Joking apart

If there is anything more remarkable than the way in which everything in the world is constantly changing, it is how everything goes on just as usual; just as it has gone on for centuries and centuries. That perpetual business of the toilet dates from the Fall. Sundays have always come round in due course. I expect that the family dinner-table, that uncouth institution, has been going on a long time. Domestic friction occurs in the first pages of Genesis. Who was the first monthly nurse? She probably dates pretty far back. And the only part of the show which we are definitely assured will be done away with is the only bit of it which has any real permanent interest—marrying and giving in marriage. On that showing we may have to face the endless routine of getting up, washing, eating, talking, and going to bed again with all the flavour that there is in any of it—gone! It will be worse than being in a nunnery, because there will be nothing to renounce. So long as one knows that the world, the flesh, and the devil (which are for each sex concentrated in the other) are only separated from us by our own will it is all right; but not to have them prowling about outside within reach, should we change our minds, is unthinkable. It will be just like an everlasting party of pew-openers, for they are the only people I can think of who have no sex. Another curious thing is that Creation—Nature—whatever you like to call her—manages to vary her show continually, while the lords of creation, who are supposed to be better equipped with intelligence, cannot for the life of them think of any new way of doing the same old thing. In Nature the same ideas are repeated, without appearing to be the same. Quite old-fashioned customs like sunrise and sunset, the seasons, the weather, recur as usual, but they are not often monotonous: except in exaggerated places like the Poles or the Equator, where it goes on being dark or light for too long at a time, or only rains once a year, or where the snow doesn’t know when to stop. But these exceptions are just faults. They don’t show the utter lack of resource displayed by the mass of human beings. Think what it means to pass our little span of time in a world where one may ask on any Sunday, “What is there for dinner?” and be told, “Just the usual!” And the usual is the absolutely usual; it is not like the setting of the sun, which goes on as usual, but with differences enough to make the performance always surprising. There is no difference whatever between the beef of one Sunday and that of the next; every bubble on the Yorkshire pudding is in its appointed place—even the burned side is the same—and the tart or pudding (it is immaterial which) is so identical with last Sunday’s that no thinking mind can seriously reject the doctrine of immortality.

“What fruit have you to-day, Mrs. Globe?” you may ask the greengrocer’s wife on Monday.

“Well, m’m, there’s not very much to-day, except the apples; they’re very nice; two-pence-halfpenny the pound.” And yet the shop looks full of fruit. But when you come to look at it closely, it is like the egg in “Alice in Wonderland,” which receded from every shelf to the one above it. The other fruit doesn’t actually melt away under one’s gaze, but it becomes impossible to obtain. It is either a pine-apple at seven-and-sixpence (very nice, but quite out of the question), or nice English grapes (which you can’t make into a serviceable pudding for a family), or some outlandish fruit, two-pence each (which, of course, wouldn’t do), or else the oranges, which we are rather tired of; and besides, they are going off now and are not recommended.

There are some days when I believe all the food in the shops is made of painted cardboard like a doll’s-house dinner-party, because, although there appears to be an endless variety, there is, in fact, nothing that can be bought and eaten by ordinary people. If you examine each item separately, this will become evident. All the things in the windows are frauds, for the reasons described in Mrs. Globe’s shop, and therefore there is nothing for it but to have just the usual; to return up the street again to the butcher. We always “fall back” on his bloated, striped perpetuity.

“What about a nice fowl?” asks some bright spirit, and, indeed, that is true; what about it? except that, even supposing you can afford to spend three-and-sixpence on a quarter-of-an-hour’s amusement for four persons, there is not really any difference between this fowl and the last we had, so we may as well fall back on the butcher, who gives more for the same price. The fish-monger has all sorts of delightful traveller’s samples in the way of foreign birds hanging over the front of his shop, but, if you look into them, they are all plain fowls at heart; and when you get the two-and-sixpenny ones home and undress them, really it would come cheaper and be just as satisfactory to pot a sparrow out of the bathroom window with a catapult. By the way, I wonder that is not done oftener. It would be a change from the neck of mutton, and until they become “just the usual” sparrows, and find their way to the poulterers, we shall not be told that they are very scarce and not in season.

Perhaps the reason why many of us behave so much as usual is that, although there are many varieties of conduct available, we have got into a nervous habit of eliminating most of them from our list of what is possible, just as we reject many eatables which the shops would provide. But in either case it is not actually necessary to fall back on the apples or the butcher or the nice thing to say. There is plenty of variety to be had if people would stop falling back on the “old favourites” either in food or conversation. The dullest permanent officials and ladies in the world have thoughts about what is going on, if they would only allow themselves to think them: thoughts as peculiar to themselves, as different from their neighbours’, as are the curves made by two lambs jumping in the air. But they won’t tell us what these thoughts are. They push them away, saying to themselves, “No, that would never do,” and so they fall back on the apples. That is to say, they dish up the same old remarks in the same old way, until those of us who feel boredom begin to scream and cry and throw the food about. It is dreadful. I have seen people sitting round a table deliberately, wantonly refusing us the thoughts which the good God put into their heads in order that that they might share them with us. Some funny fellow on reading this will discover that it would be capital sport if we all said what we thought. He will picture insults flying like bullets, and all decency at an end. But no one is suggesting that the usual topics of conversation should be changed unless with the consent of all present. All we require is that when the scenery of Dorsetshire or the marriage of one’s son or the book which every one is reading is under discussion, the company should not limit their conversation to what it is “always as nice as anything” to say; that they should not give us “just the usual,” but try some of the other things in the shop, in season and out of season, as we have been taught. The price, of course, may be a little higher; but though some will call us vulgar if we do not fall back on the apples, others will call us dull if we do, so what does it matter? No one, however careful, can be a perfect lady to the whole world. So when Mrs. Beehive asks us what we feel about the scenery of Dorsetshire, let us be as open with her as we should be with our doctor if he suddenly lost his temper, thumped his fist on the table, and, looking us straight between the eyes, thundered, “Damn it all, madam, what have you had for breakfast?” We should tell the truth at once then, without stopping to think whether we had not better leave out the fifth cup of tea. It is just the fifth cup of tea that may be the significant note in an otherwise commonplace breakfast. It is sickeningly dull hearing you tell us, not what you noticed about the scenery of Dorsetshire, but what you decided years ago that it was a nice thing to think about the scenery of any county. The apples were all right in their place, but why fall back on them?

