Most of the people who would gather in Gypsy and Ginger’s Weatherhouse at midnight had lovely professions—so lovely that they often wondered they had not thought of them themselves when they were discussing Ways and Means. There were, for instance, a Rag-and-Bone Man, and a Punch-and-Judy Man, and a Balloon Woman, and a Lavender Girl. Gypsy would gladly have been either of the two first, and Ginger both of the two last. There were other people too, singers of ballads, and merchants of muffins and groundsel. But the only one whose profession they had considered even for a moment was the Pavement Artist. He was a very good artist and had once thought of being an R.A., but in the end had decided to be a P.A. instead.

“Burlington House, pah!” he would say, half-shutting one eye as he held up in the middle distance a glistening sausage, crackling from the pan. “It is the Mausoleum of Art, my dear.”

“Mausoleum?” inquired Ginger, biting off her thread, because she was neatening a loose end of braid on the Pavement Artist’s shabby brown cotton velveteen jacket. She often did such jobs for her friends at midnight.

“I think it’s the name of a music-hall,” whispered Gypsy.

“Of a dancing-hall,” corrected the Pavement Artist, “where they do the Dance of Death to the skeleton rattle of easels and mahlsticks. Vampires sit at the door waiting to suck the red blood from the veins of any living artist who ventures in. Once in he seldom, if ever, gets out again. I thought it wasn’t worth it, and I took to the art of the populace on the pavements.”

“Do the populace like art?” asked Gypsy.

“They like mine,” said the P.A. “I paint their dreams for them.”

“What are their dreams?” asked Ginger.

“Salmon and Switzerland,” said the P.A. His eyes grew hazy. “They are also mine. Have you ever eaten salmon?” He attacked Gypsy abruptly.

“Twice,” said Gypsy, suppressing a hundredth part of the truth out of kindness of heart.

“Ah. So have I—tinned. And have you ever seen Switzerland?”

Ginger nodded. “She’s seen everywhere,” explained Gypsy apologetically.

“So have I—in Oxford Street. It was years and years ago. You sat in a pretend railway carriage for twopence, and the floor rocked, and a man turned a handle to make the sound of wheels, and another one yodelled while a panorama of mountains and waterfalls whirled past the carriage window.” The Pavement Artist’s chin sank on his breast. “But I know,” he whispered, “that it’s not like that really, neither the salmon nor the mountains. They are not even like my pictures of them.”

“What are they like?” asked Ginger, filling his teacup.

“They are like my dreams of them,” said the P.A., “they are like what I feel when I do the pictures. And I only do the best parts. I do middle cuts of Scotch. I know the loch my salmon was caught in, I know the thrill of the angler as he hooks, plays, and lands it, yes, and the thrill of the fish. I have seen it come down in spate——”

“What’s spate?” said Ginger. There were lots of words she didn’t know.

“Sh!” said Gypsy putting his finger on her mouth, for the P.A. was wandering in a world apart.

“Sometimes,” he murmured, “I do it raw, sometimes cooked. When it is raw the blue and silver scales of the skin are more exquisite; but when it is cooked there are thin slices of cucumber with seeds visible in their cool transparent centres. Have you ever felt the beauty of design in the heart of a cucumber?—Once I surrounded the king of fish with a thick layer of mayonnaise.” His nostrils inflated slightly. “And Switzerland!”

“Yes, Switzerland?” repeated Ginger softly. His way of saying it diffused glamour over a country which on the whole had bored her.

“Switzerland! the awful mountains piercing the sapphire with their silver pinnacles—earth’s knives thrust into heaven’s bosom! The cows with their tinkling bells leaping from crag to crag! The crimson sunsets, the purple nights! The still lagoons with their gondolas, the Northern lights, the white palaces——”

“But,” said Ginger.

“Hush!” said Gypsy, taking her on his knee.

“Music over the water ... the siesta at noon ... the click of castanets, the serenata ... the rugged firs be-diamonded with frost, the orange groves in flower ... the Aurora Borealis....” The P.A.’s voice trailed off and his eyes closed.

That night when their friends had gone, Ginger got down the little red pillar-box and looked defiantly at Gypsy. But Gypsy only said, “If you can’t shake it out we’ll prise it open with the fork.”

However, with a good deal of shaking they got out three-and-elevenpence, and that was practically all it contained.

“I’m afraid it won’t quite run to Switzerland,” said Gypsy.

“No,” said Ginger, “but it will to Salmon—Scotch. And I don’t want it to run to Switzerland. It would be simply brutal to send him to Switzerland.”

“Yes, we mustn’t be iconoclasts,” said Gypsy.

“Iconoclasts?” inquired Ginger.

“The antitheses of Cook and Lunn, darling. But salmon—”

“Antitheses?” interpolated Ginger.

“There really isn’t time, darling. Salmon—”

“Then talk in words of one syllable,” said Ginger. “Now what about salmon?”

“Salmon,” said Gypsy, “is safe. It’s only the Canadians who put it in tins that are iconoclasts about salmon. I don’t see how any pavement picture of the very middlest cut could be better than the real thing, do you?”

Ginger agreed that salmon was safe.

But the P.A. didn’t.

When the following night he asked for a sausage, and Ginger shyly offered him a pink slice of Scotch with a coronet of cucumber all the way round, his eyes dilated. But he shook his head.

“My dear,” he said, “do you know what are the two worst things in life?”

“Not salmon and cucumber, surely?” pleaded Ginger.

“No,” said he. “But not having what you want, and having it.” He put the plate from him. “‘Rather endure those evils’—I can’t argue about it,” he said abruptly, “I only know that if your salmon were one whit more or less delicious than mine, I should never chalk salmon on pavement again. And what would then be left me to do for a living?”

“S’rimps,” said the Rag-and-Bone Man.

“Potboiling!” said the P. A. “Can one dream of shrimps? A sausage, please.”

Artists are so hopelessly unpractical.