The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Have you ever noticed the going out of a woman?

When a man goes out, he says—“I’m going out, shan’t be long.”

“Oh, George,” cries his wife from the other end of the house, “don’t go for a moment.  I want you to—”  She hears a falling of hats, followed by the slamming of the front door.

“Oh, George, you’re not gone!” she wails.  It is but the voice of despair.  As a matter of fact, she knows he is gone.  She reaches the hall, breathless.

“He might have waited a minute,” she mutters to herself, as she picks up the hats, “there were so many things I wanted him to do.”

She does not open the door and attempt to stop him, she knows he is already half-way down the street.  It is a mean, paltry way of going out, she thinks; so like a man.

When a woman, on the other hand, goes out, people know about it.  She does not sneak out.  She says she is going out.  She says it, generally, on the afternoon of the day before; and she repeats it, at intervals, until tea-time.  At tea, she suddenly decides that she won’t, that she will leave it till the day after to-morrow instead.  An hour later she thinks she will go to-morrow, after all, and makes arrangements to wash her hair overnight.  For the next hour or so she alternates between fits of exaltation, during which she looks forward to going out, and moments of despondency, when a sense of foreboding falls upon her.  At dinner she persuades some other woman to go with her; the other woman, once persuaded, is enthusiastic about going, until she recollects that she cannot.  The first woman, however, convinces her that she can.

“Yes,” replies the second woman, “but then, how about you, dear?  You are forgetting the Joneses.”

“So I was,” answers the first woman, completely non-plussed.  “How very awkward, and I can’t go on Wednesday.  I shall have to leave it till Thursday, now.”

“But I can’t go Thursday,” says the second woman.

“Well, you go without me, dear,” says the first woman, in the tone of one who is sacrificing a life’s ambition.

“Oh no, dear, I should not think of it,” nobly exclaims the second woman.  “We will wait and go together, Friday!”

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” says the first woman.  “We will start early” (this is an inspiration), “and be back before the Joneses arrive.”

They agree to sleep together; there is a lurking suspicion in both their minds that this may be their last sleep on earth.  They retire early with a can of hot water.  At intervals, during the night, one overhears them splashing water, and talking.

They come down very late for breakfast, and both very cross.  Each seems to have argued herself into the belief that she has been lured into this piece of nonsense, against her better judgment, by the persistent folly of the other one.  During the meal each one asks the other, every five minutes, if she is quite ready.  Each one, it appears, has only her hat to put on.  They talk about the weather, and wonder what it is going to do.  They wish it would make up its mind, one way or the other.  They are very bitter on weather that cannot make up its mind.  After breakfast it still looks cloudy, and they decide to abandon the scheme altogether.  The first woman then remembers that it is absolutely necessary for her, at all events, to go.

“But there is no need for you to come, dear,” she says.

Up to that point the second woman was evidently not sure whether she wished to go or whether she didn’t.  Now she knows.

“Oh yes, I’ll come,” she says, “then it will be over!”

“I am sure you don’t want to go,” urges the first woman, “and I shall be quicker by myself.  I am ready to start now.”

The second woman bridles.

“I shan’t be a couple of minutes,” she retorts.  “You know, dear, it’s generally I who have to wait for you.”

“But you’ve not got your boots on,” the first woman reminds her.

“Well, they won’t take any time,” is the answer.  “But of course, dear, if you’d really rather I did not come, say so.”  By this time she is on the verge of tears.

“Of course, I would like you to come, dear,” explains the first in a resigned tone.  “I thought perhaps you were only coming to please me.”

“Oh no, I’d like to come,” says the second woman.

“Well, we must hurry up,” says the first; “I shan’t be more than a minute myself, I’ve merely got to change my skirt.”

Half-an-hour later you hear them calling to each other, from different parts of the house, to know if the other one is ready.  It appears they have both been ready for quite a long while, waiting only for the other one.

“I’m afraid,” calls out the one whose turn it is to be down-stairs, “it’s going to rain.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” calls back the other one.

“Well, it looks very like it.”

“What a nuisance,” answers the up-stairs woman; “shall we put it off?”

“Well, what do you think, dear?” replies the down-stairs.

They decide they will go, only now they will have to change their boots, and put on different hats.

For the next ten minutes they are still shouting and running about.  Then it seems as if they really were ready, nothing remaining but for them to say “Good-bye,” and go.

They begin by kissing the children.  A woman never leaves her house without secret misgivings that she will never return to it alive.  One child cannot be found.  When it is found it wishes it hadn’t been.  It has to be washed, preparatory to being kissed.  After that, the dog has to be found and kissed, and final instructions given to the cook.

Then they open the front door.

