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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75957 ***





 Petunia Again

 SKETCHES

 BY
 S. ELIZABETH JACKSON

 A book is very like a kite, being made of paper and
 sent out at a venture.

 _G. K. Chesterton._

 ADELAIDE
 G. HASSELL & SON
 1920




TO

MY GRANDFATHER

J.T.C.


_The little girl that was me_: “I’ve nothing to read in the train.”

_My grandfather_: “And you won’t need anything. There will be things to
see and people to listen to.”




PREFACE.


“At Petunia” was received so kindly that I venture to offer these
final sketches. The little township on the plains is now for me only a
happy memory. Unlike their predecessors, most of the present sketches
and essays have appeared before, either in _Orion_, _The Adelaide
University Magazine_, _The Red Cross Record_, or _The Woman’s Record_,
which I have to thank for allowing me to re-publish.

      S.E.J.

      Woodside,
      10th November, 1920.




CONTENTS


Petunia Again

                                              Page

 Welcome                                         1

 The Backblocks                                  3

 The Aeroplane                                   5

 From the Chinese                                8

 Adopting Emily                                 10

 Twocott                                        13

 A Country Writer                               14

 The Hypnotist                                  23

 Tin Lizzie                                     24

 The Show                                       26

 The Haircut                                    28

 Scipio                                         29

 Bill Boundy                                    31

 An Angry Man                                   33

 Alcibiades                                     36

 News                                           37

 Amusing Daisy                                  39

 Obiit                                          41

 The Drought                                    41


The Works of Simple Simon, LL.D.,
D.Litt., Ph.D., M.B., B.S.

 An Emendation                                  44

 A Protest                                      46

 A “Lancet” Article                             48

 An Application of Psychology to Medicine       50

 Our National Bulletin                          52

 Nigger                                         60


Miscellaneous

 The Queen City of the South                    62

 A Literature in the Making                     68




Petunia Again


Welcome

Such a week as we have had in the country! You talk about the stopping
of the cars giving people a welcome rest in the evenings. Well, we have
no cars to stop, and only three trains a week, and still we can manage
eleven social engagements in six days! Three of them were welcomes to
soldiers. Seventy-eight went away from this district, and every time
one returns (and that is very often now, thank God!) all the houses
along the route from the railway station are decorated with flags. I
expect that sometimes he wonders why people who take the trouble to
decorate in his honour do not come out to wave. When he gets to the
Institute he knows, because we are all there waiting to cheer and make
speeches. Nothing about our boys has been finer than the courtesy with
which they take our cheers and let us say “Thank you.” It relieves
us, but oh, how it embarrasses them! They redden, but they smile,
and are far from looking foolish when they “get up to reply.” The
speeches aren’t always very easy to reply to, either, because what
we call courage and duty-doing they think just a matter of course.
Perhaps nothing more to the point has ever been said to them than this
spontaneous outburst in one speech:—“By Jo, we are glad to see you.”
It was worth all the rest about gallantry, and endurance, and honour,
and so on. We thought all that, too, but just then what was delighting
us was to see them. We had missed them, and now they were back and
we would meet them in our daily lives again. And next morning their
mothers would wake up happy because George and Clem were safe back,
actually in the house in their own room at that moment!

Well, besides these official (and yet quite informal) welcomes there
was also a large private party where another soldier, welcomed some
time before, was to dance and talk with his friends, and there was also
a Butterfly Fair, because now the war is over we simply must have a
piano for the Sunday School Kindergarten. And there was the Red Cross
meeting, and a Home Mission meeting, and the literary society, and
choir practice, and a Band of Hope concert, and, of course, football on
Saturday, for most of our players are coming back again now, though
there are some we shall never see.


The Backblocks

Too many town people are prepared to talk as though “the outbacks” were
anywhere beyond a 20-mile radius of the G.P.O. When you are really in
the backblocks you turn the washing machine for your hostess, make
complicated arrangements for keeping the ants out of the sugar, help
“separate,” cut out some jumpers for the children on the newest town
pattern, and take your afternoon ride on the poison-cart attending to
bunny. Once or twice a week you go into the township for the mail. You
bath frugally because all the water is caught off the roof or in the
dam, and you empty the tub on to what garden there is, for none can be
wasted.

I pity all healthy women who never have a chance to go sometimes where
life, though not easy, is simple and self-contained and wholesome,
where the work cannot be delegated to the baker or the small goods
man or the dressmaker just because the weather is hot or you don’t
feel up to the mark. Without this you cannot feel all the joy of being
thoroughly essential to your family—nor its occasional terror. Only
very fine women can live such a life properly, though. You have to
find your happiness and your amusement in the life itself, not in some
artificial amusement patched on for the moment. You have to find it in
permanent and ultimate things, in love and work and effort and hope and
helpfulness, not in “The Pictures” or a variety show.

I don’t pretend not to enjoy a variety show myself when I’m in town,
and I don’t pretend that Petunia is in the backblocks, but it is in
the country, and I am quite sure that country life is as enjoyable as
a town one, though not every one feels it. Anyone can take a pill, but
not all can make one, nor even pick out the ingredients from a lot of
herbs and drugs presented to them.

I suppose that is the trouble with Joyce Wickhams. She has gone to work
in town so that she can go to the Pav. and Henley Beach on band nights
as often as she likes. I hope she will miss feeding the swill to the
grunting, shoving, greedy pigs, miss the leisurely cows, miss the glow
of health that you feel—without thinking about it—as you canter out for
them. And Saturday’s tennis is never quite so nice in town as it is in
the country, where you know everyone on the courts very well, are going
to sing with most of them at the concert in March, and went with them
to the working bee at the school last week. We shall miss Joyce. She
was the best housemaid we’ve ever had in our dialogues, and the most
popular waitress at tea meetings. Of course she will laugh a great deal
at Charlie Chaplin, and the town entertainments will be very clever,
but the fun that is made for you doesn’t make so much of your mind and
heart laugh as the fun that you help make yourself.


The Aeroplane

The excitement continues. We’ve had rain and we’ve seen the aeroplane!
In fact they came together. On Sunday it was given out in the churches
that between 10 and 11 on Monday, Capt. Butler would fly over Petunia
and drop Peace Loan literature. Farmers immediately decided that one
morning off couldn’t make much difference to a bad season, and mothers
and daughters exchanged glances in which the washing was postponed.
When the school mistress had it announced in the Twocott chapel that
there would be no lessons next morning, the children’s flushed faces
were as good as cheers. Even the Hobbledehoy, who had seen the great
sight in town, of course, was not so blasé as he pretended.

On Monday motors and traps and waggons poured into Petunia through
driving wind and rain. Pedestrians with umbrellas struggled against
the blast. I don’t quite know what we expected. Perhaps we thought
the aeroplane would only be visible from the main street, or that it
would land there, or that the literature would, and in any case, we
all wanted to take our excitement in company. We lined up for shelter
in the lee of shops and houses. Opinions differed. Some thought the
Institute the best site, some the post-office, and some plumped for
the vicinity of the Recreation Ground, as affording a clear view and a
suitable place for an airman to descend (or drop out) after a spiral or
a nose-dive.

The Postmaster suggested that the weather might be too ... but we shut
him up for a croaker, and poddled about exchanging anticipations and
chaffing young Jones, who was “look-out” to report the arrival to the
expectant school. A stockman drifted in with a herd of yearlings, and
we watched him zig-zag them resignedly past the groups of traps and
people. Wet ruts gleamed in some fitful sunshine along the straight
road stretching between green paddocks into the moist distance. There
came an unexpected sound overhead, and the school children burst along
the street with decorous hilarity. Something we had seen in pictures
emerged from the grey and glided overhead, and into the distant grey
again, “like a spoggy in the sky,” as young Allen poetically observed.

It was in sight for quite four minutes.

Half an hour later we were fairly certain that there were to be no
nose-dives, no spirals, not even any literature. We snubbed the
Postmaster, and closed in on the Institute, where the chairman of the
district tried to focus our attention on the Peace Loan, and make us
feel we had not come out for nothing. Then laughing people turned their
collars up round their ears, climbed into buggies, and shook the reins.
“Gid-dup.”


From the Chinese

A few people despise poetry; many more speak respectfully of it only
because they think they ought to, not because they, personally,
understand it or even appreciate it. Of course, it is quite easy to
enjoy a poem without understanding its technique, its rhyme, rhythm,
and so on, or without being able to say in what, apart from the form,
it differs from prose. “Can’t you _feel_ it?” is often the sufficient
answer, in the words of a certain professor of classics.

The following fragment from the Chinese makes us feel that it is
poetry, though the translator cannot convey to us the poetic form of
the original.


PO CHU-I STARTS ON A JOURNEY EARLY IN THE MORNING.

    Washed by the rain, dust and grime are laid;
    Skirting the river, the road’s course is flat.
    The moon has risen on the last remnants of night;
    The traveller’s speed profits by the early cold.
    In the great silence I whisper a faint song;
    In the black darkness are bred sombre thoughts.
    On the lotus-banks hovers a dewy breeze;
    Through the rice furrows trickles a singing stream.
    At the noise of our bells a sleeping dog stirs;
    At the sight of our torches a roosting bird wakes.
    Dawn glimmers through the shapes of misty trees....
    For ten miles, till day at last breaks.

