CHAPTER XXXVI

IN WHICH MRS. DUCKIE EMPLOYS AN ANNIHILATING PHRASE WHICH SO RANKLES THAT IT SEEMS ALMOST ABSURD TO GO ON AT ALL

Mrs. Duckie, whom, after her long speech to me on the duties of husbands, I felt I must acquaint with Lavender's arrival, came up in her best bonnet to see the ladies. She had tea with me afterwards in the sitting-room, the nurse having driven her and her kindly but not too reposeful tongue sternly forth. She said nothing for a minute or two except about Mr. Duckie and the "Gog and Magog Chop House," which is doing famously, thanking me for my share in it; but then, laying down her cup, she uttered quietly, as if speaking of the weather, the most devastating words I ever listened to.

"It's the healthiest baby I ever saw," she said, "and I've seen many. I'm so glad about it. And now you could die to-morrow, Mr. Falconer, if you liked."

Did you ever hear of such a bombshell?

What on earth did she mean? I asked.

"Why," she said, "I often think about it. That's what we're for--to marry and have children. But I didn't mean to say what I did. It must have sounded dreadful. It just popped out. Still, you're one as understands. You know what a difference there is between a father and a mother--the mothers have all the responsibility."

"All very well," I said, "if one were limited to one child. But am I not needed for more?"

"Oh," said Mrs. Duckie, laughing, "don't worry about that. You'll never have another. Not you! You've got 'one child only' written all over you."

"Then Nature's done with me?" I said as lightly as I could.

"Oh, I dare say you'll live to be eighty, and I hope you will," Mrs. Duckie replied, "such a nice gentleman as you are; but you've--you've----"

"I've answered her purpose," I suggested bravely.

"Yes," said Mrs. Duckie, without the faintest trace of mercy.

"And what about bringing up--education and so forth?"

"Oh, Mrs. Falconer will do that beautifully," said this vixen. "I couldn't think of a better mother."

I was struck dumb for a while. Here was an attitude for a woman (and one's old landlady too, thus aggravating the offence) to take up to a lord of creation!

"So you don't think husbands are any other use?" I asked at last.

"They bring in the money, of course," she replied, "but that's all. They don't really help with the children--not most of them don't. A few, yes, but even those very likely are only a bother, when all's said, and in your case there's enough money already."

No need to say that I was glad when she had gone; but when I peeped into Naomi's room and the nurse (who used to be a nice woman) hushed me sternly away, my spirits sank again.

I walked out into Regent's Park and sat down and thought about it. City men in tall hats were hastening home. "Foolish to be in such a hurry," I said; "you're not wanted. Homes are for women. Leave the money for the rent and the butcher and get out again." Nurses and mothers were here and there with their charges. "Ladies," I said, "I salute you. Permit one who could die to-morrow, if he liked, without being missed, to bid you farewell. Not, however, that your reign is much longer than mine--but a little longer. Wait till those babies are of age and see then how much you are needed!" Children were playing all about. "To you," I said, apostrophizing them at large, "is the earth and the fulness thereof. It is for you that all Nature is working, but only that you may work for her, for she does nothing for nothing. In a few years' time you too will be fathers and mothers under sentence, like me. So play on and be happy while you can."

As I was sitting there Lacey came up and joined me. "You look blue," he said--"so am I. It's that infernally beautiful sunset that's done it. Not for nothing did Dürer give his 'Melancholia' the setting sun. What's the matter? Have you suddenly discovered that your nose is out of joint?" (What an instinct the fellow has!) "Every baby puts someone's nose out of joint; either its father's or mother's or another baby's. But that's all right. That's part of the fun. Life is nothing but readjusting. Lovers are always becoming parents. There's no sense in the world, only movement; but luckily we all have our moments off, and the thing is to get as many of them as possible. That's the principal reason why brewers and distillers are so rich and noble, and why old Furley's films do so well. Anodynes, don't you see; devices for cheating facts. Take me into the Zoo with your powerful autograph and we'll soon forget our troubles. There's a little kinkajou on the right as we go in, with a tail like a boa, who hangs round your neck and drives all griefs away. I dare say, if we only knew, there's a wild animal for every mental malady."

We went in and strolled about for a while: bewaring of pickpockets, according to instructions.

"As a matter of fact," said Lacey, as we sat down in the little pavilion reserved for Fellows and ordered something to drink, "I am miserable too. But then that's about all I expect. I've made such a mess of things. Never mind how, but I have. I get too fond of too many people. Anyway, I called on an old flame of mine to-day who is married--happily married--and it hurt. I ought to have married her myself, but things went wrong. I understood her and she understood me, but we had no luck. At least perhaps she did. We fenced a good deal to-day, of course. It was the only thing to do. She asked me that inevitable question, What I was doing with my life and going to do? When a happily married woman asks this it means only one thing: it means, When are you going to be happily married too? I said I had no reason to admire marriage sufficiently to think of nothing else.

