On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in
shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and
typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the
elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the
London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the
director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the
flower business. He, being a humorist, explained to them the method of
the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman
who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined
the information. He suggested that they should combine the London
School with Kew Gardens. Eliza, to whom the procedure of the Dickensian
gentleman seemed perfectly correct (as in fact it was) and not in the
least funny (which was only her ignorance) took his advice with entire
gravity. But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a
request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton's verse,
was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand,
that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally
incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton's
words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the
task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity,
concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting
disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and
destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely
uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal
beauty, and spending three times as much on stationery as anyone else
because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to
her. She could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it
made the margins all wrong.
Their commercial school days were a period of disgrace and despair for
the young couple. They seemed to be learning nothing about flower
shops. At last they gave it up as hopeless, and shook the dust of the
shorthand schools, and the polytechnics, and the London School of
Economics from their feet for ever. Besides, the business was in some
mysterious way beginning to take care of itself. They had somehow
forgotten their objections to employing other people. They came to the
conclusion that their own way was the best, and that they had really a
remarkable talent for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled for
some years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at his bankers
to make up their deficits, found that the provision was unnecessary:
the young people were prospering. It is true that there was not quite
fair play between them and their competitors in trade. Their week-ends
in the country cost them nothing, and saved them the price of their
Sunday dinners; for the motor car was the Colonel's; and he and Higgins
paid the hotel bills. Mr. F. Hill, florist and greengrocer (they soon
discovered that there was money in asparagus; and asparagus led to
other vegetables), had an air which stamped the business as classy; and
in private life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill, Esquire. Not that
there was any swank about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had been
christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked like anything.