The Blower of Bubbles.

by Arthur Beverley Baxter.

PREFACE

It was one of Dumas' characters, I believe, who said: "I do not apologize--I explain." The purpose of this brief preface is to explain the many imperfections which of necessity appear in this volume.

It was at a dance after Armistice, given by American officers in the Palace Hotel, London, that I met a young lady who had landed from New York two days previously.

"My goodness!" she said, "they don't have any furnaces in their houses here; and I've been trying all day to buy some rubbers, and no one knew what I meant. My goodness! but they're backward over here."

I looked at her face and recognized the joyful mania of the explorer.

She was "discovering" England.

Before the war, England was "discovered" fairly often--but during the war it became the pa.s.sion of hundreds of thousands, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, Newfoundlanders, South Africans--we all brought our particular national viewpoint and centered it on the "tight little Island," nor were we backward about telling the English of their faults. Each one of us stated (or implied) that his own country was the special acreage of G.o.d, and that the Kaiser ought to be made to live in foggy London as a punishment.

And for more than four years the Old Country listened patiently as the throngs of adventurers poured in from the world's outskirts. The stately homes of England were opened in their stately, hospitable way; English taxicab drivers insulted and robbed us just as cheerfully as they did their own countrymen; English girls proved the best of comrades; and the Englishman proper continued to be the world's greatest enigma.

So, in claiming admittance to that vast throng that has already discovered England, I do so with a certain humility but a hope that, when my words are sifted, some little ore of truth may be discovered at the bottom.

In three of the five stories of this collection, I have usurped the power of the Wizard of Oz, and have looked through three pairs of gla.s.ses. In "The Blower of Bubbles" an Englishman subjects his own country to a.n.a.lysis; in "Mr. Craighouse of New York, Satirist," the gla.s.ses used are American and the medium is a New Yorker; in "The Airy Prince" (the last and favorite child) a girl of sixteen from Picardy is transplanted by aeroplane for one full day in wartime London.

In the remaining two stories I have endeavored to paint something of city life in Canada in the one, and in the other to do some little justice to that least understood type--the French Canadian.

During an interesting but undistinguished career of nearly four years with the Canadian Forces, I realized that, although the army gives one plenty of food for thought, it sometimes fails to supply facilities for a.s.similation. _Par exemple_: "Mr. Craighouse of New York, Satirist,"

was started in hospital at Abbeville, France, where my fellow-patients a.s.sumed me to be a lovelorn swain, writing a love-letter that never left off. Later, "Mr. Craighouse" developed a couple of thousand words in a charming home of Scotland. The last part of the story was finished at a table in the Turkish baths of the Royal Automobile Club, London, where the attendants were good enough to consider me eccentric, but apparently not violent.

Under the robust companionship of several normal and talkative subalterns, "The Blower of Bubbles" was written in a hut at Seaford Camp during the month of November, 1918. As my stove was a consistent performer, nearly every evening a few choice souls gathered for cocoa and refreshments from home; and if their host persisted in writing at his improvised table it did not disturb their good-fellowship in the least, providing the author did not threaten to read his "stuff" aloud.

It was in that hut in the mud of Seaford that, one November morning, a little before eleven o'clock, we heard the sound of ships' sirens in Newhaven Harbor some miles away; then a distant shouting, that grew in a great crescendo, as it rode across the downs on the throats of thousands of soldiers, and pa.s.sed us in one great prolonged roar, "The Germans have signed!"

We missed Armistice Day in London, but I like to think of the thirty Canadian officers, most of them veterans of many battles, gathered in the mess of that bleakest of camps, while one chap at the piano played the national anthems of the nations who had fought ... and in voices that were not too steady we echoed the toast: "To the Allies and America."

And so "I do not apologize--I explain."

In avoiding the "war-story" type, I have followed my own inclinations, and have taken rather the inconspicuous parts played by ordinary people who had never dreamed of being actors in the world's greatest drama. To avoid the background of war would be utterly impossible, for war has been a fever in our blood these last four years, and not in one or two generations will our veins be free of it.

If it seems in these stories that there is a recurrent note on the necessity of artistic expression for the Old Country, the reason for it is that we came from the Dominions to a land we all knew, because English literature had made England our Mother-Country in the real sense of the word. It is the hope of many of us that the artists of Britain--whether they be writers, painters, or composers--will yet realize that the Empire looks to them, as well as to the knights of the air, to bridge the seas, and by their art make us feel as great a kinship in peace as we did in war. d.i.c.kens and Burns were more than writers; they were literature's amba.s.sadors, and played no inconsiderable part in empire-building.

Perhaps, as the study of ordinary people gripped by emotions which left no one ordinary, this volume of stories may be of some little interest.

They filled many dull hours in the writing.... It would be a rich reward for the author if he could think that they do away with a few dull hours in the reading.

ARTHUR BEVERLEY BAXTER

_The_ BLOWER _of_ BUBBLES

I

Snow was falling in Sloane Square, quarreling with rain as it fell.

Lamps were gleaming sulkily in Sloane Square, as though they resented being made to work on such a night, and had more than a notion to down tools and go out of business altogether. Motor-cars were pa.s.sing through Sloane Square, with glaring lights, sliding and skidding like inebriated dragons; and the clattering hoofs of horses drawing vagabond cabs sounded annoyingly loud in the damp-charged air of Sloane Square.

It was Christmas Eve in Sloane Square, and the match-woman, the vender of newspapers, and the impossible road-sweeper were all exacting the largesse of pa.s.sers-by, who felt that the six-penny generosity of a single night atoned for a year's indifference to their lot. People were wishing each other a merry Christmas in Sloane Square, as they struggled along under ungainly parcels. The m.u.f.fin-man was doing an enormous trade.

And I looked from my window and prayed for Aladdin's Lamp or the Magic Carpet, that I might place a thousand miles between myself and Sloane Square.

There was a knock at the door.

"Enter the Slave of the Lamp," said I, and the door opened to admit--my landlady, Mrs. Mulvaney.

"Will you be dining in?" she said. Her Irish accent hardly helped the illusion of the all-potent slave.

"And why not?" I asked.

"Ach, nothing, sor. I only thought----"

"An unwomanly thing to do, Mrs. Mulvaney."

"You're afther being a strange one, dining alone on Christmas Eve."

"Then join me, Mrs. Mulvaney."

I swear she blushed, and I felt more than a little envious of the nature which could convert such a vinegary attempt at condescension into a gallantry.

"F'what would I be doing, taking dinner wid a child like you?"

I was twenty-five, but Mrs. Mulvaney looked on all men as equally immature.

"And have you not got no friends?" she went on, but I stopped her with a gesture.

"Thank Heaven--no!" I said. "I am one of intellectuality's hermits. An educated man in London is like the bell-cow of the herd--a thing apart."

"You're a great fool, I'm afther thinking."

"The foolish always d.a.m.n the wise," I answered, with an attempt at epigrammatic misquotation.

Mrs. Mulvaney heaved a sigh. Its very forcefulness recalled the nautical meaning of the verb.

"You'd be a sight happier outside," she said. "Holy Mary knows I wouldn't be driving you into the streets, but I'm worried you'd get cross wid yourself at home."

To get rid of her, I put on my coat and went out. Perhaps she was right; things would have been intolerable at home. Home! Such a travesty of the word! The sickly lamplight of Sloane Square was preferable.