“More than a thousand years have elapsed since that journey,” says the
_Times_ reviewer, “and nobody knows the words of that ‘faint song,’ or
the nature of those ‘sombre thoughts,’ but we are just as intimately
acquainted with Po Chu-I as if he had enlarged by the page on his
emotional complexities.... Chinese poetry aims to induce a mood rather
than to state a thought.... Po Chu-I’s sorrows and joys and placid
reveries hover in the mind after the book is closed, and that—and not
the number of startling remarks made—is the test of a poem’s value.”

To-day or a thousand years ago, China or Australia, it is all the same.
You and I have made journeys like that, and can share the poet’s mood.
We have arisen early and crept about by lantern-light, we have let
ourselves out on to a road that lies white under a cold moon, and have
thrilled and hasted in the chill air. The first solemn joy gave place
to gloom as the heralding darkness enveloped the world. And then we
felt the dawn-breeze among the gum trees, and heard the creek rustle
through the water-cress. A dog barked, a bird peeped, and the first
pink cloud floated in the brightening sky. And then the world woke up,
the magpies and the farmyards and the pumping engine, and we were glad
that we were afoot and off, and a little proud about it.

And a thousand years ago an old, old Chinaman sang our mood for us,
and lo! it was poetry. And because we have felt it all for ourselves,
though we did not know how to tell about it, what he says plays on our
minds like music, and we live the mood again.


Adopting Emily

“Seen that fine tabby in the woodhouse?” enquired Joshua.

“She’s got a beautiful white chest,” agreed Hob, “and that loose skin
and soft fur like old M’Glusky.”

“And a pink nose,” said Daisy.

“And her eyes are amber. Do let’s adopt her,” said I.

“Yes, let’s,” chorused the others—all except Marjorie, who prefers
mousetraps, and says that where one or two cats are gathered together,
or something, there is always an awful noise. However, we determined to
have that tabby.

Have you ever tried to adopt a duchess? A duchess in reduced
circumstances? Then you don’t know what we have been through with
Emily. (We call her Emily after Miss Fox-Seton, the “large, placid
creature, kind rather than intelligent,” who became Marchioness in one
of Mrs. Hodgson Burnett’s books.) Emily is a cat of character. She
didn’t want to be adopted. She didn’t mind renting our woodheap, but
preferred not to have to meet the family. She would keep herself to
herself, thank you. She used to sit, serene and dignified, blinking in
a sunbeam among the roots, lifting her white bosom and gently kneading
the ground. If you offered her food she seemed to put up her lorgnettes
at you, and it wasn’t any good leaving the saucer and going round the
corner. When you came back Emily was gone, and the food wasn’t.

She certainly impressed us. We built up all sorts of legends around
her. Her disdain for food and her calm refusal either to accept
our advances, to withdraw from her place, or to be seen hurrying
at any time, seemed so very aristocratic. And then how she kept up
appearances! Marjorie scarcely took the same view as the rest of us,
especially after Emily so haughtily snubbed the milk she had offered
herself. She said she didn’t believe she was a duchess at all; more of
a peroxide barmaid about Emily, if you asked her, a minx with a bust
who put on airs. And a few nights later she said she wouldn’t have cats
encouraged about the place. She said she believed Emily was the cause
of that jazz party on the lawn in the moonlight.

Emily jazz! Never!

“Adopting Emily” became the favourite diversion of our leisure. In the
end it was very mortifying, very mortifying indeed. We were all sitting
on our heels round the woodheap coaxing Emily, and Emily as usual
was barely tolerating our presence, too proud to withdraw, when Mr.
Wickhams came across the paddocks to borrow another axe.

“Well, I’m blowed!” said he; “so this is where our old cat goes. She’s
only been home for meals since the wife turned her out of the hat-box.”

Yes, what we took for dignity was sulks, and her aristocratic
superiority to food was due, to put it bluntly, to a full stomach. Mr.
Wickhams handsomely forgave us for trying to abduct his best mouser as
he stretched a long arm into the wood and hauled her off by the scruff
of the neck. Such an indignity for Emily.


Twocott

Driving out to Buxton on Wednesday afternoon, I picked up little Jennie
Elliott walking home from Twocott.

“Do you go to school already?” I exclaimed.

“Oh, I’ve been going a long time—ever since Christmas. We got a nice
teacher. She is always good to us—unless she can’t help it; and we are
always good to her, unless _we_ can’t help it.” Dear understanding
little mite. “All of us are in the second grade nearly.” “All of us”
have now learnt to sing, and Jennie is always out early—unless she is
kept in.

She held on tightly to the side of the dog-cart and looked about the
country while she prattled out the gossip of the school from the point
of view of a six-year-old, and I felt a swelling of gratitude to the
wonderful teacher who keeps eight grades busy and happy and proud of
themselves, and convinced that she is proud of them, too! “All of us”
have a very nice time at Twocott, and are learning to be considerate
and tolerant and self-controlled, as well as the more formal lessons,
and all taught by a mere woman who understands the art of discipline
without a stick.


A Country Writer

A writer in _The Times Literary Supplement_ complains of the dearth
of good novels of country life. The modern author, he asserts, claps
the story on to any county, irrespective of the spirit of the place.
He takes a tourist’s trip to Cornwall or Yorkshire, and makes a book
out of it, though his dialogue was never heard on land or sea, flowers
bloom together whose seasons never met, and his pitiful town thinness
of mind is visible alike in what he sees and in what he fails to see.

Against these degenerate moderns the letter sets Richard Doddridge
Blackmore, and regrets that all his novels but one are neglected by an
undiscriminating or too hasty generation.

Now it is the virtue of country libraries that, though only the
feeblest of modern novels may find a way there, the best of the old
linger on their shelves long after they have been ejected from more
pretentious places. And so, while this letter was still fresh in my
mind, in our Institute at Petunia, rubbing sides with volumes by Mrs.
Gaskell and Miss Braddon, I came across “Cripps the Carrier,” whose
title page proclaimed it to be “by the author of Lorna Doone.” I took
it home, despite my doubt, as I eyed its yellow pages and heavy print,
that I should pay with yawns for my virtuosity.

And then on the very first page I met Dobbin, “the best harse as ever
looked through a bridle.”

“Every ‘talented’ man must think, whenever he walks beside a horse,
of the superior talents of the horse ... the power of blowing (which
no man hath in a comely and decorous form); and last, not least, the
final blessing of terminating decorously in a tail.... Scarcely any man
stops to think of the many cares that weigh upon the back of an honest
horse. Dobbin knew all this, but was too much of a horse to dwell
on it. He kept his tongue well under his bit, his eyes in sagacious
blinkers, and sturdily up the hill he stepped, while Cripps, his
master, trudged beside him.”

At the second page I was smiling outright, and knew that not a word of
this book would I knowingly skip.

Such is the quality of the writing that not only do we learn to know
Zacchary Cripps and his brother Tickus (christened after the third
book of the “Pentachook,” as they called his sixth brother), his horse
Dobbin, and Mary Hookham, “as he was a tarnin’ over in his mind,”
together with Squire Oglander, Lawyer—or “Liar”—Sharp, as Zac addressed
him, “wishing to put all things legal,” Miranda his wife, and Kit his
son, as well as or better than we know our neighbours, but we are all
the time falling in love with that sly rogue, that mellow scholar, that
lover of a horse and a pretty girl, Richard Doddridge Blackmore. Here
is a man who knows and loves and smiles over the rustic mind and life,
as he knows and loves the trees, the hedges, the ruts, the sunlight,
and the frosts, and all the ways of Nature. He is leisurely, and you
must be leisurely with him. You must stop to see what he sees, and
accompany all his friends on their goings out and comings in, smiling
and enjoying with him. He cares more for the telling than for the
story; he knows, like Louis Stevenson, that “to travel hopefully is
better than to arrive.”

Oxford and Oxfordshire are the scenes of the story, and we hear more
of town than gown, and more of Beckley than either. If the precise
critic ask whether it be a novel of character or of place or of plot,
the precise critic is a fool. There is the country, with its lanes and
hedges and changing seasons, and there are the people who carried and
delved and gossiped and wondered, sympathized with the trials of their
“betters,” and did their duty by parish church and parish “public,”
“same as Christians ought to.” And if you put it squarely to Squire (or
Parson?) Blackmore: “Come, now, you don’t expect me to believe that
Lawyer Sharp actually ... eh?” he will vouchsafe such a Philistine not
so much as a wink in reply, though you may catch a quizzical twinkle at
a generation too bald-minded to enjoy a hop field because the blossom
must be held up on poles.

Blackmore, like Shakespeare, knows every turn of the bucolic’s slow,
sturdy, tortuous mind; he loved his pauses, the dawning of perception,
his easy missing of the point, his superstitions, and his common sense.
Read this (it comes in that passage where the escaping Grace Oglander
appeals to the Carrier to shelter her from pursuit in his van):

“But missy, poor missy,” Cripps stammered out, drawing on his heart for
every word, “you was buried on the seventh day of January, in the year
of our Lord 1838; three pickaxes was broken over digging your grave
by reason of the frosty weather, and all of us come to your funeral!
Do ’ee go back, miss, that’s a dear! The churchyard to Beckley is a
comfortable place, and this here wood no place for a Christian.”

And he can paint the brisk homely maids as well as the gaping
tongue-tied men.

