How to steal fire the myths of creativity exposed the truths of creativity explained stephen bayley
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The Business of Creativity How to Build the Right Team for Success Keith Granet
Creativity is a powerful force. It drives innovation, boosts our economy and enables us to fulfil our human potential. But what actually is creativity? Is it overrated? And where exactly do ideas come from in the first place?
In this book, design gurus Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity debunk the myths and common misconceptions that form our current thinking around this complex subject. In showing readers how to think boldly and remain undaunted by challenges, they examine the phenomenon from all sides: not only the creativity of invention and of imagination but also that of perception and of discovery, in order to reveal the truths we often overlook.
Ultimately, How to Steal Fire will help you reclaim yourself from the anonymous dreariness of a data-driven culture and spark imaginative thought.
About the Authors
Stephen Bayley, by Roger
On the surface, Stephen Bayley radiates style: chiselled features, easy charm, a perfect suit, and a hint of expensive scent. If he’d been born in the Regency era he’d have been Beau Bayley, strolling down a Nash terrace with a silver-topped cane under his arm.
But don’t be deceived: while Stephen may cultivate the manner of a dilettante, the real Stephen is a very different animal. He is astonishingly well read, and the depth of his knowledge about the worlds of art, design and architecture puts the rest of us to
shame. He doesn’t just read about culture, he writes about it –extensively. He has published no less than twenty-two books, all concerned with different aspects of style, design and culture. He worked in academe as an art historian for many years before he and Terence Conran united to found the Boilerhouse at the V&A, which evolved to become the Design Museum, where Stephen was the first Director and its driving force. So when he writes about creativity, he knows what he’s talking about. And when he writes, he writes beautifully.
My writing style is a bit like a Land Rover – workmanlike, good on rough terrain, but unlikely to win a concours d’élégance. Stephen’s style is more like a Lamborghini – sculpturally shaped, striking, powerful, yet elegant. But Stephen’s prose isn’t just about style, gracious though that may be.
His writing is full of surprising and provocative insights. There is one marvellous moment in this book where Stephen describes an encounter with a government official who seeks Stephen’s advice on how to increase levels of creativity. ‘Make it illegal’ is Stephen’s rejoinder – witty, but also original, and perhaps even true.
His writing is perceptive, but also provocative. He is brave enough to be iconoclastic and irreverent when the mood takes him (which is often) and he can be laugh-out-loud funny.
Our working method is simple: we meet, and talk at length about everything but the job in hand. During these sessions, Stephen has educated me to survive, before noon, on a diet of strong espresso or, if later, several glasses of Albariño.
Squeezing two egos into one book isn’t easy, but he makes it seem so. In truth, if it hadn’t been for Stephen’s encouragement I’d never have become a writer. So thank you, Stephen.
Or should I call you ‘Beau’ now? I think I will – I rather like it.
Roger Mavity, by Stephen
There’s really no debating the notion that Roger is very annoying. And this, of course, is exactly what makes him interesting. And very good company. I have known him for a very long time, but for even longer I had a vicarious fascination with the business of advertising, the richly dunged field where Rog was cultivated. Heineken? Volvo? He was there when these classics of popculture sellebrity were created.
The sun has set on adland. But a generation ago ad agencies still maintained the culture where ‘creative’ was a job description. Creativity was institutionalised … even if that was an absurd process because properly creative people can tolerate all manner of discomfort (poverty, cold attics, strange haircuts, severe intoxication, deaf ears, hostile audiences), but cannot tolerate … institutions. Or what we might call ‘boxes’.
In his agency days, Rog was no such thing as ‘creative’, at least insofar as job descriptions go. Instead he was one of the subspecies of adland who policed the jungle where the wacko ‘creatives’ lived, with their whims and expense accounts, busily overspending unlimited budgets.
But it would be wrong to see Rog’s presence as a ‘suit’ as anything other than creative in its own right. Genius is nothing without the power of execution. And Rog was, indeed is, the sort of person who knows exactly where results fall in the hierarchy of creative activity.
In this sense, if in no other that comes to mind, he is similar to Enzo Ferrari. Over the portal of the famous sports car factory in Maranello is an inscription from Ferrari himself: I am not an engineer. I am not a designer. I am an agitator of men. And this particular agitator of men produced really quite exceptional results without ever having to pick up a pencil, bash metal or struggle with a parallel-action drawing board.
