THE POET AND THE EMPORIUM
"I am beginning life," he said, with a sigh. "Great Heavens! I have spent a day--_a day!_--in a shop. Three bedroom suites and a sideboard are among the unantic.i.p.ated pledges of our affection. Have you lithia?
For a man of twelve limited editions this has been a terrible day."
I saw to his creature comforts. His tie was hanging outside his waistcoat, and his complexion was like white pasteboard that has got wet. "Courage," said I. "It will not occur again----"
"It will," said he. "We have to get there again tomorrow. We have--what is it?--carpets, curtains----"
He produced his tablets. I was amazed. Those receptacles of choice thoughts!
"The amber sunlight splashing through the leaky--leafy interlacing green," he read. "No!--that"s not it. Ah, here! Curtains!
Drawing-room--not to cost more than thirty shillings! And there"s all the Kitchen Hardware! (Thanks.) Dining-room chairs--query--rush bottoms?
What"s this? G.L.I.S.--ah! "Glistering thro" deeps of glaucophane"--that"s nothing. Mem. to see can we afford Indian needlework chairs--57s. 6d.? It"s dreadful, Bellows!"
He helped himself to a cigarette.
"Find the salesman pleasant?" said I.
"Delightful. a.s.sumed I was a spendthrift millionaire at first. Produced in an off-hand way an eighty-guinea bedroom suite--we"re trying to do the entire business, you know, on about two hundred pounds. Well--that"s ten editions, you know. Came down, with evidently dwindling respect, to things that were still ruinously expensive. I told him we wanted an idyll--love in a cottage, and all that kind of thing. He brushed that on one side, said idols were upstairs in the j.a.panese Department, and that perhaps we might _do_ with a servant"s set of bedroom furniture. Do with a set! He was a gloomy man with (I should judge) some internal pain. I tried to tell him that there was quite a lot of middle-cla.s.s people like myself in the country, people of limited or precarious means, whose existence he seemed to ignore; a.s.sured him some of them led quite beautiful lives. But he had no ideas beyond wardrobes. I quite forgot the business of shopping in an attempt to kindle a little human enthusiasm in his heart. We were in a great vast place full of wardrobes, with a remote glittering vista of bra.s.s bedsteads--skeleton beds, you know--and I tried to inspire him with some of the poetry of his emporium; tried to make him imagine these beds and things going east and west, north and south, to take sorrow, servitude, joy, worry, failing strength, restless ambition in their impartial embraces. He only turned round to Annie, and asked her if she thought she could _do_ with "enamelled." But I was quite taken with my idea----Where is it? I left Annie to settle with this misanthrope, amidst his raw frameworks of the Homes of the Future."
He fumbled with his tablets. "Mats for hall--not to exceed 3s. 9d....
Kerbs ... inquire tiled hearth ... Ah! Here we are: "Ballade of the Bedroom Suite":--
""n.o.ble the oak you are now displaying, Subtly the hazel"s grainings go, Walnut"s charm there is no gainsaying, Red as red wine is your rosewood"s glow; Brave and brilliant the ash you show, Rich your mahogany"s hepat.i.te shine, Cool and sweet your enamel: But oh!
_Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?_"
"They have "em in the catalogue at five guineas, with a picture--quite as good they are as the more expensive ones. To judge by the picture."
"But that"s scarcely the idea you started with," I began.
"Not; it went wrong--ballades often do. The preoccupation of the "Painted Pine" was too much for me. What"s this? "N.B.--Sludge sells music stools at--" No. Here we are (first half unwritten):--
""White enamelled, like driven snow, Picked with just one delicate line.
Price you were saying is? Fourteen!--No!
_Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?_"
"Comes round again, you see! Then _L"Envoy_:--
""Salesman, sad is the truth I trow: Winsome walnut can never be mine.
Poets are cheap. And their poetry. So _Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?_"
"Prosaic! As all true poetry is, nowadays. But, how I tired as the afternoon moved on! At first I was interested in the shopman"s amazing lack of imagination, and the glory of that fond dream of mine--love in a cottage, you know--still hung about me. I had ideas come--like that Ballade--and every now and then Annie told me to write notes. I think my last gleam of pleasure was in choosing the drawing-room chairs. There is scope for fantasy in chairs. Then----"
He took some more whisky.
"A kind of grey horror came upon me. I don"t know if I can describe it.
