The Angel and the Author and others

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"Get me out of this, old man, there's a good fellow!"

[Sometimes I wish I were an American Woman.]

The carriage was crowded, chiefly with Germans. Every window was
closed, every ventilator shut. The hot air quivered round our feet
Seventeen men and four women were smoking, two children were sucking
peppermints, and an old married couple were eating their lunch,
consisting chiefly of garlic. At a junction, the door was thrown
open. The foreigner opens the door a little way, glides in, and
closes it behind him. This was not a foreigner, but an American
lady, en voyage, accompanied by five other American ladies. They
marched in carrying packages. They could not find six seats
together, so they scattered up and down the carriage. The first
thing that each woman did, the moment she could get her hands free,
was to dash for the nearest window and haul it down.

"Astonishes me," said the first woman, "that somebody is not dead in
this carriage."

Their idea, I think, was that through asphyxiation we had become
comatose, and, but for their entrance, would have died unconscious.

"It is a current of air that is wanted," said another of the ladies.

So they opened the door at the front of the carriage and four of them
stood outside on the platform, chatting pleasantly and admiring the
scenery, while two of them opened the door at the other end, and took
photographs of the Lake of Geneva. The carriage rose and cursed them
in six languages. Bells were rung: conductors came flying in. It
was all of no use. Those American ladies were cheerful but firm.
They argued with volubility: they argued standing in the open
doorway. The conductors, familiar, no doubt, with the American lady
and her ways, shrugged their shoulders and retired. The other
passengers undid their bags and bundles, and wrapped themselves up in
shawls and Jaeger nightshirts.

I met the ladies afterwards in Lausanne. They told me they had been
condemned to a fine of forty francs apiece. They also explained to
me that they had not the slightest intention of paying it.

CHAPTER VII

[Too much Postcard.]

The postcard craze is dying out in Germany--the land of its birth--I
am told. In Germany they do things thoroughly, or not at all. The
German when he took to sending postcards abandoned almost every other
pursuit in life. The German tourist never knew where he had been
until on reaching home again he asked some friend or relation to
allow him to look over the postcards he had sent. Then it was he
began to enjoy his trip.

"What a charming old town!" the German tourist would exclaim. "I
wish I could have found time while I was there to have gone outside
the hotel and have had a look round. Still, it is pleasant to think
one has been there."

"I suppose you did not have much time?" his friend would suggest.

"We did not get there till the evening," the tourist would explain.
"We were busy till dark buying postcards, and then in the morning
there was the writing and addressing to be done, and when that was
over, and we had had our breakfast, it was time to leave again."

He would take up another card showing the panorama from a mountain
top.

"Sublime! colossal!" he would cry enraptured. "If I had known it was
anything like that, I'd have stopped another day and had a look at
it."

It was always worth seeing, the arrival of a party of German tourists
in a Schwartzwald village. Leaping from the coach they would surge
round the solitary gendarme.

"Where is the postcard shop?" "Tell us--we have only two hours--
where do we get postcards?"

The gendarme, scenting Trinkgeld, would head them at the double-
quick: stout old gentlemen unaccustomed to the double-quick, stouter
Frauen gathering up their skirts with utter disregard to all
propriety, slim Fraulein clinging to their beloved would run after
him. Nervous pedestrians would fly for safety into doorways,
careless loiterers would be swept into the gutter.

In the narrow doorway of the postcard shop trouble would begin. The
cries of suffocated women and trampled children, the curses of strong
men, would rend the air. The German is a peaceful, law-abiding
citizen, but in the hunt for postcards he was a beast. A woman would
pounce on a tray of cards, commence selecting, suddenly the tray
would be snatched from her. She would burst into tears, and hit the
person nearest to her with her umbrella. The cunning and the strong
would secure the best cards. The weak and courteous be left with
pictures of post offices and railway stations. Torn and dishevelled,
the crowd would rush back to the hotel, sweep crockery from the
table, and--sucking stumpy pencils--write feverishly. A hurried meal
would follow. Then the horses would be put to again, the German
tourists would climb back to their places and be driven away, asking
of the coachman what the name of the place they had just left might
happen to be.

