Page:Punch (Volume 147).pdf/126

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[Lines composed on what looks like the eve of a general European war; and designed to represent the views of an average British patriot.]

 

"Do you notice anything particularly queer about this house, Charles," I asked him, "now that Araminta has been forced to fly from it?"

(Araminta had gone home to visit her parents, not so much, as I explained to Charles, because she was tired of living with me as because I had invited him to come on a visit. She was to return on the following day after a fortnight's absence, and I had promised faithfully to evict him before she came).

"Except," said Charles, "that it is usual to offer one's guests the most comfortable arm-chair in the messuage and not to eat all the fattest strawberries oneself, I can't say that I do;" and he fluffed a second mashie pitch with his cigar ash well short of the drawing-room fender.

"You don't," I insisted, "remark any unusual hiatus in the household arrangements—anything that obviously betrays the absence of the feminine touch? I suppose you know what this is?" and I took from the mantelpiece a tall slender silver object.

"It seems to be a tin trumpet," replied Charles, "and why on earth you can't keep my godson's toys in the nursery, instead of littering them about—"

"Tin trumpet," I said cleverly, "be blowed! It is a vase—variously pronounced to rhyme with 'parse' or pause, according to one's pretensions to gentility. It is a flower-vase, Chawles, and, what is more, there ought to be flowers in it. The whole house, let me tell you, should be a very garden of fragrant and luscious blooms. Instead of which it is full of mocking cenotaphs such as this. When Araminta went away she flung over her shoulder a parasol and a Parthian taunt. She said, 'I'm certain there'll be no flowers in the house while I'm away,' and now it seems she was jolly well right."

"Why ever can't the servants attend to the flowers?" said Charles lazily. "They seem to be fairly competent people. There were four match-boxes and The Return of Sherlock Holmes in my bedroom."

"There you touch one of the deeper mysteries," I explained to him. "Probably in the most expensive and luxurious mansions they have a flower-maid. A kind of Persephone who comes up from the underworld with her arms full of gerania and calceolarias. 'Housemaid,' she would put it in the advertisements, 'upper (where man-servant kept); tall, of good appearance; free; several years' experience; understands vawses.' And in houses such as these the cinerarias would never wither or die. Every what-not would be a riotous profusion of et-ceteras from week's-end to week's-end. But with Jane it is different. Jane has her limitations. She comprehends match-boxes and detective fiction, but Araminta does the flowers."

"Well, what do you want me to do about it?" said Charles, bunkering his cigar-stump badly to the right of the coal-scuttle.

"I want you to help me," I told him, "because I shan't have time to attend to the matter myself. When I go out to-morrow I want you, before you leave, to fill all the vases all over the house. Pink roses will be the best, I think, and you can buy them at that little flowermonger's across the road."

"But there are pink roses in the garden," he objected.

"Only a kind of double dog-rose," I told him. "We never allow the dog-roses in the house: they haven't been properly trained. Besides you would certainly pick all the puppies and scratch yourself to death. There's no dog-rose without its tooth. You want the big ones that are grown exclusively on short stalks without any roots. And Araminta will never know that they haven't been there for several days at least."

"All right," said Charles, "I'll tackle the flower-smith for you."

When I came home on the following evening, before going upstairs, I peeped timidly into the dining-room and found to my delight that Charles had been as good as his word. All the vases had burst as though by a miracle into radiant blossom. Taking courage I went up to the drawing-room, found Araminta and saluted her, and then looked round with a smirk of conscious self-satisfaction. Charles had chosen pink carnations for the drawing-room, and the place was as starry as the final chapter of a feuilleton.

"What do you think of the flowers?" I said proudly.

"They're simply lovely," she replied, "But—"

"But what?" I asked with a sudden vague qualm. "Don't you like pink carnations?"

"I adore them," she said. "I was just going to ask how long they'd been there, that's all."

"These particular ones?" I said airily. "Oh, two or three days, I think, at most; not more than that."

"I see," she replied with a little smile. "That makes it more wonderful still."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, there isn't any water, you see, in the vases." 