Joking apart

“It wouldn’t be a bad plan, dear,” Mrs. Henry once said sarcastically to her husband, “if you were to start a ‘What the devil?’ club; you use the expression so frequently.” The club was never founded, of course, but it wouldn’t have been at all a bad plan. It would tend to clear the mind. For instance, say that at breakfast the eggs were a little underdone. If instead of exclaiming, “What the devil has cook been about?” you reflect, “What the devil does it matter whether these eggs stick together in the shell or pour over the edge? The fact that the eggs are there, and are more or less edible is enough for me,” just think of the different complexion it would put on the whole affair. But in fact it wouldn’t do, because different people have such different ideas about what they describe as “the things that matter.” The last time I called on Mrs. Henry she seemed very pleased about having had this idea of the club, and was quite excited at having used the word “devil.” She had a brother staying with her at the time, and I think it was partly his robust influence that made her break out and be so racy.

“Henry’s perfectly right, Maria, though he doesn’t know it,” said this brother. “There must be at least fifty occasions a day for saying ‘What the devil?’ in your house.”

“Whatever do you mean, William?” said Mrs. Henry indulgently. He is her favourite brother.

“I’ll show you as we go along,” he answered, “I dare say the opportunities will turn up.”

“I can’t believe that France will go to war,” observed Mrs. Henry a little later.

“What the devil does that matter?” replied William. “I beg your pardon, Maria, but it was your own idea. You see it is really of no consequence whether you believe it or not; it won’t alter the fact.”

“Oh, of course, if you look at it like that, William,” said Mrs. Henry a little huffily, “it doesn’t matter what you believe. You might apply your theory to anything.”

William said calmly, “It doesn’t matter, except that your beliefs affect your character; they don’t affect facts.”

“In that case, I suppose you wouldn’t have sided with Mr. Sprigger who used to be curate here. He left the Church of England because he couldn’t bring himself to believe the story of John the Baptist and the locusts. He had had a medical training to begin with, as he thought of being a doctor, and he was convinced that some particular part of the locust—I forget which it was exactly—would have been absolutely impossible to digest.”

“There you are!” said William. “Either John digested those locusts or he didn’t. You can’t possibly alter the fact anyhow, and thinking about them was bad for Mr. Sprigger, because it got him into the habit of taking a lawyer’s view of life; arguing for the argument’s sake.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Mrs. Henry coldly.

“Well, a lawyer will argue that a man is guilty or not guilty, whichever way he is paid to, won’t he?” said William. “He doesn’t want to get at the facts; indeed, he refuses to be told sometimes for fear the knowledge should bias his mind. Now Sprigger can’t get at his facts, which is the same as if he wouldn’t, and so he can only be arguing for argument’s sake, and he will never develop his soul in that way.”

“Mr. William,” I was moved to suggest later, “if I put my foot through that picture you have been working at this morning, would you say, ‘what the devil did it matter?’”

“No, certainly not, because it would matter.”

“Of course it would be very annoying,” said Mrs. Henry, “but I can’t see, myself, that it would matter more than that Mr. Sprigger’s beliefs should be undermined. You talk about facts, but Henry said only the other day, that your pictures were misrepresentations of fact.”

“Did he?” said William. “I’ll have to talk that over with him when he comes in. Anyhow, I don’t see what the devil it matters what Henry or anybody else thinks about my pictures so long as they don’t put their feet through them. They are definite creations—facts.”

“Henry says not,” she insisted. Henry came in just then and they began all over again.

“Well, now, about babies——” William was still pursuing his argument when we went in to dinner.

“Dear me, William,” said Mrs. Henry tightly. William waved her aside with his knife. “Now I think, for my part,” he said in loud, burly tones, “that it doesn’t matter who the father is——”

“You needn’t wait, Janet, we’ll ring,” said Mrs. Henry.

William paid the girl the graceful compliment of waiting until the door closed behind her, and then added, “So long as the thing is a fact, it doesn’t matter a hang how it became so. The question is, there’s a baby; that’s all that is of interest to us, isn’t it, so long as it is strong and well?”

“Henry, dear, do you care for more beetroot?” said his wife, and then there was silence.

“Then there’s another silly thing you women do to confound issues and obscure points,” continued William. “When some one comes to the place—some poor girl newly married—and you are asked to call on her, the first thing you ask is, ‘And—er—who was she?’ Now what the devil does it matter who she was? Who is she? you might perhaps ask if you want to know, though it is not of much importance. All you want to find out, to my thinking, is just this: is she, or is she not?”

“Is she, or is she not what, William?” his sister asked almost impatiently. “I don’t follow you.”

“Good Lord! is she what! That’s just it. Is she anything, my dear girl; is she anything with human blood, and bones, and a presentable face in front of it, or is she simply a mass of slowly decaying matter, endowed with the gift of moving from one chair to another? That’s the very thing I want to know.”

“What girl in particular were you speaking of, William?” said Mrs. Henry with forced patience. “If I know to whom you refer, perhaps I shall be able to tell you whether she is—what did you say? decaying? or not. Cheese, Henry?”