[The Postcard as a Family Curse.]

One presumes that even to the patient German the thing grew tiresome.
In the Fliegende Blatter two young clerks were represented discussing
the question of summer holidays.

"Where are you going?" asks A of B.

"Nowhere," answers B.

"Can't you afford it?" asks the sympathetic A.

"Only been able to save up enough for the postcards," answers B,
gloomily; "no money left for the trip."

Men and women carried bulky volumes containing the names and
addresses of the people to whom they had promised to send cards.
Everywhere, through winding forest glade, by silver sea, on mountain
pathway, one met with prematurely aged looking tourists muttering as
they walked:

"Did I send Aunt Gretchen a postcard from that last village that we
stopped at, or did I address two to Cousin Lisa?"

Then, again, maybe, the picture postcard led to disappointment.
Uninteresting towns clamoured, as ill-favoured spinsters in a
photographic studio, to be made beautiful.

"I want," says the lady, "a photograph my friends will really like.
Some of these second-rate photographers make one look quite plain. I
don't want you to flatter me, if you understand, I merely want
something nice."

The obliging photographer does his best. The nose is carefully toned
down, the wart becomes a dimple, her own husband doesn't know her.
The postcard artist has ended by imagining everything as it might
have been.

"If it were not for the houses," says the postcard artist to himself,
"this might have been a picturesque old High street of mediaeval
aspect."

So he draws a picture of the High street as it might have been. The
lover of quaint architecture travels out of his way to see it, and
when he finds it and contrasts it with the picture postcard he gets
mad. I bought a postcard myself once representing the market place
of a certain French town. It seemed to me, looking at the postcard,
that I hadn't really seen France--not yet. I travelled nearly a
hundred miles to see that market place. I was careful to arrive on
market day and to get there at the right time. I reached the market
square and looked at it. Then I asked a gendarme where it was.

He said it was there--that I was in it.

I said, "I don't mean this one, I want the other one, the picturesque
one."

He said it was the only market square they had. I took the postcard
from my pocket.

"Where are all the girls?" I asked him.

"What girls?" he demanded.

[The Artist's Dream.]

"Why, these girls;" I showed him the postcard, there ought to have
been about a hundred of them. There was not a plain one among the
lot. Many of them I should have called beautiful. They were selling
flowers and fruit, all kinds of fruit--cherries, strawberries, rosy-
cheeked apples, luscious grapes--all freshly picked and sparkling
with dew. The gendarme said he had never seen any girls--not in this
particular square. Referring casually to the blood of saints and
martyrs, he said he would like to see a few girls in that town worth
looking at. In the square itself sat six motherly old souls round a
lamp-post. One of them had a moustache, and was smoking a pipe, but
in other respects, I have no doubt, was all a woman should be. Two
of them were selling fish. That is they would have sold fish, no
doubt, had anyone been there to buy fish. The gaily clad thousands
of eager purchasers pictured in the postcard were represented by two
workmen in blue blouses talking at a corner, mostly with their
fingers; a small boy walking backwards, with the idea apparently of
not missing anything behind him, and a yellow dog that sat on the
kerb, and had given up all hope--judging from his expression--of
anything ever happening again. With the gendarme and myself, these
four were the only living creatures in the square. The rest of the
market consisted of eggs and a few emaciated fowls hanging from a
sort of broom handle.

"And where's the cathedral?" I asked the gendarme. It was a Gothic
structure in the postcard of evident antiquity. He said there had
once been a cathedral. It was now a brewery; he pointed it out to
me. He said he thought some portion of the original south wall had
been retained. He thought the manager of the brewery might be
willing to show it to me.

"And the fountain?" I demanded, "and all these doves!"

He said there had been talk of a fountain. He believed the design
had already been prepared.

I took the next train back. I do not now travel much out of my way
to see the original of the picture postcard. Maybe others have had
like experience and the picture postcard as a guide to the Continent
has lost its value.

