Indeed, he was reflecting as he walked in the dusk, Mrs.Spaniel was now his sheet anchor.Fortunately she showed signs of becoming extraordinarily attached to the puppies.On the two days a week when she came up from the village, it was even possible for him to get a little relaxation--to run down to the station for tobacco, or to lie in the hammock briefly with a book.Looking off from his airy porch, he could see the same blue distances that had always tempted him, but he felt too passive to wonder about them.He had given up the idea of trying to get any other servants.If it had been possible, he would have engaged Mrs.Spaniel to sleep in the house and be there permanently; but she had children of her own down in the shantytown quarter of the village, and had to go back to them at night.But certainly he made every effort to keep her contented.It was a long steep climb up from the hollow, so he allowed her to come in a taxi and charge it to his account.Then, on condition that she would come on Saturdays also, to help him clean up for Sunday, he allowed her, on that day, to bring her own children too, and all the puppies played riotously together around the place.But this he presently discontinued, for the clamour became so deafening that the neighbours complained.Besides, the young Spaniels, who were a little older, got Groups, Bunks, andYelpers into noisy and careless habits of speech.
He was anxious that they should grow up refined, and was distressed by little Shaggy Spaniel having brought up the Comic Section of a Sunday paper.With childhood's instinctive taste for primitive effects, the puppies fell in love with the coloured cartoons, and badgered him continually for "funny papers."There is a great deal more to think about in raising children (he said to himself) than is intimated in Dr.Holt's book on Care and Feeding.Even in matters that he had always taken for granted, such as fairy tales, he found perplexity.After supper--(he now joined the children in their evening bread and milk, for after cooking them a hearty lunch of meat and gravy and potatoes and peas and the endless spinach and carrots that the doctors advise, to say nothing of the prunes, he had no energy to prepare a special dinner for himself)--after supper it was his habit to read to them, hoping to give their imaginations a little exercise before they went to bed.He was startled to find that Grimm and Hans Andersen, which he had considered as authentic classics for childhood, were full of very strong stuff--morbid sentiment, bloodshed, horror, and all manner of painful circumstance.Reading the tales aloud, he edited as he went along; but he was subject to that curious weakness that afflicts some people: reading aloud made him helplessly sleepy: after a page or so he would fall into a doze, from which he would be awakened by the crash of a lamp or some other furniture.The children, seized with that furious hilarity that usually begins just about bedtime, would race madly about the house until some breakage or a burst of tears woke him from his trance.He would thrash them all and put them to bed howling.When they were asleep he would be touched with tender compassion, and steal in to tuck them up, admiring the innocence of each unconscious muzzle on its pillow.Sometimes, in a crisis of his problems, he thought of writing to Dr.Holt for advice; but the will-power was lacking.
It is really astonishing how children can exhaust one, he used to think.Sometimes, after a long day, he was even too weary to correct their grammar."You lay down!" Groups would admonish Yelpers, who was capering in his crib while Bunks was being lashed in with the largest sizeof safety pins.And Gissing, doggedly passing from one to another, was really too fatigued to reprove the verb, picked up from Mrs.Spaniel.
Fairy tales proving a disappointment, he had great hopes of encouraging them in drawing.He bought innumerable coloured crayons and stacks of scribbling paper.After supper they would all sit down around the dining-room table and he drew pictures for them.Tongues depending with concentrated excitement, the children would try to copy these pictures and colour them.In spite of having three complete sets of crayons, a full roster of colours could rarely be found at drawing time.Bunks had the violet when Groups wanted it, and so on.But still, this was often the happiest hour of the day.Gissing drew amazing trains, elephants, ships, and rainbows, with the spectrum of colours correctly arranged and blended.The children specially loved his landscapes, which were opulently tinted and magnificent in long perspectives.He found himself always colouring the far horizons a pale and haunting blue.
He was meditating these things when a shrill yammer recalled him to the house.
