On The Preparation And Employment Of Love Philtres - (2)

And then my thoughts travelled to small homes in distant suburbs, and these bright lads and lasses round me came to look older and more careworn.  But what of that?  Are not old faces sweet when looked at by old eyes a little dimmed by love, and are not care and toil but the parents of peace and joy?
    But as I drew nearer, I saw that many of the faces were seared with sour and angry looks, and the voices that rose round me sounded surly and captious.  The pretty compliment and praise had changed to sneers and scoldings.  The dimpled smile had wrinkled to a frown.  There seemed so little desire to please, so great a determination not to be pleased.
    And the flirtations!  Ah me, they had forgotten how to flirt!  Oh, the pity of it!  All the jests were bitter, all the little services were given grudgingly.  The air seemed to have grown chilly.  A darkness had come over all things.
    And then I awoke to reality, and found I had been sitting in my chair longer than I had intended.  The band-stand was empty, the sun had set; I rose and made my way home through the scattered crowd.
    Nature is so callous.  The Dame irritates one at times by her devotion to her one idea, the propagation of the species.
    “Multiply and be fruitful; let my world be ever more and more peopled.”
    For this she trains and fashions her young girls, models them with cunning hand, paints them with her wonderful red and white, crowns them with her glorious hair, teaches them to smile and laugh, trains their voices into music, sends them out into the world to captivate, to enslave us.
    “See how beautiful she is, my lad,” says the cunning old woman.  “Take her; build your little nest with her in your pretty suburb; work for her and live for her; enable her to keep the little ones that I will send.”
    And to her, old hundred-breasted Artemis whispers, “Is he not a bonny lad?  See how he loves you, how devoted he is to you!  He will work for you and make you happy; he will build your home for you.  You will be the mother of his children.”
    So we take each other by the hand, full of hope and love, and from that hour Mother Nature has done with us.  Let the wrinkles come; let our voices grow harsh; let the fire she lighted in our hearts die out; let the foolish selfishness we both thought we had put behind us for ever creep back to us, bringing unkindness and indifference, angry thoughts and cruel words into our lives.  What cares she?  She has caught us, and chained us to her work.  She is our universal mother-in-law.  She has done the match-making; for the rest, she leaves it to ourselves.  We can love or we can fight; it is all one to her, confound her.
    I wonder sometimes if good temper might not be taught.  In business we use no harsh language, say no unkind things to one another.  The shopkeeper, leaning across the counter, is all smiles and affability, he might put up his shutters were he otherwise.  The commercial gent, no doubt, thinks the ponderous shopwalker an ass, but refrains from telling him so.  Hasty tempers are banished from the City.  Can we not see that it is just as much to our interest to banish them from Tooting and Hampstead?
    The young man who sat in the chair next to me, how carefully he wrapped the cloak round the shoulders of the little milliner beside him.  And when she said she was tired of sitting still, how readily he sprang from his chair to walk with her, though it was evident he was very comfortable where he was.  And she!  She had laughed at his jokes; they were not very clever jokes, they were not very new.  She had probably read them herself months before in her own particular weekly journal.  Yet the harmless humbug made him happy.  I wonder if ten years hence she will laugh at such old humour, if ten years hence he will take such clumsy pains to put her cape about her.  Experience shakes her head, and is amused at my question.
    I would have evening classes for the teaching of temper to married couples, only I fear the institution would languish for lack of pupils. The husbands would recommend their wives to attend, generously offering to pay the fee as a birthday present.  The wife would be indignant at the suggestion of good money being thus wasted.  “No, John, dear,” she would unselfishly reply, “you need the lessons more than I do.  It would be a shame for me to take them away from you,” and they would wrangle upon the subject for the rest of the day.
    Oh! the folly of it.  We pack our hamper for life’s picnic with such pains.  We spend so much, we work so hard.  We make choice pies, we cook prime joints, we prepare so carefully the mayonnaise, we mix with loving hands the salad, we cram the basket to the lid with every delicacy we can think of.  Everything to make the picnic a success is there except the salt.  Ah! woe is me, we forget the salt.  We slave at our desks, in our workshops, to make a home for those we love; we give up our pleasures, we give up our rest.  We toil in our kitchen from morning till night, and we render the whole feast tasteless for want of a ha’porth of salt—for want of a soupcon of amiability, for want of a handful of kindly words, a touch of caress, a pinch of courtesy.
    Who does not know that estimable housewife, working from eight till twelve to keep the house in what she calls order?  She is so good a woman, so untiring, so unselfish, so conscientious, so irritating.  Her rooms are so clean, her servants so well managed, her children so well dressed, her dinners so well cooked; the whole house so uninviting. Everything about her is in apple-pie order, and everybody wretched.
    My good Madam, you polish your tables, you scour your kettles, but the most valuable piece of furniture in the whole house you are letting to rack and ruin for want of a little pains.  You will find it in your own room, my dear Lady, in front of your own mirror.  It is getting shabby and dingy, old-looking before its time; the polish is rubbed off it, Madam, it is losing its brightness and charm.  Do you remember when he first brought it home, how proud he was of it?  Do you think you have used it well, knowing how he valued it?  A little less care of your pots and your pans, Madam, a little more of yourself were wiser.  Polish yourself up, Madam; you had a pretty wit once, a pleasant laugh, a conversation that was not confined exclusively to the short-comings of servants, the wrong-doings of tradesmen.  My dear Madam, we do not live on spotless linen, and crumbless carpets.  Hunt out that bundle of old letters you keep tied up in faded ribbon at the back of your bureau drawer—a pity you don’t read them oftener.  He did not enthuse about your cuffs and collars, gush over the neatness of your darning.  It was your tangled hair he raved about, your sunny smile (we have not seen it for some years, Madam—the fault of the Cook and the Butcher, I presume), your little hands, your rosebud mouth—it has lost its shape, Madam, of late. Try a little less scolding of Mary Ann, and practise a laugh once a day: you might get back the dainty curves.  It would be worth trying.  It was a pretty mouth once.
