FullReads

“Oh I can fancy scenes in which you’d be quite natural.” And indeed I could see the slipshod rearrangements of stale properties–the stories I tried to produce pictures for without the exasperation of reading them–whose sandy tracts the good lady might help to people. But I had to return to the fact that for this sort of work–the daily mechanical grind–I was already equipped: the people I was working with were fully adequate.

“We only thought we might be more like somecharacters,” said Mrs. Monarch mildly, getting up.

Her husband also rose; he stood looking at me with a dim wistfulness that was touching in so fine a man.”Wouldn’t it be rather a pull sometimes to have–a–to have–?” He hung fire; he wanted me to help him by phrasing what he meant. But I couldn’t–I didn’t know. So he brought it out awkwardly: “The realthing: a gentleman, you know, or a lady.” I was quite ready to give a general assent–I admitted that there was a great deal in that. This encouraged Major Monarch to say, following up his appeal with an unacted gulp: “It’s awfully hard–we’ve tried everything.” The gulp was communicative; it proved too much for his wife. Before I knew it Mrs. Monarch had dropped again upon a divan and burst into tears. Her husband sat down beside her, holding one of her hands; whereupon she quickly dried her eyes with the other, while I felt embarrassed as she looked up at me.”There isn’t a confounded job I haven’t applied for–waited for–prayed for. You can fancy we’d be pretty bad first. Secretaryships and that sort of thing? You might as well ask for a peerage. I’d be anything–I’m strong; a messenger or a coalheaver. I’d put on a gold-laced cap and open carriage-doors in front of the haberdasher’s; I’d hang about a station to carry portmanteaux; I’d be a postman. But they won’t lookat you; there are thousands as good as yourself already on the ground. Gentlemen, poor beggars, who’ve drunk their wine, who’ve kept their hunters!”

I was as reassuring as I knew how to be, and my visitors were presently on their feet again while, for the experiment, we agreed on an hour. We were discussing it when the door opened and Miss Churm came in with a wet umbrella. Miss Churm had to take the omnibus to Maida Vale and then walk half a mile. She looked a trifle blowsy and slightly splashed. I scarcely ever saw her come in without thinking afresh how odd it was that, being so little in herself, she should yet be so much in others. She was a meagre little Miss Churm, but was such an ample heroine of romance. she was only a freckled cockney, but she could represent everything, from a fine lady to a shepherdess; she had the faculty as she might have had a fine voice or long hair. She couldn’t spell and she loved beer, but she had two or three “points,” and practice, and a knack, and mother-wit, and a whimsical sensibility, and a love of the theatre, and seven sisters, and not an ounce of respect, especially for the h. The first thing my visitors saw was that her umbrella was wet, and in their spotless perfection they visibly winced at it. The rain had come on since their arrival.

“I’m all in a soak; there wasa mess of people in the ‘bus. I wish you lived near a stytion,” said Miss Churm. I requested her to get ready as quickly as possible, and she passed into the room in which she always changed her dress. But before going out she asked me what she was to get into this time.