CHAPTER IX

HOW MRS. FRANK TRIED HER INNOCENT GAMES ON ONE OF THE GREAT ONES OF THE EARTH

There is a most amusing article in this week's _Balance_ on the Scold and her place in mediæval life. The writer had seen a ducking-chair somewhere, and had been led by it to a series of reflections on the Scold and, what is perhaps more interesting, the Scold's husband.

It is a topic on which we are very ill informed, and the fancy has a free field. What, he asked, was the husband doing while his wife was being corrected? Was he a spectator or an absentee? Was he proud--a kind of inverted hero--or was he ashamed? Had he not more probably a very lively sense of what was in store for him at night and was he not nerving himself for the fray in the inn parlour?

The writer then went on to consider the homecoming of the Scold: wet through certainly, but was she penitent? Did she scold no more? Is any one ever cured? The home-coming of the husband, he suggested, would be later. And so forth.

Meeting Mr. Dabney on the stairs, I mentioned the article and asked him who wrote it. He said it was written by a young fellow named Wynne--Frank Wynne. Isn't that odd? I knew Frank for an amusing embroiderer, but I never thought of him having so much humour as that.

He and his wife being at Queen Anne's Gate to dinner, I congratulated him.

"How did you know I wrote it?" he asked; and I told him about Mr. Dabney. "By the way," I added to Naomi, "that proves my prophecy. Don't you remember my saying that Mr. Dabney and I would find we had a common friend; and it turns out to be Frank."

Frank, however, denied that he knew him: his connection with the paper was the result of correspondence, and so I said I would bring Mr. Dabney to Barton Street to tea and they should then meet.

"But isn't he very fierce?" asked Mrs. Frank, thinking, I am sure, of the twins.

"You must tame him," I said.

She certainly tried.

Never was there such a tea. Mrs. Frank must have lain awake half the night meditating upon the attack, for this was her first editor, and was she not a young journalist's wife? (Such a chance.) In her original scheme were hot cakes and cold, muffins and crumpets, brown bread and white, jam and marmalade; but she had a doubt and put it to Frank.

"Isn't there a danger," she said, "that he may think we're too well off already?"

Frank thought there might. So the muffins went and the other hot cakes and the marmalade.

"And what about my dress?" she said. "I should like to wear the red one, but it does look a little bit expensive."

"It's very beautiful," said Frank.

"Don't you like the purple one, then?" she asked anxiously.

"Of course I do: they're both beautiful."

"Well, which shall it be?"

"Why not the red dress and leave off all your rings but the wedding ring?"

And so did these Machiavellian babes arrange it.

They might have saved themselves their trouble, for Mr. Dabney is one of those persons who carry their environment with them. He ate his tea nobly, but he could not have said afterwards what he consumed: it was all cake to him, or all bread-and-butter, such is the activity of his mind.

Mrs. Frank was adorable: she talked her best talk and, her fears allayed, sent for the twins, whom Mr. Dabney inspected with a most admirable show of interest, although at any moment I felt he might remark that one or the other was too long and would be better with twenty lines cut out.

He arranged for some articles with Frank, and then left. Mrs. Frank was very happy, but I doubt if her innocent and loyal strategy had anything to do with it. Still, it is very pretty to see a young wife working for her husband.

"Frank is a dear," Mrs. Frank said to me later, "but really he is a little too casual about refusing work. _The Balance_ only takes two articles a week, which doesn't pay for more than nurse and our dinners, but nothing will induce him to write for other papers unless he likes them."

"_O si sic omnes!_" I said.

"What does that mean?" she asked coldly. "I have an uncle who talks like that."

"I'm very sorry," I said, "I won't do it again. It means that I wish all the other journalists were like Frank. Then we should have some decent honest papers."

"Oh yes," she said, "but really one can be too nice and fastidious. What about the twins? I wanted them to go to Eton. And he won't write a play either," she continued. "That's the way to make money, and it's so easy. We go to the theatre pretty often, and I never see anything that Frank couldn't have done better. All you have to do is to make people say foolish things in nice clothes. But Frank says he couldn't. He says it's a special gift, and he hates the stage. He won't even try."

"Frank's all right," I said; "he's finding himself. You mustn't hurry him."

"There are so many things we want," she replied. "You don't know."

"I'm afraid you're a bad woman," I said. "You should believe more in the ravens. Young journalists and young journalists' wives ought not to be rich. If you talk like this I shall begin to think you have made a mistake and ought really to have married a stockbroker."

As a matter of fact, Frank is doing quite well enough. His name is getting to be known for delicate work, and he is in the way of making four or five hundred a year already. That is plenty. But you might as well pour Chateau Yquem into the Thames as tell a young wife that she would be less happy with more money.

Frank, however, does not let it worry him, but goes smiling through the world, elaborating his little humorous fancies, building up little literary lyrics, and writing reviews and so forth; and there is probably no great danger in Mrs. Frank's covetousness. But I wish she wouldn't.

I don't know that I blame her, for the air is so full of cupidity nowadays that it is taken in through the pores unless you watch yourself very carefully. She is otherwise a rational little woman, of no great force of character but plenty of cheerfulness and loyalty, who has in reality one of the serenest of lives, for the twins are no more trouble than they ought to be to supply their mother with congenial topics of conversation and that leaven of anxiety that keeps mothers happy, and Mrs. Frank's mother and Frank's mother vie with each other in showering little presents on the household, and Naomi is continually looking in with her dear sunny face.

