, I don't think," says Mrs. Duckie in the London sarcastic idiom. But this is not doing that young lady justice. Her heart and head are both good, but she feels a responsibility thrust upon her by reason of some of her uncle's unworldly tendencies, and this lays a consequent over-emphasis on her natural practical business aptitude.

I have always had a respect amounting almost to reverence for the name of Ruth, although none of that more intimate feeling which would lead me to wish it to belong to any of my own people; I have also always felt that among names which exert any influence upon their bearers, Ruth stood high. Ruths should be quiet, wise, sincere, and if not positively beautiful, at least comely and pleasant to look upon. Miss Wagstaff has shattered this poor little fabric of sentiment. Sincerity and candour she certainly has in some abundance, but she is not wise except with the destructive wisdom that London imparts to her children, and she is neither beautiful nor comely.

She sits at a little table surrounded by the best literature and reads penny novelettes, but her eyes and ears are never off duty. If a poor woman comes in to sell a book, Ruth is watchful to prevent Mr. Bemerton from giving too much. If a poor scholar comes in to buy one, she is equally alert to prevent Mr. Bemerton taking too little. At intervals she walks to the door to cast a glance at certain unprotected shelves or curtail the studies of the free readers. These are her despair: "They think it's a Carnegie library," she says with a toss. Some day I shall draw her attention to a little poem by Mary Lamb on this subject; but not yet. Courage may come.

The other member of the staff is Mr. Joshua Glendinning, who sits in a room in the basement for a week every month preparing Mr. Bemerton's catalogue. Mr. Glendinning is a British Museum Reading-Room hack who gets all kinds of odd jobs to keep him going, from copying sermons (on Fridays and Saturdays) to collating quoted passages in proofs and now and then correcting the Greek and Latin of a more fortunate but less scholarly literary man. He once, I learn, was not only a schoolmaster but had a flourishing school of his own; but the devil of intemperance, whose wiles for the overthrow of Christian reputations are permitted to conquer so easily, was too much for him, and he gradually and steadily lost all. The gentlest, simplest creature at heart, he now lives on a few pence a day in a Rowton House, wishes no man ill, save perhaps himself, carries a Times dated somewhen in 1893 protruding negligently from his pocket as if it were to-day's and he was a gentleman on his way to his stockbroker's (the harmless melancholy deception!) and sits every evening in the same corner of the same saloon bar tearfully imbibing gin and water and laying plans for the new career which will begin on the morrow.

"Then you don't want to sell me the Chinese book again?" said Mr. Bemerton, after we had exchanged a few generalities.

"No," I said, "certainly not;" and from Miss Wagstaff's table I heard what sounded like a sarcastic sniff deprecative of her uncle's insanity in suggesting such a transaction.

"Mrs. Duckie," said Mr. Bemerton, "tells me that you sleep badly. If there are any books here that you would like to keep by your bed, you are welcome to them. The only thing is, we should like to have them back in the morning." (So Naomi was among the prophetesses after all!)

I accepted the offer cheerfully and promised that the daily restoration should be my first thought.

"For night reading," said Mr. Bemerton, "it was Mr. Lecky's theory—Mr. Lecky often came in—that books should be very nearly dull. But it's not very easy to find exactly the right thing."

"What would you call a nearly dull book?" I asked.

He looked round for awhile. "This," he said at last, and he brought me a volume of Nichols' Literary Anecdotes. "It's good and sound, and now and then it's amusing, but it's often very small beer. There isn't a better bed book—or wouldn't be if only it was a little lighter to hold. The curious thing about it is that it is the one case known to me of an original book the best of which is all in the footnotes. You take a volume and try."

The world is very small; the mistake is, of course, ever to have thought it large. While Mr. Bemerton was talking to another customer, and I was at his shelves making my hands very grubby (as only old books can) and my eyes very glad (as old books can almost more surely than anything else), I noticed the address on a parcel which Ern had just finished packing—Miss Gold, The Cedars, Esher.

"Is Miss Gold one of your customers?" I asked.

"Miss Gold," said Mr. Bemerton, "is my best customer. She buys something from every catalogue, which is sent to her one post earlier than any one else. Do you know her?"

Do I know her? Miss Gold and I were once very nearly...

How long ago that was, and how different my life might have been! And now? I must certainly at once go to Esher to see her again.

CHAPTER VII

RECALLS OLD STRUGGLES IN THE EARLY DAYS OF GRACE AND INTRODUCES A TYRANT FROM LUDLOW

On Easter Monday I went with Alderley and Naomi to see Lionel play for a mixed team against Surrey. It was the first match of the year and bitterly cold, but to watch real cricket again was an inducement that would have led me to brave any temperature. For—think of it!—it was my first match since the Gentlemen v. Players at Prince's in 1874 when the Gentlemen won by 61 runs. Thirty-four years ago! I was then twenty-four, and I went with my brother Tom and saw every ball bowled.

Thirty-four years ago, I say, and yet what is that? To me it has been a lifetime; but what has it been to that huge man with the iron-grey beard? I had read his name in the papers as being among the players, and Lionel had shown me his letter inviting him to be one of the team; and yet it needed ocular testimony to believe that this was W.G.—that the W.G. I saw make 110 at Prince's in that 1874 match was still active in the field. "'Time has run back,'" I quoted to Lionel, "'and fetched the Age of Gold';" but he was not listening. Milton is not much in his line.

