Joking apart

Justice and Generosity are often supposed to be a pair of excellent friends who have an influence for good on one another’s character. But Generosity has a still closer friend whom she says nothing about, namely Injustice. She cannot always behave as freely as she would like when Justice is there, explaining things and being so absolutely right. But when Injustice has been to tea with her, talking his bad, unscrupulous talk, making everything so gay, and putting the blame on all the wrong people, then Generosity has a free hand and can be as lavish as she likes.

“Come in here for a minute,” said Reginald to Percy one morning in the City, “I want to get this hat ironed.”

There was some delay, and Reginald was both clear and original in what he said. Percy was lost in admiration. The shopman, expert in silence, by long practice, forbore to reply except by deprecating sounds which but served to inspire Reginald to a richer eloquence. At last the hat was brought in, ironed to perfection. Reginald finished his sentence, which glowed with the imaginative splendour of a Turner sunset.

“Oh, we never make any charge, sir, for ironing a hat,” said the expertly silent shopman.

“I don’t agree with you,” said Percy, removing from his coat the little tufts of hair which his friend had flung about in his careless agony. “You had the ball at your toe; then was the time to express a large, generous forgiveness for the unconscionable delay.”

Unless we are unpleasant sort of people we cannot be generous about an injury unless we have first been mollified to some extent; and what more mollifying than to find that the supposed injury has never been done? Percy saw this more clearly than Reginald, who was quite morbid about wanting to be in the right, always.

It is an interesting question what stupid persons find to get in a temper about, because, if you come to think of it, there is nothing in the world except stupidity (our own or other people’s) to make anyone fractious, and, of course, stupid people cannot mind or they wouldn’t be stupid. Good, just people may be angered by the wilful wickedness of some one who is determined not to do the thing required; but anger is not temper. Temper, that horrible itching and pain in one’s social sense, can only be brought on by stupidity, real or imagined, in other people (I count inanimate objects such as shirt studs and hair as people because they can be just as irritating). Consider for a moment the persons who cause temper in a household: husbands, wives, children, and servants. Wives and servants, on an average, probably cause more temper because, on an average, they are stupider than husbands and children. Relations are apt to be very thick-headed—perhaps because blood is thicker than water—almost as bad as tradesmen at the telephone. Friends are practically never stupid, while acquaintances often reach the extreme limit of what it is possible to bear. Compared to relations, who, as we have said, are as bad as tradesmen at the telephone, acquaintances are as bad as the half-witted boy who is usually left in charge of the station-master’s office.

Talking of station-masters, and à propos of wives being stupider than husbands, I feel absolutely certain that no station-master has ever spent such a day as would be inevitable for him if he were a wife, and his staff were nice, hardworking girls.

Imagine a platform full of people waiting for the 9·45 express to Holyhead. “Oh no, m’m,” says the female station-master’s second-in-command, with a silly smile, “the 9·45 hasn’t come up yet. I expect it’ll be just coming now. I’ve sent to tell the engine-driver that you’re waiting, and she says that she was a bit late this morning, as they hadn’t brought the coal.” She observes the infuriated passengers and beams upon them with her mouth open. “It is a pity, isn’t it, keeping them waiting! They do seem upset! Just fancy! What a shame!!” (It will be such a help to everyone connected with this book if all the capable ladies who run their houses to perfection will just begin to skip here, and not say anything more about it; because we know the other side of the question quite well, and the whole thing is hardly serious enough for argument.) When the matter of the 9·45 has been sifted to the bottom, it is found that the coal was only an excuse; the engine-driver really hadn’t an idea of the time. She was just washing out a few handkerchiefs in the waiting-room, where the old lady in charge never noticed her doing it; she thought she had come about the windows.

Or, again, what would happen if a man of business told his clerk to telephone for a hundredweight of grey blotting-paper, and while he wrote at his desk he had to endure this sort of thing (as we do when we ask our maids to send a telephone message): “Is that Hoggins’s? I say, is that Hoggins’s? Hoggins. Aren’t you a stationer? Beppardon?—yes, a stationer—oh, well, we want a hundredweight of blotting-paper at once, please. Beppardon? This is Mr. Beadle’s. Beadle and Sons—J. J. Beadle and Sons—will you send it at once, please. Beppardon? Beadle and Sons—Oh yes, I’m sorry—I thought you knew—44 Dacre Street—Dacre Street—No, not Baker—Dacre. [The man of business growls from his desk, “You didn’t tell him grey blotting-paper.”] What’s that? Beppardon? Yes, Dacre Street. A hundredweight of blotting-paper at once. [The man of business intervenes again, gnashing his teeth, “Grey blotting-paper.”] Beppardon? Pink or white? Oh, either, thank you—yes, please. Good morning. [Rings off.] Beppardon, sir? Did you speak?”