“Oh, George,” calls out the first woman, turning round again.  “Are you there?”

“Hullo,” answers a voice from the distance.  “Do you want me?”

“No, dear, only to say good-bye.  I’m going.”

“Oh, good-bye.”

“Good-bye, dear.  Do you think it’s going to rain?”

“Oh no, I should not say so.”

“George.”

“Yes.”

“Have you got any money?”

Five minutes later they come running back; the one has forgotten her parasol, the other her purse.

And speaking of purses, reminds one of another essential difference between the male and female human animal.  A man carries his money in his pocket.  When he wants to use it, he takes it out and lays it down.  This is a crude way of doing things, a woman displays more subtlety.  Say she is standing in the street, and wants fourpence to pay for a bunch of violets she has purchased from a flower-girl.  She has two parcels in one hand, and a parasol in the other.  With the remaining two fingers of the left hand she secures the violets.  The question then arises, how to pay the girl?  She flutters for a few minutes, evidently not quite understanding why it is she cannot do it.  The reason then occurs to her: she has only two hands and both these are occupied.  First she thinks she will put the parcels and the flowers into her right hand, then she thinks she will put the parasol into her left.  Then she looks round for a table or even a chair, but there is not such a thing in the whole street.  Her difficulty is solved by her dropping the parcels and the flowers.  The girl picks them up for her and holds them.  This enables her to feel for her pocket with her right hand, while waving her open parasol about with her left.  She knocks an old gentleman’s hat off into the gutter, and nearly blinds the flower-girl before it occurs to her to close it.  This done, she leans it up against the flower-girl’s basket, and sets to work in earnest with both hands.  She seizes herself firmly by the back, and turns the upper part of her body round till her hair is in front and her eyes behind.  Still holding herself firmly with her left hand—did she let herself go, goodness knows where she would spin to;—with her right she prospects herself.  The purse is there, she can feel it, the problem is how to get at it.  The quickest way would, of course, be to take off the skirt, sit down on the kerb, turn it inside out, and work from the bottom of the pocket upwards.  But this simple idea never seems to occur to her.  There are some thirty folds at the back of the dress, between two of these folds commences the secret passage.  At last, purely by chance, she suddenly discovers it, nearly upsetting herself in the process, and the purse is brought up to the surface.  The difficulty of opening it still remains.  She knows it opens with a spring, but the secret of that spring she has never mastered, and she never will.  Her plan is to worry it generally until it does open.  Five minutes will always do it, provided she is not flustered.

At last it does open.  It would be incorrect to say that she opens it.  It opens because it is sick of being mauled about; and, as likely as not, it opens at the moment when she is holding it upside down.  If you happen to be near enough to look over her shoulder, you will notice that the gold and silver lies loose within it.  In an inner sanctuary, carefully secured with a second secret spring, she keeps her coppers, together with a postage-stamp and a draper’s receipt, nine months old, for elevenpence three-farthings.

I remember the indignation of an old Bus-conductor, once.  Inside we were nine women and two men.  I sat next the door, and his remarks therefore he addressed to me.  It was certainly taking him some time to collect the fares, but I think he would have got on better had he been less bustling; he worried them, and made them nervous.

“Look at that,” he said, drawing my attention to a poor lady opposite, who was diving in the customary manner for her purse, “they sit on their money, women do.  Blest if you wouldn’t think they was trying to ’atch it.”

At length the lady drew from underneath herself an exceedingly fat purse.

“Fancy riding in a bumpby bus, perched up on that thing,” he continued.  “Think what a stamina they must have.”  He grew confidential.  “I’ve seen one woman,” he said, “pull out from underneath ’er a street doorkey, a tin box of lozengers, a pencil-case, a whopping big purse, a packet of hair-pins, and a smelling-bottle.  Why, you or me would be wretched, sitting on a plain door-knob, and them women goes about like that all day.  I suppose they gets used to it.  Drop ’em on an eider-down pillow, and they’d scream.  The time it takes me to get tuppence out of them, why, it’s ’eart-breaking.  First they tries one side, then they tries the other.  Then they gets up and shakes theirselves till the bus jerks them back again, and there they are, a more ’opeless ’eap than ever.  If I ’ad my way I’d make every bus carry a female searcher as could over’aul ’em one at a time, and take the money from ’em.  Talk about the poor pickpocket.  What I say is, that a man as finds his way into a woman’s pocket—well, he deserves what he gets.”