“Now, sir, if you please. You must—you must,” cried Mary Hookham, his
best maid, trotting in with her thumbs turned back from a right hot
dish, and her lips up as if she were longing to kiss him, to let out
her feelings.... “Sir, if you please, you must ate a bit.... ‘Take
on,’ as my mother has often said, ‘take on as you must, if your heart
is right, when the hand of the Lord is upon you; but never take off
with your victuals.’... All of us has our own troubles,” said Mary,
“but these here pickles is wonderful.”

In the affectionate malice of the misadventures into which is plunged
Hardenow, that earnest, scholarly Tractarian, there is all the fun of
a man who is teasing a beloved and misguided friend. The muscles he is
so proud of shall be laughed at, into brambles he shall plunge, and
lose his hat and tear his neckcloth into ribbons; in a pig-net shall
he be caught, and his athletic legs having struck terror into the mind
of Rabbit John, bound with thongs shall he be, and left in an empty
pig-stye, the very parlour of pig-styes (“on the floor, where he had
the best of it, for odour ever rises”), there to continue his fast for
many hours. Pity him not overmuch; “his accustomed stomach but thinks
it Friday come again!”

Aye, Blackmore knew man, and maid, and beast—even pig. Lying in this
plight, Hardenow sees:

“... a loose board, lifted every now and then by the unringed snout
of a very good old sow. Pure curiosity was her motive, and no evil
appetite, as her eyes might tell. She had never seen a fellow and a
tutor of a college rolling, as she herself longed to do; and yet in
a comparatively clumsy way. She grunted deep disapprovement of his
movements, and was vexed that her instructions were so entirely thrown
away.”

Here is a picture of a little child, seen through his hole by the
distracted tutor:

“A little child toddled to the wicket gate and laid fat arms against
it, and laboured, with impatient grunts, to push it open.... He gazed
with his whole might at this little peg of a body, in the distance
toppling forward, and throwing out behind the whole weight of its great
efforts.... This little peg, now in battle with the gate, was a solid
Peg in earnest; a fine little Cripps, about five years old, as firm as
if just turned out of a churn. She was backward in speech, as all the
little Crippses are; and she rather stared forth her ideas than spoke
them. But still, let her once get a settlement concerning a thing that
must be done to carry out her own ideas, and in her face it might be
seen, once for all, that stop she never would till her own self had
done it....

“Taught by adversity (the gate had banged her chubby knees, etc.)
she did thus: Against the gatepost she settled her most substantial
availability, and exerted it, and spared not. Therewith she raised one
solid leg, and spread the naked foot thereof, while her lips were firm
as any toe of all the lot, against the vile thing that had knocked
her about, and the power that was contradicting her. Nothing could
withstand this fixed resolution of one of the far more resolute moiety
of humanity. With a creak of surrender the gate gave back; and out came
little Peggy Cripps, with a broad face glowing with triumph.”

I have told you of Dobbin; I suppose I mustn’t detain you to hear
about Lawyer Sharp’s horse? “A better disposed horse was never
foaled; and possibly none—setting Dobbin aside, as the premier and
quite unapproachable type—who took a clearer view of his duties to
the provider of corn, hay, and straw, and was more ready to face and
undergo all proper responsibilities.... He cannot fairly be blamed,
and not a pound should be deducted from his warrantable value, simply
because he did what any other young horse in the world would have
thought to be right. He stared all round to ask what was coming next,
he tugged on the bridle, with his fore feet out, as a leverage against
injustice, and his hind legs spread wide apart, like a merry thought,
ready to hop anywhere.” Later he made for Oxford, “where he thought of
his oat sieve smelling sweetly, and nice little nibbles at his clover
hay, and the comfortable soothing of his creased places by a man who
would sing a tune to him.”

One of the charms of the book is that it will make you a nuisance to
your family; there are so many pictures that you simply must read them,
so many phrases they must taste with you, and everything that you
do quote seems to be capped and improved upon by something a little
further on, and you simply must venture it.

Not a thing does he miss, from ruts (oh, that pæan on ruts! “Everything
here was favourable to the very finest growth of ruts. The road had
once been made, which is a necessary condition of any masterpiece of
rut work; it had then been left to maintain itself, which encourages
wholesome development....”) to the effects of a hard frost, the borings
of the Sirex Gigas, and the tufted undergrad. who tools the “Flying
Dutchman” up the streets of Oxford. And nothing would we have him miss.


How can I let my dear friend Richard Blackmore, with his chuckling
gossip about Worth Oglander and Grace, Cripps, and the rustics of
Oxford and Beckley, fade out of memory on Petunia shelves?


The Hypnotist

The Round of Gaiety continues. We have just lived through a Sunday
School anniversary (with tea meeting), a visit from _the_ hypnotist,
and the Show.

The Hobbledehoy (latterly known as Hob) wrote that his father must go
to the hypnotic entertainment. He had been with some of the boys from
College, and the sight of a respectable schoolmaster under the delusion
that he was assisting at a dogfight left him without words to express
his joy. On hearing that our new man, Fat Bill Boundy, who has the face
of a natural comedian, meant to submit himself for experiment, Joshua
decided that a little amusement would cheer Marjorie up, and of course
he accompanied her.

Admission turned out to be 2s. 4d. and 3s. 6d.

“But the advertisement said ‘Popular Prices,’” protested Joshua.

“That’s right,” agreed the ticket man, smoothly, “popular with the
entertainer.”

Joshua says that this was the only joke of the evening. Bill Boundy
went up on to the platform all right, but the Great Man only made him
twiddle his fingers and roll his eyes. He said that on this occasion
he was “mesmerizing but not hypnotizing.” Joshua sat up half the night
with Jack’s Reference Book and the Encyclopædia Britannica, trying to
find out the difference. It appears that it consists in the size of the
town in which the performance is given.


Tin Lizzie

Our minister bought a “Tin Lizzie”—at least, I’m afraid he passed it
off with the old, old joke, “We’ll have a Ford now, and a motor after
the war.” But Tin Lizzie worked harder than any horse, and our minister
was well satisfied—except when he forgot to water her, or crank her, or
in some way misunderstood her internal organs; and then he called her
“The Pesky Thing,” and even went so far as to say—I mean, of course, to
_think_—“Dash it.”

But a time came when the Pesky Thing had to be cleaned, and
oiled, and crawled over, and squirmed under, and taken to pieces,
and—and—sermonized over. And our minister was a persevering man, and
so were his friends; and they talked and thought and read motors, and
captured the local mechanic and a passing amateur and an expert; and
finally they got her to go—a little way. Wherefore on Saturday night
the minister went to bed happy.

But all the same he had a dream, a nightmare, a hair-raising,
heart-stopping nightmare. He dreamed that he was _walking_ to church
when he noticed his boots—and they were his motor-cleaning boots,
scraped on the heels and worn at the toes and cracked all over. But he
was not dismayed; the pulpit would hide them.

And yet a little way, and lo, he had on his head the cap, the
greasy, poacher’s cap that protected his clerical hairs from the
motor-drippings.

“But I can pocket my cap,” this imperturbable man comforted himself.

And yet a little further, and it was his coat, his shapeless, sagging,
grimy motor-coat.... And now he really was put out, for, as he foresaw,

“I shall have on those trousers in a few minutes!”

And when at last he got to church the sense of doom was upon him, and
when he gave out the hymn the organ was out of order.

And they took it to pieces, and cleaned it, and oiled it, and climbed
over it and crawled under it....

“Now I see that all things work together for good,” dreamed our
minister (he was ever an optimist), “_for I’ve got the right togs on
for the job_.”


The Show

During the strike our railway supported only three trains a week; for
the Show it surpassed itself and ran three on one day, or, rather, two
and a dog-box. But they were all full, and I do think the crowd enjoyed
itself, or at any rate Marjorie’s prize cake and cream puffs, which
were carried off surreptitiously. Joshua says that the judging was
very unsatisfactory. His two-tooth did not get a prize. Marjorie, on
the other hand, considers that in the cooking and dairy sections the
most exemplary fairness was shown.

In the general excitement of meeting Pete Wigglesby, whom we haven’t
seen for years, Joshua gave his order for a milking machine, although
the drought has set in again. Marjorie wishes he would want to show off
to some other old friend, and order a new house. “One without cement
floors, and with no step down into the kitchen,” she says, plaintively.
“And with a bathroom,” puts in Hob.

Peterborough Show comes next, and I fancy our men will mob it. For one
thing, it is such a good opportunity to get their hair cut. You see, we
are short of barbers in Petunia, and any excursions are eagerly seized.
When the District Schools Picnic was held at Glenelg there were queues
outside the hairdressers there till late in the afternoon, and it was
considered that the managers of our fair made a great _coup_ when they
ran a saloon as a sideshow. By the end of the evening Dicky Conlon
was getting to be quite an expert hair-cutter. There was a little
disturbance when Joe Wickhams saw himself in the glass, but Constable
Merritt knocked the razor out of his hand and pulled him off Dicky.
After that it was all right, because some one had the presence of mind
to take away the mirror.