"'But love?' she asked.

"I admitted that love was all right, and was silent in the idiotic way that one is, at intervals, during such meetings.

"'Well?' she asked after a while.

"'I have nothing to report,' I replied. Nor had I, Heaven knows; yet I should not have mentioned it, even if I had. There is no pleasure in confessing to those who belong to another. She was still charming and beautiful and sympathetic; but sympathy when one comes second is a very different thing from sympathy when one might possibly come first. And then I left the house and, of course, for a while I saw nothing but pretty girls on young fellows' arms, as one always does when one's most lonely and miserable; and then I walked bang into that blighting sunset and then into you."

He said nothing for a while and we watched the passers-by.

"How happy other people can be, confound them!" he said. "And that is why one is never so wretched as in a crowd. Omar's comparison of life to a game of chess--

'But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays Upon the Chequer-board of Nights and Days; Hither and thither moves, and checks, and stays, And one by one back in the Closet lays--'

is no doubt true enough to such a pessimistic mind as poor, fastidious, solitary FitzGerald's and those of us to whom the Creator has not given the happy acceptive temperament. But when one hears the stories that London--and I suppose all other towns and cities--has in such numbers, of frustrated affections and loveless marriages and irregular alliances, it is rather as His jig-saw puzzle that one sees life, where the least likely pieces fit together and the most likely can never be joined. Well!"

He got up. "Now I'm going to be jolly again," he said. "Life, with all its bothers and disappointments and disillusions, and even with the circumstance that one has to live it chiefly with that impostor oneself, is too good to run down. There are so many little things to keep one going. Here, for example, see what I found to-day in a West End bookseller's catalogue:

À KEMPIS. _Imitation of Christ_. Printed on Real Vellum (only ten copies issued). Illuminated Frontispiece and Illuminated Fronts, and all the initials illuminated. Bound in Cape Levant Morocco Red, tooled in blind design with doublures. £18 18s. net.

There's a first step towards imitating the simple Nazarene! Eighteen guineas for the primer. One has no right to be doleful in a world where things like this happen."

Lacey's revived spirits did me good, and on returning home I found Naomi more sweet than ever before, and even Nan conveyed some of the illusion of pleasure at my approach, although the nurse (who was otherwise her old self again) insisted that the phenomenon was purely the effect of internal disturbance.

Lacey was more right than not. I did not and shall not forget what Mrs. Duckie said, because I know it to be true; but it has already sunk below the surface of memory into that woolly receptacle where so much of the past is preserved. Not often do I bring it out, but it has a way of desiring an airing between four and five A.M. when one's pulse is at its lowest and hope almost non-existent; and I am often conscious of its presence when I watch Naomi and Nan together, or, greatly daring, take Nan into my own hands. Greatly daring!--there you have it again. For Naomi does not greatly dare: she picks up this fragile pink atom as naturally and unthinkingly as a cricketer picks up the ball.

Nan, I must admit, does not help me. Perhaps some day, as I tell her, when she is tall and slender and seventeen, she will be more ready to accompany her grey father than her bonny mother; and then (if I have succeeded in living so long) I shall be in receipt of a little return for all my services to Nature. But it will be only for a brief season then, for her eyes will be beginning to wander this way and that for the comely form (as she considers it) of another of Nature's dupes, who at this moment is perhaps squealing in another awkward progenitor's arms in some other London nursery. For life, as Lacey says, is all progression, if not progress.

Nan, as I say, gives me no help. There is something about my features, which are not unpleasing to many of my friends, that she finds curiously terrifying; and the more kindly disposed I am to her and beam with tenderness on her little person, the more evidently do I remind her of one of the most fearsome monsters of that mysterious nowhere from which she journeyed hither.

But with her mother...! The two together make such an adorable picture that I wish I could get it painted by a worthy brush. The balance of sex wants readjusting among the representations, both in paint and in stone, of mother and child. For centuries no man of genius ever painted or graved a girl-baby at all: there might not have been such a thing in the world. In fact, if art and not biology were the evidence upon which the historian has to work, there never was a girl-baby until quite recently. It is a great pity, because this preoccupation with the boy-baby has deprived us of renderings of girl-babies which would have been exquisite beyond imagination. Think what adorable little nestling mites Luca della Robbia could have moulded, and what tiny feminine rogues Correggio would have painted! One wonders that no artist rebelled. Did none of them ever look at a family of children and think the little girls lovely? Or, against their better taste, did they merely slavishly obey tradition?