All the Gentlemen v. Players matches were days of Grace at that time. At Prince's, I remember, G.F. came off in the first innings—93 not out. How we all hoped that Strachan would keep his end up to let him get the hundred, which meant more than it does to-day and was not yet called a century; but it was not to be. Then came Ross, but Alfred Shaw caught and bowled him at once, and G.F.'s chance was over. If was G.F. who in the second innings (when W.G. made his 110) caused an odd bit of trouble. Old Jim Lillywhite was bowling, with his beautiful easy delivery—just a brief trot to the wicket and a gentle natural swing of his left arm. Well, he sent up a ball to G.F., who put it tamely back right to the bowler's hands, or what would have been right to his hands had not W.G. intervened. W.G.'s intervention did not mean then quite what it would to-day: he was not then so wide as a church door, but he was enough; and before Jim could get round the obstacle the ball was out of danger. Poor Lillywhite, with G.F.'s 93 not out only too present to his mind, appealed first to one umpire and then the other, but both held that W.G. was not to blame: he had not aggravated his offence of bulk by any conscious action. The Players didn't like the decision at all, but G.F. made only 12, and the match was lost without even those runs.

The Players' strongest men were Harry Jupp, Harry Charlwood, Shaw, and Morley. Daft also was playing, but he made only 21. Charlwood, the Sussex man, came out top scorer with 85, not a few of them made by a stroke which seems to have utterly died away since then—a glance under the left leg. He was very good at it, the little, active, mutton-chop-whiskered fellow.

My very first Gentlemen v. Players match was in 1868. It was at Lord's, and W.G. was playing then too. He only made 134 not out, but it sufficed. People, I understand, go to see individual cricketers now, but there can never since—not even in Ranjitsinhji's best days (which I missed)—have been such excitement and enthusiasm among the watchers of the cricket skies as in the late sixties and early seventies in W.G.'s first decade. The Gentlemen's innings at the Lord's match in 1868 was a sufficient indication of the place in which this stripling of nineteen, a year older than I was, stood even then—for his "hand" (as a few old-fashioned persons still called a score) was 134 not out, and the whole side made only 201.

It was W.G., too, who took the Players' wickets—6 in the first innings for 50 runs and 4 in the second for 31. He is not bowling much now, and he has come to field in the way that provokes a good-natured cheer from the crowd after every stopped ball; but the shining fact remains that here he is still, in the cricket field, an active man.

As I watched him I had to rub my eyes; for it seemed as if all my years of exile, all my absurd conscientious attention to duty in that far-off alien land, had been a dream.

What has happened in the interval? Everything has happened. The Franco-Prussian war; the death of Dickens; the re-establishment of the French Republic; the bombardment of Alexandria; the rise of the Salvation Army; the Boer war; Stevenson, Whistler and Kipling; the Daily Mail; the assassination of Kings and Queens and Presidents; the destruction of San Francisco. And all the while W.G. has been playing cricket.

After 1868 I saw every Gentlemen v. Players match but two until I went to Buenos Ayres at the beginning of 1875—in which time the Players won only once. I saw I.D. Walker make his 165 at the Oval in 1868. At Lord's in the following year I saw W.G.'s hit for 7 off Wootton, no longer possible there except with an overthrow, and I.D.'s 71; and I remember what a hard nut to crack Jupp was in the second innings. Poor Yardley, who afterwards wrote burlesques, came into the match that year.

But the 1870 match at the Oval was the great one, for that was when G.F. first played, and though he got spectacles, he took altogether 8 wickets for 46 runs, and W.G. made his 215 in the second innings. As it happened, it was too many, for it meant a draw; but what a feat it was!

Two days later, on his twenty-second birthday, at Lord's, he made 109. That was the closest match I ever saw, the Gentlemen, who went all to pieces in their second innings before old Jim Southerton and Farrands, winning by only 4 runs.

In 1871 at Lord's there was a draw again. W.G. and Hornby and Yardley and Alfred Lubbock all did well, but Ephraim Lockwood for the Players did best of all. This was the match in which George Freeman took three wickets in four balls.

I missed the Oval match that year, and alas! I was not at Brighton to see W.G. make his 217 for the Nonpareil's benefit; but I was at Lord's in 1872 again, when the champion was on hand with 77 and 112 and Daft made a superb 102 in the Players' second innings. W.G. was again in form on the next day, at the Oval, making 117, while Hornby and Yardley put on 163 between them.

The next year at Lord's the Gentlemen won almost too easily—by an innings and runs, W.G. contributing 163, while at the Oval the same thing happened again, his share then being 158 and 7 wickets for 65.

In those days you were almost as certain to see the champion come off as you now are to see an advertised actor perform. He stood aside from the glorious uncertainty of the game.

That year, 1873, gave us three matches, an extra one being arranged at Prince's, at which the Gentlemen again won by an innings and runs, W.G. making 870 and the impayable "Monkey" 104 (without running any one out, too,) and G.F. 63. Tom Emmett, I remember, bowled at the very top of his comic energies, and he made 32 in the second innings; but Grace and the influence of Grace were too much.

The next year, 1874, at the Oval W.G. was more restrained, but his countryman, Frank Townsend, made 59 and G.F. 28 and 47, and the "Monkey" 18 and 45, and all was well. Ephraim Lockwood carried his bat right through the Players' innings for 67, and in the second innings put on a hundred with Jupp before they were parted; but after that Absolom and Buchanan began to see daylight, and the Gentlemen won by 48 runs. Two days later, however, at the Oval the Players won for the first time since 1866, Lockwood again playing beautifully. I recall his cutting as wonderful. W.G. made 48 and 12, the "Monkey" 63, and G.F. 22 and 36. In the second innings our blood ran cold as Hill got Ridley, the "Monkey," and I.D. Walker with successive balls. It was that miracle which won the match.

And then came my Prince's match that I spoke of first, and my day of watching first-class cricket was done. These were the only matches I allowed myself; for the rest, I was busy at work or playing village cricket at home.

And now here I am with the prospect of more Gentlemen v. Players matches (which are the best of all) before me. It is almost too much. Such happiness seems unrealisable: once again I have the old school feeling—more than feeling, prescience—that the end of the world will come before the holidays.

