Daisy Ashford: Her Book Part 1

Daisy Ashford: Her Book.

by Daisy Ashford and Angela Ashford.

PREFACE

BY IRVIN S. COBB

The role of discoverer is pleasing, nearly always, and more especially in its reactions is it pleasing. The actual performance of discovery may be fraught with hards.h.i.+ps and with inconveniences and even with perils; as witness Christopher Columbus making his first voyage over this way in a walloping window-blind of a tub of a s.h.i.+p and his last one back with chains at his wrists and ankles; as witness Hendrick Hudson; as witness Dr. Harvey's unfortunate position in the eye of const.i.tuted authority after he had discovered the circulation of the blood; as witness the lamentable consequences to whoever it was who, probably by the process of eating a mess of miscellaneous wild fungoids, disclosed to a bereaved family and a benefited world the important fact that certain mushrooms were nouris.h.i.+ng and certain toadstools were fatal.

To your true discoverer the compensations of his trade come when he points with pride to the continent or the great natural fact or the new author he discovered and cries aloud before all creation: "See what I have found!"

So, aside from the compliment and the honor of it, I feel added gratification and added pleasure that I should be invited to write a foreword for the first American edition of Miss Daisy Ashford's second book. You see, I claim the distinction of having been the first person in America other than its publisher and my friend Mr. George H. Doran to read the ma.n.u.script of that immortal work "The Young Visiters." If I did not actually discover Miss Ashford, at the age of nine when she wrote "The Young Visiters"--for indeed no one appears to have discovered her then excepting perhaps her parents--at least I had a hand in discovering her on this side of the Atlantic ocean at a time when mention of her name, which now is so famous a name, meant nothing to the casual hearer.

After the lapse of nearly a year the event stands in my memory as marking one of those hours of pure and perfect joy which come but too rarely to human beings. At the request of Mr. Doran I read the ma.n.u.script which he had just brought with him from Europe. I read the story itself first and afterwards the preface, or foreword. This, I think, was as it should be. By rights a preface however sprightly and well done--and a preface by Sir James Barrie would have to be well done--should be served with a book as cheese is served with a dinner: at its finish and not at the beginning.

When I had read the story through to the last delicious sentence of the last delectable paragraph and when I had caught up with my breath which I had lost by laughing or rather when my breath had caught up with me, I sapiently said to him:

"Publish it? Of course you ought to publish it. Aside from such sordid considerations as the profits which are certain to accrue you owe it to yourself as a responsible member of the human race to give this glorious thing circulation among the reading public of North America. If I were you I'd print thirty thousand copies in the first batch before I released any copies among the reviewers or sent any copies as samples to the trade. And after that I'd keep the presses running steadily in the hope of being able to keep up with the demand which is sure to follow on the heels of publication. This is almost the funniest book that was ever written and it is all the funnier because the writer was so desperately in earnest, so tremendously serious all the while she was writing it."

"It has made a big hit in England already," he said. "But over there some people are saying that the author must have been a grown-up person--that no child of nine could have written such a thing. The suggestion is even being advanced that Barrie himself wrote it. I know better, because I have seen the original script in a child's handwriting on old and faded paper, and I met Miss Ashford some weeks ago in London and I have had all the proof one needs that this is the authentic product of a nine-year-old mind."

To which I said:

"No doubt some people will be saying the same thing over here and they'll be wrong just as these English skeptics are and if they'll only stop to think for a moment they'll know why they're wrong. No grown person, not even the creator of a Wendy and a Peter Pan, could have done this thing. It exhales the perfume of an authoritative genuineness in every line of it. It had to be a child who wrote it--a child with a child's imagination and a child's viewpoint and a child's ignorance of the things she wrote about. In a way of speaking it is like those unintentionally humorous obituary poems which appear in the papers. No professional humorist can hope to equal them because when he writes one he does it with deliberate intent to be funny and invariably he betrays his hand. It is when some poor mourning amateur dips a 'prentice pen in the very blood of his or her heart and writes such a poem that it becomes so pathetically and so tragically side-splitting."

This was what I said. Not in these words exactly, but to this effect.

Mind you, I am not proclaiming that I am the only person who has said this. Between chuckles thousands and thousands of others since that day have thought and have said it. What I am proud of is that I was the first person in America to say it, and so to this extent I count myself a discoverer and I feel a sort of proprietary sense in being permitted here to introduce "Daisy Ashford: Her Book." I am mindful of the distinction because of the reason I have just stated and because also in a way of speaking it qualifies me for some sort of literary kins.h.i.+p with Sir James M. Barrie.