Roger is an agitator. As I know. Like the mechanism that creates helpful turbulence in a washing machine, Rog engages with the suds of thought. And during that engagement, great benefits may become apparent in the wash. Certainly he is not inhibited by the genteel accommodations of agreement. Rog is magnificently disinclined to agree with any proposition, especially mine. Perhaps ‘argumentative’ is a better word. But, then, I enjoy argument.
Rog and I agree on very little. Music, theatre, sailing, bridge, politics; these things have no interest for me. In fact, if I could, I would have them banned. On the other hand, Rog is a polished enthusiast of each.
Of course, these disagreements are productive. We have an idea. Then we disagree about it. Not sure here if I am the glib but tuneful McCartney or the clever, headbutting cynic who was Lennon. Or, at least, Lennon’s invented persona.
Fact is, however, without Rog’s interventions and management, I would, being the feckless creative type – impulsive, restless –never have written this book. And surely that proves something.
Exactly what it proves, we will decide later.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
One
point,
two views
About this book (SB)
Introduction: a guide for the oppressed (SB)
Setting fire to thought
How to steal fire (SB)
Does creativity even matter? (RM)
Prometheus, Shiva & creation myths (SB)
What does ‘creative’ really mean? (RM)
Why are books on creativity so dull? (SB)
The fear of the unfamiliar (RM)
Quantifying creativity: would you like to borrow my template? (SB)
I am, therefore I think
Where do ideas come from? (RM)
Montaigne: happiness is an incentive to mediocrity (SB)
The price of paint (RM)
When the problem becomes the solution (RM)
Get lost! Or, Can cities be too stimulating? (SB)
Boredom & ennui (SB)
I can’t get no satisfaction (RM)
Sit down & make yourself uncomfortable (SB)
The child is father of the man (RM)
The art & craft & taste of memory (SB)
Sex: St Augustine’s autonomous penis (SB)
To produce a good idea, start from a bad place (RM)
L’appel du vide: the sublime, risk & danger (SB)
The discomfort zone (RM)
Desire (SB)
Opium, drugs & drink: the booze muse (SB)
Avant-garde: avant to exactly what? (SB)
The Book of Revelation
Napoli (RM)
Brainstorming: a benefit to the hotel industry but not to you or me (RM)
Looking out, looking in (RM)
Leave me alone! (SB)
Skunkworks (SB)
A little learning is a dangerous thing – too much learning can be worse (RM)
Education: a curse on creativity (RM)
Four white men (RM)
Thinking outside the box: lazy clichés (SB)
Too much No, No, not enough Yes, Yes (RM)
The biggest risk of all (RM)
The bitch-goddess success (SB)
The joy of failure (RM)
Writer’s block & stage fright (SB)
Invective & abuse: sh*t & c*nt (SB)
Mad, bad & fascinating to know: inside the creative mind
Uncle Jack’s centrifuge (RM)
Eureka! Caricatures of genius (SB)
The Book of Revelation: how Michelangelo set figures free (SB)
How many brains do you have? (RM)
Being contrarian & defeating habits (SB)
Artists versus the Establishment (RM)
Would you make it as an assassin? (RM)
Is creativity over-rated? (SB)
There is no ending: creativity doesn’t recognise boundaries
Can a kipper be creative? (RM)
There is no conclusion. There will never be (SB)
Acknowledgements
Picture acknowledgements
Index
HOW TO STEAL FIRE
The myths of creativity exposed, the truths of creativity explained
Stephen Bayley & Roger Mavity
‘Better to disintegrate than rot.’
This book is dedicated to the selfunemployed.
The minstrel Leonard Cohen saw a connection between error and benefit:
There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.
(‘Anthem’ , 1992)
The novelist Howard Jacobson explained:
Savour that! At a stroke, weakness becomes strength and fault becomes virtue. I feel as though original sin has just been re-explained to me. There was no fall. We were born flawed. Flawed is how we were designed to be. Which means we don’t need redeeming after all. Light? Why go searching for light? The light already shines from us. It got in through our failings.
About this book
Stupidity has been defined as repeating behaviour and expecting a different result. Indeed, Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity have done this before: an earlier collaboration was Life’s a Pitch, but it became a global bestseller, so they have risked trying again. Like that book, this one has two voices. They say the same thing, but try not to repeat themselves.