The dealer has fallen back upon the eternal feminine. The postcard
collector is confined to girls. Through the kindness of
correspondents I possess myself some fifty to a hundred girls, or
perhaps it would be more correct to say one girl in fifty to a
hundred different hats. I have her in big hats, I have her in small
hats, I have her in no hat at all. I have her smiling, and I have
her looking as if she had lost her last sixpence. I have her
overdressed, I have her decidedly underdressed, but she is much the
same girl. Very young men cannot have too many of her, but myself I
am getting tired of her. I suppose it is the result of growing old.

[Why not the Eternal Male for a change?]

Girls of my acquaintance are also beginning to grumble at her. I
often think it hard on girls that the artist so neglects the eternal
male. Why should there not be portraits of young men in different
hats; young men in big hats, young men in little hats, young men
smiling archly, young men looking noble. Girls don't want to
decorate their rooms with pictures of other girls, they want rows of
young men beaming down upon them.

But possibly I am sinning my mercies. A father hears what young men
don't. The girl in real life is feeling it keenly: the impossible
standard set for her by the popular artist.

"Real skirts don't hang like that," she grumbles, "it's not in the
nature of skirts. You can't have feet that size. It isn't our
fault, they are not made. Look at those waists! There would be no
room to put anything?"

"Nature, in fashioning woman, has not yet crept up to the artistic
ideal. The young man studies the picture on the postcard; on the
coloured almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the
advertisement of Jones' soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly
Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked
for in this imperfect world. Thus it is that woman has had to take
to shorthand and typewriting. Modern woman is being ruined by the
artist.

[How Women are ruined by Art.]

Mr. Anstey tells a story of a young barber who fell in love with his
own wax model. All day he dreamed of the impossible. She--the young
lady of wax-like complexion, with her everlasting expression of
dignity combined with amiability. No girl of his acquaintance could
compete with her. If I remember rightly he died a bachelor, still
dreaming of wax-like perfection. Perhaps it is as well we men are
not handicapped to the same extent. If every hoarding, if every
picture shop window, if every illustrated journal teemed with
illustrations of the ideal young man in perfect fitting trousers that
never bagged at the knees! Maybe it would result in our cooking our
own breakfasts and making our own beds to the end of our lives.

The novelist and playwright, as it is, have made things difficult
enough for us. In books and plays the young man makes love with a
flow of language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years
to acquire. What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when
the real young man proposes to her! He has not called her anything
in particular. Possibly he has got as far as suggesting she is a
duck or a daisy, or hinting shyly that she is his bee or his
honeysuckle: in his excitement he is not quite sure which. In the
novel she has been reading the hero has likened the heroine to half
the vegetable kingdom. Elementary astronomy has been exhausted in
his attempt to describe to her the impression her appearance leaves
on him. Bond Street has been sacked in his endeavour to get it
clearly home to her what different parts of her are like--her eyes,
her teeth, her heart, her hair, her ears. Delicacy alone prevents
his extending the catalogue. A Fiji Island lover might possibly go
further. We have not yet had the Fiji Island novel. By the time he
is through with it she must have a somewhat confused notion of
herself--a vague conviction that she is a sort of condensed South
Kensington Museum.

[Difficulty of living up to the Poster.]

Poor Angelina must feel dissatisfied with the Edwin of real life. I
am not sure that art and fiction have not made life more difficult
for us than even it was intended to be. The view from the mountain
top is less extensive than represented by the picture postcard. The
play, I fear me, does not always come up to the poster. Polly
Perkins is pretty enough as girls go; but oh for the young lady of
the grocer's almanack! Poor dear John is very nice and loves us--so
he tells us, in his stupid, halting way; but how can we respond when
we remember how the man loved in the play! The "artist has fashioned
his dream of delight," and the workaday world by comparison seems
tame to us.

CHAPTER VIII

[The Lady and the Problem.]

She is a good woman, the Heroine of the Problem Play, but accidents
will happen, and other people were to blame.