Even so I do not aspire to the presumptuous hope that any one may say "Well, I see this man Cobb is doing for Miss Ashford's second book what Barrie did for her first one." I have no such ambition. A minnow always errs when he undertakes to swim in the company of a whale. If he tries to swim alongside he is unnoticed; if he swims in the wake he is swamped. He makes other minnows jealous or contemptuous as the case may be, and he is properly ignored by the whale.

Miss Ashford's own preface, accompanying this volume, gives the chronological sequences of its contents. The first story of all, "A Short Story of Love and Marriage," she wrote when she was eight years old. "The True History of Leslie Woodc.o.c.k" was written three years later, after "The Young Visiters" had been written. "Where Love Lies Deepest" trickled from the busy pen of the young person when she was twelve years old; and "The Hangman's Daughter," the most pretentious of them all and to my way of thinking the best of her preserved works next only to "The Young Visiters," was undertaken when she was about thirteen, she says, and finished in the following year. Also included in this book is a story by Miss Ashford's sister Angela, done at the age of eight and ent.i.tled "The Jealous Governes; _or_ The Granted Wish." In this we learn the real facts regarding the coming of babies. Babies are not fetched by storks. Medical men bring them in boxes and afterward render bills for the same, as note the following: (page 330) "Miss Junick Dr. to doctor Paulin for one baby delivered as per agreement 1,"

a low enough price truly. If a child of eight (who in point of years is so very much closer to being a baby than most of the writers on the subject are) cannot be trusted to recall the circ.u.mstances of this mystery, who can? We can only regret that a second sister, Vera, the artist of this talented nursery, did not save her one contribution to the literary output of the Ashford family. It was ent.i.tled "Little Mary and The Angle." _Angle_ did not refer to a worm but to a visitor from a celestial domain; we have the word of Miss Daisy Ashford for it that this story was of a pious character. What a wonderful household the Ashford household must have been with Daisy and Angela writing romances and Vera ill.u.s.trating them and between times doing a bit of writing herself. Can't you see the pencils flying? Can't you see three little pink tongues sticking out from between three pairs of purposeful lips and wriggling in time to the pencils? Can't you see the small brows furrowed with thought? And the proud parents? And the startled nursemaid?

To my mind the very finest thing about Miss Daisy Ashford's present book is the opportunity it gives us, reading it, to follow the growth of her genius for observation. For surely the faculty to observe and, having observed, to set down in words the results of that observation is a genius. It is more than that, it is two phases of genius harmoniously coupled.

At the age of eight, as we shall note, she begins her career as a writer by knowing very little of certain phases of life largely dealt with by older writers; and this little she knows by reason of what she has read or by reason of what she has heard read. Rapidly, though, she progresses to the point where, along with these borrowed second-hand impressions, she incorporates impressions which are all her own. Reading what she wrote in the first year of her authors.h.i.+p, we can figure, approximately, when she learned her first French word; when to her there came those vague appreciations of the Roman Catholic faith which are so fascinating to the children of non-Catholics--or perhaps the Ashford family were Romanists. Influenced by these alluring ecclesiastical mysteries, we find her causing a prospective bridegroom to address the Rev. Father Fanty as "your kindness" and begging the reverend gentleman "to excuse my craving for matrimony." Through these pages one sees how travel broadened the young person's fund of experience, which in her favored case meant her fund of material, for unlike many writers, old enough to know better, little Miss Ashford was, by the virtue of a miraculous intuition, inspired to write, sometimes at least, of things that she actually knew about, rather than to deal exclusively with topics which other writers before her had professed to know about. Early in her opening story she speaks of "Cracknels." Reading this word, my memory ran back to my own childhood when we knew but three standard varieties of crackers--soda-crackers, animal crackers and cracknels which last were round, slickish objects rather like glazed oak-galls, somewhat dusty to the taste and warranted to create a tremendous thirst for licorice water and lemonade. I had entirely forgotten cracknels until Miss Ashford came along yesterday and reminded me of them.

