"Excellent athletic exercises!" cried Mr. Clarkson. "In Xenophon"s charming picture of married life we see the model husband instructing the young wife to leave off painting and adorning herself, and to seek the true beauty of health and strength by housework and turning beds."
"There"s many on us had ought to be beauties, then, without paint nor yet powder," said the landlady, turning away with a little sigh. And when Mr. Clarkson drove off that evening with his bag, she stood by the railings and said to the lady next door: "There goes my gentleman, and him no more fit to do for hisself than a babe unborn, and no more idea of cooking than a crocodile!"
The question of cooking did not occur to Mr. Clarkson till he had entered the semi-detached suburban residence with his friend"s latchkey, groped about for the electric lights, and discovered there was nothing to eat in the house, whereas he was accustomed to a biscuit or two and a little whisky and soda before going to bed.
"Never mind," he thought. "Enterprise implies sacrifice, and hunger will be a new experience. I can buy something for breakfast in the morning."
So he spent a placid hour in reading the t.i.tles of his friend"s books, and then retired to the bedroom prepared for him.
He woke in the morning with a sense of profound tranquillity, and thought with admiration of the Dean of his College, whose one rule of life was never to allow anyone to call him. "This is worth a little subsequent trouble, if, indeed, trouble is involved," he murmured to himself, as he turned over and settled down to sleep again. But hardly had he dozed off when he was startled by an aggressive double-knock at the front door. He hoped it would not recur; but it did recur, and was accompanied by prolonged ringing of an electric bell. Feeling that his peace was broken, he put on his slippers and crept downstairs.
"What do you want?" he said at the door.
"Post," came a voice. Undoing the bolts, he put out a naked arm. "Even if you are the post," he remarked, "you need not sound the Last Trumpet!"
"Davies," said the postman, crammed a bundle of proofs into the expectant hand, and departed.
Mr. Clarkson turned into the kitchen. It presented a rather dreary aspect. The range and fire-irons looked as though they had been out all night. The grate was piled with ashes, like a crater.
"No wonder," said Mr. Clarkson, "that ashes are the popular comparison for a heart of extinguished affections. Could anything be more desolate, more hopeless, or, I may say, more disagreeable? To how many a disappointed cook that simile must come home when first she gets down in the morning!"
He took the poker and began raking gently between the bars. But no matter how tenderly he raked, his hands appeared to grow black of themselves, and great clouds of dust floated about the room and covered him.
"This _must_ be the way to do it," he said, pausing in perplexity; "I suppose a certain amount of dirt is inevitable when you are grappling with reality. But my pyjamas will be in a filthy state."
Taking them off, he hung them on the banisters, and, with a pa.s.sing thought of Lady G.o.diva, closed the kitchen door and advanced again towards the grate, still grasping the poker in his hand. Then he set himself to grapple with reality in earnest. The ashes crashed together, dust rose in columns, iron rang on iron, as in war"s smithy. But little by little the victory was achieved, and lines of paper, wood, and coal gave promise of brighter things. He wiped his sweating brow, tingeing it with a still deeper black, and, catching sight of himself in a servant"s looking-gla.s.s over the mantelpiece, he said, "There is no doubt man was intended by nature to be a coloured race."
But while he was thinking what wisdom the Vestal Virgins showed in never letting their fire go out, another crash came at the door, followed by the war-whoop of a scalp-hunter. "I seem to recognise that noise," he thought, "but I can"t possibly open the door in this condition."
Creeping down the pa.s.sage, he said "Who"s there?" through the letter-box.
"Milko!" came the repeated yell.
"Would there be any objection to your depositing the milk upon the doorstep?" asked Mr. Clarkson.
"Righto!" came the answer, and steps retreated with a clang of pails.