I once had a cook who greeted me every morning with the same remark, “There’s nothing left but just the spinach.” She pronounced it “spinack,” which made the offence worse, and she referred to the fact that we had eaten all the other vegetables in our twice-a-weekly hamper from the country. Conversation among careful people has, as a rule, very little left in it besides “just the spinack.” I mentioned this to Polly one day, and she said at once, without a moment’s reflection: “I have just had a luncheon-party, and there is nothing left of me but just the spinack, I can tell you. Another quarter of an hour and I should have fallen back on the apples.”

“I thought your party was delightful,” said Mrs. Spicer, who happened to be present.

“Of course it was,” said Polly, “because I gave you the best I had. It wasn’t much compared to the intellectual treat you might have had if I happened to be one of the Great Spirits of the Age, but it was all I had in the box; it wasn’t ‘just the spinack.’ I kept nothing from you.”

“But—” Mrs. Spicer seemed about to raise an objection, and hesitated.

“Yes?” said Polly; “don’t hover round your mind, please, rejecting things; we’re not tied to the apples.”

“You said yourself,” Mrs. Spicer reminded her boldly, “that you advised me never to say what I thought about anything—that it was not safe—that the weather was the only possible subject of conversation.”

“I never said that anything else was safe now, did I?” inquired Polly. “But you won’t make your parties a success if you go on the lines I indicated as safe. After all, what is life without risks?—especially in conversation.”

“But I don’t believe I could be interesting anyhow,” said Mrs. Spicer with a forlorn sigh. “I never can think of anything to say.”

“Then don’t say anything,” Polly advised, “and your silence will become so rich and meaty with thought (for every one, even a canary, thinks, there can be no doubt about that), that after a time, when you have quite lost the habit of thinking what to say, a moment may come when some slight emotion will unloose your tongue and it will speak for itself, and——”

“Polly, dear,” I warned her, “you will be so sorry when you have drawn the analogy between what Mrs. Spicer will say and Balaam’s ass; it will be easier to stop now than to explain it away.”

Mrs. Spicer giggled. We know her pretty well now, and she doesn’t mind.

“I wish, Martha, that you would rely a little more on my judgment and less on my knowledge of Scripture,” said Polly. “I had quite forgotten the story you refer to. What was in my mind was a vision of what it would be like if the things we call ‘still life’ suddenly spoke and told us how the world looked to them. It would be a delightful change from hearing how it looks to clever men. As it is, we have no missing link between the unusual sincerity of some of us and the usual insincerity of the rest. What we want is the truth—the whole truth—about what people with faces like turbot and macaroons think. I should stay awake all night with the excitement of knowing Mrs. Beehive as her Maker knows her. Probably she could throw a great deal of light on all sorts of obvious things that complicated people, like Reginald, miss owing to being tangled up in their own intelligence.”

“By the way,” said Mrs. Spicer, “talking of food, isn’t it absurd how we keep on with the same dishes when the cookery books are full of different ways of cooking everything? But, somehow, if you look through the books, there are only about three things one can have, because the others either want ingredients that we haven’t got in the house, and that are not worth buying for once, or they have to be prepared the day before, or they use too many separate pans, and cook grumbles about the washing-up; but it does seem unenterprising, as you say.”

“Considering, my dear, that since the time of Noah, or thereabouts, we have been going on as usual and found it less trouble, it is not likely”—said Polly sententiously—“it is not likely, so far as I can judge by the look of you, that you will return our calls by moonlight, or go to church on a week-day, or tell me which of us you would rather ran away with Mr. Spicer——”

“But you don’t do those sort of things yourself,” protested Mrs. Spicer.

Polly said, “Excuse me a moment,” and went to answer the telephone.

“I never knew Polly do anything actually unusual,” I said to Mrs. Spicer, “but she seems to do the usual things because they have just occurred to her for the first time as a good thing to do; not because there is nothing else she can do.”

“Just fancy!” said Polly, coming back; “Reginald says that the Henrys are dreadfully upset because their cook is going to marry the chauffeur, and she won’t be able to stay on with them. It is just what always happens, isn’t it?”

“Just the usual,” I agreed, “unless you care to go to the expense of a Morganatic alliance for the chauffeur.”

We all agreed that there was no other way out of it.