The other day (confided Reginald), when I was killing time
in the bathroom and making bad resolutions for the New Year,
it occurred to qme that I would like to be a poet. The chief
qualification, I understand, is that you must be born.
Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was
all right on that score, and then I got to work on a Hymn to
the New Year, which struck me as having possibilities. It
suggested extremely unusual things to absolutely unlikely
people, which I believe is the art of first-class catering
in any department. Quite the best verse in it went
something like this:
“Have you heard the groan of a gravelled grouse,
Or the snarl of a snaffled snail
(Husband or mother, like me, or spouse),
Have you lain a-creep in the darkened house
Where the wounded wombats wail?”
It was quite improbable that any one had, you know, and
that's where it stimulated the imagination and took people
out of their narrow, humdrum selves. No one has ever called
me narrow or humdrum, but even I felt worked up now and then
at the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in
it. It simply wasn't nice. But the editors were unanimous
in leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done
before and done worse, and that the market for that sort of
work was extremely limited.
It was just on the top of that discouragement that the
Duchess wanted me to write something in her
album---something Persian, you know, and just a little bit
decadent---and I thought a quatrain on an unwholesome egg
would meet the requirements of the case. So I started in
with:
“Cackle, cackle, little hen,
How I wonder if and when
Once you laid the egg that I
Met, alas! too late. Amen.”
The Duchess objected to the Amen, which I thought gave an
air of forgiveness and chose jugee to the whole thing;
also she said it wasn't Persian enough, as though I were
trying to sell her a kitten whose mother had married for
love rather than pedigree. So I recast it entirely, and the
new version read:
“The hen that laid three moons ago, who knows
In what Dead Yesterday her shades repose;
To some election turn thy waning span
And rain thy rottenness on fiscal foes.”
I thought there was enough suggestion of decay in that to
satisfy a jackal, and to me there was something infinitely
pathetic and appealing in the idea of the egg having a sort
of St. Luke's summer of commercial usefulness. But the
Duchess begged me to leave out any political allusions;
she's the president of a Women's Something or other, and she
said it might be taken as an endorsement of deplorable
methods. I never can remember which Party Irene discourages
with her support, but I shan't forget an occasion when I was
staying at her place and she gave me a pamphlet to leave at
the house of a doubtful voter, and some grapes and things
for a woman who was suffering from a chill on the top of a
patent medicine. I thought it much cleverer to give the
grapes to the former and the political literature to the
sick woman, and the Duchess was quite absurdly annoyed about
it afterwards. It seems the leaflet was addressed “To
those about to wobble”---l wasn't responsible for the silly
title of the thing---and the woman never recovered; anyway,
the voter was completely won over by the grapes and jellies,
and I think that should have balanced matters. The Duchess
called it bribery, and said it might have compromised the
candidate she was supporting; he was expected to subscribe
to church funds and chapel funds, and football and cricket
clubs and regattas, and bazaars and beanfeasts and
bell-ringers, and poultry shows and ploughing matches, and
reading-rooms and choir outings, and shooting trophies and
testimonials, and anything of that sort; but bribery would
not have been tolerated.
I fancy I have perhaps more talent for electioneering than
for poetry, and I was really getting extended over this
quatrain business. The egg began to be unmanageable, and
the Duchess suggested something with a French literary ring
about it. I hunted back in my mind for the most familiar
French classic that I could take liberties with, and after a
little exercise of memory I turned out the following:
“Hast thou the pen that once the gardener had?
I have it not; and know, these pears are bad.
Oh, larger than the horses of the Prince
Are those the general drives in Kaikobad.”
Even that didn't altogether satisfy Irene; I fancy the
geography of it puzzled her. She probably thought Kaikobad
was an unfashionable German spa, where you'd meet
matrimonial bargain-hunters and emergency Servian kings. My
temper was beginning to slip its moorings by that time. I
look rather nice when I lose my temper. (I hoped you would
say I lose it very often. I mustn't monopolize the
conversation.)
“Of course, if you want something really Persian and
passionate, with red wine and bulbuls in it,” I went on to
suggest; but she grabbed the book from me.
“Not for worlds. Nothing with red wine or passion in it.
Dear Agatha gave me the album, and she would be mortified to
the quick---”
I said I didn't believe Agatha had a quick, and we got
quite heated in arguing the matter. Finally, the Duchess
declared I shouldn't write anything nasty in her book, and I
said I shouldn't write anything in her nasty book, so there
wasn't a very wide point of difference between us. For the
rest of the afternoon I pretended to be sulking, but I was
really working back to that quatrain, like a fox-terrier
that's buried a deferred lunch in a private flower-bed.
When I got an opportunity I hunted up Agatha's autograph,
which had the front page all to itself, and, copying her
prim handwriting as well as I could, I inserted above it the
following Thibetan fragment:
“With Thee, oh, my Beloved, to do a dak
(a dak I believe is a sort of uncomfortable post-journey)
On the pack-saddle of a grunting yak,
With never room for chilling chaperon,
'Twere better than a Panhard in the Park.”
That Agatha would get on to a yak in company with a lover
even in the comparative seclusion of Thibet is unthinkable.
I very much doubt if she'd do it with her own husband in the
privacy of the Simplon tunnel. But poetry, as I've remarked
before, should always stimulate the imagination.
By the way, when you asked me the other day to dine with
you on the 14th, I said I was dining with the Duchess.
Well, I'm not. I'm dining with you.