Roger Mavity’s career has been mostly in and around advertising, an environment with ample opportunities to test the hard, bright flame of creativity against the lumpen, drab, grey stuff of harsh and extinguishing reality. He writes with a wisdom that is sometimes rueful but always practical. Once lit, the flame never goes out.
Stephen Bayley is a recovering academic. An early career in universities left him with a didactic streak a mile wide (and, critics say, an inch deep). Later, he became the person for whom ‘design guru’ was coined. He writes to prompt and suggest, not to explain or justify.
They like to think they make a good double act.
Bayley and Mavity met many years ago in a business world designed by their patron, Terence Conran. In those days, ‘Conran’ was an eponym for all things creative. Today, Bayley –having midwifed the birth of Conran’s Design Museum – is an author, columnist and critic. Mavity – having managed Conran’s design and restaurant businesses – is a writer and photographer with an international reputation. Each of them has written a series of short chapters, identified by their initials and by a different typeface. In keeping with their personalities, Stephen’s typeface is
traditionally elegant, while Roger’s is plainer and blunter. Some chapters debunk the conventional wisdom and fashionable nonsense which surround this arcane subject; others explore the underlying truths.
Creativity includes the whole of God’s and man’s endeavours, including volcanoes and pop rivets, waterfalls and popcorn, giraffes and Negroni sbagliato, so it’s a big subject for a book of conventional size and length. Even to ponder a comprehensive treatment would be an absurd folly. So the chapters are not arranged in a logical narrative sequence, but more as a terrazzo of ideas.
The aim is not authoritative analysis of an ineffable subject, but rather to hint about how to steal fire … and ignite thought.
Introduction: a guide for the oppressed
A personal note from one of the authors
Given my own generous endowment of cussedness, lack of realism, demented optimism, pig-headedness, astonishing lack of empathy, reluctance to compromise, tragic lack of patience or humility, inclination to fantasy, toxic vanity and absolute refusal to cooperate on any matter whatsoever, I’m well disposed to sympathise with that legendary figure: The Creative Personality.
Often I champion him and have a stump speech where I talk about the primacy of ideas over admin. Of this I have no doubt. No one cares who was the fixed-cost accountant on the Great Pyramid, but we’d all like to know the bedroom habits of the architect. Or put it this way: the name Ettore Bugatti moves the spirit along more positive vectors than the name Arthur Andersen. No one, surely, needs persuading about creativity.
Ideas are what move civilisation along, giving it point, style and meaning. Creative types have lots. Not because it is good for business, simply because it is in their nature.
Ideas are what move civilisation along, giving it point, style and meaning. Creative types have lots. Not because it is good for business, simply because it is in their nature. Contrariness is part of the job description. When a government official once asked me how best to stimulate creativity, I said, ‘Make it illegal.’ Criminalising possession and generation of ideas would stimulate even more than the jug of hock and sodawater that Byron recommended to poets.
The most superlatively creative type I have ever met was the late, great Paul Arden, who, if any single person can make such a claim, established the critical reputation of Saatchi & Saatchi in its Augustan period. I really liked Paul and we became quite close. We went to each other’s houses and knew each other’s children. Our wives became friends.
I just mention this to put into context what follows. Paul was maddeningly exasperating and contrary. SB (charmingly): ‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’ PA (crossly): ‘What do you mean?’ We had a project to found a business together. Each of us thought this interesting, but third-party advice was unanimous. They said: ‘You must be out of your minds!’ We were. That was the point.
Arden and I would never have got anything done, but we would have thought many thoughts. We would have been a Fukushima of high-power futility. So sometimes I wonder if creativity is over-rated, a question discussed briefly later in the book. A lot of people have shapeless, glowing talent, but very few have crisply delineated skill. The workmanlike craft of execution may be just as important to the act of genius as the whack-job creative concept.
The workmanlike craft of execution may be just as important to the act of genius as the whack-job creative concept.
The advertising business was once a fine incubator, or tolerator, of creativity. In this jungle, the creatives roamed freely. And their eccentricities were tolerated because very often those predictably unpredictable eccentricities made the business sing.
But the sun has set on adland. A combination of fragmented media and consumer fatigue means splashy high-spend advertising is no more. And people have got enough stuff. The big challenge today is to be light and free, not to buy a new fridge. As John Ruskin said, ‘every increased possession loads us with new weariness’ .
