Is there anything left for her to learn?
Meanwhile, however, she is having a good time—some people think too good a time. She wants the best of both. She demands the joys of independence together with freedom from all work—slavery she calls it. The servants are not to be allowed to bother her, the children are not to be allowed to bother her, her husband is not to be allowed to bother her. She is to be free to lead the higher life. My dear lady, we all want to lead the higher life. I don’t want to write these articles. I want somebody else to bother about my rates and taxes, my children’s boots, while I sit in an easy-chair and dream about the wonderful books I am going to write, if only a stupid public would let me. Tommy Smith of Brixton feels that he was intended for higher things. He does not want to be wasting his time in an office from nine to six adding up figures. His proper place in life is that of Prime Minister or Field Marshal: he feels it. Do you think the man has no yearning for higher things? Do you think we like the office, the shop, the factory? We ought to be writing poetry, painting pictures, the whole world admiring us. You seem to imagine your man goes off every morning to a sort of City picnic, has eight hours’ fun—which he calls work—and then comes home to annoy you with chatter about dinner.
It is the old fable reversed; man said woman had nothing to do all day but to enjoy herself. Making a potato pie! What sort of work was that? Making a potato pie was a lark; anybody could make a potato pie.
So the woman said, “Try it,” and took the man’s spade and went out into the field, and left him at home to make that pie.
The man discovered that potato pies took a bit more making than he had reckoned—found that running the house and looking after the children was not quite the merry pastime he had argued. Man was a fool.
Now it is the woman who talks without thinking. How did she like hoeing the potato patch? Hard work, was it not, my dear lady? Made your back ache? It came on to rain and you got wet.
I don’t see that it very much matters which of you hoes the potato patch, which of you makes the potato pie. Maybe the hoeing of the patch demands more muscle—is more suited to the man. Maybe the making of the pie may be more in your department. But, as I have said, I cannot see that this matter is of importance. The patch has to be hoed, the pie to be cooked; the one cannot do the both. Settle it between you, and, having settled it, agree to do each your own work free from this everlasting nagging.
I know, personally, three ladies who have exchanged the woman’s work for the man’s. One was deserted by her husband, and left with two young children. She hired a capable woman to look after the house, and joined a ladies’ orchestra as pianist at two pounds a week. She now earns four, and works twelve hours a day. The husband of the second fell ill. She set him to write letters and run errands, which was light work that he could do, and started a dressmaker’s business. The third was left a widow without means. She sent her three children to boarding-school, and opened a tea-room. I don’t know how they talked before, but I know that they do not talk now as though earning the income was a sort of round game.
When they have tried it the other way round.
On the Continent they have gone deliberately to work, one would imagine, to reverse matters. Abroad woman is always where man ought to be, and man where most ladies would prefer to meet with women. The ladies garde-robe is superintended by a superannuated sergeant of artillery. When I want to curl my moustache, say, I have to make application to a superb golden-haired creature, who stands by and watches me with an interested smile. I would be much happier waited on by the superannuated sergeant, and my wife tells me she could very well spare him. But it is the law of the land. I remember the first time I travelled with my daughter on the Continent. In the morning I was awakened by a piercing scream from her room. I struggled into my pyjamas, and rushed to her assistance. I could not see her. I could see nothing but a muscular-looking man in a blue blouse with a can of hot water in one hand and a pair of boots in the other. He appeared to be equally bewildered with myself at the sight of the empty bed. From a cupboard in the corner came a wail of distress:
“Oh, do send that horrid man away. What’s he doing in my room?”
I explained to her afterwards that the chambermaid abroad is always an active and willing young man. The foreign girl fills in her time bricklaying and grooming down the horses. It is a young and charming lady who serves you when you enter the tobacconist’s. She doesn’t understand tobacco, is unsympathetic; with Mr. Frederic Harrison, regards smoking as a degrading and unclean habit; cannot see, herself, any difference between shag and Mayblossom, seeing that they are both the same price; thinks you fussy. The corset shop is run by a most presentable young man in a Vandyck beard. The wife runs the restaurant; the man does the cooking, and yet the woman has not reached freedom from bother.
A brutal suggestion.
It sounds brutal, but perhaps woman was not intended to live free from all bothers. Perhaps even the higher life—the skirt-dancing and the poker work—has its bothers. Perhaps woman was intended to take her share of the world’s work—of the world’s bothers.
CHAPTER XII
Why I hate Heroes.
When I was younger, reading the popular novel used to make me sad. I find it vexes others also. I was talking to a bright young girl upon the subject not so very long ago.
“I just hate the girl in the novel,” she confessed. “She makes me feel real bad. If I don’t think of her I feel pleased with myself, and good; but when I read about her—well, I’m crazy. I would not mind her being smart, sometimes. We can all of us say the right thing, now and then. This girl says them straight away, all the time. She don’t have to dig for them even; they come crowding out of her. There never happens a time when she stands there feeling like a fool and knowing that she looks it. As for her hair: ’pon my word, there are days when I believe it is a wig. I’d like to get behind her and give it just one pull. It curls of its own accord. She don’t seem to have any trouble with it. Look at this mop of mine. I’ve been working at it for three-quarters of an hour this morning; and now I would not laugh, not if you were to tell me the funniest thing, you’d ever heard, for fear it would come down again. As for her clothes, they make me tired. She don’t possess a frock that does not fit her to perfection; she doesn’t have to think about them. You would imagine she went into the garden and picked them off a tree. She just slips it on and comes down, and then—my stars! All the other women in the room may just as well go to bed and get a good night’s rest for all the chance they’ve got. It isn’t that she’s beautiful. From what they tell you about her, you might fancy her a freak. Looks don’t appear to matter to her; she gets there anyhow. I tell you she just makes me boil.”
Allowing for the difference between the masculine and feminine outlook, this is precisely how I used to feel when reading of the hero. He was not always good; sometimes he hit the villain harder than he had intended, and then he was sorry—when it was too late, blamed himself severely, and subscribed towards the wreath. Like the rest of us, he made mistakes; occasionally married the wrong girl. But how well he did everything!—does still for the matter of that, I believe. Take it that he condescends to play cricket! He never scores less than a hundred—does not know how to score less than a hundred, wonders how it could be done, supposing, for example, you had an appointment and wanted to catch an early train. I used to play cricket myself, but I could always stop at ten or twenty. There have been times when I have stopped at even less.
It is the same with everything he puts his hand to. Either he does not care for boating at all, or, as a matter of course, he pulls stroke in the University Boat-race; and then takes the train on to Henley and wins the Diamond Sculls so easily that it hardly seems worth while for the other fellow to have started. Were I living in Novel-land, and had I entered for the Diamond Sculls, I should put it to my opponent before the word was given to us to go.