That is the sort of occasion when Generosity does not care to hear what Justice has to say. If an angel came down from heaven and unjustly beat the offending clerk, the man of business would find it easy to say, “Poor fellow, he was doing his best,” and to give him half a crown for a new hat.

If all the efficient females will sit down quite quietly we will add what we were about to say, that men are just as irritating, but they don’t mean so inexcusably well. Take, for instance, the man at an inquiry office; he doesn’t mean well. “I want a ticket to Leamington,” you say. He gives you a first-class ticket, and you remonstrate. “You didn’t say which you wanted,” he retorts, getting impudent at once. “You never asked,” is your very natural reply.

Or, take a conjurer or magic-lantern man. You say, “I want you to be very careful, please, not to do anything to frighten the children. There will be some quite little ones, and they don’t like anything at all alarming.” “Oh, we understand children perfectly, Madam,” he says, “I know exactly the sort of thing you require.”

The first picture that he puts on the screen is of a child awakened from its sleep by an enormous beetle with coloured eyes and a walking-stick. When the commotion and the screaming are over, the smaller children are brought back and sit sobbing on their nurses’ knees, somewhere near the door. The proceedings are a trifle damped, but the babies promise, with a catch in their voices, to be very good as they know it is funny. The next picture shows a happy family party at breakfast. There enters a policeman, who by carrying papa away to prison leaves the family in tears, and the breakfast spilled on the cloth. The arrest is found to be a humorous mistake, and papa is brought home after a painful scene in the prison, but the story proves beyond a doubt that no one is safe, even in their own nursery with both parents present. Here, however, our argument seems to break down, because it is probable that the man meant well.

But in the upper classes take, for instance, Reginald himself. He is sometimes appallingly dense, and can be very intelligently tiresome. He lived, until quite lately, with three unmarried sisters, and sometimes when he came home it happened that none of them had been out, and all were eagerly sociable.

“Well, dear, what’s the news?” Louisa might ask.

“Oh, nothing,” Reginald would reply.

“I thought that cook said she had seen posters about a railway accident,” said Agnes.

“Possibly,” replied Reginald, “there may have been.”

“Didn’t you see anything about it?” asked Theresa wistfully.

“It was all in the paper I got coming home——[Chorus: “Where, oh, where is it?”] Sorry, I left it in the train,” said Reginald, and then he would go off to dress. Or the same thing might happen the other way round. Louisa had been out to tea on Saturday afternoon, and seen the paper at a friend’s house. Reginald had been playing golf and was lying half asleep in his chair.

“Such an awful thing has happened,” announced Louisa, very properly, the moment she came in.

“Oh,” said Reginald.

“A frightful railway accident; four killed, and sixteen taken to the hospital.”

“Who are the four?” Reginald inquired, putting his bottom leg on the top one and knocking out his pipe.

“Oh, no one we know; but just think!” I actually heard all this one afternoon, and it is perfectly true that Reginald replied in the following way:

“At least four people whom you don’t know die every day, anyhow, so to-day is no worse than yesterday.”

Really, it is impossible to know whether they do it on purpose or not; especially Reginald, who is supposed to be clever. However, it all just shows that it is stupidity that makes one get in a temper. There is often nothing to get angry about, but the whole thing gets on one’s nerves. But there is worse to come. So far we have only touched the fringe of what is bad for the temper. We will now visit a land of torture, parts of which are, I believe, untrodden by the male sex.