So it’s difficult for ads to achieve excellence in a culture where people are bored with buying, where great product narratives are a snooze. Factor in advertising’s dinosaur–asteroid relationship with new media where the greatest innovation is that what was called ‘popular’ is now called ‘viral’ and you’ll agree that the Golden Age of Creativity ended when Paul Arden left Saatchi in 1992. At least so far as advertising was concerned.
But this book is not about advertising. Faced with the tepid greyness and timorous conventionality of most decisionmaking in most organisations, the case for creative behaviour (which sometimes even includes creative thinking) is always worth making. But people do not make it very often. So here it is.
How to steal fire
‘No single human being can possibly know enough to produce a comprehensive study of all that can be comprised under the heading creativity.’
Anthony Storr, The Dynamics of Creation (1972)
[Storr was the respected Cambridge psychiatrist who persuaded Elaine Rosenbloom not to abort the foetus that became Will Self, giving the future novelist a highly nuanced view on creativity. Witheringly, Self said Storr kept a ‘colourcoded spice-rack’ in his kitchen … a remark intended to suggest a certain formulaic dullness in the psychiatrist’s thinking.]
How to Steal Fire is a guide for the oppressed. Which is to say, people who are bored by everyday tedium and dismayed by mediocrity. People who reject routine. People like Marcel Duchamp, who regularly contradicted himself so as to avoid conforming to his own taste. People who think: If everyone is different, I want to be the same. It’s a manifesto for those who want to zig when others zag. Or perhaps, as the Obamas did, go high when others go low.
It is an imaginative book about creativity. How could a book on creativity be anything other than imaginative? But it’s not about how to write a symphony or knit an exciting jumper, it’s about individuals reclaiming themselves
from the anonymous dreariness of a data-driven, collectivised, faceless culture.
It’s a human compulsion to be creative, to do and make new things. Without it, we’d still be mired in Proterozoic slime.
It’s a human compulsion to be creative, to do and make new things. Without it, we’d still be mired in Proterozoic slime.
Maurice Saatchi once said that creativity is the last legal way of getting an unfair advantage in business. But if creativity is legal, it is not always moral or ethical. In a signature act of creativity, Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Theft is often involved in creativity. Hence, the title.
Creative people are entirely comfortable with theft (sometimes called inspiration, plagiarism or misappropriation). Picasso said: ‘Great artists don’t borrow, they steal.’ Although some people attribute this epigram to T. S. Eliot. Perhaps they stole it from each other, which rather proves the point. Anyway, ‘steal like an artist’ is one way to avoid oppression.
And creative people do not bother to indulge their audiences, being more inclined to please themselves. David Bowie said: ‘All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.’
Creativity boosters often tell us to ‘think outside the box’ , but that’s a cliché, which is itself a denial of the creative spirit, which always tends towards the original, the unusual and the contrary. To the creative, there is no box. There are no conventions of any sort in creativity.
And that’s about the only conventional aspect of it. Creativity is a most uncertain matter. Einstein said: ‘If I knew what I was doing, it wouldn’t be research.’ Miles Davis, when asked what he was going to play, replied: ‘I’ll play it first and tell you what it is afterwards.’ Picasso was against common sense. Whoever would want common sense? Karl Lagerfeld says that clear thinking, employed inopportunely, stifles creativity. Some people would call this ragbag of attitudinising difficult and cussed. Others would call it creative. But the results are there for everyone to admire.
There are no conventions of any sort in creativity. And that’s about the only conventional aspect of it.
The simple truth is: we do not know where ideas come from. Clearly, what we call creativity involves large-scale patternrecognition, our brains crunching huge data sets and
improvising a result. Some people can simply see wider and deeper than others, finding more diverse sources of inspiration and arranging them in novel ways to impressive and influential effect. Designers, especially, seem to see the world in a different way.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, said, ‘Creativity is just connecting things,’ although he perhaps intuited it was rather more as well. He was also very good at connecting and collecting, or, as some would say, stealing. In Jobs’s case, connecting a GPS-enabled cellular phone with a touchscreen to the internet to create the smartphone. Both the cellular network and GPS, as well as the internet, existed before the iPhone of 2007, but Jobs’s creative connection changed the world forever. He saw something no one else had seen. It might yet prove to be the single most influential (which is not necessarily to say ‘beneficial’) creative act ever. At least, since Genesis.