Perhaps that is really the Problem: who was responsible for the
heroine's past? Was it her father? She does not say so--not in so
many words. That is not her way. It is not for her, the silently-
suffering victim of complicated antecedent incidents, to purchase
justice for herself by pointing the finger of accusation against him
who, whatever his faults may be, was once, at all events, her father.
That one fact in his favour she can never forget. Indeed she would
not if she could. That one asset, for whatever it may be worth by
the time the Day of Judgment arrives, he shall retain. It shall not
be taken from him. "After all he was my father." She admits it,
with the accent on the "was." That he is so no longer, he has only
himself to blame. His subsequent behaviour has apparently rendered
it necessary for her to sever the relationship.

"I love you," she has probably said to him, paraphrasing Othello's
speech to Cassio; "it is my duty, and--as by this time you must be
aware--it is my keen if occasionally somewhat involved, sense of duty
that is the cause of almost all our troubles in this play. You will
always remain the object of what I cannot help feeling is misplaced
affection on my part, mingled with contempt. But never more be
relative of mine."

Certain it is that but for her father she would never have had a
past. Failing anyone else on whom to lay the blame for whatever the
lady may have done, we can generally fall back upon the father. He
becomes our sheet-anchor, so to speak. There are plays in which at
first sight it would almost appear there was nobody to blame--nobody,
except the heroine herself. It all seems to happen just because she
is no better than she ought to be: clearly, the father's fault! for
ever having had a daughter no better than she ought to be. As the
Heroine of a certain Problem Play once put it neatly and succinctly
to the old man himself: "It is you parents that make us children
what we are." She had him there. He had not a word to answer for
himself, but went off centre, leaving his hat behind him.

Sometimes, however, the father is merely a "Scientist"--which in
Stageland is another term for helpless imbecile. In Stageland, if a
gentleman has not got to have much brain and you do not know what
else to make of him, you let him be a scientist--and then, of course,
he is only to blame in a minor degree. If he had not been a
scientist--thinking more of his silly old stars or beetles than of
his intricate daughter, he might have done something. The heroine
does not say precisely what: perhaps have taken her up stairs now
and again, while she was still young and susceptible of improvement,
and have spanked some sense into her.

[The Stage Hero who, for once, had Justice done to him.]

I remember witnessing long ago, in a country barn, a highly moral
play. It was a Problem Play, now I come to think of it. At least,
that is, it would have been a Problem Play but that the party with
the past happened in this case to be merely a male thing. Stage life
presents no problems to the man. The hero of the Problem Play has
not got to wonder what to do; he has got to wonder only what the
heroine will do next. The hero--he was not exactly the hero; he
would have been the hero had he not been hanged in the last act. But
for that he was rather a nice young man, full of sentiment and not
ashamed of it. From the scaffold he pleaded for leave to embrace his
mother just once more before he died. It was a pretty idea. The
hangman himself was touched. The necessary leave was granted him.
He descended the steps and flung his arms round the sobbing old lady,
and--bit off her nose. After that he told her why he had bitten off
her nose. It appeared that when he was a boy, he had returned home
one evening with a rabbit in his pocket. Instead of putting him
across her knee, and working into him the eighth commandment, she had
said nothing; but that it seemed to be a fairly useful sort of
rabbit, and had sent him out into the garden to pick onions. If she
had done her duty by him then, he would not have been now in his
present most unsatisfactory position, and she would still have had
her nose. The fathers and mothers in the audience applauded, but the
children, scenting addition to precedent, looked glum.

Maybe it is something of this kind the heroine is hinting at.
Perhaps the Problem has nothing to do with the heroine herself, but
with the heroine's parents: what is the best way of bringing up a
daughter who shows the slightest sign of developing a tendency
towards a Past? Can it be done by kindness? And, if not, how much?

Occasionally the parents attempt to solve the Problem, so far as they
are concerned, by dying young--shortly after the heroine's birth. No
doubt they argue to themselves this is their only chance of avoiding
future blame. But they do not get out of it so easily.

"Ah, if I had only had a mother--or even a father!" cries the
heroine: one feels how mean it was of them to slip away as they did.

