THE TRIPLETS

Evening Star, Issue 19002, 25 July 1925, Page 13

THE TRIPLETS

AN ALLEGORY FROM LIFE [Written by A Mrs Crusoe, for the ‘ Evening Star.’] No. 2. Dramatis Per some : P Poverty. W Work. L.B Lowly Birth. The Haven certainly presents no domestic problems, and if ever P. allows me a' maid to keep her employed I shall have to keep house a la Dutch, have my windows cleaned eveiy day, and my outside walls scrubbed every week. A wee little house it 'is, perched tip high, and looking down across a valley at the road. Its outside dimensions are 18ft x 22ft ( and inside them are a miniature bathroom, kitchen, sleeping porch, and sitting room, and plenty of windows, which help to make life with my three friends a cheerful thing. A bare floor with three small mats, books, two armchairs, a sofa, a desk, a table—these are the chief furnishings of my sitting room, and of these only the desk, tire armchair, and tho sofa need any polishing. I refused to polish tho floor when W. told me to. I said there would be no one to pick mo up if I fell on its polished surface. Ho saw tho reasonableness of that, and lets me oil it now and then instead. The armchair deserves its polkh. Was it not made by the son who, when he was six, used to say; “ When mother is very, very old I shall make her an armchair, and she will always sit in it.” He was too young to know it is well to keep moving when “ very, very old,” lest your joints get so stiff you can’t move! bo I keep moving still, but the armchair is here all ready for me!

.My throe mats are a token of how 1 ' got the better of P. Nothing like having contests with these irienos of mine! Sometimes I win; sometimes 1 do not—as good as a game of chess, and quite as varied. A large ‘‘grass mat” rug wore out, and my lloor became like Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. P. insisted on a bare boor (and VV. clearly thought by his glistening eyes, “How 1 can make her polish it!”). But 1 let my house for two weeks to folks who wished for a seaside trip, and the Moor had to have something on it, or how could you charge B2 10s per week for the Haven as “a furnished house’’? So I got two mats, and paid 5s 6d for one and 6s 6d for the oilier. But then W. rose up, and this time made me provide a third mat by using the thick strands of my old “grass mat” as a foundation for a soft and thick railia mat! Then he made me make another for ray sleeping porch, and I am now at work on. another to use as a bath mat. Nursery - raen’s raffia, both plain and colored, is used. These mate have pleased all my three friends at once. So seldom do I please all at once! P. feels how cheap they arc. She is always so pleased with cheapness! W. rejoices in his power over me, and is saying to himself; “They won’t last Jong. Then I will make her make another!” (will he!), and L. 8., who is so quiet and silent that we treat her often as if she is a specimen of Pickwick’s fat boy, “ always asleep,” roused up to murmur her approval of the mats, because they remind her of the rag mats and rugs my forbears need to malm. I suppose they used to make them, as she says so. I know my men folk used_ to plough the fields round Oxford is ancient times, and leave their bones beneath the grass round an old village church, and to the memory of the good ones of my ancestors were tablets placed on the church walls within. I sometimes remind L.B. I that, though these were tenant farmers, still one of my folk was a “college Don,” but she always retorts: “But the same, page of # yonr j ancestors’ doings and beings also said one of them was a college cook !” And there 8.8. scores, for she takes no account of modem ways of thought. How should sho know that the real head of a college is the cook? Manners may make the man, but good conking goes a long, long wav towai'ds tho upkeep of tho brains Unit win tho scholarships! (Heads of colleges, please take notice!) In a. delightful book called ‘ Nerves in Order ’ is a, long and humorous poem on ‘The Cabbage,’ written by a medical student after attending a lecture on its values as food. Tho poem pictures a cabbage sitting “ serenely on its stump,” hugging to itself the knowledge that progress in the arts, sciences, and what not was (really) due to it! So may the cooks of this world take pride in their honorable and undoubtedly ancient calling! P. and W. make furniture quite well (and they mind not that it is rny fingers, not theirs, that the hammer hits—rather hard, too, for the “hammer” is the back edge of a little axe). I have lost my real one, and P. won’t lot me buy another; she says it would only get lost, too! A bookcase is easy to make, of course, but wo have made also an oval dining table. Tho recipe for this is: “ Take an ordinary ‘ dressing tabic,’ such as in one’s childhood used to bo done up in pink glazed | calico and muslin (I remember them well). On its top put a long piece of three-ply board,' with its corners sawn round.” I find its lightness a great advantage, as it can bo easily moved to tho best held, when I am sowing or writing. It has “turned legs,” alas! but though not up to date now they will bo some day, and then I shall sell them, and at a price! P. will then bo very pleased, for P., though loving cheapness when buying, ■ dearly, dearly loves dearness when selling, if (ho things belong to her guests. This reminds me that seldom do I venture to call rny homo my own, nor even my soul. I believe P. and W. think they own both, and regard me not even as a paying guests, but as' one who gives them infinite trouble at j times. I

