Lovers Make Moan

company to ‘You spotted snakes with double tongue’. Her audience had been augmented by Henri, who stood beaming in the doorway with two small flowered aprons over his arm. When the song was ended he said:

“If Madame pleases, all is in readiness for the making of toffee.”

“Well!” said Laura, as the children ran off to the kitchen.

“We have been out-generalled by a superior tactician,” said Dame Beatrice. “The ground had already been prepared.”

“Sappers and miners have been at work. That frightful kid will end up in gaol,” said Laura.

“From what she disclosed in her last oration, I think her choice of ‘inducer’ rather than ‘producer’ was an inspired one,” said Dame Beatrice. “The most that anyone misguided enough to direct or produce an amateur dramatic society’s offerings can hope for is to induce the members to play their parts as he wishes. Without monetary compensation, few are prepared to surrender their own ideas merely to contribute to the common good.”

“Don’t eat that if you don’t want it, Rosamund,” said Dame Beatrice, turning a sympathetic eye on the valiant struggles of her young guest. Rosamund laid down her implements and sighed.

“Cook says ‘better belly bust than good stuff be lost’,” she observed. “She said it when Carrie had to come in and clean up the floor after Edmund.”

“I was sick,” said Edmund.

“No, you weren’t. You were naughty. He was only two,” explained Rosamund, turning to Laura, “but he was naughty. He said, ‘You gave me too much’, and he threw his plate of stewed fruit and custard on the floor.”

“Well, that was one way of dealing with the surplus,” said Dame Beatrice.

“Yes, but then he wanted a banana and Daddy said no, and Mummy said, ‘He knows what he wants’, and let him have one and he kept looking at Daddy and eating the banana so fast he got it all over his face and up into his hair, but he ate it all, so Mummy was right. Yolanda’s mummy was going to look after us for a fortnight when we go home, but they are having Mr Rinkley to stay with them while his flat is being done up, and he won’t be gone before we get back and they have only one spare room. I don’t like Mr Rinkley.”

“Because he is bagging the spare room?” asked Laura.

“No. He kept picking me up and throwing me in the air and catching me like he does Yolanda, and Auntie Deb said, ‘Please don’t do that. Rosamund doesn’t like it’, so then Mr Rinkley laughed and did it again, and Uncle Jon said, ‘You heard my wife, you oaf’—what’s an oaf?”

“A person of low origin and few manners.”

“So Uncle Jon punched Mr Rinkley in the stomach and Auntie Deb said, ‘Oh, please!’ and Mr Bourton said, ‘Play around with girls your own size, Rinkley, and leave small kids alone’, and Mr Yorke said, ‘Steady on, Bourton’, and Mr Rinkley went outside and was sick.”

“My, my! You do have fun at your rehearsals!” said Laura.

“Yes, so Mr Rinkley didn’t come to the next rehearsal, but it’s all right now. Mr Rinkley said, ‘I’m sorry I upset your dignity, little lady’, and I said, ‘I’m sorry I don’t like you’, and everybody laughed, but afterwards Mr Bourton said to Mr Woolidge, ‘What a swine that fellow is! I wish Yorke would kick him out of the play. He’s a something child mole-star’. What’s a something child mole-star?”

“A man who tosses little girls into the air when he has been told they don’t like it. Incidentally, did Cook ever remark that little pitchers have long ears?” asked Laura, anxious to change the subject. Rosamund considered the question, then shook her head and turned to other matters of interest, as Laura intended that she should.

“We have the rehearsals at our house now,” she said, “so people can get used to talking out of doors. They do our fairy scenes first and then we are sent upstairs, but Yolanda and I come down again and hide and listen. When Yolanda’s daddy gets cross he calls everybody ‘darling’. That’s how they know he is cross with them. He said, ‘Rinkley, darling boy, do you have to put your arm round Flute’s waist? Miss Hythe is supposed to be your fellow workman, not a girl you’re trying to chat up’. So Mr Rinkley said a lot of it went on in Shakespeare’s time and anyway he was only building up to the Pyramus and Thisbe scene when Miss Hythe really would be a girl, but Mr Yorke—that’s Yolanda’s daddy—he said, ‘Cut it out, darling boy, just to please me. Back to “Answer as I call you ”, everybody, please, and, Robina, darling, do try to look as though you’re taking an interest in what the others are saying, and Caroline, darling, I know Starveling is a tailor, but it isn’t necessary for you to play the whole scene pretending to be stitching or else waving your arms in the air’, and Miss Frome said, ‘Sorry. It will look better when we can use the “props”. It’s supposed to be my tailoring shears I’m waving,’ and Mr Yorke said, ‘You wouldn’t have brought your shears to the workmen’s rehearsal. Be more imaginative, darling, and, anyway, you mustn’t distract attention from the person who is actually speaking. It’s an old ham’s trick and you are not to use it’.”

“You must be learning a great deal about play-acting from Mr Yorke,” said Dame Beatrice. “Shall we adjourn? I see that George is bringing the dogs out for their run.”

“I wish they were little tiny ponies,” said Rosamund.

“I hadda little pony his name was Dappergay I lent him to a lady to ride-a-mile-away she stroked him she fed him she hadda lovely ride, she brought him backateventime a-walking by his side,” said Edmund, finishing up breathless.

“We don’t let him know the real words because of kindness to animals,” said Rosamund.

“Ought one to point out to that all-too-intelligent infant that she ought not to listen-in to the rehearsals when she is not supposed to be present?” asked Laura, when the children had gone out.

“It would be wrong to saddle her with a guilty conscience when she listens in next time, as, of course, she will, whether we point out her error of taste or not.”

“Do you think she represses Edmund too much?”

“From what we have heard, he seems capable of asserting himself when he feels it necessary. Besides, in a few years’ time his innate aggressiveness and his masculine ego will provide self-assertion enough and to spare, I fancy.”

“I wish I didn’t enjoy listening to Rosamund’s disclosures. Things seem to be hotting up nicely, don’t they?