The Haircut

Joshua couldn’t go to Peterborough Show after all, and his hair was
awful. Marjorie “could not foresee to what lengths it would go,” and
advised him to wear it in curling-pins. Joshua begged her to try what
she could do with a basin, and finally persuaded her to take a comb and
scissors and “put the reaper into the crop.” Of course, the machine had
to go over it several times, but at last only the stubble remained. She
had some difficulty in getting the furrows on one side to meet those on
the other, but finally the terrace effect was complete. Windy corner,
where the roads meet on top, was a difficult point to negotiate, and
Vimy Ridge took some levelling. The razor-work was particularly fine,
and Joshua deserves the V.C. Marjorie was rather dashed by her failure
to sell him a bottle of hair-restorer; she urged that it might help
check the growth.


Scipio

Daisy is still after a pet whose usefulness she can justify as a
potential mouse-catcher, but our disappointment with the Duchess has
made us humbler and more discreet. This time we asked a neighbour for
the gift of his apparently superfluous black kitten.

“’Taint mine,” said he; “it belongs to my old Nosey. She had it in the
haystack, and I have never been able to catch it to drown it. If you
can get it you can have it.”

“We shan’t find any difficulty with Scipio,” exulted the Hobbledehoy,
home for “month out,” “because no one has been feeding him.”

“Scipio?” I asked.

“The black kitten,” he explained. “What they used to call the little
niggers. Good name for a gutter-snipe.”

Well, we certainly have no difficulty in getting Scipio into the
neighbourhood of nourishment. He (and Nosey his mother, and Miss
Perkins his aunt, and the Yellow Peril from up the road) will scud
across two paddocks at the sound of our call. At twenty paces, however,
Scipio becomes coy. He rubs himself ingratiatingly against his mother,
he sniffs towards the food, but won’t be wheedled. He may daringly
sneak up within six feet to snatch a piece of meat, but he runs off
again growling and sticks a paw on it, and turns his eyes towards us,
flattening his ears while he eats. By the exercise of great patience
and by throwing bits of meat at lessening distances he has even learned
to snatch the meat from Daisy’s hand, to eat it without moving far,
to—no, not to be stroked! At the first touch on his fur he darts to
the gate, brings up, turns round, a little ashamed of his fright as
he hears Daisy’s cooing voice—or, perhaps, still a little hungry!—and
stands ready for flight, his tail gallantly up, though, and twitching
his muscles confidingly, so that the fur ripples up and down his back
in the sunlight. He fixes us with his blue eyes, that are already
turning green at the edges, starts forward, checks—and that is as far
as we can get with the adopting of Scipio. Poor little gutter-snipe!
We shall never tame him. He can’t believe in human kindness. The only
love he trusts is the warm touch of his mother, and she will cast him
off soon, and his kittenhood will be over. Scipio will live as he can
on pickings from rubbish heaps and mice in the haystacks and birds in
the hedge. But it is Daisy who will be unhappy about it, not Scipio!
Luckily, cats are not introspective.


Bill Boundy

Have I told you about our Bill Boundy? I have a rooted conviction that
for a good many people music is simply a noise that they hope will soon
stop. The reason why people will hardly ever confess to being unmusical
is probably Shakespeare’s unfortunate remark:

    “The man that hath no music in himself,
    Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
    Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”

To me it seems very hard that people should be under a cloud simply
because of some defect in their organs of Corti, or some other part of
the physical apparatus for hearing the exquisiteness of tune in sound.
However, Bill Boundy is undoubtedly musical. He could lean against the
wall all day listening to Hob practising. “It makes the skin of my head
run tight,” he says, ecstatically and in apology, when Joshua motions
him stablewards.

Bill is a treasure. I hope Joshua will never sack him irrevocably. He
had “a week home to Munta” for Christmas, and is simply bursting with
conversation. Most of his anecdotes turn upon his mother, a salty old
Cornishwoman. She is a pensioner, but quite properly expects as much
courtesy from the officials as if she were any other member of the
public.

“I be waiting, my son,” was her gentle reminder through the post office
window to the negligent back of “some young Jack-a-napes.” The new
clerk took no notice.

“Didn’t ’ee hear, son? I be standing.”

“No son of yours,” snapped the sensitive youth.

“Must be somebody’s son,” urged the old lady, calmly, “unless ’ee come
out of incubator.”

Jack-in-Office is now quite briskly attentive to Bill Boundy’s mother.

Bill is filled with admiration and a little malice because John Thomas
Trellagan’s boy has just qualified as a doctor.

“Fair set up about it, John Tummas be. ‘Rayther young, John,’ says I.
‘Shouldn’t like him monkeying with my innards, ’a believe.’ ‘Aw,’ says
John Tummas, a terrible obliging man, ‘they only practise on quite
young children at first, ’a believe.’”

Joshua says Bill is “an ingratiating beggar.” Relations were strained
because Bill hadn’t got the milking machine clean in time, but while
they speeded up Bill wheedled Joshua into a good temper. He told him
another story of John Tummas Trellagan’s boy. He has had his first
maternity case. The mother and child are in a bad way, says Bill, but
Clarence still hopes to save the father.

Bill always knows all that goes on in the township. Now that paper and
string cost so much those who forget to take a cloth for their bread
have to pay a halfpenny extra. Bill was there when the butcher took
his revenge by charging the baker’s little messenger for the paper he
wrapped the dog’s meat in. Thank goodness, everyone in Petunia can take
a joke.


An Angry Man

I had chosen “Mary Barton” because Mrs. Gaskell wrote it, and “Joan
and Peter” because no blue stocking with a care for her reputation
can afford to admit ignorance of whatever book happens to be Wells’s
penultimate, (or at any rate ante-penultimate), and I felt that I
deserved some champagne after this solid-looking fare. I looked round
the shelves gloomily, despairing of finding anything frivolous
in the scanty stock from which in Petunia we draw for our week’s
entertainment. “Pickwick Papers”—delightful, but too old a friend.
“Three Men in a Boat”—also past its first youth. “Galahad Jones”—the
very best of its kind, but then we only returned it last week.
“Fatima”—um-m. Well, it had the plain cover of a self-respecting
publisher; good print, plenty of conversation, titled folk, a yacht. It
sounded frivolous enough. I took it.

I do not regret my choice, though my pleasure was scarcely due to
the writer. There is no need to tell you the story. It was about a
French-Arabian young lady dressed in a burnous (yes!) and coins, who
married a tuberculous Scotch peer, and fell out with a deep-dyed
villain (also of the peerage), and loved a doctor, the Bayard of his
profession and the saintliest scientist who ever fell into the devilish
hands of Arabian bandits agitating (apparently) for the eight hour day,
only to be rescued by the lady in the burnous. No, the fun was not in
the story, entertaining as its author’s luxurious enjoyment of herself
undoubtedly was; the fun was entirely due to reading in the wake of an
angry man with a pencil, who took the whole thing seriously.

He began on the first page. “A baronet would not be called ‘Lord,’”
he reproves mildly. You could see his feeling; purely irritation with
the printers. But as the story progressed it became clear that it was
not the compositor who was at fault. “The authoress evidently does not
understand titles,” he snarls. “Earl Harben would not be referred to as
‘Lord Eric.’” He slashes his pencil through “the Lady Eric,” and bang
goes “her grace.” Fury nearly obliterates the “gh” in “straightened
circumstances.” Next he reasons with the misguided person who has been
adjudged worthy of the dignity of print (my own idea is that a doting
husband paid for the whole thing himself). “Not a burgomaster _and_
a maire,” he pleads; “not in the same town. One is German, the other
French.” Other anomalies he passes with a mere flick of the pencil,
an exasperated sniff, as it were. I stuck to the yarn solely for the
pleasure of savouring his hot fury, his cold despair, his pleading, his
rage.

“The Presbyterians”—the infuriated man nearly dug through the page—“do
not pray for the dead.”

And then came the (for me) sad page whereafter comment ceased. He had
pounced on an exotic phrase.

“Pure Yankee!” he exclaims, triumphantly, and all is forgiven. I parted
from him with sorrow.

His conclusion was wrong, of course, as I could prove if I met him. No
one ought to accuse an American woman of not understanding the British
peerage!


Alcibiades

The pet problem is solved! A chum has presented Hob with a small black
pup, and, as Hob found to his disgust that even Prefects can’t keep
dogs at school, he brought him home at the Michaelmas holidays.

“What is his name?” demanded Daisy.

“The Dam Dog,” replied Hob.

“What!” ejaculated Marjorie.

“The Dam Dog. Oh, it’s all right, mother. It means ‘dog that washes in
a dam.’ D.A.M., you know.”

“Thank you, Hob. I know you go to college, but I can spell ‘dam’
myself—both ways. You must find some other name for your dog.”

The little fellow kept us all awake the night Hob left, and Joshua
remarked in the morning that he thought Marjorie might now be more
willing to let the name stand. However, Hob wrote to say that he had
decided upon Alcibiades.

This time it was Joshua who put his foot down. He said that, if ever
the time should come (which he doubted) when the dog was useful
with sheep he was not going to make a fool of himself by shouting
“Alcibiades.”

So now “his name is Alcibiades,” as Daisy explains, “but we call him
Peter.”

Peter is a lovable little chap. He barks, prances, pounces, worries,
with all the energy possible to a little barrel-shaped body that
has only just ceased to wobble when it walks. Yesterday the
police-constable called with news of our missing cow. Peter took the
opportunity to bite his trousers and pull his boot laces, and then
rolled over and over in an ecstacy of self-importance.


News

Don’t apologize for sending “no news, only views, blended with a cold
in the head.” I never can see why letters should be newsy.