Lionel did pretty well, but it was bad cricket weather, for there was a snow-laden wind which numbed the fingers. It was, however, a start: a new cricket season had begun.

I have since seen the Gentlemen v. Players of 1908, and I am disappointed. It was not so much the inferior cricket of the Gentlemen that troubled me: I would as soon see the Players win; it was the spirit of the Gentlemen that distressed me, or rather the want of it. Gentlemen they may be in name and even station, but they no longer play like gentlemen; they play like overworked artisans. Anxiety and boredom have crept into cricket. The Gentlemen as I remember them took the field joyously and cut a dash. It was their pride to let no ball pass them. The Gentlemen to-day are listless and without jokes—almost without personality. They have no Grace and, even more conspicuously perhaps, no "Monkey." It comes, I fancy, very largely from playing too much. What was once a game is now a calling; and a calling which involves of necessity so much disappointment and so much idleness (while waiting first for one's own innings and then for the other innings of one's side to finish, to say nothing of rain,) must lead to a certain amount of cynicism and saturnine fatalism.

I don't think that cricket as a whole has improved in these thirty years. Batting, perhaps, is nearer perfection; but it is far less interesting. The first-class game seems to know three strokes only—the late cut, the off drive, and the leg glance: all good, and it is astonishing how many batsmen can make them; but I would like to see more hitting, in the old style, where fieldsmen are not. In my time the fieldsmen did not exert such a magnetic influence over the ball as they now do, attracting it for the most part straight to their hands.

Bowling, I think, is not so good as it was. Too much dependence has been placed on the fast bumping men and five slips, and the result is a loss in the more delicate finesse that was so attractive when I was young—the finesse of Shaw and Southerton, and Jim Lillywhite, and later, as I have been told, of Lohmann and Peel and Briggs.

But the pendulum is always swinging, and personality knows no law and may appear at any moment; so I do not despair. And it will always be the best of games.

In the evening after Lionel's match I found Queen Anne's Gate in despair. The annual visit of old Mrs. Wynne—Grandmamma, as she is called, for Margaret's mother (my stepmother) long since gave up all rivalry in the title—the annual visit of Mrs. Wynne has been fixed for next month.

Every one dreads this yearly fortnight of best behaviour, but does not say so for fear of Alderley overhearing. As for Alderley, he looks forward to his mother's visit with what appears to be the keenest anticipation, but it has been remarked by the family that never does he have so many public and legal dinners as during its progress. His heartiness at breakfast is, however, unbearable, Drusilla says.

Old Mrs. Wynne, who is nearing eighty, if not quite that age, holds decided views on the decadence of modern life, cannot forgive the Queen Anne's Gate celibacy, and has so capricious a memory that while remembering clearly incidents of the dim past she is often unaware that she is saying now what she said with equal solemnity five minutes earlier.

Her convictions and foibles, added to her tireless activity,—eighty years sitting more lightly on her shoulders than forty on those of many persons,—make her a formidable visitor, especially to Drusilla, who, being her favourite, has always to be in attendance. What this means to that impatient young rebel may be instantly understood when it is stated that Grandmamma's first excitement after she is comfortably settled under her son's roof is to visit the Royal Academy and, catalogue in hand, conscientiously look at every picture long enough at any rate to decide whether or not it merits a pencil mark. When it is added that Grandmamma's taste is governed wholly by sentiment, that Drusilla is at the Slade, and that the visit lasts four hours early in May, the extent of the poor girl's sufferings may be gauged.

Being a happy old lady, Grandmamma says more of the pictures that she likes than of those that displease her; but it is on record in the family that, standing before one of Mr. Sargent's masterpieces, she was heard by the whole room to exclaim, "My dear, never let that man paint me!" her idea apparently being that Mr. Sargent pursued his quarry rather in the desperate way that an Italian gunner pursues little birds than was over besought. Drusilla promised.

CHAPTER VIII

I MEET AN OLD FRIEND AND RECEIVE
A LESSON IN PHILOSOPHY

It was not so easy to run down to Esher to see Miss Gold. Cowardice intervened. It requires not a little courage for a naturally diffident and sympathetic person to renew a friendship that thirty years ago was in danger of becoming the closest of all intimacies between a man and a woman.

Miss Gold—Agnes, as I called her—was then a girl of twenty-one or two, and I fancy that people were beginning to join our names. We were together a great deal; her society gave me extraordinary pleasure, for she had a natural frankness and shrewdness and was intellectually a rebel. To be a rebel then was, for a girl, very exceptional. Also she danced beautifully and so masterfully as to make me as a partner cut some kind of a figure, which no other woman could do, and she liked me enough to give me three or four dances every evening. Our last meeting was at a party in Hyde Park Street, I remember, on the last night of the year 1874—and I held her hand for a few moments longer than I should. I did not mean anything by it but affection. It was one of those sudden impulses to convince persons that you like them very much or feel for them very much; but I believe it meant more to her. I often regretted it, and never so much as when I heard of her accident.

Her accident! She was intensely fond of horses, and rode every morning. I have seen her in the Row many a time and envied the men with her their power to afford a horse. One day, when she was still a mere girl, soon after I left England, she was thrown, and has never stood upright since. She is carried from her bed to a couch and from her couch to bed. That is her life, and has been these thirty years.

I can assure you that I (who am still vigorous and last saw her dancing) dreaded the visit. To see Miss Gold again was for long an unbearable thought, for I possess little of that fortitude in bearing other persons' calamities that La Rochefoucauld attributed to the world at large.

But I made up my mind at last, and Naomi accompanied me to a flower shop to buy some flowers as an offering.