“One minute!” I should have called out to him. “Are you the hero of this novel, or, like myself, only one of the minor characters? Because, if you are the hero you go on; don’t you wait for me. I shall just pull as far as the boathouse and get myself a cup of tea.”
Because it always seems to be his Day.
There is no sense of happy medium about the hero of the popular novel. He cannot get astride a horse without its going off and winning a steeplechase against the favourite. The crowd in Novel-land appears to have no power of observation. It worries itself about the odds, discusses records, reads the nonsense published by the sporting papers. Were I to find myself on a racecourse in Novel-land I should not trouble about the unessential; I should go up to the bookie who looked as if he had the most money, and should say to him:
“Don’t shout so loud; you are making yourself hoarse. Just listen to me. Who’s the hero of this novel? Oh, that’s he, is it? The heavy-looking man on the little brown horse that keeps coughing and is suffering apparently from bone spavin? Well, what are the odds against his winning by ten lengths? A thousand to one! Very well! Have you got a bag?—Good. Here’s twenty-seven pounds in gold and eighteen shillings in silver. Coat and waistcoat, say another ten shillings. Shirt and trousers—it’s all right, I’ve got my pyjamas on underneath—say seven and six. Boots—we won’t quarrel—make it five bob. That’s twenty-nine pounds and sixpence, isn’t it? In addition here’s a mortgage on the family estate, which I’ve had made out in blank, an I O U for fourteen pounds which has been owing to me now for some time, and this bundle of securities which, strictly speaking, belong to my Aunt Jane. You keep that little lot till after the race, and we will call it in round figures, five hundred pounds.”
That single afternoon would thus bring me in five hundred thousand pounds—provided the bookie did not blow his brains out.
Backers in Novel-land do not seem to me to know their way about. If the hero of the popular novel swims at all, it is not like an ordinary human being that he does it. You never meet him in a swimming-bath; he never pays ninepence, like the rest of us, for a machine. He goes out at uncanny hours, generally accompanied by a lady friend, with whom the while swimming he talks poetry and cracks jokes. Some of us, when we try to talk in the sea, fill ourselves up with salt water. This chap lies on his back and carols, and the wild waves, seeing him, go round the other way. At billiards he can give the average sharper forty in a hundred. He does not really want to play; he does it to teach these bad men a lesson. He has not handled a cue for years. He picked up the game when a young man in Australia, and it seems to have lingered with him.
He does not have to get up early and worry dumb-bells in his nightshirt; he just lies on a sofa in an elegant attitude and muscle comes to him. If his horse declines to jump a hedge, he slips down off the animal’s back and throws the poor thing over; it saves argument. If he gets cross and puts his shoulder to the massive oaken door, we know there is going to be work next morning for the carpenter. Maybe he is a party belonging to the Middle Ages. Then when he reluctantly challenges the crack fencer of Europe to a duel, our instinct is to call out and warn his opponent.
“You silly fool,” one feels one wants to say; “why, it is the hero of the novel! You take a friend’s advice while you are still alive, and get out of it anyway—anyhow. Apologize—hire a horse and cart, do something. You’re not going to fight a duel, you’re going to commit suicide.”
If the hero is a modern young man, and has not got a father, or has only something not worth calling a father, then he comes across a library—anybody’s library does for him. He passes Sir Walter Scott and the “Arabian Nights,” and makes a bee-line for Plato; it seems to be an instinct with him. By help of a dictionary he worries it out in the original Greek. This gives him a passion for Greek.
When he has romped through the Greek classics he plays about among the Latins. He spends most of his spare time in that library, and forgets to go to tea.
Because he always “gets there,” without any trouble.
That is the sort of boy he is. How I used to hate him! If he has a proper sort of father, then he goes to college. He does no work: there is no need for him to work: everything seems to come to him. That was another grievance of mine against him. I always had to work a good deal, and very little came of it. He fools around doing things that other men would be sent down for; but in his case the professors love him for it all the more. He is the sort of man who can’t do wrong. A fortnight before the examination he ties a wet towel round his head. That is all we hear about it. It seems to be the towel that does it. Maybe, if the towel is not quite up to its work, he will help things on by drinking gallons of strong tea. The tea and the towel combined are irresistible: the result is always the senior wranglership.
I used to believe in that wet towel and that strong tea. Lord! the things I used to believe when I was young. They would make an Encyclopædia of Useless Knowledge. I wonder if the author of the popular novel has ever tried working with a wet towel round his or her head: I have. It is difficult enough to move a yard, balancing a dry towel. A heathen Turk may have it in his blood to do so: the ordinary Christian has not got the trick of it. To carry about a wet towel twisted round one’s head needs a trained acrobat. Every few minutes the wretched thing works loose. In darkness and in misery, you struggle to get your head out of a clammy towel that clings to you almost with passion. Brain power is wasted in inventing names for that towel—names expressive of your feelings with regard to it. Further time is taken up before the glass, fixing the thing afresh.
You return to your books in the wrong temper, the water trickles down your nose, runs in rivulets down your back. Until you have finally flung the towel out of the window and rubbed yourself dry, work is impossible. The strong tea always gave me indigestion, and made me sleepy. Until I had got over the effects of the tea, attempts at study were useless.
Because he’s so damned clever.
But the thing that still irritates me most against the hero of the popular novel is the ease with which he learns a modern foreign language. Were he a German waiter, a Swiss barber, or a Polish photographer, I would not envy him; these people do not have to learn a language. My idea is that they boil down a dictionary, and take two table-spoonsful each night before going to bed. By the time the bottle is finished they have the language well into their system. But he is not. He is just an ordinary Anglo-Saxon, and I don’t believe in him. I walk about for years with dictionaries in my pocket. Weird-looking ladies and gentlemen gesticulate and rave at me for months. I hide myself in lonely places, repeating idioms to myself out loud, in the hope that by this means they will come readily to me if ever I want them, which I never do. And, after all this, I don’t seem to know very much. This irritating ass, who has never left his native suburb, suddenly makes up his mind to travel on the Continent. I find him in the next chapter engaged in complicated psychological argument with French or German savants. It appears—the author had forgotten to mention it before—that one summer a French, or German, or Italian refugee, as the case may happen to be, came to live in the hero’s street: thus it is that the hero is able to talk fluently in the native language of that unhappy refugee.
I remember a melodrama visiting a country town where I was staying. The heroine and child were sleeping peacefully in the customary attic. For some reason not quite clear to me, the villain had set fire to the house. He had been complaining through the three preceding acts of the heroine’s coldness; maybe it was with some idea of warming her. Escape by way of the staircase was impossible. Each time the poor girl opened the door a flame came in and nearly burned her hair off. It seemed to have been waiting for her.
“Thank God!” said the lady, hastily wrapping the child in a sheet, “that I was brought up a wire walker.”