“There is nothing to write about; I am not doing anything,” people say.
But if they are not doing they are thinking, and our thoughts are often
more interesting to our friends than events, which very likely have
little connection with ourselves at all. I’ve an idea that the best
correspondents, like the best essay writers, are the egoists.

I am not one of the best letter-writers, however. In fact, I feel
distinctly newsy. There is always something going on in Petunia. For
instance, some more of our boys have returned from the war. We were
pleased! A turkey was dressed in honour of one, and then the date of
arrival was several times postponed. The problem of problems is—how
long will a turkey keep even in (home-made) cold storage this weather?
Any little unusual smell was greeted anxiously with, “I hope that isn’t
the turkey!”

Twocott gave a strawberry fête and magic lantern in honour of its
soldiers, only the strawberries didn’t come, and the lantern was
missing. Still, the evening was a great success; there was so much more
time to talk and play.

But the policeman’s wife has had the most excitement. Her husband was
away, and she was awakened by strange noises. At first she thought
it was smothered laughter, and then she thought it was curses (not
smothered); presently there was a crash and a groan. In the shadow of
the lane opposite a writhing mass of men bore something stealthily
into the darkness. Our policeman’s wife is a heroine. She resolved not
to desert the children, and buried her head in the bedclothes. In the
morning Mrs. Odgers, coming over to borrow some dripping, was full of
the kindness of the men who had moved the piano into her new house on
their way home from the political meeting at Buxton.


Amusing Daisy

I do wish all girls took a course of home nursing. I’ve been nursing
Daisy with one hand and reading up the subject with the other, so to
speak. I can now sponge the patient with almost no exertion to her and
without letting her get cold, at least, not very; and I can change the
sheets without moving her from the bed. When Daisy gets better perhaps
Marjorie or Joshua will give me a turn, just so that I can perfect my
art. Daisy liked the cap I wore to protect my hair; it decided her
to be a nurse herself some day. But the best subject for amusing the
restless little soul was Peter—well, then, Alcibiades. I told Joshua
about the beautiful echo that would reverberate “over the downs” if he
called “Alcibiades,” but he said life was too short for elocutionary
exercises while you round up sheep. “You mean your temper is too
short,” observed Marjorie very justly.

Of course, I couldn’t have Peter in the room catching scarlatina and
spreading infection, but Daisy was never tired of hearing about him. We
country people don’t keep our animals in the Zoo and visit them once a
year. They are part of our life, and we talk about them accordingly.
Dobbin, now—but I suppose I mustn’t? Well, well, to return to Peter.
Sometimes he would stand on a bench under the window and put his paws
on the sill, eagerly looking in with his bright black eyes, his ears
pricked, his ecstatic tail hopefully suggesting a walk. And then bones.
He loves bones, nice old gamey ones, disinterred with excitement and
later buried again with earnest care. The ambition of his heart is
to gnaw them inside. He prances in proudly, tail up, head up, bone
on one side, and then at the reprimand, the transparent bubble of
his innocence pricked, he turns round (laughing, doubtless, at his
discomfiture), and makes for his mat—when he doesn’t defy you from
under the table. And to see him tugging at an apron-string, legs set,
eyes bulging!

“What else does he do?” enquires Daisy solemnly. I can’t think of
anything else, and I say lamely:

“Well, once he barked at a beetle.”


Obiit

Peter is dead.

Daisy is inconsolable. He was such an engaging little fellow.

He was the only dog that Marjorie ever allowed inside.

He is buried under the apple tree where he used to forage so busily for
bones.


The Drought

Last birthday Hob got a rather special penknife. This disposed him to
be generous with his third and oldest.

“If I give you this,” he meditated to little Allen from next door, “I
suppose you will cut yourself with it?”

“I wouldn’t,” protested Allen. Hob gave it to him. Last week when Daisy
and I were going to the library Allen came prancing up to us.

“I’ve got a cut finger,” he exclaimed, triumphantly. Then, suddenly
remembering, “But I didn’t do it with Hob’s knife.” He danced backward
on his toes so as to face us as we walked on.

“I’ve been to town,” offered Daisy.

“See the aererplane? See the Cave? See Father Christmas?” he demanded.

“Yes,” bragged Daisy.

“I ain’t,” said Allen, wistfully.

And the harvest is so scanty that Father Christmas will have to be
very frugal if he is to come at all to the homes of some working men.
Petunia looks very sad, bare and brown and dusty. The sparrows hop
about with parched open beaks, waiting their turn when the tap drips,
and on Sundays the dejected draught horses stand about in the trampled
dust while the hot wind soughs through the stunted shrubs, and the sun
blazes on bare paddocks, and shimmers on the iron roofs. In winter it
is different. The light shines clearly on gay green crops and whitens
the curving blades, and the horses mosey companionably along the
roadsides, nibbling the grass, twitching humorous nostrils, gambolling
clumsily and shaking their bell-bottomed pasterns, screaming with
laughter when sportively bitten by a friend. Oh, man and beast love
Petunia in winter! But droughts really ought not to be allowed. It is
moving to think of ill-fed cattle and disheartened workers.

    “Then welcome each rebuff
    That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
    Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go,”

writes Browning. In the good seasons I find this advice inspiring. When
the rebuff begins it seems less so. And when one thinks of the returned
soldiers who are only getting three bushels to the acre (not even
enough for seed!) one remembers with tears that it is easier to die for
a country than to live for it. “Beginning again” after the years at
the war takes resolution and courage, the willingness to take risks,
and the patience not to take them hastily, that are as true tests of
manhood as any they had abroad.




The Works of Simple Simon, LL.D., D.Litt., Ph.D., M.B., B.S.


An Emendation

Amid the welter of possible misprints in such writers as Shakespeare,
Shelley, and Coleridge, one obvious correction would appear to have
been overlooked.

    “Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?
    I’ve been to London to look at the Queen.
    Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?
    I frightened a little mouse under her chair.”

So runs one of the earliest-known (to me) and best-loved poems.

But is it credible that the romantic young cat who trimmed his fur and
hoisted his tail and fared forth to catch a glimpse of Majesty would
create a vulgar scene in that adored presence? Is it credible that,
returning, he should boast of his boorishness, like a gutter-snipe
making a _pied de nez_? Nor can I think that what he saw at Court
turned our gallant to a cynic, coarsely sniggering out his disillusion.
No, I prefer to believe that a pedantic regard for mechanical accuracy
of metre has caused the printer to err. For “frightened” I believe we
should read “caught.”

    “I _caught_ a little mouse under her chair.”

The astonishing thing is that no previous editor seems to have thought
of this. Of course, there will be some dissenters.

“What!” will exclaim the upholder of things as they are, instead of as
they might so much better be, “Would you have us sentimentalize the
cat, and by pathetic fallacy pretend that the young prig thought to
‘serve his Queen’?”

“Not at all,” I reply. I will tell you my idea. Having stepped softly
and daintily into the presence and slipped behind the tapestry and out
again near the throne, he gazed adoringly at the lovely Queen, at her
soft hair under the crown, at her rosy fingers, her silk-clad knee, the
graceful brocaded train with which his pussy-humour longed to play. And
then his eyes, big and black with the unaccustomed splendour, suddenly
espied the natural, homely mouse licking his whiskers impudently in
the fancied security of the royal throne. Pussycat was shocked and
interested (like a little boy with a dog in church), and he watched
and watched till he was all pussy, till the Court faded and Pussycat’s
strategic eye made him pounce before he thought.

And when the Ladies-in-Waiting fainted because they dared not scream,
and the Gentlemen-in-Waiting dashed forward because they thought
Pussycat might scrunch the mouse under the royal chair, Pussycat laid
back his ears and darted his eyes defensively, and with a laughing
growl laid it at the Queen’s own feet.

And so when, safe back at home over a saucer of milk, Pussycat told a
reproachful little boy where he had been, and the little boy screamed
with delight,

    “Pussycat, Pussycat, what did you there?”

Pussycat, hugging himself for his naughty boldness, and smiling to
think how the Queen had smiled, and vastly enjoying the sensation he
was making, burst out with his answer (and that is the meaning of the
irregular metre, the long pause and stress):

    “I _caught_ a little mouse under her chair!”


A Protest

I have long regretted the publicity accorded to the pieman
incident—solely on the pieman’s account.

    “Simple Simon met a pieman,
    Going to the fair.”

Our family has always been noted for its straightforward simplicity. I
was hungry, I was curious in pie-lore, and I made the request which I
conceive any youth, bred to gracious treatment, would have made.

    “Said Simple Simon to the pieman,
    Let me taste your ware.”

So might the Prince of Wales himself have spoken. O, sordid, oh
mercenary pieman! Where was thy pride of bakery, where thy manners?
Thou did’st neither feed the hungry nor wait with honest pride a meed
of praise. Thine not the artist soul, thine not the joy of giving;
thine, alas! but lust of pelf. What does the paltry fellow reply?

    “Said the pieman to Simple Simon,
      Show me first your penny.”

With sorrow and scorn I gave answer candidly:

    “Said Simple Simon to the pieman,
      For sure I haven’t any.”

My simple dignity speaks for itself. A more sophisticated youth would
have demanded the production of the hawker’s licence.


A “Lancet” Article

A subject on which I have several times reflected is tuberculosis, and
I believe that I can cure it. An account of my method and of how I hit
upon it will doubtless gratify my readers.