It was then that I made a discovery of my own with regard to the changes that have come upon England, for, looking round the florist's, I suddenly realised the vast increase not only in interest in flowers but in the variety of flowers that has been witnessed by the thirty years and more that I have been abroad. Where can it lead? I have wondered often since, after luxurious travels amid nursery gardens and Temple marquees? Take, for example, daffodils. In my youth there were daffodils too—but they were in two varieties only, the double and the single. That was all. To-day there must be hundreds, all beautiful and all named. In my day they were not grown among grass as now they are: there was no encouragement of wild exuberance as one now sees. No one said, "How sweet Sir Watkin looks under the trees!" How could they, for Sir Watkin had not been evolved.

I wish, by the way, that some one would call a flower after me. I should feel that indeed I had lived to some purpose could I, even from my death-bed, raise a weary head and, straining my poor, exhausted, failing auditories, catch the words, "How luxuriantly the Kent Falconers bloom this year!" Thus hearing I could die in peace.

And the anemone. That is a totally new discovery. I saw for fourpence bunches of anemones of a deep purple such as was never heard of in my time. And tulips are even more wonderful. We had tulips, of course, but they were the flaunting type. The new tulips can burn too, but also how sweet and grave they can be; and again, how cheery and courageous! But most of the new colours are wonderful. Sweet-peas we used to call merely sweet-peas and grow for scent: to-day the sweet-pea has a thousand names and colours, and every year, I am told, new and exquisite hues find expression in its butterfly bloom. The delphinium again is a magical revelation. I seem to remember something dingily like it—a larkspur we called it—but that this flower should ever adventure so gently up and down the scale of blue into the tenderest melodies—who would have expected that? The delphinium seems to me the perfect flower against or under a grey sky. It is not till the sun has left that it comes to its delicate own. I like to think of all the care and thought that the great florists have been spending during my absence to evolve this lovely apparition against my return.

Naomi tells me that gardening has become as fashionable as motoring, and England surely is very fortunate in this pretty hobby, although it hurts me a little not only to think of what I missed by being born too soon, but also to have such difficulty in finding some of my old favourites. The Sweet William, for example, eludes me in garden after garden, and mignonette I no longer smell. In our garden at home, before artistic gardening was heard of, these were grown profusely. The only flower in which I see no improvement is the rose. No doubt there are beautiful new roses; but all my favourites are the old ones, and I do not find that the new roses smell as sweet. The cabbage rose remains the most satisfying of all.

Miss Gold lives in a large and cheerful Georgian house. Her sitting-room is on the ground floor, with high French windows uniting it to the lawn. Like so many invalids, she is far less susceptible to cold than most of us, and she lies there with the windows open most of the time. On fine days she is wheeled into the garden itself or into the paddock. All the pretty apparatus for ingratiating human beings with birds is to be seen in the garden—the bath and the nest boxes and the cocoanut for the tits. This means, of course, the privation of a cat; but instead of a cat Miss Gold keeps several dogs, with a King Charles spaniel as the most privileged, and in the paddock she has a home of rest for old horses.

The garden is very full of flowers—so full that I might well have bought something else with my money—and it has also two large cedars, beneath which her wheeled couch often stands.

Very nervously did I ring Miss Gold's bell; but, as is usual in this life, I found the realisation of the visit far easier than the anticipation. The little lady was brave enough for two. "My dear Kent," she said, after a little while, "you must not come and see me if you are going to look so sad. I want you to come often: you will do me so much good. But it is quite useless if you have such a mournful expression. What is it after all? I am very happy lying here. I have many kind friends. The garden is so wonderful always, and I have a gardener who is also an invaluable companion and never wants to make a rustic fence. The birds trust me: there is a robin that comes right into the room and will do so until he is a month or so older and has been told more about man's nature. I have letters every morning, and my eyes are so good that I can read and write all day if I like. As for death, my dear Kent, we must not be so frightened of it. I have grown to think of death without any fear or shuddering. After all, if I live to be eighty, my life on my eightieth birthday will be as much behind me as a child's of five. It is only to-day that we live for—to-day and to-morrow. No one dares to look much more forward than that. The past is so completely over that in a kind of way one life may be said to be as long as another."

I did my best to be equally optimistic, and quoted an old epigram of my friend Trist's to the effect that every birth certificate is in a manner of speaking a death warrant.

Miss Gold liked that. "And another thing," she said: "considering how uncertain is life and how many fatal accidents occur every day, it is illogical to be cheerful with every one else, and pull a long face when you come to see me. Because I may be lying on this couch in ten years' time just as I am to-day; whereas one of your strong, healthy friends with whom you dine to-night may be knocked down and killed by a motor car to-morrow morning. No, Kent, with me you must be gay."

I so far fell into her humour as to tell her about one or two of Mr. Giles's Chinese heroes, whose quiet acceptance of death is perhaps their most astonishing characteristic to a Western reader—the characteristic which most differentiates them from ourselves, who cling to life more passionately with each generation. I told her of the death of Wang Ching-wên of the fifth century A.D., who one evening, as he was playing chess with a friend, received orders to commit suicide. "After having read the Imperial mandate, he finished his game and put the board away. A bowl of poison was brought to him; and then turning to his friend he remarked jestingly, 'I am afraid I cannot ask you to join me!' and quietly drained the bowl."

"That is the way," said Miss Gold; "but it certainly is not English."

I told her also of the death of Hsieh Chiu-chēng, whose was perhaps the most ludicrously ironical end on record, since it came "from poisoning himself with a compound which he fancied was the Elixir of Life."

Miss Gold asked me if any women were included in the book. There are, of course, a few, but China is not a woman's country. One is Liu Shih, the wife of an official at Court, who also had dealings with the cup. The Emperor one day sent her "a potion which he commanded her to drink, and which he said would cause instant death if she was jealous; adding that if she was not jealous she need not drink it. Without hesitation she drank it off, saying that death would be preferable to such a life."