Let Mrs. Frank be happy while she can. Some day her husband will be offered £1000 a year to edit a paper, and a literary peeress will take them up, and that will be the end.

I find that Frank has been selling his review copies to Mr. Bemerton for a long time, and they are old friends. I met him there recently on the search for second-hand copies of the collected poems of one of the older living poets, having had a commission from an editor to prepare his obituary notice against the dread summons. I had not given much thought to this branch of journalistic industry, but of course now that I think of it I see that the pigeon-holes of Fleet Street must be full of these anticipatory articles which only need occasional revision to date to be all ready when the scythe is finally sharpened. To meet an editor must be for a thoughtful celebrity as chilling as the spectacle of the mummy at the Egyptian banquet.

Frank tells me that the practice on one of the papers for which he is engaged is to withhold payment until the article is used. "This," he says, "is all very well so long as one is flush. But if one were broke just think of what one might be tempted to do, for I see Blank [his poetical victim] at the Museum continually, and could easily poison his soup at the Vienna Café."

"Poets," Frank said to me one day, "ought to have some common fund from which they might borrow for sustenance without shame--some Pactolian spring into which to dip their cups. You know those ingenious contribution boxes invented by Mr. Sidney Holland, which invite you to drop in a penny and by so doing maintain the London Hospital for one second--a dial indicating the passage of your own pennyworth of time as you do so. Well, I thought once of adopting this plan, and calling upon the public to drop in a penny and thus maintain me. 'A penny keeps a poet for half an hour,' it might have said."

"Apropos of poets," said I, "come upstairs and I will show you a book." I need hardly say what the book was.

I delighted Frank immensely by reading him the passage describing the ruse to which Ch'ēn Tzu-ang the poet resorted in order to win recognition.

"Proceeding to the capital he purchased a very expensive guitar which had been for a long time on sale, and then let it be known that on the following day he would perform upon it in public. This attracted a large crowd; but when Ch'ēn arrived he informed his auditors that he had something in his pocket worth much more than the guitar. Thereupon he dashed the instrument into a thousand pieces, and forthwith began handing round copies of his own writings."

Like every one else who sees this fascinating volume, Frank was wild for more, and I read him excerpts from the lives of other poets--not better than Dr. Samuel Johnson's, but more concise and freakish. Such as Wang Po, a poet of the seventh century A.D., who began as a statesman, but on being dismissed from office for satirising the cock-fighting propensities of the Imperial princes, filled up his leisure by composing verses.

"He never meditated upon these beforehand, but after having prepared a quantity of ink ready for use, he would drink himself tipsy and lie down with his face covered up. On waking, he would seize his pen and write off verses, not a word of which needed to be changed; whence he acquired the sobriquet of Belly-draft."

Liu Ling, another poet, and one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grave, was also a hard drinker and a man of infinite humour. It was he who declared that "'to a drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as so much duckweed in a river.' He wished to be always accompanied by a servant with wine, and followed by another with a spade, so that he might be buried where he fell. On one occasion, yielding to the entreaties of his wife, he promised to 'swear off,' and bade her prepare the usual sacrifices of wine and meat. When all was ready, he prayed, saying, 'O God, who didst give to Liu Ling a reputation through wine, he being able to consume a gallon at a sitting and requiring a quart to sober him again, listen not to the words of his wife, for she speaketh not truth.' Thereupon he drank up the sacrificial wine, and was soon as drunk as ever."

A tenderer genius was Chēng Ku, of the ninth century A.D., who "said that no one should sing his _Song of the Partridge_ in the presence of Southerners, as it made them think sadly of their far-off homes."

Li Po, founder of the coterie known as the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup (having got his hand in as a club-maker by forming, some years earlier, the hard-drinking company known as the Six Idlers of the Bamboo Brook), should certainly be better known in a country where the sanction of an illustrious wine-bibber--a Burns or an Omar--is so necessary to literary convivialists. The mother of Li Po, who roystered and revelled in the eighth century A.D., dreamed just before his birth of the planet Venus. The boy was therefore a poet at ten years of age, and a great swordsman very soon after.

About A.D. 742 he reached Ch'ang-an. The Emperor "was charmed with his verses, prepared a bowl of soup for him with his own hands, and at once appointed him to the Han-liu College." Later, "with a lady of the Seraglio to hold his ink-slab, he dashed off some of his most impassioned lines; at which the Emperor was so overcome that he made the powerful eunuch Kao Li-shih go down on his knees and pull off the poet's boots." Kao's desire for revenge made it necessary for Li Po to leave the court, which he did with seven companions, and they are now known collectively as the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup. He met his death, characteristically, by drowning, "from leaning one night over the edge of the boat, in a drunken effort to embrace the reflection of the moon."

Li Po had no monopoly of such ends. Fu I, another poet and the originator of epitaphs, was of the same mettle. His own epitaph, which he composed with accurate foresight, runs thus--

"Fu I loved the green hills and the white clouds, Alas! he died of drink."

"Very different from our reputed Laureate," Frank remarked, adding, "I wish you'd lend me that book."

"For why?" I replied. "To write about it?"

He admitted the weakness.

"No," I said with startling decision. "No."