CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH I AM FORBIDDEN TO BE IDLE AND THEREFORE FIND CONGENIAL EMPLOYMENT
Naomi was very firm about my finding an occupation. Men must do something, she said. As for herself, she intended to retain her various poor protégés, and to continue to visit her mother in Queen Anne's Gate every day, and probably lunch there; which made it the more important that I should have something to engage me.
"A man who has no employment is like a ship without a rudder," she said.
I replied that perhaps it was employment enough to be married to an epigrammatist. This being received without enthusiasm, I pointed out that I was executor to no fewer than three persons.
"All of whom are alive and extremely healthy," said Naomi.
"True," I answered, "but think how insecure is one's hold upon life. At any moment one of them may be crushed by a falling aeroplane and plunge me into affairs."
"'It's ill waiting for dead men's shoes,'" Naomi quoted, and at the totally new light which the proverb threw upon the attitude of the ordinary executor I broke down.
"How do you know," I asked, "that I am not writing a really valuable work on the Zoo? A philosophical treatise on apes?"
"You're not, are you?" she asked. Naomi for all her shrewdness has a childlike belief in certain things that she hears. A child could pull her leg.
"No," I said; "I am not. But I had thoughts of playing a little at writing. Wouldn't that satisfy you?"
She did not thoroughly kindle to it. "I hope you will write, dear," she said; "but that is only play anyway. And what would you write?"
"Well," I said, "supposing I was to write a book about you?"
Naomi was indignant. "About me? How could I make a book?"
"Very well then," I replied; "about us."
"But we are so uninteresting," she said. "We're so ordinary. Besides, I don't think, dear, you have--have you?--quite the novelist's gifts."
"Perhaps not," I said, "but you mustn't be a reviewer before I've begun. Anyway, mightn't I play a little at being a novelist, just for fun? I asked advice from quite a good man the other day and he said: 'When in doubt, to describe your neighbours is perhaps the second-best piece of counsel that one can give.' And that's not so very difficult. Mightn't I try that?"
"I'd love you to," she said, "only I want you to do something."
Then I made use of a cowardly argument: "When one has worked and then can afford to retire, one ought not to keep others out of a job."
Naomi, bless her, has no patience with this kind of talk. "If work is good for the soul," she said, "as I believe, one must work and let the work of others be their own affair. A pretty pass we should come to if the good men abstained from work because by so doing they were giving the loafers a better chance of taking it if they felt so inclined! But I don't want you to make any money," she added. "Something honorary and useful."
"Such as?" I asked.
"We'll find it," she said.
Chance, as so often happens, took the matter into its hands and settled it; for an evening or so later we met at a party a gentleman who had given his life to the search for, and reproduction of, old English songs and dances, several of which were rendered by a troop of London girls that he brought with him, and these melodies were so simple and fresh and charming that, although no musician, I was completely captured. In conversation with him afterwards, we learned that he was in need of assistance in forming and managing a society for the systematic encouragement and performance of these things, and at Naomi's suggestion I offered my services. So I am now an honorary secretary, one of those bustling diplomatic persons whom reporters always describe as courteous and indefatigable.
The duties connected with the launching of this Society, together with such desultory private desk-work as it amuses me to do, ought to satisfy anyone. They convince me at any rate that no one is in such danger of overwork as that man of more or less amiable disposition who gives it out that he has retired.
I don't pretend to understand the full value of folk-music or to be able to distinguish between the mixolydian and the dorian mode, and so forth; but I do know this, that there are no sweeter songs for young voices, or merrier and more innocent measures for young feet, and that the more we can catch of the spirit of the early days when English music had these pure and happy characteristics the better for all of us.
A very little music is ordinarily enough for me; and though I do not say that an evening at the Opera, especially when the Russians are dancing, or an afternoon at Queen's Hall now and then, is not very welcome, I would not too often be found at either. Sophisticated self-conscious music makes me too old, and the world too old, and its enigmas too difficult, and all that is best too fugitive. But these ancient English songs of an unthinking peasantry do not trouble the waters; they make for joy.