Another Chinese lady is Li Fu-jen of the second century B.C., who was so beautiful that "one glance of hers," said a poet, "would destroy a City, two glances a State." Li Fu-jen, however, lived for pleasure; more heroic was Li Hsien, who, finding that she fascinated a student named Chêng Yüan-ho to such an extent that he began to neglect his career, she tore out her eyes: "after which," says the historian, "her lover rapidly rose to distinction." But—and here comes in the surprise to the Western reader accustomed to think of the Chinese as monsters of impassive selfishness—after he had achieved distinction he married her, all sightless as she was. Isn't that a pretty story?

To my mind, one of the most agreeable girls in the book is the sarcastic waiting-maid who rebuked the meanness of Táo Ku. "On one occasion he bade a newly purchased waiting-maid get some snow and make tea in honour of the Feast of Lanterns, asking, somewhat pompously, 'Was that the custom in your old home?' 'Oh no,' the girl replied; 'they were a rough lot. They just put up a gold-splashed awning, and had a little music and some old wine.'"

We talked also of the Wynnes, and Miss Gold made me promise to bring Naomi to see her, and she asked also if I would bring Trist, whom neither of us had seen since the early seventies, but who was in those days my inseparable friend and very attractive also to her. She was greatly amused by my discovery of her name at Bemerton's and the chance which had taken me to live over her favourite bookseller's shop. But in Mr. Dabney she was even more interested.

"How extraordinary to think he should be in the same house," she said. "There is no journalist whom I follow so closely. He has a fearless mind and a hatred of injustice. Do you like him?"

"Well, he compels attention," I said, "but he is a little too near white heat for me."

"If he were cooler," said Miss Gold, "he would probably be tolerant—like you—and then he would be no use. There is so much comfortable tolerance to-day, so little anger. I hope he will go on being angry."

"He will," I said.

CHAPTER IX

HOW MRS. FRANK TRIED HER INNOCENT GAMES ON ONE OF THE GREAT ONES OF THE EARTH

There is a most amusing article in this week's Balance on the Scold and her place in mediæval life. The writer had seen a ducking-chair somewhere, and had been led by it to a series of reflections on the Scold and, what is perhaps more interesting, the Scold's husband.

It is a topic on which we are very ill informed, and the fancy has a free field. What, he asked, was the husband doing while his wife was being corrected? Was he a spectator or an absentee? Was he proud—a kind of inverted hero—or was he ashamed? Had he not more probably a very lively sense of what was in store for him at night and was he not nerving himself for the fray in the inn parlour?

The writer then went on to consider the homecoming of the Scold: wet through certainly, but was she penitent? Did she scold no more? Is any one ever cured? The home-coming of the husband, he suggested, would be later. And so forth.

Meeting Mr. Dabney on the stairs, I mentioned the article and asked him who wrote it. He said it was written by a young fellow named Wynne—Frank Wynne. Isn't that odd? I knew Frank for an amusing embroiderer, but I never thought of him having so much humour as that.

He and his wife being at Queen Anne's Gate to dinner, I congratulated him.

"How did you know I wrote it?" he asked; and I told him about Mr. Dabney. "By the way," I added to Naomi, "that proves my prophecy. Don't you remember my saying that Mr. Dabney and I would find we had a common friend; and it turns out to be Frank."

Frank, however, denied that he knew him: his connection with the paper was the result of correspondence, and so I said I would bring Mr. Dabney to Barton Street to tea and they should then meet.

"But isn't he very fierce?" asked Mrs. Frank, thinking, I am sure, of the twins.

"You must tame him," I said.

She certainly tried.

Never was there such a tea. Mrs. Frank must have lain awake half the night meditating upon the attack, for this was her first editor, and was she not a young journalist's wife? (Such a chance.) In her original scheme were hot cakes and cold, muffins and crumpets, brown bread and white, jam and marmalade; but she had a doubt and put it to Frank.

"Isn't there a danger," she said, "that he may think we're too well off already?"

Frank thought there might. So the muffins went and the other hot cakes and the marmalade.

"And what about my dress?" she said. "I should like to wear the red one, but it does look a little bit expensive."

"It's very beautiful," said Frank.

"Don't you like the purple one, then?" she asked anxiously.

"Of course I do: they're both beautiful."

"Well, which shall it be?"

"Why not the red dress and leave off all your rings but the wedding ring?"

And so did these Machiavellian babes arrange it.

They might have saved themselves their trouble, for Mr. Dabney is one of those persons who carry their environment with them. He ate his tea nobly, but he could not have said afterwards what he consumed: it was all cake to him, or all bread-and-butter, such is the activity of his mind.

Mrs. Frank was adorable: she talked her best talk and, her fears allayed, sent for the twins, whom Mr. Dabney inspected with a most admirable show of interest, although at any moment I felt he might remark that one or the other was too long and would be better with twenty lines cut out.

He arranged for some articles with Frank, and then left. Mrs. Frank was very happy, but I doubt if her innocent and loyal strategy had anything to do with it. Still, it is very pretty to see a young wife working for her husband.

"Frank is a dear," Mrs. Frank said to me later, "but really he is a little too casual about refusing work. The Balance only takes two articles a week, which doesn't pay for more than nurse and our dinners, but nothing will induce him to write for other papers unless he likes them."

"O si sic omnes!" I said.

"What does that mean?" she asked coldly. "I have an uncle who talks like that."

"I'm very sorry," I said, "I won't do it again. It means that I wish all the other journalists were like Frank. Then we should have some decent honest papers."

"Oh yes," she said, "but really one can be too nice and fastidious. What about the twins? I wanted them to go to Eton. And he won't write a play either," she continued. "That's the way to make money, and it's so easy. We go to the theatre pretty often, and I never see anything that Frank couldn't have done better. All you have to do is to make people say foolish things in nice clothes. But Frank says he couldn't. He says it's a special gift, and he hates the stage. He won't even try."