Without a moment’s hesitation she opened the attic window and took the nearest telegraph wire to the opposite side of the street.
In the same way, apparently, the hero of the popular novel, finding himself stranded in a foreign land, suddenly recollects that once upon a time he met a refugee, and at once begins to talk. I have met refugees myself. The only thing they have ever taught me is not to leave my brandy flask about.
And, finally, because I don’t believe he’s true.
I don’t believe in these heroes and heroines that cannot keep quiet in a foreign language they have taught themselves in an old-world library. My fixed idea is that they muddle along like the rest of us, surprised that so few people understand them, begging everyone they meet not to talk so quickly. These brilliant conversations with foreign philosophers! These passionate interviews with foreign countesses! They fancy they have had them.
I crossed once with an English lady from Boulogne to Folkestone. At Folkestone a little French girl—anxious about her train—asked us a simple question. My companion replied to it with an ease that astonished herself. The little French girl vanished; my companion sighed.
“It’s so odd,” said my companion, “but I seem to know quite a lot of French the moment I get back to England.”
CHAPTER XIII
How to be Healthy and Unhappy.
“They do say,” remarked Mrs. Wilkins, as she took the cover off the dish and gave a finishing polish to my plate with the cleanest corner of her apron, “that ’addicks, leastways in May, ain’t, strictly speaking, the safest of food. But then, if you listen to all they say, it seems to me, we’d have to give up victuals altogether.”
“The haddock, Mrs. Wilkins,” I replied, “is a savoury and nourishing dish, the ‘poor man’s steak’ I believe it is commonly called. When I was younger, Mrs. Wilkins, they were cheaper. For twopence one could secure a small specimen, for fourpence one of generous proportions. In the halcyon days of youth, when one’s lexicon contained not the word failure (it has crept into later editions, Mrs. Wilkins, the word it was found was occasionally needful), the haddock was of much comfort and support to me, a very present help in time of trouble. In those days a kind friend, without intending it, nearly brought about my death by slow starvation. I had left my umbrella in an omnibus, and the season was rainy. The kind rich friend gave me a new umbrella; it was a rich man’s umbrella; we made an ill-assorted pair. Its handle was of ivory, imposing in appearance, ornamented with a golden snake.
The unsympathetic Umbrella.
“Following my own judgment I should have pawned that umbrella, purchased one more suited to my state in life, and ‘blued’ the difference. But I was fearful of offending my one respectable acquaintance, and for weeks struggled on, hampered by this plutocratic appendage. The humble haddock was denied to me. Tied to this imposing umbrella, how could I haggle with fishmongers for haddocks. At first sight of me—or, rather, of my umbrella—they flew to icy cellars, brought up for my inspection soles at eighteenpence a pound, recommended me prime parts of salmon, which my landlady would have fried in a pan reeking with the mixed remains of pork chops, rashers of bacon and cheese. It was closed to me, the humble coffee shop, where for threepence I could have strengthened my soul with half a pint of cocoa and four “doorsteps”—satisfactory slices of bread smeared with a yellow grease that before the days of County Council inspectors they called butter. You know of them, Mrs. Wilkins? At sight of such nowadays I should turn up my jaded nose. But those were the days of my youth, Mrs. Wilkins. The scent of a thousand hopes was in my nostrils: so they smelt good to me. The fourpenny beefsteak pie, satisfying to the verge of repletion; the succulent saveloy, were not for the owner of the ivory-handled umbrella. On Mondays and Tuesdays, perhaps, I could enjoy life at the rate of five hundred a year—clean serviette a penny extra, and twopence to the waiter, whose income must have been at least four times my own. But from Wednesday to Saturday I had to wander in the wilderness of back streets and silent squares dinnerless, where there were not even to be found locusts and wild honey.
“It was, as I have said, a rainy season, and an umbrella of some sort was a necessity. Fortunately—or I might not be sitting here, Mrs. Wilkins, talking to you now—my one respectable acquaintance was called away to foreign lands, and that umbrella I promptly put ‘up the spout.’ You understand me?”
Mrs. Wilkins admitted she did, but was of opinion that twenty-five per cent., to say nothing of the halfpenny for the ticket every time, was a wicked imposition.
“It did not trouble me, Mrs. Wilkins,” I replied, “in this particular instance. It was my determination never to see that umbrella again. The young man behind the counter seemed suspicious, and asked where I got it from. I told him that a friend had given it to me.”
“‘Did he know that he had given it to you?” demanded the young man.
“Upon which I gave him a piece of my mind concerning the character of those who think evil of others, and he gave me five and six, and said he should know me again; and I purchased an umbrella suited to my rank and station, and as fine a haddock as I have ever tasted with the balance, which was sevenpence, for I was feeling hungry.
“The haddock is an excellent fish, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “and if, as you observe, we listened to all that was said we’d be hungrier at forty, with a balance to our credit at the bank, than ever we were at twenty, with ‘no effects’ beyond a sound digestion.”
A Martyr to Health.
“There was a gent in Middle Temple Lane,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “as I used to do for. It’s my belief as ’e killed ’imself worrying twenty-four hours a day over what ’e called ’is ’ygiene. Leastways ’e’s dead and buried now, which must be a comfort to ’imself, feeling as at last ’e’s out of danger. All ’is time ’e spent taking care of ’imself—didn’t seem to ’ave a leisure moment in which to live. For ’alf an hour every morning ’e’d lie on ’is back on the floor, which is a draughty place, I always ’old, at the best of times, with nothing on but ’is pyjamas, waving ’is arms and legs about, and twisting ’imself into shapes unnatural to a Christian. Then ’e found out that everything ’e’d been doing on ’is back was just all wrong, so ’e turned over and did tricks on ’is stomach—begging your pardon for using the word—that you’d ’ave thought more fit and proper to a worm than to a man. Then all that was discovered to be a mistake. There don’t seem nothing certain in these matters. That’s the awkward part of it, so it seems to me. ’E got ’imself a machine, by means of which ’e’d ’ang ’imself up to the wall, and behave for all the world like a beetle with a pin stuck through ’im, poor thing. It used to give me the shudders to catch sight of ’im through the ’alf-open door. For that was part of the game: you ’ad to ’ave a current of air through the room, the result of which was that for six months out of the year ’e’d be coughing and blowing ’is nose from morning to night. It was the new treatment, so ’e’d explain to me. You got yourself accustomed to draughts so that they didn’t ’urt you, and if you died in the process that only proved that you never ought to ’ave been born.
