"A dinner of herbs-the sentiment applies equally to lunch-and contentment therewith is better," I said, "than a stalled ox."
"Don"t talk about oxen," he interrupted fretfully. "I feel I could just eat one-a plump one."
There is a man I know. I confess he irritates me. His argument is that you should always rise from a meal feeling hungry. As I once explained to him, you cannot rise from a meal feeling hungry without sitting down to a meal feeling hungry; which means, of course, that you are always hungry. He agreed with me. He said that was the idea-always ready.
"Most people," he said, "rise from a meal feeling no more interest in their food. That was a mental att.i.tude injurious to digestion. Keep it always interested; that was the proper way to treat it."
"By "it" you mean . . . ?" I said.
"Of course," he answered; "I"m talking about it."
"Now I myself;" he explained-"I rise from breakfast feeling eager for my lunch. I get up from my lunch looking forward to my dinner. I go to bed just ready for my breakfast."
Cheerful expectancy, he said, was a wonderful aid to digestion. "I call myself;" he said, "a cheerful feeder."
"You don"t seem to me," I said, "to be anything else. You talk like a tadpole. Haven"t you any other interest in life? What about home, and patriotism, and Shakespeare-all those sort of things? Why not give it a square meal, and silence it for an hour or two; leave yourself free to think of something else."
"How can you think of anything," he argued, "when your stomach"s out of order?"
"How can you think of anything," I argued, "when it takes you all your time to keep it in order? You are not a man; you are a nurse to your own stomach." We were growing excited, both of us, forgetting our natural refinement. "You don"t get even your one afternoon a week. You are healthy enough, I admit it. So are the convicts at Portland. They never suffer from indigestion. I knew a doctor once who prescribed for a patient two years" penal servitude as the only thing likely to do him permanent good. Your stomach won"t let you smoke. It won"t let you drink-not when you are thirsty. It allows you a gla.s.s of Apenta water at times when you don"t want it, a.s.suming there could ever be a time when you did want it. You are deprived of your natural victuals, and made to live upon prepared food, as though you were some sort of a prize chicken.
You are sent to bed at eleven, and dressed in hygienic clothing that makes no pretence to fit you. Talk of being hen-pecked! Why, the mildest husband living would run away or drown himself, rather than remain tied for the rest of his existence to your stomach."
"It is easy to sneer," he said.
"I am not sneering," I said; "I am sympathising with you."
He said he did not want any sympathy. He said if only I would give up over-eating and drinking myself, it would surprise me how bright and intelligent I should become.
I thought this man might be of use to us on the present occasion.
Accordingly I spoke of him and of his theory. d.i.c.k seemed impressed.
"Nice sort of man?" he asked.
"An earnest man," I replied. "He practises what he preaches, and whether because, or in spite of it, the fact remains that a chirpier soul I am sure does not exist."
"Married?" demanded d.i.c.k.
"A single man," I answered. "In all things an idealist. He has told me he will never marry until he can find his ideal woman."
"What about Robina here!" suggested d.i.c.k. "Seem to have been made for one another."
Robina smiled. It was a wan, pathetic smile.
"Even he," thought Robina, "would want his beans cooked to time, and to feel that a reasonable supply of nuts was always in the house. We incompetent women never ought to marry."
We had finished the bacon. d.i.c.k said he would take a stroll into the town. Robina suggested he might take Veronica with him, that perhaps a bun and a gla.s.s of milk would do the child no harm.
Veronica for a wonder seemed to know where all her things were. Before d.i.c.k had filled his pipe she was ready dressed and waiting for him.
Robina said she would give them a list of things they might bring back with them. She also asked d.i.c.k to get together a plumber, a carpenter, a bricklayer, a glazier, and a civil engineer, and to see to it that they started off at once. She thought that among them they might be able to do all that was temporarily necessary, but the great thing was that the work should be commenced without delay.
"Why, what on earth"s the matter, old girl?" asked d.i.c.k. "Have you had an accident?"