But then, of course, you also need the power of execution. It’s no use, as they used to say in the eighteenth century, to be in possession of imaginative genius if you lack the technical skills to express your vision. Jobs was, incidentally, fortunate to own a successful computer manufacturer. Without that, he would have remained an eccentric visionary, a loopy Californian airhead with bad manners and unsatisfactory personal hygiene.
Philosophers and neurosurgeons are agreed that they do not really have a clue how, at the Steve Jobs level, the brain works. But artists are often more matter-of-fact: Leonardo looked at damp stains to get inspiration; Brahms said music came to him without the exercise of conscious thought. Meanwhile, Jobs did Zen and macrobiotics.
The painter Stanley Spencer on the other hand, or rather on both knees, found sniffing lavatory bowls a reliable stimulus to his art. A famous car designer is inspired by looking at trainers. Hard exercise, danger and long holidays can also be
stimulating. So too can drink and drugs. The majority of US Nobel Laureates in Literature have been hopeless drunks.
But no one has ever found a reliable method of generating ideas, although people do keep trying. There is still a tendency in business to suggest that groupthink is the way to do it. This horrible intellectual collectivism has been accelerated in the past generation by the increasing influence of fast, but essentially dumb, electronic networks in our crowded and over-busy lives.
The world population has doubled since the fifties. Over fifty years ago Intel founder Gordon Moore declared a ‘Law’ that chip memory doubled about every eighteen months, during that time when the population has, thanks to Jobs and others, had ever easier access to ever more clever devices. It now seems likely that, surprisingly soon, anybody who wants one will have a smartphone. Jerusalem! Actually, no.
This ecstasy of connectivity has encouraged some excitable people to say that we have left the era of autonomous individual creativity as surely as we have left the era of child sacrifice, public executions, ducking witches, monochrome television and free parking in city centres.
But the digital world is a terrible disappointment. Nothing is less cool than data. The internet has undermined newspapers, magazines and books; it has devalued research and put us all under pitiless surveillance. All this in exchange for the opportunity to send pictures of skateboarding hamsters instantaneously around the world.
James Surowiecki’s influential book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) argued for an amazing creative democracy where the responsibility of developing ideas is devolved to the consumer, not to the creative genius. Never mind that this has not actually happened. Never mind that if it did, the results would be melancholy: would you prefer that the check-out queue planned your dinner or would you prefer to have a gently perspiring and finger-lickin’ Nigella Lawson over a hot six-
burner? This form of groupthink may be wrong and rather dated, but it remains, nonetheless, persuasive.
Besides, no one is going to bed tonight dreaming about digital encryption. How to Steal Fire suggests an approach to life where you don’t have to be a passive supplicant to data, but instead become an active participant in a more rewarding personal activity. Namely, thinking.
One of the great deceptions, ruinous fallacies and lazy excuses in contemporary life, and especially in contemporary business life, is the belief that ‘teams’ get things done. In his great book The School of Genius (1988), the psychiatrist Anthony Storr argued convincingly that being alone with your own thoughts is the most reliable and productive method of generating ideas. There’s a continuing debate here, but it’s an important opinion.
The focus group is one example. Herein, politicians or manufacturers of edible fats, too timid to launch a campaign or a product with heroic conviction, secure the approval of a room of bored housewives who have been paid twenty-five pounds, tube fare and some yoghurt tokens to turn up and offer faked opinions. It is not difficult to see what poor quality ideas, with denominators lower than the Puerto Rico Trench –lower than whale shit, to use Frank Sinatra’s impressive expression – emerge from focus groups.
Then there is ‘brainstorming’ , an invention of the Mad Men era on Madison Avenue. The concept of brainstorming was, paradoxically, an autonomous creative act by an individual called Alex Osborn, one of the founders of the BBDO ad agency. In his book Applied Imagination (1953), Osborn showed how groups of people, sometimes a mix of experts and novices, might perhaps generate new ideas. But group dynamics, subtle pressures and a reluctance to be truly outspoken usually combine to mean that brainstorming produces, at best, a light, irritating drizzle of complacent mediocrity.
So far from being liberating and democratic, brainstorming sessions are just evidence of the strange tendency towards
Soviet-style collectivism and thought-management in American life. Anyone who has been to Atlanta’s Varsity restaurant, the world’s largest, will have sensed that this was what the Electricians’ Union refectory in Magnitogorsk might have been like in 1928.