“Then there came in this new Japanese business, and ’e’d ’ire a little smiling ’eathen to chuck ’im about ’is room for ’alf an hour every morning after breakfast. It got on my nerves after a while ’earing ’im being bumped on the floor every minute, or flung with ’is ’ead into the fire-place. But ’e always said it was doing ’im good. ’E’d argue that it freshened up ’is liver. It was ’is liver that ’e seemed to live for—didn’t appear to ’ave any other interest in life. It was the same with ’is food. One year it would be nothing but meat, and next door to raw at that. One of them medical papers ’ad suddenly discovered that we were intended to be a sort of wild beast. The wonder to me is that ’e didn’t go out ’unting chickens with a club, and bring ’em ’ome and eat ’em on the mat without any further fuss. For drink it would be boiling water that burnt my fingers merely ’andling the glass. Then some other crank came out with the information that every other crank was wrong—which, taken by itself, sounds natural enough—that meat was fatal to the ’uman system. Upon that ’e becomes all at once a raging, tearing vegetarian, and trouble enough I ’ad learning twenty different ways of cooking beans, which didn’t make, so far as I could ever see, the slightest difference—beans they were, and beans they tasted like, whether you called them ragoût à la maison, or cutlets à la Pompadour. But it seemed to please ’im.
He was never pig-headed.
“Then vegetarianism turned out to be the mistake of our lives. It seemed we made an error giving up monkeys’ food. That was our natural victuals; nuts with occasional bananas. As I used to tell ’im, if that was so, then for all we ’ad got out of it we might just as well have stopped up a tree—saved rent and shoe leather. But ’e was one of that sort that don’t seem able to ’elp believing everything they read in print. If one of those papers ’ad told ’im to live on the shells and throw away the nuts, ’e’d have made a conscientious endeavour to do so, contending that ’is failure to digest them was merely the result of vicious training—didn’t seem to ’ave any likes or dislikes of ’is own. You might ’ave thought ’e was just a bit of public property made to be experimented upon.
“One of the daily papers interviewed an old gent, as said ’e was a ’undred, and I will say from ’is picture as any’ow ’e looked it. ’E said it was all the result of never ’aving swallowed anything ’ot, upon which my gentleman for a week lives on cold porridge, if you’ll believe me; although myself I’d rather ’ave died at fifty and got it over. Then another paper dug up from somewhere a sort of animated corpse that said was a ’undred and two, and attributed the unfortunate fact to ’is always ’aving ’ad ’is food as ’ot as ’e could swallow it. A bit of sense did begin to dawn upon ’im then, but too late in the day, I take it. ’E’d played about with ’imself too long. ’E died at thirty-two, looking to all appearance sixty, and you can’t say as ’ow it was the result of not taking advice.”
Only just in time.
“On this subject of health we are much too ready to follow advice,” I agreed. “A cousin of mine, Mrs. Wilkins, had a wife who suffered occasionally from headache. No medicine relieved her of them—not altogether. And one day by chance she met a friend who said: ‘Come straight with me to Dr. Blank,’ who happened to be a specialist famous for having invented a new disease that nobody until the year before had ever heard of. She accompanied her friend to Dr. Blank, and in less than ten minutes he had persuaded her that she had got this new disease, and got it badly; and that her only chance was to let him cut her open and have it out. She was a tolerably healthy woman, with the exception of these occasional headaches, but from what that specialist said it was doubtful whether she would get home alive, unless she let him operate on her then and there, and her friend, who appeared delighted, urged her not to commit suicide, as it were, by missing her turn.
“The result was she consented, and afterwards went home in a four-wheeled cab, and put herself to bed. Her husband, when he returned in the evening and was told, was furious. He said it was all humbug, and by this time she was ready to agree with him. He put on his hat, and started to give that specialist a bit of his mind. The specialist was out, and he had to bottle up his rage until the morning. By then, his wife now really ill for the first time in her life, his indignation had reached boiling point. He was at that specialist’s door at half-past nine o’clock. At half-past eleven he came back, also in a four-wheeled cab, and day and night nurses for both of them were wired for. He also, it appeared, had arrived at that specialist’s door only just in time.
“There’s this appendy—whatever they call it,” commented Mrs. Wilkins, “why a dozen years ago one poor creature out of ten thousand may possibly ’ave ’ad something wrong with ’is innards. To-day you ain’t ’ardly considered respectable unless you’ve got it, or ’ave ’ad it. I ’ave no patience with their talk. To listen to some of them you’d think as Nature ’adn’t made a man—not yet: would never understand the principle of the thing till some of these young chaps ’ad shown ’er ’ow to do it.”
How to avoid Everything.
“They have now discovered, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “the germ of old age. They are going to inoculate us for it in early youth, with the result that the only chance of ever getting rid of our friends will be to give them a motor-car. And maybe it will not do to trust to that for long. They will discover that some men’s tendency towards getting themselves into trouble is due to some sort of a germ. The man of the future, Mrs. Wilkins, will be inoculated against all chance of gas explosions, storms at sea, bad oysters, and thin ice. Science may eventually discover the germ prompting to ill-assorted marriages, proneness to invest in the wrong stock, uncontrollable desire to recite poetry at evening parties. Religion, politics, education—all these things are so much wasted energy. To live happy and good for ever and ever, all we have to do is to hunt out these various germs and wring their necks for them—or whatever the proper treatment may be. Heaven, I gather from medical science, is merely a place that is free from germs.”
“We talk a lot about it,” thought Mrs. Wilkins, “but it does not seem to me that we are very much better off than before we took to worrying ourselves for twenty-four ’ours a day about ’ow we are going to live. Lord! to read the advertisements in the papers you would think as ’ow flesh and blood was never intended to ’ave any natural ills. ‘Do you ever ’ave a pain in your back?’ because, if so, there’s a picture of a kind gent who’s willing for one and sixpence halfpenny to take it quite away from you—make you look forward to scrubbing floors, and standing over the wash-tub six ’ours at a stretch like to a beanfeast. ‘Do you ever feel as though you don’t want to get out of bed in the morning?’ that’s all to be cured by a bottle of their stuff—or two at the outside. Four children to keep, and a sick ’usband on your ’ands used to get me over it when I was younger. I used to fancy it was just because I was tired.
The one Cure-All.
“There’s some of them seem to think,” continued Mrs. Wilkins, “that if you don’t get all you want out of this world, and ain’t so ’appy as you’ve persuaded yourself you ought to be, that it’s all because you ain’t taking the right medicine. Appears to me there’s only one doctor as can do for you, all the others talk as though they could, and ’e only comes to each of us once, and then ’e makes no charge.”
CHAPTER XIV
Europe and the bright American Girl.
“How does she do it?”
That is what the European girl wants to know. The American girl! She comes over here, and, as a British matron, reduced to slang by force of indignation, once exclaimed to me: “You’d think the whole blessed show belonged to her.” The European girl is hampered by her relatives. She has to account for her father: to explain away, if possible, her grandfather. The American girl sweeps them aside:
“Don’t you worry about them,” she says to the Lord Chamberlain. “It’s awfully good of you, but don’t you fuss yourself. I’m looking after my old people. That’s my department. What I want you to do is just to listen to what I am saying and then hustle around. I can fill up your time all right by myself.”