I have always held that Nature’s avenue of healing is the lips. In my
youth I studied physics, and passed the Senior—or was it the Junior?
Anyway, the idea came to me of disintegrating the molecules of which
the bacillus or germ is composed. To be precise, I meant to grab the
nitrogen out of them. Unfortunately, I recollected that there is
nitrogen in the tissues as well, and I did not feel certain that I
could disintegrate one without the other.

My present device is strictly scientific. Beginning with the principle
that cure is to be through the lips, and that the goal is to be the
elimination of the bacilli, I asked myself how they could be extracted.
Not with forceps, that was clear. Then, in the course of my extensive
reading I was much struck in “The English at the North Pole,” with
the adhesion of nails, knives, and other steel and iron ware to the
magnetic pole. “What,” thought I to myself, “if I were to magnetize
the bacilli?” Of course, the tubercle bacilli contain no iron, but
iron can be taken through the lips, and some of it would roost on the
germs in passing. I followed this procedure, and then, having opened
the patient’s mouth to its fullest extent, dangled a magnet down the
throat. On withdrawing the instrument it was found that 149,563,769
tubercles, or more than can dance on the point of a needle, adhered
to it. No other treatment is necessary, though the operation needs to
be performed daily (at a fee of £10 10s. per time) for twelve months.
The operator should wear a mask, and should boil his face and hands
thoroughly after each operation.

At the end of this time the patient will be in a very different
condition from what he was before.

I tried this treatment on T.B. He was 96 years old, with a previous
history of fractured skull and varicose veins. The epidermis of his
nose was found to be a good deal reddened. I administered three ounces
of iron, and applied the magnet. The operation was entirely successful.
There is no prognosis, because the patient choked. Through what?
_Through the flocking of the germs to the magnet._ This proves that
the dose of iron was too strong. Care must be taken to prevent the
magnetization of too many bacilli at the same operation.

I confidently look forward to receiving large sums for this treatment,
especially if well-advertised in gullible quarters.


An Application of Psychology to Medicine

The insistent demands of Psychology (too long regarded with jealousy)
to be called in to the aid of Medicine have at length been recognized.
_In corpore sano_ is an easy matter compared with _mens sana_. The
medical man soon learns to prescribe his nostrums, and to draw up a
diet which shall suit the palate of his patient; the very skilled can
even hit upon the exact vintage which shall be most acceptable. The
mentality is also diagnosed with as much insight as can be expected;
but now the treatment is less easy to decide. The book-list proves
harder than the wine-list, for here the doctor is on less familiar
ground. It is at this point that the psychologist’s work is of value.
Disciples of Æsculapius will be glad to receive the following typical
book-list communicated to us by a rising young physician of South
Australia (a remote province of our Empire in the outlying parts of the
Southern Hemisphere) who has used it with success.

First week of treatment.—Letting the mind down gently. Works by Ethel
Dell, Gertrude Page.

Second week.—Mind to be lulled. “Just David,” “Pollyanna.” (In very
obstinate cases, _e.g._, returned soldiers, “Jessica’s First Prayer”
and “Eric, or Little by Little” may be added.)

Third week.—Stage of acute self-pity, to be discharged by weeping over
woes of others. The “Elsie” books, “The Wide, Wide, World.” Confessions
(anybody’s).

Fourth week.—Patient needs rousing. This is a very critical period, and
the psychosis of the individual must be carefully studied. No general
prescription can be given, but the following suggestions are made:
For elderly Methodist spinster, Victoria Cross novel (preferably that
alleged to have set a bookstall alight); jaded divorcé (or divorcée),
“Golden Heart Novelettes”; case of delirium tremens, _Patriot_, or
other temperance organ. President of the Liberal Union: “_Direct
Action_,” “Sabotage.” (If these fail, get him to make up his income-tax
return.) Member of the I.W.W.: Probate lists; failing these, the
speeches of Irvine and Hughes will be found efficacious. Doctor
(difficult case, especially at night): works of Mrs. Baker-Eddy, or the
present article.

Fifth week.—Patient annoyed to hear he is looking better. Mild case:
Emerson’s Essays (one to be taken after each meal). Obstinate case:
Degree 1, the Bible; degree 2 (probably a lodge patient), advise to
make peace with God, and send for a clergyman.

Sixth week.—Patient returns to his wallowing: Hegel or Bertrand
Russell; Thompson or Lodge, and “Science from an Easy Chair”;
“Structure and Growth” or “Psychology for Little Tots”; Wells or
Charles Garvice; _London Punch_ or _The Pink ’Un_; “Horner’s Penny
Stories” and the _Sunday Circle_; all according to taste.


Our National Bulletin

At Fremantle the observant academic on his travels to the Antipodes
notes the rush of his Australian fellow-passengers for a large, bright
pink compendium. “Ah!” he thinks to himself, “that national paper of
theirs!” and at the first opportunity he purchases a copy in order to
study the manners and customs of the inhabitants.

“Bai Jove!” he gasps weakly, as he opens on a huge and brutal Norman
Lindsay cartoon, a quite unnecessarily unpleasant sketch by Mack or
Souter, or (as _The Bulletin_ itself might say) at the allegedly
humorous caricatures of “Poverty Point,” or “Sundry Shows.” On the Red
Page he is upset to find Looney’s Shakespeare theory taken seriously,
the sacred laws of punctuation explicitly and at length, but without
explanation, denied, and (in “A Satchel of Books”) a snub administered
to E. V. Lucas, while space is devoted to analysis and appreciation
of some unheard-of Australian writer. He considers the tone of the
Society gossip columns “most regrettable” (“vulgar” is his word if
no Australian is in earshot), and when he turns to Aboriginalities
for local colour, his refined literary palate is outraged at the—the
travesty on the English language which he finds. There is perhaps
the story of an egg-stealing crow, “whose black nibs” carries away
“bunches” of “this fruit.” And the whole paper is like that! Even
“Plain English!” From the number of abuses attacked, in provocative
captions like “Australia for the Asiatics,” “Murder at £4 11s. 3d. a
Time,” it appears that nothing, except perhaps an occasional piece of
work by a _Bulletin_ young man, goes right in Australia. Unless our
academic is a brave man, with sound missionary instincts, he writes
at once to resign his appointment. He really must refuse to herd with
these callow vulgarians.

Is _The Bulletin_ really characteristic of Australia? In the long run,
and with modifications, yes. It is the one paper which every good
Australian, at home or abroad, reads, and reads with gusto. It contains
argument, comment, or anecdote about nearly every subject on which
the Australian is interested. Its opinion may be wrong and its manner
blatant, but there is never any doubt that it has an opinion, and it
is never dull for a single sentence. But it is surely the _reductio
ad absurdum_ of some, as well as the highest power of other, of our
characteristics. Like the comic writers of the eighteenth century,
it holds the mirror up to nature—Australian nature—and its mirror is
always unsentimental and sometimes distorting.

Young nations are self-confident—and so is _The Bulletin_;
self-confident and bumptious and cock-sure. The Cheerful Cherub must
certainly have had this paper in mind when he wrote:

    I always envy editors
      With minds both deep and bright;
    They always feel so positive
      That what they think is right.

Whatever the subject, when the hail of argument ceases, the pulverized
reader wonders why he had not agreed to this before; or, if he still
has a doubt or objection, he keeps it to himself, because obviously
it is all his foolishness. Indeed that is _The Bulletin_ attitude
in every subject and in every paragraph. “It am It, and the other
fellow is a fool, most probably a damned fool.” _The Bulletin_ really
has convictions, too; its violence isn’t entirely explained, as the
psycho-analysts explain swearing, as an attempt to make up for the
defects of genius by the violence of style. No, _The Bulletin_ knows
its happy-go-to-football-match average Australian; it is perfectly
aware that to make him listen to reason you must (and this is the
reason both for our yellow press and our stump oratory) hold him by
the scruff of the neck while you shout your lesson in his ear. And so
_The Bulletin_ hits you in the eye with its red cover, and, having
caught your attention, rapidly emits a brisk succession of crisp
ideas, conveyed in a style of studied unexpectedness. It is terse and
trenchant and clear, though no one could call it nervous or sympathetic
or scholarly or refined. Those responsible have had extraordinary
success in achieving uniformity of manner through all their many
regular and paragraph writers. The essentials are something to say
(captious for preference), and trenchancy in saying it. Probably in no
other paper of its size are there fewer tiresome circumlocutions. Even
Death is briskly handled. “Died last week ...” begins the paragraph.
_De mortuis_, too, not _nil nisi bonum_, but whatever you like. _The
Bulletin_ doesn’t think much of classical learning, and perhaps it has
thrown a courteous precept or two overboard at the same time.