Tn truth ant! fact my home is not quite my own yet; its name should be “Tamoi ” —on wliich name bancs n tale from ‘ Punch.’ Scone: A seaside cottage bought bv a young couple who cannot afford it, hut who hope that rich “Undo G.” will finance their venture. They invito him to stay, and cliscuss a “name for the cottage” before him. Uncle G. maintains a gloomy silence, so at last they ask him: “What would yon call it, Uncle, dear?” “Uncle, dear,” answers sharp and short; “Tnmoi. because, there’s a mortgage on it.” And the name is all they get from “Unde, dear.” My “Unde, dear.” has let me have a real mortgage—or I have let him have it is more accurate, I believe! His real name is “The Government Advances to Workers Department” (and W. is so pleased at having “official notice” taken of himself). _Ho is too big an undo to “ask to stay,” so I send him a grateful cheque every half-year, for which ho sends me (just like an uncle) a laconic and printed acknowledgment. But we are the best of friends, and I have never got into his “bad books”—only Udo not expect a lecacy when he dies f But ray home is my own, and P. and W. are my guests, and not my owners, and there are times when they should remember this. If P. and W. over got married, I wonder what their children would be like? Have they been married, and are they “keeping it secret”? Many years ago” I wrote over and over in Vere Foster’s copybooks; “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Now, necessity fe one of P.’s names. I am sorry to say she has several aliases, and we know no respectable person lias even one “alias”! (P. is respectable, I may say, in my_ house, but there are places where she lives in dirt and rags and uncomfortableness. You wouldn’t believe it seeing her in my house!) The proverb reveals P. ns invention’s mother, and surely W. must be his father! How thrilling to come on a “secret romance of low life” all of a sodden! I wonder how long ago It was

and who lied the knot, and what “people said,” and did P. run away with W. (it mast huvo been a runaway match), or did W. do tlio more manly thing of running away with P. '! I expect “Necessity” was P.’s everyday name, not Christian name, because P. is very much a u.C. person, nearly as old as Eve! “Necessity’ —it sounds so pretty when you say it softly, 1 quite different from the grim thing wo call necessity. I can hear W., as no leans over invention’s cradle, say softly and proudly: “ Necessity is the mother of invention." W. chose the name for his child because he saw P. always doing and devising some new thing. But, alas! for tho father and mother of Invention. If ever I get exasperated with P. and W. (and I often have wished them at Jericho), let me remember their romance of long ago and their age-long disappointment in their son (I am sure he is a son; no daughter would have behaved as ho bash Invention’s whole aim and object in life seems to have been to get away from bis parente, especially from his mother.. He lias not always succeeded; he has often made a few very rich, and tho many (at the same time) very, very poor. He has lightened his father’s burdens often, but I fear tho old folks’ hearts have been often very, very sore over hhn. He comes often to the Haven, and we welcome him heartily, and I shall bo more comfortable in my mind if I make not too much of tho secret romance of low life I have stumbled on, but remember that “time heals all” (or is said to); and, anyway, P. and W. keep their mutual troubles to themselves and share with me only mine. Dear P. and W! Never, never leave me—perhaps you never will. But if you do, never shall other hands than yours that made it possess the furniture of the Haven. When you leave me I shah carry it all outside and make a bonfire of it, and sit by its ashes afterwards and mourn tlio loss of the truest friends of my life, and feel tho Haven is no longer “what it used to be.” CHAPTER lII.—LOWLY BIRTH. To each of my triplets I have promised, as children say, “a whole chapter to myself.” P. and W. clamored for this. L. sat silent, but looked so wistful that I shall put her chapter first. Besides, I have to, for W. is the only man in my house, so he will have to come last, “ ladiee first ” being still the rule iu fiction, if not in life, iu these days of women's rights rather than privileges. L.B.’s chapter must come lirst, because IV. would be furious if P.’s chapter was not next his, so that he could “bold her hand,” so to speak. W. is so fond (after all their years together, too!) of P., it would be a shame to separate them by more than half a page. All down tho centuries P. and W. have been like Siamese twins, and tho bright prospect before the forld is thought by some to be the cxtinctLm oi both at once. I daresay dying together would greatly please both, but there are some wise folk who see that P. can flourish when W. is absent, and that W. gets thin and inactive when P. absents herself. But this is no work on economics, and I leave to wiser heads than mine to see tho wisdom (if any) hidden in the last sentence. Lot us to L.B.

Lowly Birth! Can anything be said for L.B. as a life companion? She covers an enormous range of human experience in all the ages and countries of this world, and fitter pens than mine should sing her virtues and her praises. L.B. gave mo years ago but an ordinary ‘‘middle class” quality of birth. Not mine was the honor to be born in a. workhouse, nor in my early days to sweep crossings nr doorsteps like the little Cosntfo of Victor Hugo's wonderful talc. Never was mine the enchanting and adventurous life of that child “ just my age,” of whom I read at tho ago of nine a. long, illuetrated-in-colors poem called ‘ Our Father's Care.’ She roso before dawn in a. London collar or attic (I forget which), made tea for and kissed her sick mother, and started off (still before dawn) for Covent Garden, where, “stamping the snow from her freezing toes,” site bought watercress in the market, and then went through tho cold London streets crying “ Watercresses! Who’ll buy? Who’ll buv mv fresh watercress® ?” She visited Iter sick father in the hospital, and “carried on” for the who’e family till a rich and kindly friend appeared to rescue them all from the cellar (or a(tic). and “set them on their feet ” in the country. At nine years T never told anyone (children never do) how entrancing I thought that child's life! Hour eagerly I would have exchanged my motherless state, for a sick mother in a collar or attic, on whom I could spend mv energies in work and rare and love (and have no lessons to do!). Believe me, one of the. blessings of hninc of very lowly birth is that life early offers adventure and adventures. It makes peonle old before their time. But (hev have had the adventure and the adventures. In a tine war story of a midshipman, a. little book called ‘From Dartmouth to the, Dardanelles,’ a mother tells how, when she went up to London to meet iter boy again, there came slowly up the siens to meet her one whom she hardlv knew, so old. so worn did he look. He had gone away a hoy.; he returned a man. It may bo that in the war of life Providence likes to make men, and especially women, ■quickly. It may be, 100, that '“the masses” are as dear to God as three who are born higher up social bidders, and that in pressing for the recognition of this truth as a fact, the Socialists so far could say with St. Paul: “And I think T havc_thn mind of Christ.” There is a science little dreamt of in our universities, our schools, onr social life. T rail it. the science of the relative importance of things and of people. Christ was a supreme teacher of it!

(To be Continued.)