Her father may be a soap-boiler, her grandmother may have gone out charing.
“That’s all right,” she says to her Ambassador: “They’re not coming. You just take my card and tell the King that when he’s got a few minutes to spare I’ll be pleased to see him.”
And the extraordinary thing is that, a day or two afterwards, the invitation arrives.
A modern writer has said that “I’m Murrican” is the Civis Romanus sum of the present-day woman’s world. The late King of Saxony, did, I believe, on one occasion make a feeble protest at being asked to receive the daughter of a retail bootmaker. The young lady, nonplussed for the moment, telegraphed to her father in Detroit. The answer came back next morning: “Can’t call it selling—practically giving them away. See Advertisement.” The lady was presented as the daughter of an eminent philanthropist.
It is due to her to admit that, taking her as a class, the American girl is a distinct gain to European Society. Her influence is against convention and in favour of simplicity. One of her greatest charms, in the eyes of the European man, is that she listens to him. I cannot say whether it does her any good. Maybe she does not remember it all, but while you are talking she does give you her attention. The English woman does not always. She greets you pleasantly enough:
“I’ve so often wanted to meet you,” she says, “must you really go?”
It strikes you as sudden: you had no intention of going for hours. But the hint is too plain to be ignored. You are preparing to agree that you really must when, looking round, you gather that the last remark was not addressed to you, but to another gentleman who is shaking hands with her:
“Now, perhaps we shall be able to talk for five minutes,” she says. “I’ve so often wanted to say that I shall never forgive you. You have been simply horrid.”
Again you are confused, until you jump to the conclusion that the latter portion of the speech is probably intended for quite another party with whom, at the moment, her back towards you, she is engaged in a whispered conversation. When he is gone she turns again to you. But the varied expressions that pass across her face while you are discussing with her the disadvantages of Protection, bewilder you. When, explaining your own difficulty in arriving at a conclusion, you remark that Great Britain is an island, she roguishly shakes her head. It is not that she has forgotten her geography, it is that she is conducting a conversation by signs with a lady at the other end of the room. When you observe that the working classes must be fed, she smiles archly while murmuring:
“Oh, do you really think so?”
You are about to say something strong on the subject of dumping. Apparently she has disappeared. You find that she is reaching round behind you to tap a new arrival with her fan.
She has the Art of Listening.
Now, the American girl looks at you, and just listens to you with her eyes fixed on you all the time. You gather that, as far as she is concerned, the rest of the company are passing shadows. She wants to hear what you have to say about Bi-metallism: her trouble is lest she may miss a word of it. From a talk with an American girl one comes away with the conviction that one is a brilliant conversationalist, who can hold a charming woman spell-bound. This may not be good for one: but while it lasts, the sensation is pleasant.
Even the American girl cannot, on all occasions, sweep from her path the cobwebs of old-world etiquette. Two American ladies told me a sad tale of things that had happened to them not long ago in Dresden. An officer of rank and standing invited them to breakfast with him on the ice. Dames and nobles of the plus haut ton would be there. It is a social function that occurs every Sunday morning in Dresden during the skating season. The great lake in the Grosser Garten is covered with all sorts and conditions of people. Prince and commoner circle and recircle round one another. But they do not mix. The girls were pleased. They secured the services of an elderly lady, the widow of an analytical chemist: unfortunately, she could not skate. They wrapped her up and put her in a sledge. While they were in the garde robe putting on their skates, a German gentleman came up and bowed to them.
He was a nice young man of prepossessing appearance and amiable manners. They could not call to mind his name, but remembered having met him, somewhere, and on more than one occasion. The American girl is always sociable: they bowed and smiled, and said it was a fine day. He replied with volubility, and helped them down on to the ice. He was really most attentive. They saw their friend, the officer of noble family, and, with the assistance of the German gentleman, skated towards him. He glided past them. They thought that maybe he did not know enough to stop, so they turned and skated after him. They chased him three times round the pond and then, feeling tired, eased up and took counsel together.
“I’m sure he must have seen us,” said the younger girl. “What does he mean by it?”
“Well, I have not come down here to play forfeits,” said the other, “added to which I want my breakfast. You wait here a minute, I’ll go and have it out with him.”
He was standing only a dozen yards away. Alone, though not a good performer on the ice, she contrived to cover half the distance dividing them. The officer, perceiving her, came to her assistance and greeted her with effusion.
The Republican Idea in practice.
“Oh,” said the lady, who was feeling indignant, “I thought maybe you had left your glasses at home.”
“I am sorry,” said the officer, “but it is impossible.”
“What’s impossible?” demanded the lady.
“That I can be seen speaking to you,” declared the officer, “while you are in company with that—that person.”
“What person?” She thought maybe he was alluding to the lady in the sledge. The chaperon was not showy, but, what is better, she was good. And, anyhow, it was the best the girls had been able to do. So far as they were concerned, they had no use for a chaperon. The idea had been a thoughtful concession to European prejudice.
“The person in knickerbockers,” explained the officer.
“Oh, that,” exclaimed the lady, relieved: “he just came up and made himself agreeable while we were putting on our skates. We have met him somewhere, but I can’t exactly fix him for the moment.”
“You have met him possibly at Wiesman’s, in the Pragerstrasse: he is one of the attendants there,” said the officer.
The American girl is Republican in her ideas, but she draws the line at hairdressers. In theory it is absurd: the hairdresser is a man and a brother: but we are none of us logical all the way. It made her mad, the thought that she had been seen by all Dresden Society skating with a hairdresser.
“Well,” she said, “I do call that impudence. Why, they wouldn’t do that even in Chicago.”
And she returned to where the hairdresser was illustrating to her friend the Dutch roll, determined to explain to him, as politely as possible, that although the free and enlightened Westerner has abolished social distinctions, he has not yet abolished them to that extent.
Had he been a commonplace German hairdresser he would have understood English, and all might have been easy. But to the “classy” German hairdresser, English is not so necessary, and the American ladies had reached, as regards their German, only the “improving” stage. In her excitement she confused the subjunctive and the imperative, and told him that he “might” go. He had no wish to go; he assured them—so they gathered—that his intention was to devote the morning to their service. He must have been a stupid man, but it is a type occasionally encountered. Two pretty women had greeted his advances with apparent delight. They were Americans, and the American girl was notoriously unconventional. He knew himself to be a good-looking young fellow. It did not occur to him that in expressing willingness to dispense with his attendance they could be in earnest.
There was nothing for it, so it seemed to the girls, but to request the assistance of the officer, who continued to skate round and round them at a distance of about ten yards. So again the elder young lady, seizing her opportunity, made appeal.
What the Soldier dared not do.