We were destined to see a good deal of William. He was trying to run some scheme or other in the neighbourhood, and he went into rooms for a time. He was asked out a good deal at first, but not so much later on. To me he became a sort of Eulenspiegel, and I delighted to hear of his progress in the town. But I believe that was not the light in which he regarded himself; he quite intended to be a serious reformer. One good thing he did; he stimulated industry in the neighbourhood. Ladies almost invariably took up a piece of knitting or work of some kind when he came near them, and men would go off to their studies, saying, “I’ll leave you to have a chat with my wife while I just finish a bit of work.” It interested him more than anything to find out what were the various landmarks in their past lives to which other people attached importance. There were some, he discovered, who thought that what they called “sound principles” were of importance, and when he pressed them to describe by what process a principle became sound, they nearly always said that it was sound if the best men held it. It took him many an hour’s hard work running the old ladies of Millport to ground on the point who the best men were. They dodged and doubled, burrowed and soared, fluttering, on to fences, which gave way under them when they sat for a moment to take breath. They took sanctuary in all sorts of funny little temples, which they had built, from time to time, of precepts gathered here and there. I remember seeing Mrs. Beehive flee, breathless, into one of these, and remain for a long time, while William stood, so to speak, baying at the door. It was the temple of “Woman being a good influence over man.”

“Now, seriously,” I heard William say, “do you think that you are a good influence for your husband to have about him? Remember, he is a very shrewd man, and knows what he is about.”

Mrs. Beehive for the moment completely filled the temple, she swelled so much as she replied, “I hope, indeed, that I am, Mr.—er—”

“Why? in what way?” demanded deep-throated William.

“It is not for me to describe in what way,” answered Mrs. Beehive, “but there are many ways. Perhaps you will find out some day for yourself when you are married!” she added, artfully drawing another bolt across the door.

He went round to the back of the temple and shouted through the window, “Isn’t it more likely that the influence of the Almighty keeps your husband friendly with you, rather than that your influence keeps him friendly with the Almighty? Not of course that it matters either way; the result is the same. He is a good honest man. But it is worth getting at the facts.”

“Wait till you are married,” repeated Mrs. Beehive shrilly, and I have no doubt that soon he had her fluttering before him once more, but I was obliged to leave them.

“What the devil do these people think they are doing, leading the moral tone of the town?” he once said to Mrs. Henry. “Women who don’t understand the rudiments of morality.”

“Well, I am sure the men are no better, William,” said poor Mrs. Henry, who, as I have said, really admires her brother, and would like her sex to stand well with him.

“They are better in this way,” observed William, “that they treat their own morals as what they are, manners suitable and appropriate to the society in which they live; they don’t take them seriously as you do, as if they were ordained by Divine inspiration.”

“Do you mean to say that Henry, for instance, is not in earnest in the things which he believes to be right?” said Mrs. Henry, indignant at last. “Really, William, I can’t make you out at all.”

“Henry’s all right,” said William, “leave him out of it. What I mean is that when I see that woman, Beehive, for instance——”

“Oh, William, do be careful. I feel sure they can hear in the pantry——”

“That woman, Beehive, I repeat,” pursued William, “walking about and pretending that she knows for certain that it is wrong for other people to keep later hours and to use more varied language than she herself cares to do, I feel that I must somehow compel her to look at the facts, and to justify the high moral position she has usurped, before I can allow her to remain seated there unchallenged.”

William’s progress through the town was as easily marked as that of a tornado. I could always track him by a glance at the faces of people in the streets. Where he had passed there would inevitably be one or more injured-looking persons, readjusting their expressions and muttering indignantly to themselves. Sometimes a knot of women would be seen gibbering at a street corner, their individual disorders gathering them together by a natural process like that which goes to form an abscess. And when Mrs. Beehive was so far off as to be scarcely visible to the naked eye, I could tell by the angle at which she rolled whether or no she had fallen in with William.

Dear William and his facts were most enjoyable when taken together with Henry’s quiet visions, and when Mrs. Beehive crossed the field of their united activities there was indeed a rare sight. For William, in his relentless pursuit of Mrs. Beehive’s fallacies, had overlooked one most important fact, that so fast as you disperse matter in one direction it gathers together again in another. Henry was a persevering visionary, and no sooner had William scattered Mrs. Beehive to the four winds, than Henry built her up again, so that in the end one was forced to the conclusion that the poor lady had no independent existence at all. When Henry expressed his belief in any of her assertions, she swelled larger than any frog; and when William ran at her in order to get at the facts, she crumbled to pieces like any other act of faith. The marvel is that William himself lived with a vitality independent of facts, and no “getting at the facts” had any destructive power over Henry. But that, as William explained when it was pointed out to him, was just as it should be. “There is better stuff in me,” he assured us, “than the mere fact of my existence, and the fact about Henry is that he is a good man. You can’t do away with that.”

Mrs. Beehive overheard this unintelligible remark, and immediately, I believe, put on more weight.