THE SKETCHER

Otago Witness, Issue 3769, 8 June 1926, Page 77

THE SKETCHER

TO A POET CRITIC. (A Swig of Sin and Satire.) %ey sent you my five books of verse, You gave me neither thanks nor praise. Why tempt anew the ancient curee I smote you with, in pagan days!— When I made weals come on your hands, And blisters burgeon on your face, Because you said my poems were bad And drove me seawards in disgrace. From Ballyshannon on the Erne In Donegal beyond the Boyne, Where bards were rampant as the fern, And catgut flagellant as coin. Ah! Death is short, but Life is long; And as it was it comes again That Right should burgeon out of Wrong, And something glisten out of Shame. For you are rich, and I am poor; And you’re a tower, and I’m a clod, And you are verminous with Power, And I am bibulous with God. 0! you grow jealous more and more For I am wicked, you are good; My conscience is at itching sore, And your’s is hard as cedar-wood. 0! You grow jealous more and more, For I sing clear—you only bleat. Hush! hush! Fear not. Unbar your door; My lips have spoken. Plot in peace. —Herbert E. Palmer, in The Irish Statesman. KITTENS AND KISSES. (By “Cynthia,” in the Weekly Scotsman.) How often one wishes that babies had the power of articulating their thoughts. What mysteries might then be solved! Then birth would no longer mean but “a sleep and a forgetting.” There are some people who even maintain that the gift of speech is withheld from them lest they tell us too much of that “Kingdom of the future” of Maeterlinck, the home of the unborn children, from whence they come trailing their clouds of glory. When thev do commence to talk, the process of forgetting has been well-nigh completed. By that time they are beginning to adjust themselves to the world into which they have come. Interest in this place where all is new, where everything is to be explored, where so many things are to be seen and felt and heard, banishes any thoughts of the life before. About this new world in which they find themselves a great deal of wondering has certainly been going on in their little minds, ere their lips are able to frame the questions—so many questions, and so many that are impossible to answer! # # # Rena, who has just passed half-past three, came with her aunt to tea the other day. Chubby and rosv-cheeked, she is a perfect little "picture of health. Her brown velvet coat peeled off, she stood Tcvealed in a little blue frock, a smile on her wondering face. At first she refused to say a word. She was, obviously, taking her bearings. Her eyes encircled the room ; they dwelt long on the pictures and on the cushions; they dwelt longer still on the faces of her grown-up admirers. Her youthful aunt sought to call her to attention—but Rena continued to gaze. Sometimes that auntie of hers finds Rena something of a handful. Though called upon to temporise as her mother, she finds it difficult to assume the authority necessary for the maternal role. Mother, when present, is used to be called upon in every little misadventure to console and comfort, and, even in her absence, her spirit is invoked. Rena very freqentlv addresses her aunt in cars and other public places as “mummy”; indeed “Oh mummy!” is a very favourite exclamation of hers, however little significance it may contain. Indeed she scatters it about quite as freely as actors on the stage scatter those imprecations of theirs, which no matter how stereotyped and stale, always raise a laugh from a section of the audience. Rena’s exclamation is equally effective in calling up expressions of solicitude, *ut as auntie's finger holds no wedding ring, her embarrassment can be understood.

Rena was silent until the arrival of a pussy cat. Tho freemasonry that exists between babies and pet animals then worked the miracle. The ice was broken. Rena has loved animals from her earliest days. She has hailed dogs and cats as her •\ery intimate friends. She scorns a bowing acquaintance with them ; each of them must be stroked and caressed—and that as soon as they appear. Of her dealings with them manv tales are recounted by auntie. .At a baker’s shop which Rena was in the habit of visiting, a cat had its home. After once making its acquaintanceship. Rena would march in, all on her own, and say, “Please may I see it?” At first the shop people were mystified by this request of the little girl-baby. Then the identity of “it” dawned upon them. The result was that Rena emerged from the shop carrying the unfortunate pussy upside-down ! There is, too, the tale of a dog,- Rena made its acquaintance, also, in a shop—a butcher’s that time. The dog was regaling itself with a bone—but this fact concerned Rena not at all. She marched up to it, for even quite huge dogs had no terrors for this tiny person. She patted it, and the dog turned round fiercely and snapped its teeth. Fortunately that

was all. Rena does not mind how often the kittens scratch her little hands and arms. Though often enough temporarily disfigured, she loves them none the less.