“I cannot,” persisted the officer, who, having been looking forward to a morning with two of the prettiest girls in Dresden, was also feeling mad. “I dare not be seen speaking to a hairdresser. You must get rid of him.”
“But we can’t,” said the girl. “We do not know enough German, and he can’t, or he won’t, understand us. For goodness sake come and help us. We’ll be spending the whole morning with him if you don’t.”
The German officer said he was desolate. Steps would be taken—later in the week—the result of which would probably be to render that young hairdresser prematurely bald. But, meanwhile, beyond skating round and round them, for which they did not even feel they wanted to thank him, the German officer could do nothing for them. They tried being rude to the hairdresser: he mistook it for American chic. They tried joining hands and running away from him, but they were not good skaters, and he thought they were trying to show him the cake walk. They both fell down and hurt themselves, and it is difficult to be angry with a man, even a hairdresser, when he is doing his best to pick you up and comfort you.
The chaperon was worse than useless. She was very old. She had been promised her breakfast, but saw no signs of it. She could not speak German; and remembered somewhat late in the day that two young ladies had no business to accept breakfast at the hands of German officers: and, if they did, at least they might see that they got it. She appeared to be willing to talk about decadence of modern manners to almost any extent, but the subject of the hairdresser, and how to get rid of him, only bored her.
Their first stroke of luck occurred when the hairdresser, showing them the “dropped three,” fell down and temporarily stunned himself. It was not kind of them, but they were desperate. They flew for the bank just anyhow, and, scrambling over the grass, gained the restaurant. The officer, overtaking them at the door, led them to the table that had been reserved for them, then hastened back to hunt for the chaperon. The girls thought their trouble was over. Had they glanced behind them their joy would have been shorter-lived than even was the case. The hairdresser had recovered consciousness in time to see them waddling over the grass. He thought they were running to fetch him brandy. When the officer returned with the chaperon he found the hairdresser sitting opposite to them, explaining that he really was not hurt, and suggesting that, as they were there, perhaps they would like something to eat and drink.
The girls made one last frantic appeal to the man of buckram and pipeclay, but the etiquette of the Saxon Army was inexorable. It transpired that he might kill the hairdresser, but nothing else: he must not speak to him—not even explain to the poor devil why it was that he was being killed.
Her path of Usefulness.
It did not seem quite worth it. They had some sandwiches and coffee at the hairdresser’s expense, and went home in a cab: while the chaperon had breakfast with the officer of noble family.
The American girl has succeeded in freeing European social intercourse from many of its hide-bound conventions. There is still much work for her to do. But I have faith in her.
CHAPTER XV
Music and the Savage.
I never visit a music-hall without reflecting concerning the great future there must be before the human race.
How young we are, how very young! And think of all we have done! Man is still a mere boy. He has only just within the last half-century been put into trousers. Two thousand years ago he wore long clothes—the Grecian robe, the Roman toga. Then followed the Little Lord Fauntleroy period, when he went about dressed in a velvet suit with lace collar and cuffs, and had his hair curled for him. The late lamented Queen Victoria put him into trousers. What a wonderful little man he will be when he is grown up!
A clergyman friend of mine told me of a German Kurhaus to which he was sent for his sins and his health. It was a resort, for some reason, specially patronized by the more elderly section of the higher English middle class. Bishops were there, suffering from fatty degeneration of the heart caused by too close application to study; ancient spinsters of good family subject to spasms; gouty retired generals. Can anybody tell me how many men in the British Army go to a general? Somebody once assured me it was five thousand, but that is absurd, on the face of it. The British Army, in that case, would have to be counted by millions. There are a goodish few American colonels still knocking about. The American colonel is still to be met with here and there by the curious traveller, but compared with the retired British general he is an extinct species. In Cheltenham and Brighton and other favoured towns there are streets of nothing but retired British generals—squares of retired British generals—whole crescents of British generals. Abroad there are pensions with a special scale of charges for British generals. In Switzerland there has even been talk of reserving railway compartments “For British Generals Only.” In Germany, when you do not say distinctly and emphatically on being introduced that you are not a British general, you are assumed, as a matter of course, to be a British general. During the Boer War, when I was residing in a small garrison town on the Rhine, German military men would draw me aside and ask of me my own private personal views as to the conduct of the campaign. I would give them my views freely, explain to them how I would finish the whole thing in a week.
“But how in the face of the enemy’s tactics—” one of them would begin.
“Bother the enemy’s tactics,” I would reply. “Who cares for tactics?”
“But surely a British general—” they would persist. “Who’s a British general?” I would retort, “I am talking to you merely as a plain commonsense man, with a head on my shoulders.”
They would apologize for their mistake. But this is leading me away from that German Kurhaus.
Recreation for the Higher clergy.
My clergyman friend found life there dull. The generals and the spinsters left to themselves might have played cards, but they thought of the poor bishops who would have had to look on envious. The bishops and the spinsters might have sung ballads, but the British general after dinner does not care for ballads, and had mentioned it. The bishops and the generals might have told each other stories, but could not before the ladies. My clergyman friend stood the awful solemnity of three evenings, then cautiously felt his way towards revelry. He started with an intellectual game called “Quotations.” You write down quotations on a piece of paper, and the players have to add the author’s name. It roped in four old ladies, and the youngest bishop. One or two generals tried a round, but not being familiar with quotations voted the game slow.
The next night my friend tried “Consequences.” “Saucy Miss A. met the gay General B. in”—most unlikely places. “He said.” Really it was fortunate that General B. remained too engrossed in the day before yesterday’s Standard to overhear, or Miss A. could never have again faced him. “And she replied.” The suppressed giggles excited the curiosity of the non-players. Most of the bishops and half the generals asked to be allowed to join. The giggles grew into roars. Those standing out found that they could not read their papers in comfort.
From “Consequences” the descent was easy. The tables and chairs were pushed against the walls, the bishops and the spinsters and the generals would sit in a ring upon the floor playing hunt the slipper. Musical chairs made the two hours between bed and dinner the time of the day they all looked forward to: the steady trot with every nerve alert, the ear listening for the sudden stoppage of the music, the eye seeking with artfulness the likeliest chair, the volcanic silence, the mad scramble.
The generals felt themselves fighting their battles over again, the spinsters blushed and preened themselves, the bishops took interest in proving that even the Church could be prompt of decision and swift of movement. Before the week was out they were playing Puss-in-the-corner; ladies feeling young again were archly beckoning to stout deans, to whom were returning all the sensations of a curate. The swiftness with which the gouty generals found they could still hobble surprised even themselves.
Why are we so young?
But it is in the music-hall, as I have said, that I am most impressed with the youthfulness of man. How delighted we are when the long man in the little boy’s hat, having asked his short brother a riddle, and before he can find time to answer it, hits him over the stomach with an umbrella! How we clap our hands and shout with glee! It isn’t really his stomach: it is a bolster tied round his waist—we know that; but seeing the long man whack at that bolster with an umbrella gives us almost as much joy as if the bolster were not there.
