"Two years!" we exclaimed. "And why?"
"To get the atmosphere."
"The steam?" we questioned.
"Oh, no," said Mrs. Afterthought, "I did that separately. I took a course in steam at a technical school."
"Is it possible?" we said, our heart beginning to sing again. "Was all that necessary?"
"I don"t see how one could do it otherwise. The story opens, as no doubt you remember--tea?--in the boiler room of the laundry."
"Yes," we said, moving our leg--"no, thank you."
"So you see the only possible _point d"appui_ was to begin with a description of the inside of the boiler."
We nodded.
"A masterly thing," we said.
"My wife," interrupted the Great Novelist, who was sitting with the head of a huge Danish hound in his lap, sharing his b.u.t.tered toast with the dog while he adjusted a set of trout flies, "is a great worker."
"Do you always work on that method?" we asked.
"Always," she answered. "For _Frederica of the Factory_ I spent six months in a knitting mill. For _Marguerite of the Mud Flats_ I made special studies for months and months."
"Of what sort?" we asked.
"In mud. Learning to model it. You see for a story of that sort the first thing needed is a thorough knowledge of mud--all kinds of it."
"And what are you doing next?" we inquired.
"My next book," said the Lady Novelist, "is to be a study--tea?--of the pickle industry--perfectly new ground."
"A fascinating field," we murmured.
"And quite new. Several of our writers have done the slaughter-house, and in England a good deal has been done in jam. But so far no one has done pickles. I should like, if I could," added Ethelinda Afterthought, with the graceful modesty that is characteristic of her, "to make it the first of a series of pickle novels, showing, don"t you know, the whole pickle district, and perhaps following a family of pickle workers for four or five generations."
"Four or five!" we said enthusiastically. "Make it ten! And have you any plan for work beyond that?"
"Oh, yes indeed," laughed the Lady Novelist. "I am always planning ahead. What I want to do after that is a study of the inside of a penitentiary."
"Of the _inside_?" we said, with a shudder.
"Yes. To do it, of course, I shall go to jail for two or three years!"
"But how can you get in?" we asked, thrilled at the quiet determination of the frail woman before us.
"I shall demand it as a right," she answered quietly. "I shall go to the authorities, at the head of a band of enthusiastic women, and demand that I shall be sent to jail. Surely after the work I have done, that much is coming to me."
"It certainly is," we said warmly.
We rose to go.
Both the novelists shook hands with us with great cordiality. Mr.
Afterthought walked as far as the front door with us and showed us a short cut past the beehives that could take us directly through the bull pasture to the main road.
We walked away in the gathering darkness of evening very quietly. We made up our mind as we went that novel writing is not for us. We must reach the penitentiary in some other way.
But we thought it well to set down our interview as a guide to others.
IX. The New Education
"So you"re going back to college in a fortnight," I said to the Bright Young Thing on the veranda of the summer hotel. "Aren"t you sorry?"
"In a way I am," she said, "but in another sense I"m glad to go back.
One can"t loaf all the time."
She looked up from her rocking-chair over her Red Cross knitting with great earnestness.
How full of purpose these modern students are, I thought to myself. In my time we used to go back to college as to a treadmill.
"I know that," I said, "but what I mean is that college, after all, is a pretty hard grind. Things like mathematics and Greek are no joke, are they? In my day, as I remember it, we used to think spherical trigonometry about the hardest stuff of the lot."
She looked dubious.
"I didn"t _elect_ mathematics," she said.
"Oh," I said, "I see. So you don"t have to take it. And what _have_ you elected?"
"For this coming half semester--that"s six weeks, you know--I"ve elected Social Endeavour."
"Ah," I said, "that"s since my day, what is it?"
"Oh, it"s _awfully_ interesting. It"s the study of conditions."
"What kind of conditions?" I asked.
"All conditions. Perhaps I can"t explain it properly. But I have the prospectus of it indoors if you"d like to see it. We take up Society."
"And what do you do with it?"
"a.n.a.lyse it," she said.
"But it must mean reading a tremendous lot of books."