The fact remains, however, that they are dead. One despises them for
dying, but beyond that it is difficult to hold them personally
responsible for the heroine's subsequent misdeeds. The argument
takes to itself new shape. Is it Fate that is to blame? The lady
herself would seem to favour this suggestion. It has always been her
fate, she explains, to bring suffering and misery upon those she
loves. At first, according to her own account, she rebelled against
this cruel Fate--possibly instigated thereto by the people
unfortunate enough to he loved by her. But of late she has come to
accept this strange destiny of hers with touching resignation. It
grieves her, when she thinks of it, that she is unable to imbue those
she loves with her own patient spirit. They seem to be a fretful
little band.

Considered as a scapegoat, Fate, as compared with the father, has
this advantage: it is always about: it cannot slip away and die
before the real trouble begins: it cannot even plead a scientific
head; it is there all the time. With care one can blame it for most
everything. The vexing thing about it is, that it does not mind
being blamed. One cannot make Fate feel small and mean. It affords
no relief to our harrowed feelings to cry out indignantly to Fate:
"look here, what you have done. Look at this sweet and well-
proportioned lady, compelled to travel first-class, accompanied by an
amount of luggage that must be a perpetual nightmare to her maid,
from one fashionable European resort to another; forced to exist on a
well-secured income of, apparently, five thousand a year, most of
which has to go in clothes; beloved by only the best people in the
play; talked about by everybody incessantly to the exclusion of
everybody else--all the neighbours interested in her and in nobody
else much; all the women envying her; all the men tumbling over one
another after her--looks, in spite of all her worries, not a day
older than twenty-three; and has discovered a dressmaker never yet
known to have been an hour behind her promise! And all your fault,
yours, Fate. Will nothing move you to shame?"

[She has a way of mislaying her Husband.]

It brings no satisfaction with it, speaking out one's mind to Fate.
We want to see him before us, the thing of flesh and blood that has
brought all this upon her. Was it that early husband--or rather the
gentleman she thought was her husband. As a matter of fact, he was a
husband. Only he did not happen to be hers. That naturally confused
her. "Then who is my husband?" she seems to have said to herself; "I
had a husband: I remember it distinctly."

"Difficult to know them apart from one another," says the lady with
the past, "the way they dress them all alike nowadays. I suppose it
does not really matter. They are much the same as one another when
you get them home. Doesn't do to be too fussy."

She is a careless woman. She is always mislaying that early husband.
And she has an unfortunate knack of finding him at the wrong moment.
Perhaps that is the Problem: What is a lady to do with a husband for
whom she has no further use? If she gives him away he is sure to
come back, like the clever dog that is sent in a hamper to the other
end of the kingdom, and three days afterwards is found gasping on the
doorstep. If she leaves him in the middle of South Africa, with most
of the heavy baggage and all the debts, she may reckon it a certainty
that on her return from her next honeymoon he will be the first to
greet her.

Her surprise at meeting him again is a little unreasonable. She
seems to be under the impression that because she has forgotten him,
he is for all practical purposes dead.

"Why I forgot all about him," she seems to be arguing to herself,
"seven years ago at least. According to the laws of Nature there
ought to be nothing left of him but just his bones."

She is indignant at finding he is still alive, and lets him know it--
tells him he is a beast for turning up at his sister's party, and
pleads to him for one last favour: that he will go away where
neither she nor anybody else of any importance will ever see him or
hear of him again. That's all she asks of him. If he make a point
of it she will--though her costume is ill adapted to the exercise--go
down upon her knees to ask it of him.

He brutally retorts that he doesn't know where to "get." The lady
travels round a good deal and seems to be in most places. She
accepts week-end invitations to the houses of his nearest relatives.
She has married his first cousin, and is now getting up a bazaar with
the help of his present wife. How he is to avoid her he does not
quite see.

Perhaps, by the by, that is really the Problem: where is the early
husband to disappear to? Even if every time he saw her coming he
were to duck under the table, somebody would be sure to notice it and
make remarks. Ought he to take himself out one dark night, tie a
brick round his neck, and throw himself into a pond?

[What is a Lady to do with a Husband when she has finished with him?]

But men are so selfish. The idea does not even occur to him; and the
lady herself is too generous to do more than just hint at it.

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