It is exactly the same with PowerPoint. This is not really an efficient and invigorating presentation tool. Quite the opposite: PowerPoint encourages dull, linear thinking and disguises platitudinous structures by neat graphics. Brainstorms and PowerPoint are the democracy of a Parliament of Fools. Creative people have no use for them. Wiki is for lazy dullards.
So, instead of production-line thinking, consider instead our romantic ideas of great artists, or even great scientists, at work. Schubert in his garret; Picasso harassing a canvas in his studio at Vallauris; Newton in his Cambridge exile; Elon Musk in his Jacuzzi.
Great thoughts come to inspired individuals, not to weary groups. The great poet of solitude was Henry David Thoreau, who decided to live alone in the Massachusetts woods. He wrote: ‘I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.’ In solitary exhilaration, Thoreau wrote one of the great inspirational books: Walden was published in 1854 and has been a counter-culture classic ever since.
Great thoughts come to inspired individuals, not to weary groups.
From here it is a short step to Steve Jobs chewing mung beans on his Kyoto moon-viewing platform. (Although it is worth noting that Thoreau’s conception of solitariness was something of a grandiose creative delusion – or a deception:
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CHAPTER XIII HOME
I was necessary to stay in Montgomery over night in order to make railroad connections; so Hazel was able to visit Mr. and Mrs. Jenks again, while Miss Davis went to a hotel. Mrs. Jenks and her husband were delighted at the change in Hazel’s appearance. The thin, shy child had grown almost plump and was full of spirits. She talked gaily at dinner, she romped with the children, and she gave her host such a generous good-night hug that he was breathless and disheveled when it was over.
“Excuse me,” Hazel called as she ran upstairs, “but that is the way Mr. Perkins likes me to say good-night to him. And, oh,” ecstatically, “I shall see him next Sunday!”
The following morning Mrs. Jenks put up an enormous box of luncheons and breakfasts and suppers for Hazel. Such a quantity of bread and butter sandwiches, such a lot of sliced chicken and hardboiled eggs, and a jar of guava jelly with a spoon that didn’t have to be returned.
“It will be less expensive for you than to get your meals on the train,” Mrs. Jenks began hesitatingly.
Hazel broke in impetuously, “I know all about it, Mrs. Jenks. I’m not wanted in the dining car because I’m colored. I’m traveling North as Miss Davis’s maid, and I’m to do little things for her and to play I really am a maid. She says her traveling dress hooks up the back and around the side with about a hundred hooks, and that she could never wear it except for me. And I must keep her hair smooth for her because her mother says it is always untidy—it isn’t, it’s beautiful. And I’m to fan the flies away from her when she takes a nap. As if I thought flies were on trains! But we are going to play that I am her maid, to make a game of it, because it is better to do that than to
keep feeling angry How many meals do I eat? One, two, three, four, five? This is plenty, for I can get milk and cocoa. I’m going to sleep in an upper berth, think, and climb up on a ladder! It will be great fun.”
Mrs. Jenks smiled and sighed and put some cakes in the box.
Miss Davis called for Hazel in a carriage, and the little girl felt very proud as she drove away with her new friend. The station was an exciting place. Hazel saw a check marked “Boston” put on her trunk and knew that home was near. She entered the Pullman car with Miss Davis and held her hand tightly as the porter showed them their seats. All her safety from insult, she knew, lay in the presence of her white companion. They sat down together and at length the train drew out of the station, headed for the North and home.
The little girl looked up at her friend. “I’m trying to think all the time of Mother,” she said, “but I can’t forget Granny and Scip.”
“You’ll visit them again,” Miss Davis said consolingly. “When people once begin to travel they never stop.”
The journey was full of interest to Hazel, and not an unkind word was said to her during the trip. Indeed, an old lady in the seat across the aisle took a fancy to her, and sent her a big plate of ice-cream from the dining car. “Two portions, I’m sure,” Miss Davis said when she heard about it. New York was reached, a din of trolleys and elevateds and a big, beautiful station with a restaurant where everyone could sit and eat, and then Boston and home.
It was night when they got off the train at the South Station, and Hazel trembled as she walked by Miss Davis’s side. If Mother should miss her! Then she saw a big black man and she rushed toward and past him and into her mother’s arms.
“I waited a long time for my greeting,” said Mr. Perkins, smoothing his coat collar, “but it was satisfactory when I got it.”
“Where is Miss Davis?” asked Hazel when she could look about her again.