"Why do the common people love to add "o" to their words?" Mr. Clarkson reflected. "Is it that they unconsciously appreciate "o" as the most beautiful of vowel sounds? But I wonder whether I ought to have blacked that range before I lighted the fire? The ironwork certainly looks rather pre-Dreadnought! What I require most just now is a hot bath, and I"d soon have one if I only knew which of these little slides to pull out. But if I pulled out the wrong one, there might be an explosion, and then what would become of the _History of the Masque?_"
So he put on a kettle, and waited uneasily for it to sing as a kettle should. "Now I"ll shave," he said; "and when I am less like that too conscientious Oth.e.l.lo, I"ll go out and buy something for breakfast."
The bath was distinctly cool, but when he got out there was a satisfaction in the water"s hue, and, though chilled to the bone, he carried his pyjamas upstairs with a feeling of something accomplished.
On entering his bedroom, he was confronted by his disordered pillow, and a bed like a map of Switzerland in high relief. "Courage!" he cried, "I will make it at once. The secret of labour-saving is organisation."
So, with a certain asperity, he dragged off the clothes, and flung the mattress over, while the bedstead rolled about under the unaccustomed violence. "Rightly does the Scot talk about sorting a bed!" he thought, as he wrenched the blankets asunder, and stood wondering whether the black border should be tucked in at the sides or the feet. At last he pulled the counterpane fairly smooth, but in an evil moment, looking under the bed, he perceived large quant.i.ties of fluffy and coagulated dust.
"I know what that is," he said. "That"s called flue, and it must be removed. Swift advised the chambermaid, if she was in haste, to sweep the dust into a corner of the room, but leave her brush upon it, that it might not be seen, for that would disgrace her. Well, there is no one to see me, so I must do it as I can."
He crawled under the bed, and gathering the flue together in his two hands, began throwing it out of the window. "Pity it isn"t nesting season for the birds," he said, as he watched it float away. But this process was too slow; so taking his towel, he dusted the drawers, the washing-stand, and the greater part of the floor, shaking the towel out of the window, until, in his eagerness, he dropped it into the back garden, and it lay extended upon the wash-house roof.
Tranquillity had now vanished, and solitude was losing some of its charm. It was quite time he started for the office, but he had not begun to dress, and, except for the kettle, which he could hear boiling over downstairs, there was not a gleam of breakfast. After washing again, he put on his clothes hurriedly, and determined to postpone the remainder of his physical exercise till his return in the evening.
Running downstairs, he saw his dirty boots staring him in the face. "Is there any peace in ever climbing up the climbing wave?" he quoted, with a sinking heart. There was no help for it. The things had to be cleaned, or people would wonder where he had been. Searching in a cupboard full of oily rags, grimy leathers, and other filthy instruments, he found the blacking and the brushes, and presently the boots began to shine in patches here and there. Then he washed again, and as he flung open the front door, he kicked the milk all down the steps. It ran in a broad, white stream along the tiled pavement to the gate.
"There goes breakfast!" he thought, but the disaster reached further.
Hastily fetching a pail of water, he soused it over the steps, with the result that all the whitening came off and mingled with the milk upon the tiles. A second pail only heightened the deplorable aspect, and he splashed large quant.i.ties of the water over his trousers and boots. He felt it running through his socks. It was impossible to go to the office like that, or to leave his friend"s house in such a state.
He took off his coat and began pushing the milky water to and fro with a broom. Seeing the maid next door making great wet curves on her steps with a sort of stone, he called to her to ask how she did it.
"Same as other people, saucy," she retorted at once.
"Is that a bath-brick you are manipulating?" Mr. Clarkson asked.
"Bath-brick, indeed! What do you take me for?" she replied, and continued swirling the stuff round and round.
After a further search in the cupboard, Mr. Clarkson discovered a similar piece of stone, and stooping down, began to swirl it about in the same manner. The stuff was deposited in yellowish curves, which he believed would turn white. But it showed the marks so obviously that, to break up the outlines, he carefully dabbed the steps all over with the flat of his hands. "The effect will be like an Academician"s stippling,"
he thought, but when he had swept the surface of the garden path into the road, he scrutinised his handiwork with some satisfaction.