I laugh at the knockabout brothers, I confess, so long as they are on the stage; but they do not convince me. Reflecting on the performance afterwards, my dramatic sense revolts against the “plot.” I cannot accept the theory of their being brothers. The difference in size alone is a strain upon my imagination. It is not probable that of two children of the same parents one should measure six foot six, and the other five foot four. Even allowing for a freak of nature, and accepting the fact that they might be brothers, I do not believe they would remain so inseparable. The short brother would have succeeded before now in losing the long brother. Those continual bangings over the head and stomach would have weakened whatever affection the short brother might originally have felt towards his long relation. At least, he would insist upon the umbrella being left at home.
“I will go for a walk with you,” he might say, “I will stand stock still with you in Trafalgar Square in the midst of the traffic while you ask me silly riddles, but not if you persist in bringing with you that absurd umbrella. You are too handy with it. Put it back in the rack before we start, or go out by yourself.”
Besides, my sense of justice is outraged. Why should the short brother be banged and thumped without reason? The Greek dramatist would have explained to us that the shorter brother had committed a crime against the gods. Aristophanes would have made the longer brother the instrument of the Furies. The riddles he asked would have had bearing upon the shorter brother’s sin. In this way the spectator would have enjoyed amusement combined with the satisfactory sense that Nemesis is ever present in human affairs. I present the idea, for what it may be worth, to the concoctors of knockabout turns.
Where Brotherly (and Sisterly) Love reigns supreme.
The family tie is always strong on the music-hall stage. The acrobatic troupe is always a “Family”: Pa, Ma, eight brothers and sisters, and the baby. A more affectionate family one rarely sees. Pa and Ma are a trifle stout, but still active. Baby, dear little fellow, is full of humour. Ladies do not care to go on the music-hall stage unless they can take their sister with them. I have seen a performance given by eleven sisters, all the same size and apparently all the same age. She must have been a wonderful woman—the mother. They all had golden hair, and all wore precisely similar frocks—a charming but décolletée arrangement—in claret-coloured velvet over blue silk stockings. So far as I could gather, they all had the same young man. No doubt he found it difficult amongst them to make up his mind.
“Arrange it among yourselves,” he no doubt had said, “it is quite immaterial to me. You are so much alike, it is impossible that a fellow loving one should not love the lot of you. So long as I marry into the family I really don’t care.”
When a performer appears alone on the music-hall stage it is easy to understand why. His or her domestic life has been a failure. I listened one evening to six songs in succession. The first two were sung by a gentleman. He entered with his clothes hanging upon him in shreds. He explained that he had just come from an argument with his wife. He showed us the brick with which she had hit him, and the bump at the back of his head that had resulted. The funny man’s marriage is never a success. But really this seems to be his own fault. “She was such a lovely girl,” he tells us, “with a face—well, you’d hardly call it a face, it was more like a gas explosion. Then she had those wonderful sort of eyes that you can see two ways at once with, one of them looks down the street, while the other one is watching round the corner. Can see you coming any way. And her mouth!”
It appears that if she stands anywhere near the curb and smiles, careless people mistake her for a pillar-box, and drop letters into her.
“And such a voice!” We are told it is a perfect imitation of a motor-car. When she laughs people spring into doorways to escape being run over.
If he will marry that sort of woman, what can he expect? The man is asking for it.
The lady who followed him also told us a sad story of misplaced trust. She also was comic—so the programme assured us. The humorist appears to have no luck. She had lent her lover money to buy the ring, and the licence, and to furnish the flat. He did buy the ring, and he furnished the flat, but it was for another lady. The audience roared. I have heard it so often asked, “What is humour?” From observation, I should describe it as other people’s troubles.
A male performer followed her. He came on dressed in a night-shirt, carrying a baby. His wife, it seemed, had gone out for the evening with the lodger. That was his joke. It was the most successful song of the whole six.
The one sure Joke.
A philosopher has put it on record that he always felt sad when he reflected on the sorrows of humanity. But when he reflected on its amusements he felt sadder still.
Why was it so funny that the baby had the lodger’s nose? We laughed for a full minute by the clock.
Why do I love to see a flabby-faced man go behind curtains, and, emerging in a wig and a false beard, say that he is now Bismarck or Mr. Chamberlain? I have felt resentment against the Lightning Impersonator ever since the days of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. During that summer every Lightning Impersonator ended his show by shouting, while the band played the National Anthem, “Queen Victoria!” He was not a bit like Queen Victoria. He did not even, to my thinking, look a lady; but at once I had to stand up in my place and sing “God save the Queen.” It was a time of enthusiastic loyalty; if you did not spring up quickly some patriotic old fool from the back would reach across and hit you over the head with the first thing he could lay his hands upon.
Other music-hall performers caught at the idea. By ending up with “God save the Queen” any performer, however poor, could retire in a whirlwind of applause. Niggers, having bored us with tiresome songs about coons and honeys and Swanee Rivers, would, as a last resource, strike up “God save the Queen” on the banjo. The whole house would have to rise and cheer. Elderly Sisters Trippet, having failed to arouse our enthusiasm by allowing us a brief glimpse of an ankle, would put aside all frivolity, and tell us of a hero lover named George, who had fought somebody somewhere for his Queen and country. “He fell!”—bang from the big drum and blue limelight. In a recumbent position he appears to have immediately started singing “God save the Queen.”
How Anarchists are made.
Sleepy members of the audience would be hastily awakened by their friends. We would stagger to our feet. The Sisters Trippet, with eyes fixed on the chandelier, would lead us: to the best of our ability we would sing “God save the Queen.”
There have been evenings when I have sung “God save the Queen” six times. Another season of it, and I should have become a Republican.
The singer of patriotic songs is generally a stout and puffy man. The perspiration pours from his face as the result of the violent gesticulations with which he tells us how he stormed the fort. He must have reached it very hot.
“There were ten to one agin us, boys.” We feel that this was a miscalculation on the enemy’s part. Ten to one “agin” such wildly gesticulating Britishers was inviting defeat.
It seems to have been a terrible battle notwithstanding. He shows us with a real sword how it was done. Nothing could have lived within a dozen yards of that sword. The conductor of the orchestra looks nervous. Our fear is lest he will end by cutting off his own head. His recollections are carrying him away. Then follows “Victory!”
The gas men and the programme sellers cheer wildly. We conclude with the inevitable “God save the King.”
CHAPTER XVI
The Ghost and the Blind Children.
