We had cold bacon for lunch that day. There was not much of it. I took it to be the bacon we had not eaten for breakfast. But on a clean dish with parsley it looked rather neat. It did not suggest, however, a lunch for four people, two of whom had been out all the morning in the open air. There was some excuse for Dick.
"I never heard before," said Dick, "of cold fried bacon as a hors d'oeuvre."
"It is not a hors d'oeuvre," explained Robina. "It is all there is for lunch." She spoke in the quiet, passionless voice of one who has done with all human emotion. She added that she should not be requiring any herself, she having lunched already.
Veronica, conveying by her tone and bearing the impression of something midway between a perfect lady and a Christian martyr, observed that she also had lunched.
"Wish I had," growled Dick.
I gave him a warning kick. I could see he was on the way to getting himself into trouble. As I explained to him afterwards, a woman is most dangerous when at her meekest. A man, when he feels his temper rising, takes every opportunity of letting it escape. Trouble at such times he welcomes. A broken boot-lace, or a shirt without a button, is to him then as water in the desert. An only collar-stud that will disappear as if by magic from between his thumb and finger and vanish apparently into thin air is a piece of good fortune sent on these occasions only to those whom the gods love. By the time he has waddled on his hands and knees twice round the room, broken the boot-jack raking with it underneath the wardrobe, been bumped and slapped and kicked by every piece of furniture that the room contains, and ended up by stepping on that stud and treading it flat, he has not a bitter or an angry thought left in him. All that remains of him is sweet and peaceful. He fastens his collar with a safety-pin, humming an old song the while.
Failing the gifts of Providence, the children--if in health--can generally be depended upon to afford him an opening. Sooner or later one or another of them will do something that no child, when he was a boy, would have dared--or dreamed of daring--to even so much as think of doing. The child, conveying by expression that the world, it is glad to say, is slowly but steadily growing in sense, and pity it is that old-fashioned folks can't bustle up and keep abreast of it, points out that firstly it has not done this thing, that for various reasons--a few only of which need be dwelt upon--it is impossible it could have done this thing; that secondly it has been expressly requested to do this thing, that wishful always to give satisfaction, it has--at sacrifice of all its own ideas--gone out of its way to do this thing; that thirdly it can't help doing this thing, strive against fate as it will.
He says he does not want to hear what the child has got to say on the subject--nor on any other subject, neither then nor at any other time. He says there's going to be a new departure in this house, and that things all round are going to be very different. He suddenly remembers every rule and regulation he has made during the past ten years for the guidance of everybody, and that everybody, himself included, has forgotten. He tries to talk about them all at once, in haste lest he should forget them again. By the time he has succeeded in getting himself, if nobody else, to understand himself, the children are swarming round his knees extracting from him promises that in his sober moments he will be sorry that he made.
I knew a woman--a wise and good woman she was--who when she noticed that her husband's temper was causing him annoyance, took pains to help him to get rid of it. To relieve his sufferings I have known her search the house for a last month's morning paper and, ironing it smooth, lay it warm and neatly folded on his breakfast plate.
"One thing in this world to be thankful for, at all events, and that is that we don't live in Ditchley-in-the-Marsh," he would growl ten minutes later from the other side of it.
"Sounds a bit damp," the good woman would reply.
"Damp!" he would grunt, "who minds a bit of damp! Good for you.
Makes us Englishmen what we are. Being murdered in one's bed about once a week is what I should object to."
"Do they do much of that sort of thing down there?" the good woman would enquire.
"Seems to be the chief industry of the place. Do you mean to say you don't remember that old maiden lady being murdered by her own gardener and buried in the fowl-run? You women! you take no interest in public affairs."
"I do remember something about it, now you mention it, dear," the good woman would confess. "Always seems such an innocent type of man, a gardener."
"Seems to be a special breed of them at Ditchley-in-the-Marsh," he answers. "Here again last Monday," he continues, reading with growing interest. "Almost the same case--even to the pruning knife.
Yes, hanged if he doesn't!--buries her in the fowl-run. This is most extraordinary."
"It must be the imitative instinct asserting itself," suggests the good woman. "As you, dear, have so often pointed out, one crime makes another."
"I have always said so," he agrees; "it has always been a theory of mine."
He folds the paper over. "Dull dogs, these political chaps!" he says. "Here's the Duke of Devonshire, speaking last night at Hackney, begins by telling a funny story he says he has just heard about a parrot. Why, it's the same story somebody told a month ago;
I remember reading it. Yes--upon my soul--word for word, I'd swear to it. Shows you the sort of men we're governed by."
"You can't expect everyone, dear, to possess your repertoire," the good woman remarks.
"Needn't say he's just heard it that afternoon, anyhow," responds the good man.
He turns to another column. "What the devil! Am I going off my head?" He pounces on the eldest boy. "When was the Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race?" he fiercely demands.
"The Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race!" repeats the astonished youth.
"Why, it's over. You took us all to see it, last month. The Saturday before--"