The Cards

Guest Blogger Dept.: We had the opening chapter of Barry Pain’s masterful Eliza a few weeks ago; let’s see how she and her fussy husband are faring in the second chapter. (Drawing below by Wallace Goldsmith.)

                                                                        

ABOUT A YEAR AGO Eliza and myself had a little difference of opinion. I mentioned to her that we had no visiting-cards.

“Of course not,” she said. “The idea of such a thing!” She spoke rather hastily.

“Why do you say 'of course not'?” I replied, quietly. “Visiting-cards are, I believe, in common use among ladies and gentlemen.”

"He seemed to think
it was not essential."

She said she did not see what that had to do with it.

“It has just this much to do with it,” I answered: “that I do not intend to go without visiting-cards another day!”

“What's the use?” she asked. “We never call on anybody, and nobody ever calls on us.”

“Is Miss Sakers nobody?”

“Well, she's never left a card here, and she really is a lady by birth, and can prove it. She just asks the girl to say she's been, and it's nothing of importance, when she doesn't find me in. If she can do without cards, we can. You'd much better go by her.”

“Thank you, I have my own ideas of propriety, and I do not take them from Miss Sakers. I shall order fifty of each sort from Amrod's this morning.”

“Then that makes a hundred cards wasted.”

“Either you cannot count,” I said, “or you have yet to learn that there are three sorts of cards used by married people—the husband's cards, the wife's cards, and the card with both names on it.”

“Go it!” said Eliza. “Get a card for the cat as well. She knows a lot more cats than we know people!”

I could have given a fairly sharp retort to that, but I preferred to remain absolutely silent. I thought it might show Eliza that she was becoming rather vulgar. Silence is often the best rebuke. However, Eliza went on:

“Mother would hate it, I know that. To talk about cards, with the last lot of coals not paid for—I call it wickedness.”

I simply walked out of the house, went straight down to Amrod's, and ordered those cards. When the time comes for me to put my foot down, I can generally put it down as well as most people. No one could be easier to live with than I am, and I am sure Eliza has found it so; but what I say is, if a man is not master in his own house, then where is he?

Amrod printed the cards while I waited. I had them done in the Old English character. I suggested some little decoration to give them a tone,—an ivy leaf in the corner, or a little flourish under the name,—but Amrod was opposed to this. He seemed to think it was not essential, and it would have been charged extra, and also he had nothing of the kind in stock. So I let that pass. The cards looked very well as they were, a little plain and formal, perhaps, but very clean (except in the case of a few where the ink had rubbed), and very gratifying to one's natural self-respect.

That evening I took a small cardboard box that had contained candles, and packed in it a few carefully selected flowers from the garden, and one of our cards. On the card I wrote “With kindest love from” just above the names, and posted it to Eliza's mother.

So far was Eliza's mother from being offended that she sent Eliza a present of a postal-order for five shillings, three pounds of pressed beef, and a nicely worked apron.

On glancing over that sentence, I see that it is, perhaps, a little ambiguous. The postal order was for the shillings alone—not for the beef or the apron.

I put a few of my own cards in my letter-case, and the rest were packed away in a drawer. A few weeks afterward I was annoyed to find Eliza using some of her cards for winding silks. She said that it did not prevent them from being used again, if they were ever wanted.

“Pardon me,” I said, “but cards for social purposes should not be bent or frayed at the edge, and can hardly be too clean. Oblige me by not doing that again!”

That evening Eliza told me that No. 14 in the Crescent had been taken by some people called Popworth.

“That must be young Popworth who used to be in our office,” I said. “I heard that he was going to be married this year. You must certainly call and leave cards.”

“Which sort, and how many?”

“Without referring to a book, I can hardly say precisely. These things are very much a matter of taste. Leave enough—say one of each sort for each person in the house. There should be no stint.”

“How am I to know how many persons there are?”

“Ask the butcher with whom they deal.”

On the following day I remarked that Popworth must have come in for money, to be taking so large a house, and I hoped she had left the cards.

“I asked the butcher, and he said there was Popworth, his wife, two sisters, a German friend, and eleven children. That was sixteen persons, and made forty-eight cards altogether. You see, I remembered your rule.”

“My dear Eliza,” I said, “I told you as plainly as possible that it was a matter of taste. You ought not to have left forty-eight at once.”

“Oh, I couldn't keep running backwards and forwards leaving a few at a time. I've got something else to do. There's three pair of your socks in the basket waiting to be darned, as it is.”

“And, good heavens! That Popworth can't be my Popworth. If he's only married this year, he can't, in the nature of things, have got eleven children. And a house like this can't call on a house like that without a something to justify it.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Then what on earth did you call for?”

“I didn't. Who said I did?”

I gave a sigh of relief. Later in the evening, when Eliza took a card, notched a bit out of each side, and began winding silk on it, I thought it wiser to say nothing. It is better sometimes to pretend not to see things.

– Barry Pain, Eliza, Dana Estes & Co., Boston, 1904.