Has any man ever had to defend his own self—his ego—call it anything you like, from the pursuing eye of a friend? Has he ever been obliged to draw a veil over the process of his living and say politely, “Excuse me, my ego I think?” It has become the custom for people to go about in society more or less clothed, and we get to know our friends fairly well, even when thus attired; indeed, it is unusual to insist on a complete deshabille before we can enjoy a pleasant chat. But it would be very tiresome if we were obliged to cover up our face and hands with a mask and thick gloves because our friends insisted on examining the pores of our skin through a magnifying glass. Some women habitually treat those whom they love to such a dreadful moral scrutiny. Men don’t do it to each other. Has any man ever gone to his work and been met by a fellow labourer who gazed into his eyes and said in a voice that seemed to lift his spinal cord and search beneath it, “You are looking tired to-day.”

Now that is a remark which, except it be made in the most casual and perfunctory manner, is intolerable from any one but a member of the opposite sex, with whom we are passionately in love. Women seldom understand that it is not enough that they love the person whom they examine in this way. The victim must be deeply in love with his tormentor before he can bear it, and even then it is a risk. For of course the rash loveress, emboldened by silence, goes on to ask, “What’s the matter?” and if it happens that the Beloved is wearing boots of which he is immoderately anxious to be rid, the loveress is almost bound to be the victim of Injustice before she obtains anything from Generosity.

All personal remarks are to imaginative persons a heavy strain on endurance. Their imagination at once conjures up a loathly picture of themselves in the circumstances suggested by the remark. It also mentally fits the remark with an answer, and another offensive picture results. For instance, there is the question, “Are you very tired?” The imagined answer, in a tone to fit the question, is, “Yes, dear, very.” Plop! You immediately see yourself as a great, fat, loose body dropping into an arm-chair. You see a luscious smile spread over your imagined face as the kindly solicitous one unlaces your boots—you feel mushy all over. “Damn!” is probably your ungracious reply as you hurriedly put the mask over your normally apparent fatigue. “What the deuce should I be tired for? You’re tired yourself—I’ll take your boots off.” So you divert attention from the anxious scrutiny of commonplace blemishes which in tactful circles “we don’t notice.” Then you feel a brute, and you get in a temper at having been made to feel a brute when you were not really one at all; and you were already in a temper before, because you had seen an incorrect vision of yourself as a juicy fool. And yet there was nothing in any of it to get in a temper about. There are scores of harmless remarks that have this irritating, personal effect. “Is your head very bad?” is a ticklish question for anybody but one’s old nurse to take upon themselves. It is not often that there are more than three people in the world who may ask it. You see, the only possible answer, “Yes, very,” is so silly. What a thing to be asked to say! The next move on the part of the dear enemy can only be, “Would you like anything for it?” and what on earth could one like for it that one has not already done of one’s own accord? Even if we haven’t put on a wet handkerchief with eau-de-Cologne it is unthinkable to have any but one of the possible three persons fiddling with wet things about our head. Our forehead would, to a certainty, be shiny and the hair pushed the wrong way. The wretch would probably smooth back the curls behind our ears, and we should know what a hideous fright we looked and that they loved us just as well like that—No, three people is too many. No one but our nurse who was there from the very first can be suffered to deface our beauty and not know what they have done.

All sensible people will have abandoned this chapter long ago, so I may as well finish it for the morbid delectation of the neurotic, or for those perfectly sane, yet kind-hearted sufferers, who have not yet dared to speak of their sorrows, even to themselves. Let us collect some other impossible, searching remarks and leave them to soak in without comment. “My darling’s eyes look heavy to-day”—(if you are not very careful the adjective may quite well be “puffy”)—“perhaps you have eaten something that has disagreed with you.” I had to write this in a great hurry for fear I thought about it and began to get furious again.

“You must tell me when you are tired of me, and I’ll go.”

Murder is too good for the inquisitress who subjects one to this last torture; and yet she sins in the name of Love, and we dare not complain for fear of angering the god, who employs the weak-minded as often as not. I never heard one man say to another, “Your beard has lost its pretty colour since you were ill. I wonder if you tried vaseline—” or, “I can’t bear to see you wear those trousers; they are too loose on the hips; they make you look quite stout. You don’t mind my saying so, do you?” This would entail a searching finger through the beard or a playful pinch on the hips. No, men don’t do it. They have to bear it sometimes, but they don’t do it. Decidedly the fringe of aggravation is male and female in fairly equal proportion; but when you get to the very heart of it, you will find a lady sitting there as sure as fate. And it is only after you have been thoroughly unjust that you can begin to lavish affection on her with a generous hand.