    Who invented that mischievous falsehood that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach?  How many a silly woman, taking it for truth, has let love slip out of the parlour, while she was busy in the kitchen.  Of course, if you were foolish enough to marry a pig, I suppose you must be content to devote your life to the preparation of hog’s-wash.  But are you sure that he is a pig?  If by any chance he be not?—then, Madam, you are making a grievous mistake.  My dear Lady, you are too modest.  If I may say so without making you unduly conceited, even at the dinner-table itself, you are of much more importance than the mutton. Courage, Madam, be not afraid to tilt a lance even with your own cook. You can be more piquant than the sauce à la Tartare, more soothing surely than the melted butter.  There was a time when he would not have known whether he was eating beef or pork with you the other side of the table.  Whose fault is it?  Don’t think so poorly of us.  We are not ascetics, neither are we all gourmets: most of us plain men, fond of our dinner, as a healthy man should be, but fonder still of our sweethearts and wives, let us hope.  Try us.  A moderately-cooked dinner—let us even say a not-too-well-cooked dinner, with you looking your best, laughing and talking gaily and cleverly—as you can, you know—makes a pleasanter meal for us, after the day’s work is done, than that same dinner, cooked to perfection, with you silent, jaded, and anxious, your pretty hair untidy, your pretty face wrinkled with care concerning the sole, with anxiety regarding the omelette.
    My poor Martha, be not troubled about so many things.  You are the one thing needful—if the bricks and mortar are to be a home.  See to it that you are well served up, that you are done to perfection, that you are tender and satisfying, that you are worth sitting down to.  We wanted a wife, a comrade, a friend; not a cook and a nurse on the cheap.
    But of what use is it to talk? the world will ever follow its own folly. When I think of all the good advice that I have given it, and of the small result achieved, I confess I grow discouraged.  I was giving good advice to a lady only the other day.  I was instructing her as to the proper treatment of aunts.  She was sucking a lead-pencil, a thing I am always telling her not to do.  She took it out of her mouth to speak.
    “I suppose you know how everybody ought to do everything,” she said.
    There are times when it is necessary to sacrifice one’s modesty to one’s duty.
    “Of course I do,” I replied.
    “And does Mama know how everybody ought to do everything?” was the second question.
    My conviction on this point was by no means so strong, but for domestic reasons I again sacrificed myself to expediency.
    “Certainly,” I answered; “and take that pencil out of your mouth.  I’ve told you of that before.  You’ll swallow it one day, and then you’ll get perichondritis and die.”
    She appeared to be solving a problem.
    “All grown-up people seem to know everything,” she summarized.
    There are times when I doubt if children are as simple as they look.  If it be sheer stupidity that prompts them to make remarks of this character, one should pity them, and seek to improve them.  But if it be not stupidity? well then, one should still seek to improve them, but by a different method.
    The other morning I overheard the nurse talking to this particular specimen.  The woman is a most worthy creature, and she was imparting to the child some really sound advice.  She was in the middle of an unexceptional exhortation concerning the virtue of silence, when Dorothea interrupted her with—
    “Oh, do be quiet, Nurse.  I never get a moment’s peace from your chatter.”
    Such an interruption discourages a woman who is trying to do her duty.
    Last Tuesday evening she was unhappy.  Myself, I think that rhubarb should never be eaten before April, and then never with lemonade.  Her mother read her a homily upon the subject of pain.  It was impressed upon her that we must be patient, that we must put up with the trouble that God sends us.  Dorothea would descend to details, as children will.
    “Must we put up with the cod-liver oil that God sends us?”
    “Yes, decidedly.”
    “And with the nurses that God sends us?”
    “Certainly; and be thankful that you’ve got them, some little girls haven’t any nurse.  And don’t talk so much.”
    On Friday I found the mother in tears.
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “Oh, nothing,” was the answer; “only Baby.  She’s such a strange child. I can’t make her out at all.”
    “What has she been up to now?”
    “Oh, she will argue, you know.”
    She has that failing.  I don’t know where she gets it from, but she’s got it.
    “Well?”
    “Well, she made me cross; and, to punish her, I told her she shouldn’t take her doll’s perambulator out with her.”
    “Yes?”
    “Well, she didn’t say anything then, but so soon as I was outside the door, I heard her talking to herself—you know her way?”
    “Yes?”
    “She said—”
    “Yes, she said?”
    “She said, ‘I must be patient.  I must put up with the mother God has sent me.’”
    She lunches down-stairs on Sundays.  We have her with us once a week to give her the opportunity of studying manners and behaviour.  Milson had dropped in, and we were discussing politics.  I was interested, and, pushing my plate aside, leant forward with my elbows on the table. Dorothea has a habit of talking to herself in a high-pitched whisper capable of being heard above an Adelphi love scene.  I heard her say—
    “I must sit up straight.  I mustn’t sprawl with my elbows on the table. It is only common, vulgar people behave that way.”
    I looked across at her; she was sitting most correctly, and appeared to be contemplating something a thousand miles away.  We had all of us been lounging!  We sat up stiffly, and conversation flagged.
    Of course we made a joke of it after the child was gone.  But somehow it didn’t seem to be our joke.
    I wish I could recollect my childhood.  I should so like to know if children are as simple as they can look.