“She left her good-bye,” said Mr. Perkins; “she was hurrying to meet someone, too; perhaps it was her brother, and perhaps it wasn’t.
Come, Little Frog, give me your check. I’ll look after your trunk when I’ve put you and your mother on the car. You’re coming to dine with us Sunday.”
How beautiful home looked with its three dear little rooms! The table was set for supper. There was a big dish of strawberries, white bread and butter, and a spider on the fire with a lamb chop in it ready to cook! In a moment Charity came in.
The two little girls flew into one another’s arms.
“My, ain’t you fat, Hazel!” said Charity.
Hazel laughed delightedly. “I like to be fat,” she said.
“I am going to cook your chop,” said Charity, and Mrs. Tyler let her.
“Mother,” said Hazel as she ate her supper, “you don’t know, for you haven’t been South, how good this chop tastes. There are two things I don’t want to see again for a long time; one is bacon and the other is corn bread.” Then, feeling that this might seem ungrateful to Granny, “they are both good, but I’ve had enough of them.”
“There’s a moving-picture show around the corner,” said Charity, when Hazel had finished her supper, “want to go? I’ve got two dimes.”
“Oh, not to-night, Charity.”
“Well, whenever you want, the price is on me.”
Hazel was not allowed to help with the dishes, for she was a visitor this evening. To-morrow she would slip back into the routine of home. She and her mother talked and talked far into the night, there was so much to tell about, and both were so happy. At length Hazel dropped off to sleep, but her mother lay awake until the dawn showed her her child’s face again. “How well she looks,” Mrs. Tyler said again and again to herself. “I did right to send her away.”
“Here is a wash-cloth that I spun and wove for you, Charity,” Hazel said the next morning and handed it triumphantly to her friend.
Charity looked it over carefully. “I can buy ’em like that for five cents at Jordan, Marsh’s.”
“Can you?” answered Hazel, trying not to be hurt. “And it took me days and days to make it.”
“Sure,” said Charity loftily, “didn’t I tell you it was slow down South?”
When Hazel took the same gift to her school-teacher, however, she heard a very different comment.
“You’ve done a wonderful thing, Hazel,” Miss Grey said. “You’ve followed an industry from its beginning to the finished product. Next year, if it is possible, we will get a spinning-wheel and loom and you can demonstrate the spinning and weaving to the school.”
Hazel repeated this to Charity.
“Bet you’d break your thread,” Charity declared, “when you had to spin before all the boys and girls.”
The homecoming was very exciting. There was the first Sunday at church, and the Sunday school service, when they wanted to hear about their song-books down in Alabama, and the good time at the Perkins’s and the trolley rides with Charity. Mr. Perkins gave Hazel a dollar for trolley rides, telling her that she must not forget the city and its delights.
June came, and one late afternoon Mrs. Tyler returned from her work looking so happy that Hazel accused her of having a secret.
Mrs. Tyler nodded assent. “You shall hear it after supper,” she said. So when the dishes were washed they sat down together, and Hazel heard the secret.
“We are going away for the summer,” said her mother. “I find I can make more money at my shampooing in the country than here. Some of my customers go to a beautiful place by the sea and they promise me plenty of business there.”
“Is it at Revere Beach?” asked Hazel.
“No indeed, goosey, much further than that, ’way down in Maine.”
“More traveling?”
“Yes, more traveling, but not so far as Alabama.”
“I shall miss Charity,” mused Hazel, “but I believe wherever you go you have to miss somebody. Are there pines in Maine?”
“Pines?”
“Yes, pine trees. Do they grow there?”
“I think so, dear.”
“Then, if there are pine trees, I shall like it very much!”
Just before they left town letters came from Granny and Scip.
“Mother,” said Hazel after reading them, “my heart is content. Scipio is living with Granny; at least, he is staying there at night. She never did like living alone, the least bit, and so she got Scip’s father to let the boy stay with her. She gives him supper and breakfast and Granny says he was half starved before, and at night they both read out of the books I left. Granny says they think of me.”
Scipio’s letter was plainly printed and showed constant consultation with the dictionary.
Dear Sister:
Aunt Ellen has took me in.
I am going to help her pick cotton when it ripes.
The cat is playing by the fire.
S L .
“I’m so glad you trimmed my summer hat with the feathers Scip gave me, Mother,” Hazel said, “I shall tell him about it the next time I write.”
THE END.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained from the original.
*** END OF THE PROJECT
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