"Frank's all right," I said; "he's finding himself. You mustn't hurry him."

"There are so many things we want," she replied. "You don't know."

"I'm afraid you're a bad woman," I said. "You should believe more in the ravens. Young journalists and young journalists' wives ought not to be rich. If you talk like this I shall begin to think you have made a mistake and ought really to have married a stockbroker."

As a matter of fact, Frank is doing quite well enough. His name is getting to be known for delicate work, and he is in the way of making four or five hundred a year already. That is plenty. But you might as well pour Chateau Yquem into the Thames as tell a young wife that she would be less happy with more money.

Frank, however, does not let it worry him, but goes smiling through the world, elaborating his little humorous fancies, building up little literary lyrics, and writing reviews and so forth; and there is probably no great danger in Mrs. Frank's covetousness. But I wish she wouldn't.

I don't know that I blame her, for the air is so full of cupidity nowadays that it is taken in through the pores unless you watch yourself very carefully. She is otherwise a rational little woman, of no great force of character but plenty of cheerfulness and loyalty, who has in reality one of the serenest of lives, for the twins are no more trouble than they ought to be to supply their mother with congenial topics of conversation and that leaven of anxiety that keeps mothers happy, and Mrs. Frank's mother and Frank's mother vie with each other in showering little presents on the household, and Naomi is continually looking in with her dear sunny face.

Let Mrs. Frank be happy while she can. Some day her husband will be offered £1000 a year to edit a paper, and a literary peeress will take them up, and that will be the end.

I find that Frank has been selling his review copies to Mr. Bemerton for a long time, and they are old friends. I met him there recently on the search for second-hand copies of the collected poems of one of the older living poets, having had a commission from an editor to prepare his obituary notice against the dread summons. I had not given much thought to this branch of journalistic industry, but of course now that I think of it I see that the pigeon-holes of Fleet Street must be full of these anticipatory articles which only need occasional revision to date to be all ready when the scythe is finally sharpened. To meet an editor must be for a thoughtful celebrity as chilling as the spectacle of the mummy at the Egyptian banquet.

Frank tells me that the practice on one of the papers for which he is engaged is to withhold payment until the article is used. "This," he says, "is all very well so long as one is flush. But if one were broke just think of what one might be tempted to do, for I see Blank [his poetical victim] at the Museum continually, and could easily poison his soup at the Vienna Café."

"Poets," Frank said to me one day, "ought to have some common fund from which they might borrow for sustenance without shame—some Pactolian spring into which to dip their cups. You know those ingenious contribution boxes invented by Mr. Sidney Holland, which invite you to drop in a penny and by so doing maintain the London Hospital for one second—a dial indicating the passage of your own pennyworth of time as you do so. Well, I thought once of adopting this plan, and calling upon the public to drop in a penny and thus maintain me. 'A penny keeps a poet for half an hour,' it might have said."

"Apropos of poets," said I, "come upstairs and I will show you a book." I need hardly say what the book was.

I delighted Frank immensely by reading him the passage describing the ruse to which Ch'ēn Tzu-ang the poet resorted in order to win recognition.

"Proceeding to the capital he purchased a very expensive guitar which had been for a long time on sale, and then let it be known that on the following day he would perform upon it in public. This attracted a large crowd; but when Ch'ēn arrived he informed his auditors that he had something in his pocket worth much more than the guitar. Thereupon he dashed the instrument into a thousand pieces, and forthwith began handing round copies of his own writings."

Like every one else who sees this fascinating volume, Frank was wild for more, and I read him excerpts from the lives of other poets—not better than Dr. Samuel Johnson's, but more concise and freakish. Such as Wang Po, a poet of the seventh century A.D., who began as a statesman, but on being dismissed from office for satirising the cock-fighting propensities of the Imperial princes, filled up his leisure by composing verses.

"He never meditated upon these beforehand, but after having prepared a quantity of ink ready for use, he would drink himself tipsy and lie down with his face covered up. On waking, he would seize his pen and write off verses, not a word of which needed to be changed; whence he acquired the sobriquet of Belly-draft."

Liu Ling, another poet, and one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grave, was also a hard drinker and a man of infinite humour. It was he who declared that "'to a drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as so much duckweed in a river.' He wished to be always accompanied by a servant with wine, and followed by another with a spade, so that he might be buried where he fell. On one occasion, yielding to the entreaties of his wife, he promised to 'swear off,' and bade her prepare the usual sacrifices of wine and meat. When all was ready, he prayed, saying, 'O God, who didst give to Liu Ling a reputation through wine, he being able to consume a gallon at a sitting and requiring a quart to sober him again, listen not to the words of his wife, for she speaketh not truth.' Thereupon he drank up the sacrificial wine, and was soon as drunk as ever."

A tenderer genius was Chēng Ku, of the ninth century A.D., who "said that no one should sing his Song of the Partridge in the presence of Southerners, as it made them think sadly of their far-off homes."

Li Po, founder of the coterie known as the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup (having got his hand in as a club-maker by forming, some years earlier, the hard-drinking company known as the Six Idlers of the Bamboo Brook), should certainly be better known in a country where the sanction of an illustrious wine-bibber—a Burns or an Omar—is so necessary to literary convivialists. The mother of Li Po, who roystered and revelled in the eighth century A.D., dreamed just before his birth of the planet Venus. The boy was therefore a poet at ten years of age, and a great swordsman very soon after.