On the occasion in question she proceeded to “love” yet another member of the feline race, pressing her little cheeks tightly against its fur. Pussy gave her no encouragement, but he was long-suffer-ing, slow to wrath. His half-hearted efforts at avoiding her attentions were futile. He was commanded to move to the very edge of his own particular footstool that it might accommodate Rena as well. He was petted and caressed beyond his liking. He took refuge on someone’s lap. Rena sat on the stool and worshipped at a little distance. Then she drew him, once again, into her arms, and listened to his “song.” Again he took refuge on someone’s lap and closed his eyes. “Pussy is sleeping,” they told her presently. Rena continued to watch. Her elders continued to talk of others than cats, of cabbages and kings. Then, some time after, their conversation was suddenly interrupted by Rena, who suggested that pussy ought to have a bed. The urgency of this need was not at first grasped. But Rena proceeded to explain, ■“Pussy is sleeping,” she said, and of course, the beautiful accompaniment to sleep, as we all know when it is explained to us, is a bed! * # * This particular cat is of a tortoiseshell colour. A small boy once described it as “the cat that is all colours:” It appealed to Rena in quite a different way. She found only its white patches to her taste, they alone being clean! The black patches and the yellow ones have still, according to Rena’s ideas, to undergo the cleansing process. At the tea-table she opened out further. She proved herself a very jolly little person, ready to make advances, extremely happy and gay. Overcome by a laughing fit, she was admonished bv auntie, whom she in turn advised to “Get on with your tea.” A gay little person, Rena! Flirtations, too—she prefers thaf her adorers be gentlemen ! She encounted a large collie dog at the door, on her way out, but his attentions were too overwhelming. She prefers the cats, despite their claws. Her own pussy at home bears a higiny distinguished literary name, that must take a great deal of living up to. But in Rena’s eyes I imagine he is already perfect. THE OLD NUN. Bowed at her prie-dieu, fingering her beads She kneels, or quavering in the choir she sings Sonorous Latin as the organ leads Skywards the psalm. Though with it her spirit wings, She understands but vaguely the words she reads. She has no learning save in the deep skies’ Profiwiditis—in simple faith and hope And candid love, that makes the simple wise, And innocence that holds within its scope Joy, and sheds tenderness upon her eyes. Adoring at the altar in the dim Light of the winter dawns, her soul goes tree, No longer bounded by the world’s small rim, » But yearning to "her approaching God as He Kisses His bride, and draws her close to Him. So waits she for her end—the happy night When she will hear the singing round her bed Of salve, as the darkening room grows bright, And she goes forth, the youngest of the dead To life eternal and eternal light. —Theodore Maynard, in The Commonweal.

QUIT YOU LIKE MEN. (By Jane Doe, in the Daily Chronicle.) In one of Professor Jack’s books of his Hibbert lectures he says: — “Most of the world’s greatest men have been educated by women, and most of the world’s greatest women have earned their title to everlasting honour precisely by educating such men sometimes early in life and sometimes late. “Though the modern woman no longer seems to recognise this as one of her functions in the universe, and the highest of them (which goes far, perhaps, to account for the dearth of great men in these times), it is impossible to believe that a function so clearly intended by Nature to be supreme can have fallen into permanent obsolescence.” Though I do not share the professor’s view that we cannot hold up our heads in this matter of current great men, I am very much afraid that the obsolescence will remain permanent until women have less need to be more gravely preoccupied with two other of their functions in the universe. The first is the tremendous business for a woman of bringing herself up as a self-supporting member of the world’s workers, able to cope successfully with the potential problems of natural