We went through vast vistas of chairs, of hall-tables, of machine-made pictures, of curtains, huge wildernesses of carpets, and ever this cold, unsympathetic shopman led us on, and ever and again made us buy this or that. He had a perfectly grey eye--the colour of an overcast sky in January--and he seemed neither to hate us nor to detest us, but simply to despise us, to feel such an overwhelming contempt for our petty means and our petty lives, as an archangel might feel for an apple-maggot. It made me think...."
He lit a fresh cigarette.
"I had a kind of vision. I do not know if you will understand. The Warehouse of Life, with our Individual Fate hurrying each of us through.
Showing us with a covert sneer all the good things that we cannot afford. A magnificent Rosewood love affair, for instance, deep and rich, fitted complete, some hours of perfect life, some acts of perfect self-sacrifice, perfect self-devotion.... You ask the price."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?" I quoted.
"That"s it. All the things one might do, if the purse of one"s courage were not so shallow. If it wasn"t for the lack of that coinage, Bellows, every man might be magnificent. There"s heroism, there"s such n.o.bility as no one has ever attained to, ready to hand. Anyone, if it were not for this lack of means, might be a human G.o.d in twenty-four hours....
You see the article. You cannot buy it. No one buys it. It stands in the emporium, I suppose, for show--on the chance of a millionaire. And the shopman waves his hand to it on your way to the Painted Pine.
"Then you meet other couples and solitary people going about, each with a gloomy salesman leading. The run of them look uncomfortable; some are hot about the ears and in the spiteful phase of ill-temper; all look sick of the business except the raw new-comers. It"s the only time they will ever select any furniture, their first chance and their last. Most of their selections are hurried a little. The salesman must not be kept all day.... Yet it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and find it just a "special line" made to sell.... We"re all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing--or dying. Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little sc.r.a.ps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It"s a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. "If we have _this_ so good, dear, I don"t know _how_ we shall manage in the kitchen," says the careful housewife.... So it is we do our shopping in the Great Emporium."
"You will have to rewrite your Ballade," said I, "and put all that in."
"I wish I could," said the poet.
"And while you were having these very fine moods?"
"Annie and the shopman settled most of the furniture between them.
Perhaps it"s just as well. I was never very good at the practical details of life.... Cigarette"s out! Have you any more matches?"
"Horribly depressed you are!" I said.
"There"s to-morrow. Well, well...."
And then he went off at a tangent to tell me what he expected to make by his next volume of poems, and so came to the congenial business of running down his contemporaries, and became again the cheerful little Poet that I know.
THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS
During the early Victorian revival of chivalry the Language of Flowers had some considerable vogue. The Romeo of the mutton-chop whiskers was expected to keep this delicate symbolism in view, and even to display his wit by some dainty conceits in it. An ignorance of the code was fraught with innumerable dangers. A sprig of lilac was a suggestion, a moss-rosebud pushed the matter, was indeed evidence to go to court upon; and unless Charlotte parried with white poplar--a by no means accessible flower--or apricot blossom, or failing these dabbed a cooling dock-leaf at the fellow, he was at her with tulip, heliotrope, and honeysuckle, peach-blossom, white jonquil, and pink, and a really overpowering and suffocating host of attentions. I suppose he got at last to three-cornered notes in the vernacular; and meanwhile what could a poor girl do? There was no downright "No!" in the language of flowers, nothing equivalent to "Go away, please," no flower for "Idiot!" The only possible defence was something in this way: "Your cruelty causes me sorrow," "Your absence is a pleasure." For this, according to the code of Mr. Thomas Miller (third edition, 1841, with elegantly coloured plates) you would have to get a sweet-pea blossom for Pleasure, wormwood for Absence, and indicate Sorrow by the yew, and Cruelty by the stinging-nettle. There is always a little risk of mixing your predicates in this kind of communication, and he might, for instance, read that his Absence caused you Sorrow, but he could scarcely miss the point of the stinging-nettle. That and the gorse carefully concealed were about the only gleams of humour possible in the language. But then it was the appointed tongue of lovers, and while their sickness is upon them they have neither humour nor wit.
