LIX

THOSE DANGEROUSLY DYNAMIC BRITISH GIRLS

It is difficult to get into Rose Macaulay's "Dangerous Ages" once you discover that it is going to be about another one of those offensively healthy English families. Ever since "Mr. Britling" we have been deluged with accounts from overseas of whole droves of British brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandfathers and grandmothers, who all get out at six in the morning and play hockey all over the place. Each has some strange, intimate name like "Bim," or "Pleda," or "Goots," and you can never tell which are the brothers and which the sisters until they begin to have children along in the tenth or eleventh chapter.

In "Dangerous Ages" they swim. Dozens of them, all in the same family, go splashing in at once and persist in calling out health slogans to one another across the waves. There are _Neville_ and _Rodney_ and _Gerda_ and _Kay_, and one or two very old ladies whose relationship to the rest of the clan is never very definitely established. Grandma, for some reason or other, doesn't go in swimming that day, doubtless because she had already been in before breakfast and her suit wasn't dry.

These dynamic British girls are always full of ruddy health and current information. They go about kidding each other on the second reading of the Home Rule bill or fooling in their girlish way about the chances of the Labor candidate in the coming Duncastershire elections. It is getting so that no novel of British life will be complete without somewhere in its pages a scene like the following:

"A chance visitor at The Beetles some autumn morning along about five o'clock might have been surprised to see a trail of dog-trotting figures winding their way heatedly across the meadow. No one but a chance visitor would be surprised, however, for it was well known to invited guests that the entire Willetts family ran cross-country down to the outskirts of London and back every morning before breakfast, a matter of fourteen miles. In the lead was, of course, Dungeon in running costume, followed closely by the flaxen-haired Mid and snub-nosed Boola, then Arlix and Linny, striving valiantly for fourth place but not reckoning on the fleet-footed Meeda, who was no longer content to hobble in the vanguard with Grandpa Willetts and Grandpa's old mother, who still insisted on cross-country running, although she had long since been put on the retired list at the Club.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Why didn't you tell us that you were reading a paper on birth control?"]

"'Oh, Linny,' called out Dungeon over her shoulder, 'you young minx! Why didn't you tell us that you were reading a paper on Birth Control at the next meeting of the Spiddix? Twiller just told me today. It's too ripping of you!'

"'Silly goose,' panted Linny, stumbling over a hedgerow, 'how about what the vicar said the other night about your inferiority complex? It was toppo, and you know it.'

"'It won't be long now before we'll have disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt through, anyway,' muttered Grandpa Willetts, crashing down into a stone quarry, at which exhibition of reaction a loud chorus of laughter went up from the entire family, who by this time had reached Nogroton and were bursting with health."

LX

BOOKS AND OTHER THINGS

For those to whom the purple-and-gold filigreed covers of Florence L.

Barclay's books bring a stirring of the sap and a fluttering of the susceptible heart, "Returned Empty" comes as a languorous relief from the stolid realism of most present-day writing. One reads it and swoons.

And on opening one's eyes again, one hears old family retainers murmuring in soft retentive accents: "Here, sip some of this, my lord; 'twill bring the roses back to those cheeks and the strength to those poor limbs." It's elegant, that's all there is to it, elegant.

"Returned Empty" was the inscription on the wrappings which enfolded the tiny but aristocratic form of a man-child left on the steps of the Foundlings Inst.i.tution one moonless October night. There was also some reference to Luke, xii., 6, which in return refers to five sparrows sold for two farthings. What more natural, then, than for the matron to name the little one Luke Sparrow?

Luke was an odd boy but refined. So odd that he used to go about looking in at people's windows when they forgot to pull down the shades, and so refined that he never wished to be inside with them.

But one night, when he was thirty years old, he looked in at the window of a very refined and elegant mansion and saw a woman. In the simple words of the author, "in court or cottage alike she would be queen."

That's the kind of woman she was.

And what do you think? She saw Luke looking in. Not only saw him but came over to the window and told him that she had been expecting him.

Well, you could have knocked Luke over with a feather. However, he allowed himself to be ushered in by the butler (everything in the house was elegant like that) and up to a room where he found evening clothes, bath-salts and grand things of that nature. On pa.s.sing a box of books which stood in the hall he read the name on it "before he realized what he was doing." Of course the minute he thought what an unrefined thing it was to do he stopped, but it was too late. He had already seen that his hostess's name was "Lady Tintagel."

When later he met her down in the luxurious dining-room she was just as refined as ever. And so was he. They both were so refined that she had to tell the butler to "serve the fruit in the Oak Room, Thomas."

Once in the Oak Room she told him her strange tale. It seemed that he was her husband. He didn't remember it, but he was. He had been drowned some years before and she had wished so hard that he might come back to life that finally he had been born again in the body of Luke Sparrow.

It's funny how things work out like that sometimes.

But Luke, who, as has been said before, was an odd boy, took it very hard and said that he didn't want to be brought back to life. Not even when she told him that his name was now Sir Nigel Guido Cadross Tintagel, Bart. He became very cross and said that he was going out and drown himself all over again, just to show her that she shouldn't have gone meddling with his spirit life. He was too refined to say so, but when you consider that he was just thirty, and his wife, owing to the difference in time between the spirit world and this, had gone on growing old until she was now pushing sixty, he had a certain amount of justice on his side. But of course she was Lady Tintagel, and all the lovers of Florence Barclay will understand that that is something.