instincts frustrated, and her own old age and care. The other function is the equally great need for educating women to be kind to each other. The really shocking stories that are told everywhere concerning the plight paid housework among the middle classes has reached, are scarcely credible, and certainly not creditable, in an age when all women can be said to be created equal. The casual and often heartless breaking of verbal contracts to take jobs. The abominable amount of petty theft —so enormously difficult to detect at the time. The extraordinary fact that thousands of grown-up women won’t bargain to commence their duties before nine in the morning. The horror with which able-bodied females regard the family wash-tub or the inside cleaning of windows. * * # Once upon a time the Avoman who was unable to keep servants was looked upon as well deserving her unfortunate experiences. It was quite likely she was. The misery that was domestic service for many poor, neglected, downtrodden girls and women before this century opened its eyes is to be realised in tuose contemptuous and odious classifications, “skivvy” and “slavey.” But nowadays the cry: “I can’t get & maid who will sleep in, or come at seven in the morning, or who can be relied upon to give me reasonable notice or see me settled with someone else, if she finds she prefers another job elsewhere,” or ‘‘the servants 1 could have, I won’t have,” is so generally heard that it wouldn’t be true or fair to say that these employers are incapable of appreciating or dealing with good and honourable housekeeping assistance. The curious thing is—perhaps it’s not so curious after all—that the woman who is careless about her establishment, and who insists on no high standard of work or appearance is very infrequently tc be heard recounting long and dreary stories ol domestic discomfort. It’s the woman with the delightful house, the easily workable, up to date kitchen, the time and labour saving gadgets, who often cannot get help to give her clean and dainty service in return for good conditions and pay, and courteous dealings the “skivvies” and the “slaveys” of years ago would have given their eyes for. *• # * And so it comes about that all over the country families are taking to private hotels, because the problem of staffing large houses is too disheartening and unsatisfactory. Married women, capable of earning money that will increase the family standard of comfort are forced to dissipate their energies in getting breakfasts, cleaning in boots, coping with the errand boys, and doing all the household jobs they are willing to pay to have done for them. Women with very young children have unimagined struggles to run a home, because nearly all the working housekeepers advertising for situations want to go to bachelors, widowers, or to business houses! Mow, why are women refusing to work for women in their own kitchens? It can’t be because the work is too hard. Nothing could be more laborious or fatiguing than certain kinds of factory work; the hairdresser employed in a popular shop is on her feet for twelve hours of steady* hard labour on Fridays and Saturdays, and waiting in a city tea shop needs the strength and endurance of a young draught horse. And why is it that many a woman, when consenting to do housework, goes about her simple tasks with the injured air of one who has been told off, singlehanded, to run the British Empire? * # * Meanwhile, the middle-class man (deservedly and rather subtly called the backbone of the country) pays his rates and taxes for the upkeep of the free schools, the unemployment insurance, and the widow’s pensions (which will mean that the supply of outside help will be still further curtailed), and his wife, unable to obtain even a washerwoman, sends the linen to the laundry, and has the pain of being charged one penny for the cleaning and faint ironing of a nine-inch square handkerchief. The self-supporting middle-class woman is in the same boat. She is endeavouring, with the fruits of her brain, t-o secure her own independent odd age, but the class for whose future safety she is also contributing refuse to take her money, or, alternatively, give her good value for it. She is lucky if she gets a work-tired charwoman to keep her bachelor flat or rooms in order. What a topsy-turvy joke. For those, that is, who have no domestic difficulties. OUR CHANCING SPEECH. (By an Old Buffer, in the Daily Mail.) It is surprising how many a word loses its meaning in the course of much less than a lifetime. When you young folks poke fun at me and declare, behind my back, that I’m a bit potty, yoif mean that I’m weak in the head, or touched. Fifty years ago it was people in the early stage of consumption whom wc spoke of as touched, and potty was the slang term for what you now £erm fishy. If you say that Smith is a gorger you mean that he doe* himself too well at table. A gorger in my young days was a gorgeously dressed young fellow—a knut, as he was called a few years ago. When you say that a thing was a scream, or screaming, you mean that it was very funny. We meant merely tliat it was splendid or first-rate. A muff to you signifies an effeminate sort of person with a marked distaste for any athletic pursuit likely to entail danger. Muffs in our days were weakminded people.