About A.D. 742 he reached Ch'ang-an. The Emperor "was charmed with his verses, prepared a bowl of soup for him with his own hands, and at once appointed him to the Han-liu College." Later, "with a lady of the Seraglio to hold his ink-slab, he dashed off some of his most impassioned lines; at which the Emperor was so overcome that he made the powerful eunuch Kao Li-shih go down on his knees and pull off the poet's boots." Kao's desire for revenge made it necessary for Li Po to leave the court, which he did with seven companions, and they are now known collectively as the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. He met his death, characteristically, by drowning, "from leaning one night over the edge of the boat, in a drunken effort to embrace the reflection of the moon."

Li Po had no monopoly of such ends. Fu I, another poet and the originator of epitaphs, was of the same mettle. His own epitaph, which he composed with accurate foresight, runs thus—

"Fu I loved the green hills and the white clouds,
                Alas! he died of drink."

"Very different from our reputed Laureate," Frank remarked, adding, "I wish you'd lend me that book."

"For why?" I replied. "To write about it?"

He admitted the weakness.

"No," I said with startling decision. "No."

CHAPTER X

A HERO-WORSHIPPER AGAIN GLIMPSES
HIS HERO, AFTER MANY YEARS

To look up Trist was, I knew, both necessary and desirable, and yet I dreaded it too. Not quite as I had dreaded the visit to Esher, but as a duty to be put off. Why? For we had been great friends; more, he had been my exemplar, my model. His year or two of seniority, his flair for civilisation, as I might call it, had set him in the position of mentor. I had been rather at his feet than by his side. That was thirty and more years ago; and now, ... do you understand?

In the days when Trist and I shared rooms, I was in the City and he sub-edited an evening paper. He was fresh from Oxford, wealthy, contemptuous, and gay; he took his duties very lightly, but was an admirable man for the post, and did much to establish the paper's reputation on the humorous side.

Although I could not afford it, I went to the same tailor and hosier; I smoked the same brand, which was then a simple thing to do, for it was before the second discovery of tobacco, so to speak, when there were few mixtures, and no "Pioneers of the Smoking World," and it was possible to walk twenty yards along a street and not pass three tobacconists. I am not naturally a hero-worshipper, but Trist found me at an impressionable age and he filled an empty space. I had better have been in love, no doubt, but that was not my way.

Soon after I had left England he threw up journalism, travelled, then did some political private-secretarial work and so forth, and as relation after relation died and left him money he gradually became a connoisseur of life and nothing else, and settled down in Gray's Inn, permanently, with his floating population of fifty pairs of perfect trousers, a profile glass, and an invaluable man.

In Buenos Ayres I had written to Trist now and then, and he to me: enough to inform each other that the end was not yet, but little more.

I continued to put off the call as long as I could. There is something very perilous in the resumption of intercourse after many years, especially when the man you are going to see was once your hero. Heroes do not wear well, and it is a question whether they are less heroic to their valets who see them continually or to old admirers who have acquired thirty years of experience since they saw them last. I was going, I felt, to see Trist with very clear eyes, and I did not want to. I am absurdly fond of the past.

Few friendships, I suppose, wear honestly through a long life. The friends do not progress equally; one matures quickly, the other slowly. One becomes pious, the other impious. They marry (this is the commonest interruption of all) antipathetic wives. It is all as it should be if they were really friends once, for friends, in fact, belong to periods rather than to all time, although sentiment would have it otherwise. One is always changing a little, although of radical change there is almost none, and new friends are found in tune with each stage. I could admit no longer any need for Trist, and yet all the same I longed to see him and dreaded it too.

There was another obstacle in the way. We were both bachelors. In every man, I take it, even the most married, there sleeps a bachelor; but a bachelor through and through as I have been, and as Trist is, is a less negotiable quantity. No one probably has more affectionate impulses than I,—a warmer wish to help and comfort,—and yet I am always conscious of a slight barrier between me and those I would befriend and assist, a barrier which probably would not be there had I married. Marriage, there is no doubt, is a solvent; and the curious thing is that the married reveal their state: marconigrams pass.

Bachelors have many advantages, but they are all minor. Perhaps the greatest advantage they enjoy is that of still being able to follow an impulse; but even this rarely seems to give them all the pleasure that it would give many a man who has tasted restriction. Feeding on impulses can become as distasteful as feeding on jam roll.

As it happened, fate took the matter out of my hands, for I walked bang into Trist one afternoon under my own roof—that is to say, in Bemerton's shop. He was engaged in the characteristic occupation of making some one do something for him, and in this case he was dealing with such ordinarily unpromising material as Miss Ruth Wagstaff. He seemed so genuinely glad to see me again that I felt ashamed of having so long deferred my visit; and I promised to dine with him that very evening.

I found Trist in very comfortable, almost luxurious, rooms, at the top of a seventeenth-century house in Gray's Inn, overlooking a beautiful grave square on one side and a beautiful grave lawn on the other. Not quite the true Oxford cloister, but very near it; and with busy London within a stone's-throw. His only companion is his man, Jack Rogers, once a sailor in the King's Navy, but now through the loss of an eye enjoying a pension on land, although only twenty-nine years of age, and acting as valet, cook, and parlour-maid to my old friend. Why a navy which owes most of its prestige to the activities of a man who lacked not only one eye but also one arm should be in such a hurry to get rid of Jack I cannot understand; for he sees far more with his widowed orb than the ordinary observer does with two, and is quite the most capable all-round hand I have yet met.

That Trist should live in Gray's Inn, off Holborn, of all streets, and that his man should not have been for some years with the Duke of B—— and the Earl of A——, are the surprising things; but then Trist makes a point of never belonging wholly to any type. His aim is always to be original somewhere, although never original enough to be conspicuous.