But the paper has a code of its own, an air of sea-green
incorruptibility and impartiality, and a fearlessness in defying the
conventional, which, even if it is sometimes only the aggressiveness
of crudity, makes its value more than that of a _succès de scandale_.
Politically it stands for two or three principles, which are rooted
(and which it assisted to root) in Australian conviction, and for two
or three others which will probably become so. It stands for a White
Australia and Protection and Self-Defence; it is anti-Imperial and
anti-Party and anti-Hughes, but no one can doubt that it is always
and wholly pro-Australian. It is the critic of all parties, with an
opinion as far removed from stick-in-the-mud Liberalism as it is from
the Party that Declines to Work. Its treatment of Royalty is probably
characteristic of the bulk of Australians. It wishes us to understand
that it holds no brief for Royalty, but that it likes and respects
“the Princelet” for himself, and wishes it could rescue him from the
pitiful efforts at entertainment of the vulgar Sassiety and official
classes. “Refer to us for information on Teddy’s tastes. Young Windsor
and we are pals,” it rather patronizingly suggests. Imagine H.R.H.
having a _Bulletin_ and Bohemian good time with Harrison O. and Henry
Horsecollar and Pat O’Maori and the rest! (Though occasionally one
wonders whether they live in so hectic a Bohemia as they would have us
believe.) For the pompous and the stupid they have no pity; to Gaud
Mayors and Gaud Mayoresses and Gent Helps they mete out treatment
savage or contemptuous, according to the degree of offence. Pitiless
publicity and offensive epithet are _The Bulletin’s_ ungenerous
treatment of inexperience and human weakness alike with incompetence
and considered roguery and political opposition.

The aspiring Australian inevitably submits his literary productions to
_The Bulletin_. Its frank and wholesome judgments are what he wants.
Its reviews of literary works are in accordance with the best typically
Australian opinion, though in its admiration for the vigorous and the
original and the characteristic it fails to appreciate some of the
fundamentally sound and admirable achievement which the conventional
often represents. The sound discipline it imposes upon writers of
verse is in striking contrast with this. In prose, too, of course,
it insists on grammatical English, but scholarship, and much that
scholarship implies, are alien to _The Bulletin_ (and to the young
Australian?) temperament. It is so much easier and more flattering
to ignorance to assume that mere common-sense can take precedence of
intelligence which is instructed and disciplined. In noticing a work on
sociology, ostentatiously to give its author—and one so well known—as
“a” Professor J. J. Findlay, is a perverse and provincial parade of
ignorance and detachment which discredit the writer. A reviewer should
at least know the literature and personnel of his subject.

_The Bulletin_ is full of energy and character and youth. Like youth,
in its horror of being Wowserish it assumes a bold bad air, but
fundamentally it has the wholesomeness as well as the intolerance of
youth. With the passage of years perhaps its intolerance and its slang
will wear off together, for most of us do not want to see the rise of
a mongrel Australian tongue akin to the worst kind of Americanese.
It deals with everything from sport to business, from literature to
politics, and all with an absence of qualm as to its ability that of
itself inspires confidence. That it excludes certain types of writer
is no reproach, for unity requires selection. Despite the following
imaginary list, the present writer is graciously pleased to admit that
he for one would not like to do without his weekly _Bulletin_.


ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.

 Elia: Using “Roast Pig”; returning “Dream Children” and “Poor
 Relations” for decent burial.... R.L.S.: Yarn has the right stuff in
 it. Keep on.... “Paradise Lost”: Send a couple of bullock drays for
 the M.S. What’s it all about, anyway?... Walt Whitman: You can’t get
 away with that verse, not in this paper.... A.A.M.: Joke feeble. You
 might try it on London _Punch_.... Alice Meynell: What do we care
 about your blooming kids?... Sage of Chelsea: Got a grouch about
 something, haven’t you? Work it off on the woodheap.... Walter Pater:
 Take it away.... Robert B.: Just misses being a shocking example....
 Bagehot: Laodicean stuff not in our line. For Gawsake lose your temper
 sometimes.... Bernard Partridge: Drawing accurate, but not enough kick
 in the figures. So the holy lady with the wings is Peace, is she?...
 W.W.:

    “A primrose by the river’s brim,
    A simple primrose was to him,
    And it was nothing more.”

 Beats us what more it ought to have been—two primroses? Our Temperance
 Editor protests.


Nigger


I.

Master was away all the afternoon; it was very dull. He did not come
back in the evening. Nigger was uneasy. Once during the night he
slipped his chain and went in search.

“Perhaps he’ll be in when I get back,” he thought hopefully.

And later: “He’s sure to be here for breakfast.”

But he wasn’t.

Nigger searched every room and sniffed the furniture. No master.
Nigger was lonely. He cuddled up on the forbidden cushions of the
garden-seat with Simonette, waiting for master to come whizzing round
the corner. He opened an eye at a noisy cycle, and cocked his ear for
a motor. He trotted up the drive, he wheeled sharply round to the
stables, he cut back, barking, to master’s room. No master.

After a little dejected self-examination Nigger paid a rapid visit to
several rabbit-holes. Whatever the strain, duty must be done. He came
back to be comforted.

“I know,” he yapped joyously, “he’s afraid to come home; he’s hiding
behind a tree.”

But he wasn’t.

“Then I darn well hope,” snapped Nigger, “that they’ll shut him up for
a day when he does turn up.” He sighed heavily.

But they didn’t. They shut Nigger up instead.


II.

The sun shone on the pale sodden summer grass, and the raindrops on the
trees glistened. The clouds were rolling back over the plain and the
sea. Nigger wanted a walk. He danced down the drive, and looked back to
see if anyone were following. No one. Nigger wagged his tail and tried
again. The invitation was ignored. Nigger drooped his tail (what there
was of it) and came back.

Simonette got her coat; Nigger wagged; an umbrella; Nigger sprang into
the air and spun round and round and barked. Simonette would indicate
the general direction of the walk, and he, Nigger, could introduce all
the variety. Simonette went over the hill; so did Nigger—and right and
left, too; he knew all the _best_ rabbit-holes.

But Simonette heard him tell little kennel-bound Kiwi, “Oh, just a
middling walk. Better than nothing, of course. But if only a man had
been here...!”

And since master came back Nigger hasn’t even spoken to Simonette.




Miscellaneous


The Queen City of the South

Writers about the Old World can take so much for granted. Even the
Colonial knows what to expect when the scene is laid in Tooting,
Maida Vale, or the _Boul’ Mich’_. He is intimate with some of the
geographical details, and with the social atmosphere of very different
parts of London and Paris. Regent Street, Clapham Junction, and the
Edgeware Road are as atmospheric for him as the Domain and Toorak.
The writer of the New World has no such advantage. He cannot be
certain that even the names of his capital cities will be recognized,
and he knows that few readers abroad (abroad, for him, is the
Northern Hemisphere) will care to learn even the general outlines
of God-knows-what insignificant citylet. Yet Australian States and
cities, nay, the very suburbs, are almost as broadly distinct and as
superficially varied as anything in the Old World, even though they are
not as mellow or as complex; and our citizens are as much moulded by
their surroundings.

Some years ago Foster Fraser tried to help us out as he whizzed through
each capital. Thus he labelled Sydney “for pleasure,” Melbourne “for
business,” and Adelaide “for culture.” But Adelaide is the only city
that is satisfied with his judgment. All six capitals bridle with
pleasure when “the Queen City of the South” is mentioned, which, as any
South Australian will tell you, is absurd; every unbiassed person knows
that the phrase is only a descriptive variant for Adelaide.

The only superiority freely accorded to Adelaide by her sister cities
is that of piety. The reason is partly the number of her churches, but
far more, I think, a malicious disinclination to let drop the legend
of our mayor who veiled with decent calico our Venus and our Hercules.
Some of our many later statues more rightly bring a blush to the
aesthetic cheek of the young person, but not, alas, because they are
unclad.

South Australia is a long, narrow State running down the middle of
the continent from the centre to the sea, from which, and her port,
Adelaide is not seven miles distant. The cattle tracks of the dry, hot
(and cold) Far North, and all the railways through the wheat and sheep
and copper areas, and all good roads everywhere, lead towards Adelaide.
That Queen City herself lies like a jewel on the broad and beautiful
plain, in the bend of the arm of hills which sweep inland from the
shore. The heart of it is a square mile of broad streets intersecting
at right angles, bound by gardened terraces, and secured from the rough
jostling and elbowing of the suburbs by broad belts of park land sacred
to browsing cows and horses, cricket, tennis, football, and bowls. East
Terrace has specialized in markets, for it lies nearest the hills and
the vegetable gardens; West Terrace faces the monuments and the sad
little mounds of a cemetery. Within these confines are five tree-shaded
lawns where children may play, and seats for those who choose to watch
the gay flower-beds. To the south are crowded streets and populous
lanes, lined mainly with dwellings; to the middle and north business
has developed.

Three or four shopping streets for womenkind, ten or twelve streets
of offices for men, and some of warehouses and factories, are so far
enough for this hub of the State. King William Street bisects it from
north to south, lined with banks and shops and huge hotels (huge for
us, you know), and cutting it at right angles is Rundle Street, a
kind of Drapers’ Row. Next to Rundle Street, and parallel with it, is
North Terrace, where the chambers of doctors and dentists intermingle
with warehouses. The Terrace is broad and treed and gardened like a
boulevard, and even along its garden and pedestrian side buildings have
been allowed. Here are the Railway Station and Parliament House, and,
east of King William Street, Government House behind its palm trees
and lawns, the Public Reading Rooms and Library, the Art Gallery, the
University, and the big Exhibition Building, which forms one entrance
to an Oval and Showground. Still further east is the long red-bricked
General Hospital, with its wide, shady lawn, and the ironwork entrance
to the lovely Botanic Gardens.