Who minds being spoken of as a chap nowadays? Chap in my youth was a term of contempt, as fellow used to be a century previously. Huggermugger meant underhand or deceitful to us mid-Victorians. Nowadays all huggermugger means is a muddle. “He has got a screw loose,” is a term you use when implying that a man is eccentric or a little weak in the head. It meant something totally different to us. We used it to suggest that a man’s financial position or reputation was unsound, or of two former friends between whom a coolness had arisen. A snob to us by no means applied only to any person who attached exaggerated importance to social distinctions. The terra signified a non-col-legiate townsman at Oxford or Cambridge. A blackguard did not mean a man of any moral turpitude; it signified a very poor, dirty, and ragged person, often a regular churchgoer, of exemplary life and principles. Nor was a cad a man who broke what a celebrated sporting nobleman called “the laws that do matter.” He was merely a fellow’ who was always borrowing money and worming tips out of his acquaintances. “SATURDAYISH.” It begins about the time when the shops in the principal streets close — that creeping, cold, uncanny feeling which may be summarised as having one’s heart in one’s boot (writes Katharine Tynan in the Star.) Perhaps it does not come to all of us: not to the football crowds or those who anticipate Sunday as a day of late rising and freedom to do what one w’ills. It is certainly a precursor of Sundavishness, and one would have said that it w r as an emanation of all the harsh Sabbatarianism which ever withered the world for one day in the week if it were not that you are Saturdayish and Sundayish in countries w’here Sabbatarianism never existed. What is it, then, the gloom that comes down upon Saturday and extends over Sunday, and is not lifted till Monday morning ? It reaches its worst point at three o’clock on Sunday afternoon. It may be only chance, though it is a strangely continuous chance, that makes Sunday more often wet than any other day of the week. To walk, say, along Kensington High street to Kensington Gardens —and that is usually a very cheerful promenade—about three o’clock of a wdnter Sunday afternoon is to touch bottom. It might be given as a reason for Saturdayislmess and Sundavishness in a town, especially in a great town like London, that, the town existing primarily for purposes of business, business being suspended the town is dead from closing-time on Saturday till openingtime on Monday morning. But Saturdayishness takes you by the throat in the country as well as in the town. I remember a big house on a cliff-top in Ireland, in the midst of the most heavenly scenery, where one always felt on Sunday as though one lived behind a great shop where the shutters were all up. It has taken me by the throat motoring in the Highlands, picnicking in a German forest, under Italian skies, at French fairs, where all the fun of the fair was proceeding —in the most unlikely places. Sundayishness, which Saturdayishness anticipates, must have its origin in Piyitan gloom, the gloom which persisted for so long, lying over the otherwise pleasant homes of England. Ask the Victorian man or woman of the middle classes how Sunday was spent in the Victorian home. The misery of those Sundays must have left an emanation. To many of us three in the afternoon in an intolerable hour, but it may be frustrated. I frustrated it once, through a whole summer in London, by lunching at 2.30. One had hardly time to feel thrce-o’clockish before the cheerful hour of tea was upon us. LONDON IN JUNE. Let us openly and boldly declare that London in June has beauty and allurement that no town in the world can match, writes a correspondent in The Times. There is no disputing about degrees; but there is no denying that London in June has beauty which in kind is hers and only hers. Tha obvious rival is Paris in May; and not to love Paris in May is to prove oneself a barbarian. But Paris is a captivating woman of full maturity whose gaiety of heart inclines her to pretend to be younger than she is. She dresses young; discreetly, and with exquisite taste, but, without concealment, she makes up a little. The beauty of London in June is the incomparable freshness of an old, old lady, who on her good days is as young as the youngest, because her heart is young. And she puts on a pretty cap and a ribbon or two and some old lace; and all the men fall in love with her, and all the women feel younger and happier because of her smile. On her good days this year she has put on her very prettiest cap and her smartest ribbons. A few weeks ago she was invalidish and cross—the very dingiest old thing, muffled up in dull grey, and snapping and scowling at everyone.