It seems to me that essential melody never reached a more exquisite purity than in "Mowing the Barley," and I often wonder what Society would say if, without any warning, when they were all securely in their seats at the Opera, in their best clothes, and had finished ascertaining who their immediate neighbours were, and who occupied the boxes, the curtain rose, not upon the voluptuous passion of _La Bohème_, or the civilized ache of _Louise_, or the barbaric excesses of _Scheherazade_, but upon a company of youths and children and maidens singing this lovely song. After the first shock of surprise, anxious searching of influential countenances and bewildered references to the programme, might they not settle down to the profoundest content? And as song gave way to dance, and dance to song--"Blow away the Morning Dew" to "Laudnum Bunches," and "Dargason" to "The Keys of Heaven," and "I'm Seventeen come Sunday" to "Lord Rendal"--might they not experience a feeling wholly new in that building and wholly pleasurable? For there is nothing like a plunge into the simple life now and then.
And yet--I don't know. It might be dangerous. These songs are too fascinating: Mayfair would be decimated. There is one of them so infectious in its melody, so irresistible in its appeal, that it should be rigidly excluded from the programme. The Italian's _La Bohème_, which sets so many of our stately dames in a quiver, is quite safe compared with this concise English treatment of the same theme. For "The Wraggle Taggle Gipsies" has the very seeds of revolt and escape in it. Here is the first verse:
[Illustration: Music fragment]
There were three gip-sies a-come to my door, And down-stairs ran this a la dy, O! One sang high an an-oth-er sang low And the oth er sang bon-ny, bon-ny Bis cay, O!
Then she pulled off her silk finished gown And put on hose of leather, O! The ragged, ragged rags about our door-- She's gone with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O.
It was late last night, when my lord came home, Inquiring for his a-lady, O! The servants said, on every hand: "She's gone with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O."
There's a new version of _La Bohème_ for you, and no less provocative! I do not hear Caruso in it; but Caruso is not all.
His lordship at last overtakes the rebel:
"What makes you leave your house and land? What makes you leave your money, O? What makes you leave your new wedded lord, To go with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O?"
And what says she? She has heard the call of the road:
"What care I for my house and my land? What care I for my money, O? What care I for my new wedded lord? I'm off with the wraggle taggle gipsies, O."
For the most part, however, these old English songs which we want to see popularized are less intoxicating. Their tunes are not those of the pied piper who would upset the family, but more serene and sweet, like the music of birds by a running stream. And the words are emotion remembered in tranquillity. This exquisite "Mowing the Barley," for example, is as artless a love-ballad as ever was written, in which the least romantic character in English life is transfigured into a hero. A lawyer, in short. I wonder that in the Temple they ever sing anything else, so proud should this ditty make them. It begins:
[Illustration: Music fragment]
Law-yer he went out one day, A for to take his plea-sure, And who should he spy but some fair pret-ty maid, So hand-some and so clev er? Where [Illustration: Music fragment]
are you go-ing to, my pret-ty maid, Where are you go-ing my hon ney? Go-ing o-ver the hills, kind sir, she said, To my fa-ther a-mow-ing the bar ley
Rhymes, you see, don't matter much in our kind of song. We hate pedantry; and we hate everything that sets up the slightest obstacle between the singer and the listener.
The lawyer said no more that day, but the next he rode forth again, and though at first she gave him the slip (for she thought him like all lawyers, true to type) he
Caught her round the middle so small, And on his horse he placed her.
The legal courting then began
"Hold up your cheeks, my fair pretty maid, Hold up your cheeks, my honey, That I may give you a fair pretty kiss, And a handful of golden money."
The fair pretty maid at first refused, for she suspected the honesty of his intentions; but after he had talked a little more, and more ardently,
She quite forgot the barley field, And left her father a-mowing.
And now--the end is perfect--
And now she is the Lawyer's wife, And dearly the Lawyer loves her; They live in a happy content of life, And well in the station above her.
No one who has ever heard a company of fresh young voices lilting out this beautiful piece of rural idealism--for I take it that it is no small thing for a country girl to catch a lawyer, that terrible person who knows everyone's business and arranges for distraints and evictions as well as the making of wills and the lending of money--has ever known music at its very spring.
Such is "Mowing the Barley," which I always think our best song, but there is not one of the many hundreds which our indefatigable Director has collected and scored that has not a certain charm. And you can understand that I am proud to be able to help him in his organized effort to find still more, with new dances too, wherever they are still remembered, and to get enthusiasts to sing and dance them.