Then it was that Robina exploded. I had been wondering when it would happen. To d.i.c.k"s astonishment it happened then.
Yes, she answered, there had been an accident. Did he suppose that seven scrimpy sc.r.a.ps of bacon was her notion of a lunch between four hungry persons? Did he, judging from himself, imagine that our family yielded only lunatics? Was it kind-was it courteous to his parents, to the mother he pretended to love, to the father whose grey hairs he was by his general behaviour bringing down in sorrow to the grave-to a.s.sume without further enquiry that their eldest daughter was an imbecile? (My hair, by-the-bye, is not grey. There may be a suggestion of greyness here and there, the natural result of deep thinking. To describe it in the lump as grey is to show lack of observation. And at forty-eight-or a trifle over-one is not going down into the grave, not straight down. Robina when excited uses exaggerated language. I did not, however, interrupt her; she meant well. Added to which, interrupting Robina, when-to use her own expression-she is tired of being a worm, is like trying to stop a cyclone with an umbrella.) Had his attention been less concentrated on the guzzling of cold bacon (he had only had four mouthfuls, poor fellow)-had he noticed the sweet patient child starving before his very eyes (this referred to Veronica)-his poor elder sister, worn out with work and worry, pining for nourishment herself, it might have occurred to even his intelligence that there had been an accident. The selfishness, the egotism of men it was that staggered, overwhelmed Robina, when she came to think of it.
Robina paused. Not for want of material, I judged, so much as want of breath. Veronica performed a useful service by seizing the moment to express a hope that it was not early-closing day. Robina felt a conviction that it was: it would be just like d.i.c.k to stand there dawdling in a corner till it was too late to do anything.
"I have been trying to get out of this corner for the last five minutes,"
explained d.i.c.k, with that angelic smile of his that I confess is irritating. "If you have done talking, and will give me an opening, I will go."
Robina told him that she had done talking. She gave him her reasons for having done talking. If talking to him would be of any use she would often have felt it her duty to talk to him, not only with regard to his stupidity and selfishness and general aggravatingness, but with reference to his character as a whole. Her excuse for not talking to him was the crushing conviction of the hopelessness of ever effecting any improvement in him. Were it otherwise-
"Seriously speaking," said d.i.c.k, now escaped from his corner, "something, I take it, has gone wrong with the stove, and you want a sort of general smith."
He opened the kitchen door and looked in.
"Great Scott!" he said. "What was it-an earthquake?"
I looked in over his shoulder.
"But it could not have been an earthquake," I said. "We should have felt it."
"It is not an earthquake," explained Robina. "It is your youngest daughter"s notion of making herself useful."
Robina spoke severely. I felt for the moment as if I had done it all myself. I had an uncle who used to talk like that. "Your aunt," he would say, regarding me with a reproachful eye, "your aunt can be, when she likes, the most trying woman to live with I have ever known." It would depress me for days. I would wonder whether I ought to speak to her about it, or whether I should be doing only harm.
"But how did she do it?" I demanded. "It is impossible that a mere child-where is the child?"
The parlour contained but Robina. I hurried to the door; d.i.c.k was already half across the field. Veronica I could not see.
"We are making haste," d.i.c.k shouted back, "in case it is early-closing day."
"I want Veronica!" I shouted.
"What?" shouted d.i.c.k.
"Veronica!" I shouted with my hands to my mouth.
"Yes!" shouted d.i.c.k. "She"s on ahead."
It was useless screaming any more. He was now climbing the stile.
"They always take each other"s part, those two," sighed Robina.
"Yes, and you are just as bad," I told her; "if he doesn"t, you do. And then if it"s you they take your part. And you take his part. And he takes both your parts. And between you all I am just getting tired of bringing any of you up." (Which is the truth.) "How did this thing happen?"
"I had got everything finished," answered Robina. "The duck was in the oven with the pie; the peas and potatoes were boiling nicely. I was feeling hot, and I thought I could trust Veronica to watch the things for awhile. She promised not to play King Alfred."