In "A Short History of Love and Marriage"--and how woefully short sometimes is the history of a love and how short too, perhaps, the history of a marriage!--she shows to us that for all its admitted shortness the narrative is properly rounded out. For on page 24 we learn that the happy couple went on a bridal tour to India and "seven hours after they got there had two twin babies." Seven hours and two twin babies, a magnificent showing surely and the prevalent rage for shortness maintained to the very end! Page 24 is one of the very best pages in this book, containing, as it also does, a painstaking description of perhaps the most striking and interesting marriage-morn costume worn by any bridegroom in the Christian era.

It is not my intention to quote over-liberally from the contents of this volume. To my way of thinking the trick of inserting copious extracts from a novel into the foreword of that novel is as great a mistake as though I invited you to my house for dinner and before dinner gave you tidbits and choice bites from each course. I should merely be dulling your appet.i.te, without satisfying your hunger.

My aim is to direct your attention, if I may make so bold, to certain pages, specifying them by their numbers and trusting that when you have progressed so far you will, in the reading of them, find the same joy and the same zest that I have found there. For example, on page 46 I respectfully invite your consideration to the pains taken in enumerating the various articles of one Sylvia's running-away or elopement trousseau. There was a thorough young woman for you, and a provident.

On page 87 occurs mention of two sisters and here, despite my promise of two paragraphs ago, I cannot resist the temptation to quote one short but tremendously illuminating line. The author is speaking now of two sisters and of the elder she says, she "was by no means beautiful but she was intensely good." How often it happens that those who are by no means beautiful are intensely good--how often and sometimes oh, how easy for them to be so good. But most of us, even those who educate our faculties of observation the better to earn a living thereby, are very much older than eleven years before we discern this great truth.

I think the brightest gems of all this collection are to be found, in the greatest profusion, in "The Hangman's Daughter." The ill-fated gentleman hangman, Mr. Winston, who moved to Kenelham "where only about two people were hung a year" is in my opinion worthy to be rated with the deathless and ever-to-be glorious Mr. Salteena. Miss Ashford says she was shocked when her brothers on hearing the trial scene read (pages 150, 151, 152) laughed at what she had conceived to be a tragic and dramatic pa.s.sage in the action of her tale. Later, no doubt, she has come to realize how dangerous a thing it is for one to acquire, either intentfully or otherwise, the reputation of being a humorist; for when he who has been branded as a humorist says a thing with desire to be serious his friends laugh at it as a most rare whimsicality and when, on the other hand, he deliberately sets out to be humorous, his enemies very likely will declare that never before in all his life was he quite so serious. And had her brothers been older, had they been of an age to appreciate the unconscious comedy that marked the Dreyfus trial, say, or had they ever had opportunity to hear the proceedings in sundry murder trials in America, when learned counsel was asking questions and learned alienists were making answers, they would have been able to appreciate the fact that no burlesque description of a murder trial can ever be quite so utterly comic as a real murder trial sometimes is.

A flas.h.i.+ng jewel of dramatic intensity awaits you (pages 229 to 234 inclusive) when you come to read of the rescue of Gladys and Helen from the grasp of the murderer of Helen's own dear father and of the method employed by Gladys' heroic brother for detaining the miscreant Likewise, I pray you, reader dear, that you linger on page 257 wherein the "menu of the table d'hote" which was "of nightly recurrence" at Lord Beaufort's castle, is printed in full. In my mind's eye I see little Miss Daisy Ashford, twelve years old going on thirteen, carefully bearing away with her the card of the first meal she ever ate in a regular restaurant and taking it home and treasuring it up against the time when she might insert it into her greatest story, then in process of incubation, at exactly the appointed spot to create the most telling effect, under the most appropriate possible circ.u.mstances. Could a proper respect and a proper instinct for local color rise to greater heights? I deny it. So too will you deny it when you arrive at page 258 and read the words emphasized by being displayed in capitals that are on that page at the end of the menu.

Personally I do not think that as a whole this book is equal to "The Young Visiters." Only once in a decade or so is it vouchsafed the writing craft that one among us shall create a masterpiece, destined in time to become a cla.s.sic and a thing immortal. Only once in an eon or so is it vouchsafed a writer to write a masterpiece at the age of nine years. Very few among us ever produce a second perfect work on top of a first one. But this I will say--every line in this book is worthy to have been written by the same hand that wrote "The Young Visiters" and that, I think, is praise enough for any writer.

_New York, April, 1920._

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

The publication of these stories gives me an opportunity of expressing my thanks for the very cordial reception which was given to "The Young Visiters." I only hope that those who have been amused at the adventures of Ethel and Mr. Salteena will not be disappointed in those of Helen Winston, Leslie Woodc.o.c.k, and the others whose histories now appear.