Hardly had he cleaned his boots again, washed again, and changed his socks, when there came another knocking at the door, polite and important this time. He found a well-dressed man, with tall hat, frock-coat, and umbrella, who inquired if he could speak to the proprietor.
"Mr. Davies is away," said Mr. Clarkson, fixing his eyes on the stranger"s boots. "I beg your pardon, but may I remind you that you are standing on my steps? I"m afraid you will whiten the soles of your boots, I mean."
"Thank you, that"s of no consequence," said the stranger, entering, and leaving two great brown footprints on the step and several white ones on the pa.s.sage. "But I thought I might venture to submit to your consideration a pound of our unsurpa.s.sable tea."
"Tea?" cried Mr. Clarkson, with joyous eagerness. "I suppose you don"t happen to have milk, sugar, bread and b.u.t.ter, and an egg or two concealed about your person, do you?"
"I am not a conjuror," said the stranger, resuming his hat with some _hauteur_.
An hour later, Mr. Clarkson was enjoying at his Club a meal that he endeavoured to regard as lunch, and on reaching the office in the afternoon he apologised for having been unavoidably detained at home.
"There"s no place like home," replied his elderly colleague, with his usual inanity.
"Perhaps fortunately, there is not," said Mr. Clarkson, and attempting to straighten his aching back and ease his suffering limbs, he added, "I am coming to the conclusion that woman"s place is the home."
XXVIII
THE CHARM OF COMMONPLACE
George Eliot warned us somewhere not to expect Isaiah and Plato in every country house, and the warning was characteristic of the time when one really might have met Ruskin or Herbert Spencer. How uncalled for it would be now! If Isaiah or Plato were to appear at any country house, what a shock it would give the company, even if no one present had heard of their names and death before! We do not know how prophets and philosophers would behave in a country house, but, to judge from their books, their conversation could not fail to embarra.s.s. What would they say when the daughter of the house inquired if her Toy-Pom was not really rather a darling, or the host proclaimed to the world that he never took potatoes with fish? What would the host and daughter say if their guest began to prophesy or discuss the nature of justice? There is something irreligious in the incongruity of the scene.
The age of the wise, in those astonishing eighteen-seventies, was succeeded by the age of the epigram, when someone was always expected to say something witty, and it was pa.s.sed on, like a sporting tip, through widening circles. Such sayings as "I can resist everything but temptation" were much sought after. Common sense became piquant if reversed, and the good, plain man disappeared in laughter. When a languid creature told him it was always too late to mend, and never too young to learn, he was disconcerted. The bases of existence were shaken by little earthquakes, and he did not know where to stand or what to say. He felt it was nonsense, but as everyone laughed and applauded he supposed they were all too clever for him--too clever by half, and he went away sadder, but no wiser. "If Christ were again on earth," said Carlyle, of an earlier generation, "Mr. Milnes (Lord Houghton) would ask him to breakfast, and the clubs would all be talking of the good things he had said." Frivolity only changes its form, but the epigrams of the early "nineties were not Christlike, and Mr. Milnes would have been as much astray among them as the good, plain man.
The epigrammatist still lingers, and sometimes dines; but his roses have faded, and the weariness of his audience is no longer a pose. A tragic ghost, he feels like one who treads alone some banquet-hall, not, indeed, deserted, but filled with another company, and that is so much drearier. The faces that used to smile on him are gone, the present faces only stare and if he told them now that it may be better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but both are good, they would conceal a shiver of boredom under politeness. It is recognised that life with an epigrammatist has become unendurable. "Witty?" (if one may quote again the Carlyle whom English people are forgetting) "O be not witty: none of us is bound to be witty under penalties. A fashionable wit? If you ask me which, he or a death"s head, will be the cheerier company for me, pray send _not_ him."