Ghosts are in the air. It is difficult at this moment to avoid talking of ghosts. The first question you are asked on being introduced this season is:
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
I would be so glad to believe in ghosts. This world is much too small for me. Up to a century or two ago the intellectual young man found it sufficient for his purposes. It still contained the unknown—the possible—within its boundaries. New continents were still to be discovered: we dreamt of giants, Liliputians, desert-fenced Utopias. We set our sail, and Wonderland lay ever just beyond our horizon. To-day the world is small, the light railway runs through the desert, the coasting steamer calls at the Islands of the Blessed, the last mystery has been unveiled, the fairies are dead, the talking birds are silent. Our baffled curiosity turns for relief outwards. We call upon the dead to rescue us from our monotony. The first authentic ghost will be welcomed as the saviour of humanity.
But he must be a living ghost—a ghost we can respect, a ghost we can listen to. The poor spiritless addle-headed ghost that has hitherto haunted our blue chambers is of no use to us. I remember a thoughtful man once remarking during argument that if he believed in ghosts—the silly, childish spooks about which we had been telling anecdotes—death would possess for him an added fear: the idea that his next dwelling-place would be among such a pack of dismal idiots would sadden his departing hours. What was he to talk to them about? Apparently their only interest lay in recalling their earthly troubles. The ghost of the lady unhappily married who had been poisoned, or had her throat cut, who every night for the last five hundred years had visited the chamber where it happened for no other purpose than to scream about it! what a tiresome person she would be to meet! All her conversation during the long days would be around her earthly wrongs. The other ghosts, in all probability, would have heard about that husband of hers, what he said, and what he did, till they were sick of the subject. A newcomer would be seized upon with avidity.
A lady of repute writes to a magazine that she once occupied for a season a wainscotted room in an old manor house. On several occasions she awoke in the night: each time to witness the same ghostly performance. Four gentlemen sat round a table playing cards. Suddenly one of them sprang to his feet and plunged a dagger into the back of his partner. The lady does not say so: one presumes it was his partner. I have, myself, when playing bridge, seen an expression on my partner’s face that said quite plainly:
“I would like to murder you.”
I have not the memory for bridge. I forget who it was that, last trick but seven, played the two of clubs. I thought it was he, my partner. I thought it meant that I was to take an early opportunity of forcing trumps. I don’t know why I thought so, I try to explain why I thought so. It sounds a silly argument even to myself; I feel I have not got it quite right. Added to which it was not my partner who played the two of clubs, it was Dummy. If I had only remembered this, and had concluded from it—as I ought to have done—that my partner had the ace of diamonds—as otherwise why did he pass my knave?—we might have saved the odd trick. I have not the head for bridge. It is only an ordinary head—mine. I have no business to play bridge.
Why not, occasionally, a cheerful Ghost.
But to return to our ghosts. These four gentlemen must now and again, during their earthly existence, have sat down to a merry game of cards. There must have been evenings when nobody was stabbed. Why choose an unpleasant occasion to harp exclusively upon it? Why do ghosts never give a cheerful show? The lady who was poisoned! there must have been other evenings in her life. Why does she not show us “The first meeting”: when he gave her the violets and said they were like her eyes? He wasn’t always poisoning her. There must have been a period before he ever thought of poisoning her. Cannot these ghosts do something occasionally in what is termed “the lighter vein”? If they haunt a forest glade, it is to perform a duel to the death, or an assassination. Why cannot they, for a change, give us an old-time picnic, or “The hawking party,” which, in Elizabethan costume, should make a pretty picture? Ghostland would appear to be obsessed by the spirit of the Scandinavian drama: murders, suicides, ruined fortunes, and broken hearts are the only material made use of. Why is not a dead humorist allowed now and then to write the sketch? There must be plenty of dead comic lovers; why are they never allowed to give a performance?
Where are the dead Humorists?
A cheerful person contemplates death with alarm. What is he to do in this land of ghosts? there is no place for him. Imagine the commonplace liver of a humdrum existence being received into ghostland. He enters nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at school. The old ghosts gather round him.
“How do you come here—murdered?”
“No, at least, I don’t think so.”
“Suicide?
“No—can’t remember the name of it now. Began with a chill on the liver, I think.”
The ghosts are disappointed. But a happy suggestion is made. Perhaps he was the murderer; that would be even better. Let him think carefully; can he recollect ever having committed a murder? He racks his brains in vain, not a single murder comes to his recollection. He never forged a will. Doesn’t even know where anything is hid. Of what use will he be in ghostland? One pictures him passing the centuries among a moody crowd of uninteresting mediocrities, brooding perpetually over their wasted lives. Only the ghosts of ladies and gentlemen mixed up in crime have any “show” in ghostland.
The Spirit does not shine as a Conversationalist.
I feel an equal dissatisfaction with the spirits who are supposed to return to us and communicate with us through the medium of three-legged tables. I do not deny the possibility that spirits exist. I am even willing to allow them their three-legged tables. It must be confessed it is a clumsy method. One cannot help regretting that during all the ages they have not evolved a more dignified system. One feels that the three-legged table must hamper them. One can imagine an impatient spirit getting tired of spelling out a lengthy story on a three-legged table. But, as I have said, I am willing to assume that, for some spiritual reason unfathomable to my mere human intelligence, that three-legged table is essential. I am willing also to accept the human medium. She is generally an unprepossessing lady running somewhat to bulk. If a gentleman, he so often has dirty finger-nails, and smells of stale beer. I think myself it would be so much simpler if the spirit would talk to me direct; we could get on quicker. But there is that about the medium, I am told, which appeals to a spirit. Well, it is his affair, not mine, and I waive the argument. My real stumbling-block is the spirit himself—the sort of conversation that, when he does talk, he indulges in. I cannot help feeling that his conversation is not worth the paraphernalia. I can talk better than that myself.
The late Professor Huxley, who took some trouble over this matter, attended some half-dozen séances, and then determined to attend no more.
“I have,” he said, “for my sins to submit occasionally to the society of live bores. I refuse to go out of my way to spend an evening in the dark with dead bores.”
The spiritualists themselves admit that their table-rapping spooks are precious dull dogs; it would be difficult, in face of the communications recorded, for them to deny it. They explain to us that they have not yet achieved communication with the higher spiritual Intelligences. The more intelligent spirits—for some reason that the spiritualists themselves are unable to explain—do not want to talk to them, appear to have something else to do. At present—so I am told, and can believe—it is only the spirits of lower intelligence that care to turn up on these evenings. The spiritualists argue that, by continuing, the higher-class spirits will later on be induced to “come in.” I fail to follow the argument. It seems to me that we are frightening them away. Anyhow, myself I shall wait awhile.
When the spirit comes along that can talk sense, that can tell me something I don’t know, I shall be glad to meet him. The class of spirit that we are getting just at present does not appeal to me. The thought of him—the reflection that I shall die and spend the rest of eternity in his company—does not comfort me.