“You mean ‘In Wonderland,’ I suppose?” said Hugh.
“I dare say. Or you could win punting races.”
Hugh removed his tongue from his cheek merely because he wanted it for the purposes of speech. Figuratively, it was there still.
“I am writing a volume of fairy-tales—several, in fact,” he said; “and I am going in for the punting championship of Northern Europe.”
“Oh, how can you tell such stories?” said Peggy.
“Easily. There’s not the slightest difficulty about it. You had better put down your parasol a moment. I am going to tie up underneath those trees.”
“Oh, but we’ve hardly gone a hundred yards!” said she.
“No; but it is clearly your purpose to argue with me. I can’t argue while I’m punting. If you like, we will drift down mid-stream, but there are a good many excursion steamers about.”
They tied up accordingly just below Odney Weir, and since Peggy intended to begin arguing at once, it did not seem worth while to disclaim the intention of doing so.
“You sing so well too,” she said. “Surely you ought to do something with some of those things? Now, don’t interrupt; as you insist on it, I did come out to argue with you.”
“But the argument is to be conducted without any interruption from me?” asked Hugh.
“Yes. You see, you are twenty-four, aren’t you?—which is really middle-age nowadays, when everybody is past everything at forty, and it’s time you did something. It doesn’t really matter much what you do, as long as you do something. ‘Men must work,’ as Mr. Kingsley said.”
Dead silence from Hugh, according to instructions. Peggy wanted to argue the question on general lines and make him suggest singing as a profession, since she did not officially know of this offer of the Opera Syndicate. Hence she continued with glorious generalisations.
“You see, it is a necessity to work,” she said, “for all of us, though I think Mr. Kingsley said that women only had to weep, but I cease at this point to use him as an authority. Good heavens, how dull I should find London if I only went to luncheon and dinner and balls and concerts! Life is simply idiotic unless you do something. And doing things is much more necessary for men than for women, because men are not naturally frivolous; they are only frivolous because women ask them to play about, like—like the flower-maidens and Parsifal.”
Hugh gave a little explosion of laughter.
“I beg your pardon!” he said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Then don’t, because I am going on until I have finished. Good gracious, I think that one of the saddest sights that the world has to show is an unoccupied bachelor, who is always ready to go out to tea, or make the fourteenth, when there would otherwise be thirteen! I have been in a good many slums and factories and shelters, but I have never seen anything quite so sad as that.”
“You must have been reading the works of President Roosevelt!” said Hugh.
“Not one line, but I have occasionally driven up and down St. James’s Street and looked at the row of bald heads, back to the windows in clubs. Those wretches read the Times, or more probably the Daily Mail, all morning, and totter out to lunch. They read some pink or green paper all afternoon, and totter out to dinner. Then they go to bed, and close their weary eyes till late on in the following morning. Hugh, you will become like them if you don’t take care.”
“May I speak?” asked he.
“No. I am much older than you, because I am thirty-eight, though I don’t look it, and you needn’t say that. And all through those fourteen years which separate us I have been always learning one thing—that happiness lies in being busy. Years——”
Then the romantic, the picturesque, that always beats in Celtic blood—and she was half Irish—came to her tongue.
“The years, or time, whatever it is, are like a golden river that flows round us,” she said. “You may just sit in it, as you are doing, and watch the golden iridescent stream flowing and combing round you. That is letting it run to waste. But use your brain, Hughie, and let your brain talk to your fingers, and let your fingers pull a bit of the water into your grasp, and that which you thought was only just water, just the passage of time in this heavenly world, is a real tangible thing, a golden thing, and your fingers will make a golden something—a book or a statue or a song—out of it. You must mould and carve this bit of time, and when it is finished you will let it float down again on the golden river of time, and those who come after will see it and handle it.”
He did not want to interrupt now. Peggy, as he well knew, was “doing” something for more hours in the day and for more days in the year than any one he knew, and it was not often that this vein of romance surged to the surface. She had quite forgotten, it must be confessed, the missionary enterprise on which she had set out an hour ago at her sister’s suggestion. Just now she was speaking not from another’s wish, but out of her own heart.
“Oh, we ought all to be so busy!” she said, “grasping at the golden time and moulding it, every drop of it, into golden images! Also, when we do that, we are not only using time, we are saving it. It is all ours, and it is only spent and wasted when we let it go by. Whatever we make of it is invested; it becomes things of gold that float down on the golden river. Ah, don’t you see, Hughie?”
He was grave, too, now.
“Then do I waste time when I tell the children fairy-stories and sing to you?” he asked.
“No, you dear; but make bigger things. Write your book of fairy-stories, which you said you were writing—only I didn’t believe you! Or win a punt race even—only I didn’t believe you! Take hold of the world somehow, sing to it, or—or do anything to it,” she added, afraid she had betrayed her knowledge.
Hugh was extremely susceptible, using that word not in the confined sense of being easily influenced by a woman, but in the larger meaning of being quick to be caught by an idea. To be a weather-cock is a phrase that has had attached to it a sense, if not opprobrious, at any rate a little depreciatory; but in reality to be fitted with that simile is the highest praise, since it implies the wonderful sensitiveness of the temperament that is never other than artistic. To catch and to record the faintest breeze that blows is a better gift than to stand four-square like a tower and defy the winds of heaven. It is not denied that the four-square towers are eminently useful, and, as far as usefulness of this sort is concerned, the weather-cock is not in any way comparable to them. Yet the blowing and breathing of the winds is perhaps worth record, and the towers do not show it. And if Hugh was obstinate, as Peggy had declared he was, he was obstinate perhaps with the deadly obstinacy of weather-cocks, which, however much the world in general shouts “Northeast!” will continue to register southwest if it seem to them that the wind is coming from that quarter. There may be clattering and screaming, as she had said, but the weather-cock goes on exactly as before. On this occasion Hugh, perhaps because he had received commands, did not argue and even when Peggy said “Well, what have you got to say?” only pleaded her original command in defence. But his tongue had been in his cheek before, and as he punted her back again for lunch it again came out.
“I want to ask you one question,” he said. “But pray don’t answer it unless you wish. Did Mrs. Allbutt tell you that the Opera Syndicate had made me a certain offer? Mind, I don’t draw any conclusions if you refuse to answer.”
Peggy had put up the huge red umbrella again, but at this she put it down with a snap.
“Hughie, I will never tell you not to talk again,” she said, “for I believe you guess best when you are silent. When did you guess?”
“Oh, I guessed right