This Mr. Thomas Miller wrote abundant flowers of language in his book, and the plates were coloured by hand. By the bye, what a blessed thing colour-printing is! These hand-tinted plates, to an imaginative person, are about as distressing as any plates can very well be. Whenever I look at these triumphs of art over the beauties of nature, with all their weary dabs of crimson, green, blue, and yellow, I think of wretched, anaemic girls fading their youth away in some dismal attic over a publisher"s, toiling through the whole edition tint by tint, and being mocked the while by Mr. Miller"s alliterative erotics. And they _are_ erotics! In one place he writes, "Beautiful art thou, O Broom! on the breezy bosom of the bee-haunted heath"; and throughout he buds and blossoms into similar delights. He wallows in doves and coy toyings and modest blushes, and bowers and meads. He always adds, "Wonderful boy!"
to Chatterton"s name as if it were a university degree (W.B.), and he invariably refers to Moore as the Bard of Erin, and to Milton as the Bard of Paradise--though Bard of the Bottomless Pit would be more appropriate. However, we are not concerned with Mr. Miller"s language so much as with a very fruitful suggestion he throws out, that "it is surely worth while to trace a resemblance between the flower and the emblem it represents" (a turn like that is nothing to Mr. Miller) "which shall at least have some show of reason in it."
Come to think of it, there is something singularly unreasonable about almost all floral symbolism. There is your forget-me-not, pink in the bud, and sapphire in the flower, with a fruit that breaks up into four, the very picture of inconstancy and discursiveness. Yet your lover, with a singular blindness, presents this to his lady when they part. Then the white water-lily is supposed to represent purity of heart, and, mark you, it is white without and its centre is all set about with innumerable golden stamens, while in the middle lies, to quote the words of that distinguished botanist, Mr. Oliver, "a fleshy disc." Could there be a better type of sordid and mercenary deliberation maintaining a fair appearance? The tender apple-blossom, rather than Pretence, is surely a reminder of Eden and the fall of love"s devotion into inflated worldliness. The poppy which flaunts its violent colours athwart the bearded corn, and which frets and withers like the Second Mrs. Tanqueray so soon as you bring it to the shelter of a decent home, is made the symbol of Repose. One might almost think Aime Martin and the other great authorities on this subject wrote in a mood of irony.
The daisy, too, presents you Innocence, "companion of the milk-white lamb," Mr. Miller calls it. I am sorry for the milk-white lamb. It was one of the earliest discoveries of systematic botany that the daisy is a fraud, a complicated impostor. _The daisy is not a flower at all._ It is a favourite trap in botanical examinations, a snare for artless young men entering the medical profession. Each of the little yellow things in the centre of the daisy is a flower in itself,--if you look at one with a lens you will find it not unlike a cowslip flower,--and the white rays outside are a great deal more than the petals they ought to be if the Innocence theory is to hold good. There is no such thing as an innocent flower; they are all so many deliberate advertis.e.m.e.nts to catch the eye of the undecided bee, but any flower almost is simpler than this one. We would make it the emblem of artistic deception, and the confidence trick expert should wear it as his crest.
The violet, again, is a greatly overrated exemplar. It stimulates a certain bashfulness, hangs its head, and pa.s.sed as modest among our simple grandparents. Its special merit is its perfume, and it pretends to wish to hide that from every eye. But, withal, the fragrance is as far-reaching as any I know. It droops ingenuously. "How _could_ you come to me," it seems to say, "when all these really brilliant flowers invite you?" Mere fishing for compliments. All the while it is being sweet, to the very best of its undeniable ability. Then it comes, too, in early spring, without a chaperon, and catches our hearts fresh before they are jaded with the crowded beauties of May. A really modest flower would wait for the other flowers to come first. A subtle affectation is surely a different thing from modesty. The violet is simply artful, the young widow among flowers, and to hold up such a flower as an example is not doing one"s duty by the young. For true modesty commend me to the agave, which flowers once only in half a hundred years, as one may see for oneself at the Royal Botanical Gardens.
Enough has been said to show what scope there is for revision of this sentimental Volapuk. Mr. Martin himself scarcely goes so far as I have done, though I have merely worked out his suggestion. His only revolutionary proposal is to displace the wind star by the "rathe primrose" for Forsaken, on the strength of a quotation familiar to every reader of Mason"s little text-book on the English language. For the rest he followed his authorities, and has followed them now to the remote recesses of the literary lumber-room and into the twopenny book-box.
From that receptacle one copy of him was disinterred only a day or so ago; a hundred and seventy pages of prose, chiefly alliterative, several coloured plates, enthusiastic pencil-marking of a vanished somebody, and, besides, an early Victorian flavour of dust and a dim vision of a silent conversation in a sunlit flower garden--altogether I think very cheap at twopence. The fashion has changed altogether now. In these days we season our love-making with talk about heredity, philanthropy, and sanitation, and present one another with Fabian publications instead of wild flowers. But in the end, I fancy, the business comes to very much the same thing.