So, after reciting Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar," at her request (credit is given in the front of the book for the use of this poem, and only rightly too, for without it the story could never have been written), he goes out into the ocean. But there--we mustn't give too much of the plot away. All that one need know is that Luke or Sir Nigel, as you wish (and what reader of Florence Barclay wouldn't prefer Sir Nigel?), was so cultured that he said, "n.o.body in the whole world knows it, save you and I," and referred to "flotsam and jetson" as he was swimming out into the path of the rising sun. "Jetsam" is such an ugly word.

It is only fitting that on his tombstone Lady Tintagel should have had inscribed an impressive and high-sounding misquotation from the Bible.

LXI

"MEASURE YOUR MIND"

"Measure Your Mind" by M.R. Traube and Frank Parker Stockbridge, is apt to be a very discouraging book if you have any doubt at all about your own mental capacity. From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be cla.s.sified in Group B, indicating "Low Average Ability," reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it. If they ever adopt the "menti-meter tests" on this journal I shall last just about forty-five minutes.

And the trouble is that each test starts off so easily. You begin to think that you are so good that no one has ever appreciated you. There is for instance, a series of twenty-four pictures (very badly drawn too, Mr. Frank Parker Stockbridge. You think you are so smart, picking flaws with people's intelligence. If I couldn't draw a better head than the one on page 131 I would throw up the whole business). At any rate, in each one of these pictures there is something wrong (wholly apart from the drawing). You are supposed to pick out the incongruous feature, and you have 180 seconds in which to tear the twenty-four pictures to pieces.

The first one is easy. The rabbit has one human ear. In the second one the woman's eye is in her hair. Pretty soft, you say to yourself. In the third the bird has three legs. It looks like a cinch. Following in quick succession come a man with his mouth in his forehead, a horse with cow's horns, a mouse with rabbit's ears, etc. You will have time for a handspring before your 180 seconds are up.

But then they get tricky. There is a post-card with a stamp upside down.

Well, what's wrong with that? Certainly there is no affront to nature in a stamp upside down. Neither is there in a man's looking through the large end of a telescope if he wants to. You can't arbitrarily say at the top of the page, "Mark the thing that is wrong," and then have a picture of a house with one window larger than all the others and expect any one to agree with you that it is necessarily _wrong_. It may look queer, but so does the whole picture. You can't tell; the big window may open from a room that needs a big window. I am not going to stultify myself by making things wrong about which I know none of the facts. Who am I that I should condemn a man for looking through the large end of a telescope? Personally, I like to look through the large end of a telescope. It only shows the state of personal liberty in this country when a picture of a man looking at a ship through the large end of a telescope is held before the young and branded as "wrong."

Arguing these points with yourself takes up quite a bit of time and you get so out of patience with the man that made up the examination that you lose all heart in it.

Then come some pictures about which I am frankly in the dark. There is a Ford car with a rather funny-looking mud-guard, but who can pick out any one feature of a Ford and say that it is wrong? It may look wrong but I'll bet that the car in this picture as it stands could pa.s.s many a big car on a hill.

Then there is a boy holding a bat, and while his position isn't all that a coach could ask, the only radically wrong thing that I can detect about the picture is that he is evidently playing baseball in a clean white shirt with a necktie and a rather natty cap set perfectly straight on his head. It is true he has his right thumb laid along the edge of the bat, but maybe he likes to bunt that way. There is something in the picture that I don't get, I am afraid, just as there is in the picture of two men playing golf. One is about to putt. Aside from the fact that his putter seems just a trifle long, I should have to give up my guess and take my defeat like a man.

But I do refuse to concede anything on Picture No. 22. Here a baby is shown sitting on the floor. He appears to be about a year and a half old. Incidentally, he is a very plain baby. Strewn about him on the floor are the toys that he has been playing with. There are a ball, a rattle, a ring, a doll, a bell and a pair of roller-skates. Evidently, the candidate is supposed to be aghast at the roller-skates in the possession of such a small child.

The man who drew that picture had evidently never furnished playthings for a small child. I can imagine nothing that would delight a child of a year and a half more than a pair of roller-skates to chew and spin and hit himself in the face with. They could also be dropped on Daddy when Daddy was lying on the floor in an attempt to be sociable. Of all the toys arranged before the child, the roller-skates are the most logical.

I suppose that the author of this test would insist on calling a picture wrong which showed a baby with a safety-razor in his hand or an overshoe on his head, and yet a photograph of the Public Library could not be more true to life.

That is my great trouble in taking tests and examinations of any kind. I always want to argue with the examiner, because the examiner is always so obviously wrong.

LXII

THE BROW-ELEVATION IN HUMOR

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get out a new book by him each year.

Without recourse to the ouija board, Harper & Brothers manage to do very well by Mark Twain, considering that all they have to work with are the books that he wrote when he was alive. Each year we get something from the pen of the famous humorist, even though the ink has faded slightly.