"A Short Story of Love and Marriage," I wrote at eight years old. It was dictated to my father, who took it down faithfully word for word. My very first story, "Mr. Chapmer's Bride," which was also dictated, is among those that have been lost. "The True History of Leslie Woodc.o.c.k"

was a later production, and was written at about the age of eleven as a surprise for my mother on her birthday--it was originally ent.i.tled "The Q. I. B." (our family word for a secret)--but after the secret was out I changed the t.i.tle. "Where Love Lies Deepest" was written when I was twelve, and dedicated to our governess of whom I was very fond.

"The Hangman's Daughter," started at the age of about thirteen and finished the following year, I always consider the greatest literary achievement of my youth, for the reason that I put so much more effort into it than any of the others. By this time I had really determined to become an auth.o.r.ess (an ambition which entirely left me after my school days), and I put solid work into "The Hangman's Daughter" and really tried to write well. I shall never forget my feeling of shock when I read it aloud to my brothers and they laughed at the trial scene! A great friend of mine whose Christian name was Helen, was the heroine (Helen Winston) of this story. She was really a little younger than I was, but was far more "grown-up" in every way, a fact of which I was secretly rather "jellus," and it did not require much imagination on my part to picture what she would be at nineteen. I told her she was to be the heroine of my new novel, which I truly thought would thrill _anyone_, and I must say she was as excited as I could have wished. She will be amused now when she reads this book!

My sister Angela's story, which she wrote at the age of eight, will certainly be voted the most amusing of this collection. It was the first she ever wrote, and it was followed by "Treacherous Mr.

Campbell"--another lost ma.n.u.script. A great deal of "The Jealous Governes" she wrote herself, as will be noticed by the spelling. Other portions were dictated to my father and mother, and I think the nurse had a hand at it too.

My second sister, Vera, was the artist of the nursery, and drew a wonderful poster to the only play I ever wrote, "A Woman's Crime." She wrote one story, however. It was of a pious nature, profusely ill.u.s.trated, and ent.i.tled "Little Mary and the Angle."

Since the publication of "The Young Visiters," I have often been asked if I don't myself think it funny. When I first discovered it--not having seen it since it was written--I certainly did. That is one of the most curious things about it--to be able to laugh at what one wrote in such solemn seriousness--and that is why I can never feel all the nice things that have been said about "The Young Visiters," are really due to me at all, but to a Daisy Ashford of so long ago that she seems almost another person. It has all been like a fairy tale, from the accidental finding of the original note book to the day when, at her request, I left a copy with my friend Miss Margaret Mackenzie, for it is to her I really owe the publication of the book. She showed it to Mr. Frank Swinnerton, and thus I was lucky enough to have it brought to the notice of my present publishers in England and America.

But the real success of the book I owe to the great kindness of Sir James Barrie in writing such a wonderful preface, and I am glad to have this opportunity of thanking him publicly. His name gave "The Young Visiters" a send-off and a reading which it could not have gained on its own account and of this fact I am most deeply appreciative.

DAISY ASHFORD.

_March, 1920._

A SHORT STORY OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE

CHAPTER 1

LOVE

The house in which Mr. and Mrs. Molvern lived was one of the usual kind, with its red painted door and small garden looking out on a very dreamy park. The bed-room windows which all looked out on the front, had half dirty white curtains in them, above which could be seen dark red silk sashes of the same dirtiness.

Mr. Molvern was a red haired quick tempered gentleman, with very small grey eyes and a clever looking pink face. He would always wear brown suits, but as everybody said he looked much better in black. Mrs.

Molvern was quite on the contrary. She had indeed a quiet temper, with a pale delicate looking face with large brown eyes that looked at people with great interest, and her fair hair glistened in the sun. She usually wore half dirty white dresses, and in going out she wore a dark blue velvet jacket with black fur and a brown hat with red poppies. She never wore gloves except on Sundays and then she wore yellow cotton ones.

At the present time they had a young gentleman staying with them, who lived in the neighbourhood. He was sitting in his room waiting for the town clock to strike four, because when it did he had to go out and meet his truelove, whose name was Edith Plush. His own name was Thomas Henrick, but he was known as Burke in that family. At last hearing the hour strike, he s.n.a.t.c.hed up a felt hat, and putting it on his greasy head started off to meet his truelove.