At the back of all these, between sloping banks of grass and flowers,
flows the Torrens. There is a little embarrassment about showing our
river to visitors, lest they should wish to row too far west or east,
and we South Australians do not care to expose our limitations to
dwellers on Thameside. The fact is that our river has to be carefully
saved up and dammed back for the purpose, and once a year we empty
it for excavation and repairs. Some precisians call it a lake—an
artificial lake. One midwinter, when the mud-banks gleamed grey and
slimy, and only a narrow trickle forced a way along the middle of the
bed, we were subjected to civic humiliation. The Governor-General
announced a hasty and unpremeditated visit. Every effort was made to
fill the Torrens against his Excellency’s arrival, but despite all that
man could do we had to hurry the representative of majesty past a very
meagre stream.

This north end of the city is undoubtedly the loveliest. Here the
line of lower roofs is broken by towers and spires and miniature
sky-scrapers rising above the quaint architecture of a cruder time and
art. And it is over this north end of the city, with its corrugated
sky-line, its river and its lawns, that the slender Cathedral looks,
standing on a hill above churches and houses whose bases are lost in
greenery. East and south are pretty suburbs where each house stands in
its own garden, but only in North Adelaide are the homes so spacious,
so serene, so certain of their beauty and their fitness. Oddly enough,
this retreat of wealth and leisure has for western neighbour the region
where the gas and soap and bricks are made, where hides are tanned and
laundry work is done. But then North Adelaide holds up her skirts with
jewelled hands and stands clear of the squalor of Bowden and Hindmarsh
by a whole park width.

When electric cars were brought to Adelaide the Municipal Tramways
Trust had the humorous notion, or perhaps it was only the business
instinct, fortified by democratic principle, of whizzing the North
Adelaide cars down the hill and round to Bowden. And so pretty misses
with books or racquets or clubs rub shoulders with stout old parties
laden with string bags and parcels, and dingy women are bitterly
amused when their grubby offspring wipe their boots on the dresses
of remote and silken ladies. The fastidious gaze reluctantly on the
lashless, pink-lidded outdoor patients, on the monstrous and deformed.
Oh, the classes meet the masses in the Hill Street car!


A Literature in the Making

Criticism often seems presumptuous, yet until we have examined and
weighed, how can we set a price—appreciate? For us who are but
amateurs, and who have taken our growth in a province, the attempt to
fix the price (as against assessing the value for us, which is always
legitimate, for it reveals our own position rather than the subject’s)
of the great writers of the world is true presumption; our legitimate
training in criticism we get by exercising our discrimination on our
unfortunate contemporaries and compeers, the not-yet, the perhaps
not-to-be, acclaimed.

In 1916, G. Hassell & Son published a small brown pocket volume,
“Poems, Real and Imaginative,” by M. R. Walker. Like so many other
little books between 1914 and 1919, it was intended to aid the funds
of the Red Cross; unlike, on the other hand, so many of its companions,
it really deserved for its own sake the sympathetic attention of all
literary Australians. _The Bulletin_ was rather off-handed with the
little stranger, for _The Bulletin_, hardy parent that it is, often
favours the lusty, the clamorous, even the violent and rude, more than
the child with the low, sweet voice; but there must have been many who
pondered the twenty-four sets of verses in the wee book, for it ran
into a second edition.

It has been out long enough now for us to estimate it impartially.

Not a mine of pure gold, it is good enough to be mistaken for such by
the uncritical, bad enough to have its qualities entirely overlooked
by the supercilious. All is very fair verse, bits are true poetry; but
perhaps no piece, however short, is pure poetry throughout.

The topics are the simple, natural, age-old topics of the poet—the sea
and the moon and the mountains, love, friendship, and country. Of these
Miss Walker is most adequate to the first group, to “Sea Pictures,” “A
June Evening,” “To the Ouse.” Read this fragment of blank verse from
“Half-moon Bay”:—

                            High overhead
    The forest stretching to the seven peaks
    Is beautiful in slopes of wilding gum,
    Wattle, and box. The sad shea-oaks,
    Huddled together down a windy ridge,
    Whisper their troublous sighing to the waves
    A thousand feet below.
    The coves and inlets of the circling bay
    Are floored with giant pebbles, and the wash
    Goes sweeping up the deep rock-riven cracks
    To break in shallows on the level ledge,
    And drop again in sparkling waterfall.

The felicities of picture and of sound in this are typical of her art,
but it misses the sunshine and open-air buoyancy of “At Maria Island.”

    Oh the yellow broom is growing
    On the sand-banks by the sea,
    And the breezes blowing, blowing,
    Mingle with the waters’ flowing
        In a haunting melody.

    There the gulls are rising, falling,
    To the heaving of the tide,
    Listen to them calling, calling,
    To the fishermen a-hauling
        Nets, out where the schooners ride.

Perhaps “At Maria Island” comes nearest to maintaining throughout
the same technical level, and the same trend of theme. A short
and convenient instance of the vague but disconcerting shifting
of the direction of the thought, and a certain incompleteness or
fragmentariness, that characterize most of the pieces, is “Sea
Pictures.”

    Know you the swinging of wild water after storm,
      The racing breeze that sings along the sand,
    And rocks, deep-flung, where sea-birds love to swarm,
      Wave-weary for the land?

    There are fair nights in summer on the sea,
      And moonlight falling gentlier on the waves
    Than echo’s sighs, borne back again to me
      From dim, sea-haunted caves.

Here the thought does not march from one verse to the next; rather
there is a turning away from the question that links poet and reader in
eager sympathy, to a mood of brooding, personal reminiscence. In “Blue”
the jerkiness is conscious, and is covered by a conceit impossible
to the serious poetic mood. In “There is a Land” it manifests itself
as obscurity. Poetry is in the air, but the poet cannot freely draw
breath. In the eighteen lines of this poem are examples of nearly
all Miss Walker’s qualities; there is inspiration, but inadequately
expressed, a passionate clutching at a meaning that eludes the words,
and comes out rather baldly, as in the line,

    Ah Death; and some pass on, that know not and are blind.

There is technical failure—and technical felicity.

                                  ... the soul
    Cries to the silence with a living cry—
    A whisper that goes by upon the wind,
    A breaking wave upon some lonely shore,
    The list’ning hush of mountains in the dawn,
    And lo! the Voice! An echo in the soul!
    And then—the level stillness of the days.

The irregularity in the pulse of the thought is found also in some
constructions which, though grammatical, are unexpected and not at
first obvious, where, for instance, we were expecting one object to be
described, and find that the epithet applies to another, the thought
having moved on; it is also reflected in a technique so frequent as to
become a mannerism:—

                                  ... a Voice
    Calling unto its own, that, oft, the soul ...
    As sullen seas that, sweeping o’er some reef ...
    Where, low, the boobyallas keep....

These halts and returns would not be noticed in longer poems, or in the
poems read separately; but the ear of the student begins to wait for
them, as it does for some inevitable voice-pauses at line-endings where
the meaning should trip on.

                    ... tree-guarded from the light
    Flinging its wide farewell across the sky.

(This also is an instance of the unexpected construction referred to
above; we are expecting a further description of “deep wells of shade,”
what we get is an adjectival clause about “light”; perhaps it is the
voice-pause that gives this feeling and sends us back again upon our
construing.)

    ... the fishermen a-hauling
    Nets,

in the quotation above also pulls us up with a jerk.

There are other tricks of manner that grow monotonous. “O Moon,” “O Son
of Essex,” “Ah, Love,” “Ah, Death,” “Oh have you ever stood alone to
watch ...” Apostrophe and exclamation so reiterated point to poverty
of expression, to a labouring to say what cannot get itself said. And
there are commonplace lines, prose in metre—

    O moon, that risest now, how beautiful thou art.
        Poor little girl, you did not wish to die.

Perhaps there is bathos—

    A little, wandering, broken-hearted child.

But not all this can do away with the many triumphs, the recurrent
charms for eye and ear—

    Thy waters washing into shallow pools ...

                                ... a moorèd boat
            Asway upon the idle-swinging tide ...

    The islands to the north were bathed in sleep,
    Their cliffs stood out in sunshine to the sea,
    Only the murmur, murmur, of the waves,
    Broke the long silence unto you and me.

The songs and the scenes and the thought are not joyous. Beauty of
nature, and loves of friends, or man and maid, induce wistful thoughts.
The sadness may be explicit—

    But in the days, ay me! the empty days,
    The long, long days that lead to no fireside,
    Philosophy’s a thing to call a friend,
    To hold to, and to cherish, lest one fail,
    Afraid before the vista of the years.

Or it may sigh itself out in falling cadence, as in the song on page
24, where what should be a sigh of ecstacy falls on the ear like a
foreboding. But the melancholy is never morbid. It may be hopeless, but
it is resigned and controlled and quietly courageous.

Australia is too young to produce great poetry, for that never blossoms
from unacclimatized minds. But the necessary conditions are gradually
emerging. Australians are increasingly in sympathy with their country
and its qualities: its sunlight, its seas and mountains and plains and
deserts, its sheep and its wheat and forests and minerals, are all
giving out their emanations into the mental medium where poetry forms;
there, too, our traditions are being made or absorbed. We have not yet
the plethora of elements from which the great poetic souls take shape,
but crystals more or less characteristic are being precipitated from
such material as there is. Those of to-day may be small and cloudy and
faultily-shapen, but they presage a beauty and a perfection in the
poetry of the future.


  G. HASSELL & SON.
  PRINTERS & PUBLISHERS,
  CURRIE ST., ADELAIDE.



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75957 ***