They, hey presto; her mood changes. Out come the trees into young leaf; the grass is emerald green; the rhododendrons and the flower-beds in the parks are gay; the ducks, rid at last of those pestilent gulls, splash and mate and dive in their gaudiest plumage; the pigeons justify the dictum of the late Lord Tennyson, and even the sparrows are seen to be parti-coloured, not all a dismal dun. Can you match the view over the water in St. James’s Park* whether eastward to the lively jumble of roofs and turrets and towers of Whitehall, or westward beyond the irises and the white parapets to the stately, reticence of Buckingham Palace? Equal beauty may be shown elsewhere, but nothing of just the same entrancingkind. AUTHORS’ DOCS. Byron made regret for a lost pet an| excuse for libelling his own kind, as when ! he extolled his beloved Newfoundland! Boatswain, as possessing beauty without ( vanity, strength without insolence, cour-j age without ferocity, and all the virtues, of man without his vices (says a writer! in John o’ London’s Weekly). Boats-* wain was five years old in November, ’ 1808, when his master wrote: “ Boats-* wain is dead. He expired in a state o£‘ madness on the 18th, after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his nature to the last.” Byron was unlucky with his pets; his bull-mastiff! Nelson, escaping unmuzzled from the> house, fastened upon a horse by the> throat, and did not let go his hold until! he was shot through the head. Death came as suddenly, though not son; deservedly, to Luath, the famous colliej of Burns. If he made friends every-! where, as the poet states, he had the! misfortune to make an enemy some-! where, for he was wantonly killed the! night before Burns’s father died. In aj fine poem the poet laments the loss ofj his pet ewe Mailie, which was accidenw ally strangled. Mrs Browning sang poetically of he* doves, but her pet of pets was a dog with dark-brown body, silver breast, and eyes of hazel bland, her peerless Flush* of whom his proud mistress wrote: But of thee it shall be said, This dog watched beside a bed, -*• Day and night unweary ; Watched within a curtained room, Where no sunbeam broke the gloom, Round the sick and dreary. Charles Lamb possessed a dog pre-1 sented to him by his friend Hood, butj Dasli was so erratic that Lamb passed him over to Patmore, who found him the best behaved of his species, as he told, Lamb afterwards. But Elia was notj tempted to take him back. CARINC FOR PUSSY. There is a very great deal of ignorance!’ even among cat-lovers as to the best way; to look after their pets, and neglect in; winter often proves fatal to these very,: delicate and sensitive animals (says al Westminster Gazette correspondent). A cat is often desperately ill for a long time before anybody notices it, and when it is finally treated it is often too late to save it. If a cat refuses food it i» always wise to act at once, especially, if tlie refusal is accompanied by sick-' ness. Milk should he avoided, and a little beef tea given at once, and very; often a teaspoonful of olive oil two or; three times a week will keep puss well,' and free from gastric trouble. In winter meat is much more import-; ant for cats than milk. ' It is not generally realised how im-' portant it is for cats to have access to 1 grass. People who keep cats in flats ori places where there is no grass should always have a pot of growing grass kepir outside the window. A great cat specialist declares that cats never live very long! lives without grass to eat. It is cruel to turn a cat out of a warm J house to sleep outside on nights. Kittens should he at least six weeka old before they are taken from their, mothers. In the winter it is better it thev are two months old. In cold; weather it is absolutely cruel to deprive the kitten of the mother’s warmth ani* cosiness, although a hot bottle rolled in a soft shawl is better than nothing. Finally, cats and kittens going to % new home should invariably wear an elastic collar with the new address clearly,, written on a small label attached. That simple precaution would prevent many a catastrophe. As a general rule, however it is dangerous for eats to wear any kind of collar in case they are canghtj and hanged m a tree. v