Another of his foibles is to be thought worldly to a point of cynicism; but he is of course far too English to be a genuine success, although he may deceive the poor observer. Every man has some ideal, and Trist has been true to his ever since I have known him. I should describe his ideal, which he acquired as quite a youth, as a blend of Lytton's Zanoni and Meredith's Adrian Harley, the wise youth. (For one has to get one's durable exemplars from books; in real life one finds them out.) Underneath, however, he has a sympathetic kindliness which has prompted him to many actions wholly out of keeping with his cool exterior.

He does nothing: he is a true dilettante; but though he does nothing he knows all. He studies the papers, collects gossip, sees the new plays, reads the new books, attends sales at Christie's and Sotheby's. Half-past seven finds him in evening dress as naturally as it finds a baby in bed. He is never in a hurry, and never late. His cigarette case is always full.

Trist's second ambition (the first being never to be unprepared) is to own the best Old Crome. His life may be said almost to have been dedicated to Old Crome. He has three on his walls, and he wants others, but they must be better than the three; which to my eye are perfect. Two are views of Household Heath, which stood for the promised land to this painter, and the other is a cottage and a tree and a peasant woman. They are the only pictures in the room. In the dining-room one painter again is represented, and one only, the rare and marvellous Bonington, who perished in his pride, but not before he had revolutionised French landscape painting,—all water-colours. Trist spends hours every week in curiosity shops, and in the summer, when he is driven from London by sheer lack of activity there, he makes his holiday in Norfolk, partly sailing on the Broads and partly bicycling among the farmhouses, into which with masterly address he finds his way and scans the walls for the Master's glow. His manners are charming, and he rarely meets with a rebuff. Down to the present time, however, he tells me, one Crome and one only has he found that he covets—and that he cannot get. The owner, a strong wealthy farmer of as much independence and will-power as Trist himself, would as soon sell his daughter.

Nothing else moves Trist to feeling. Old Crome and Bonington can light his eye, but for the rest his attitude through life is one of cool, amused detachment and perfect self-possession. I have from time to time set down his obiter dicta on the management of one's affairs in a very civilised progress through this vale of tears; but as I can remember only those that he has dropped in my hearing, the record necessarily is deprived of thousands that may be better,—as indeed I suppose Boswell's also is. (A new collection of Johnson's good things uttered when Boswell was absent would stand almost first among the books we desire. I mentioned this to Mr. Bemerton one day, for we often talk of the impossible books we should like to have. "Yes," he said, "and what a good subject for the forger." He is, by the way, greatly interested in literary forgeries, and keeps a number of them together on a shelf, and is one of the few people who have read Vortigern.)

Here, then, are certain of the aphorisms with which Trist would, in his Chesterfieldian manner, instruct his son, if he had anything so ridiculous. All begin with the same words—concerning which I might perhaps say that by "life" Trist does not mean what a poet means, or a saint, or a schoolboy, or a motorist, or even what I mean by it. Trist means by "life" a protected ease. I have jotted them down from time to time as I remembered them—my first thought being mischievously to convict him of inconsistency. I see now, however, that one definite idea connects all.

"The art of life," says Trist, "is the pigeon-holing of women." True enough of Englishmen, at any rate, who want women only when they want them (and then they must behave); but no Frenchman would say it.

"The art of life," says Trist, "is to say the same things to everybody. To differentiate one's treatment of people may be interesting, but it leads to complications."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is to assume that no one else has any feelings."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is the use and not abuse of alcohol. A wise apéritif can make a bad dinner almost good, and a bad partner almost negligible."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is to be so well known at a good restaurant that you can pay by cheque."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is to make your tailor come to you."

"The art of life," says Trist, who hates gossip, "is never to see two unrelated people together; but if you must,—and it can't be helped very easily,—never to mention it again. Three-quarters of the ills of life proceed from the report that So-and-so has been seen with So-and-so. There is too much talk. A wise autocrat would cut out the tongue of every baby. A silent society would probably be a happy one; because it would be largely without scandal." That seemed to me, I said, too drastic, and I recommended instead the example (from my Chinese book) of Hsin Shao, of the second and third century A.D., "who is now chiefly remembered in connection with his practice of devoting the first day of every month to criticism of his neighbours and their conduct."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is never to be out of small change."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is to keep down acquaintances. One's friends one can manage, but one's acquaintances can be the devil."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candour. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is to live near a post office, but never to go there one's self."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is never to think you know what other people are feeling about you. You are sure to be wrong."

"The art of life," says Trist, "is to be thought odd. Everything will then be permitted to you. The best way to be thought odd is to return a cheque now and then on a conscientious scruple. There is no such investment."

Trist also has a very interesting and ingenious theory that goes more deeply into the management of life. "I do not believe," he once said to me, "in carving out our own destiny, but I believe that the unexpected happens so often, and the expected so seldom, that one might by steadily anticipating ills avoid calamity."

Trist, however, is not really as monstrous as these maxims would make him out to be. For the full play of his personality he must undoubtedly be calm and prosperous and spoiled; but once he is in that state of bliss he can be extraordinarily kind. One would not see him carrying a poor woman's bundle, or putting himself out over a street casualty; but he has befriended several young artists and musicians, and he lends money capriciously to needy persons at the very moment when money means most to them. He likes to play Fate.

I came away from his rooms that first evening a little saddened. I could not help contrasting the past, when he was so necessary to me, with the present, when we each made the other constrained, and had grown so naturally into the power of doing without each other that the early conditions could never be restored.

But since then I have fallen into the old Trist habit again, and now I like to be with him almost as much as ever, although I am no longer plastic as I was. I like his fastidiousness, and it amuses me (and perhaps does me good) to watch the skill with which he looks ahead by instinct to ensure his comfort.

We are to go down to Miss Gold's to tea one afternoon next week. Trist, it seems, has a taxi-cab driver in his pocket, and he will convey us there. "I telephone him when I want him," said Trist; "it is far better than being bothered with a car of one's own."

Of course.