But it was the thought of more serious matters that lured me into reflections concerning the over-carefulness of women.  It is a theory of mine—wrong possibly; indeed I have so been informed—that we pick our way through life with too much care.  We are for ever looking down upon the ground.  Maybe, we do avoid a stumble or two over a stone or a brier, but also we miss the blue of the sky, the glory of the hills.  These books that good men write, telling us that what they call “success” in life depends on our flinging aside our youth and wasting our manhood in order that we may have the means when we are eighty of spending a rollicking old age, annoy me.  We save all our lives to invest in a South Sea Bubble; and in skimping and scheming, we have grown mean, and narrow, and hard.  We will put off the gathering of the roses till to-morrow, to-day it shall be all work, all bargain-driving, all plotting.  Lo, when to-morrow comes, the roses are blown; nor do we care for roses, idle things of small marketable value; cabbages are more to our fancy by the time to-morrow comes.

Life is a thing to be lived, not spent, to be faced, not ordered.  Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one’s hand by skill to be made the best of.  Is it the wisest who is always the most successful?  I think not.  The luckiest whist-player I ever came across was a man who was never quite certain what were trumps, and whose most frequent observation during the game was “I really beg your pardon,” addressed to his partner; a remark which generally elicited the reply, “Oh, don’t apologize.  All’s well that ends well.”  The man I knew who made the most rapid fortune was a builder in the outskirts of Birmingham, who could not write his name, and who, for thirty years of his life, never went to bed sober.  I do not say that forgetfulness of trumps should be cultivated by whist-players.  I think my builder friend might have been even more successful had he learned to write his name, and had he occasionally—not overdoing it—enjoyed a sober evening.  All I wish to impress is, that virtue is not the road to success—of the kind we are dealing with.  We must find other reasons for being virtuous; maybe, there are some.  The truth is, life is a gamble pure and simple, and the rules we lay down for success are akin to the infallible systems with which a certain class of idiot goes armed each season to Monte Carlo.  We can play the game with coolness and judgment, decide when to plunge and when to stake small; but to think that wisdom will decide it, is to imagine that we have discovered the law of chance.  Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a smile, leaving our losings with a shrug.  Perhaps that is why we have been summoned to the board and the cards dealt round: that we may learn some of the virtues of the good gambler; his self-control, his courage under misfortune, his modesty under the strain of success, his firmness, his alertness, his general indifference to fate.  Good lessons these, all of them.  If by the game we learn some of them our time on the green earth has not been wasted.  If we rise from the table having learned only fretfulness and self-pity I fear it has been.

The grim Hall Porter taps at the door: “Number Five hundred billion and twenty-eight, your boatman is waiting, sir.”

So! is it time already?  We pick up our counters.  Of what use are they?  In the country the other side of the river they are no tender.  The blood-red for gold, and the pale-green for love, to whom shall we fling them?  Here is some poor beggar longing to play, let us give them to him as we pass out.  Poor devil! the game will amuse him—for a while.

Keep your powder dry, and trust in Providence, is the motto of the wise.  Wet powder could never be of any possible use to you.  Dry, it may be, with the help of Providence.  We will call it Providence, it is a prettier name than Chance—perhaps also a truer.

Another mistake we make when we reason out our lives is this: we reason as though we were planning for reasonable creatures.  It is a big mistake.  Well-meaning ladies and gentlemen make it when they picture their ideal worlds.  When marriage is reformed, and the social problem solved, when poverty and war have been abolished by acclamation, and sin and sorrow rescinded by an overwhelming parliamentary majority!  Ah, then the world will be worthy of our living in it.  You need not wait, ladies and gentlemen, so long as you think for that time.  No social revolution is needed, no slow education of the people is necessary.  It would all come about to-morrow, if only we were reasonable creatures.

Imagine a world of reasonable beings!  The Ten Commandments would be unnecessary: no reasoning being sins, no reasoning creature makes mistakes.  There would be no rich men, for what reasonable man cares for luxury and ostentation?  There would be no poor: that I should eat enough for two while my brother in the next street, as good a man as I, starves, is not reasonable.  There would be no difference of opinion on any two points: there is only one reason.  You, dear Reader, would find, that on all subjects you were of the same opinion as I.  No novels would be written, no plays performed; the lives of reasonable creatures do not afford drama.  No mad loves, no mad laughter, no scalding tears, no fierce unreasoning, brief-lived joys, no sorrows, no wild dreams—only reason, reason everywhere.

But for the present we remain unreasonable.  If I eat this mayonnaise, drink this champagne, I shall suffer in my liver.  Then, why do I eat it?  Julia is a charming girl, amiable, wise, and witty; also she has a share in a brewery.  Then, why does John marry Ann? who is short-tempered, to say the least of it, who, he feels, will not make him so good a house-wife, who has extravagant notions, who has no little fortune.  There is something about Ann’s chin that fascinates him—he could not explain to you what.  On the whole, Julia is the better-looking of the two.  But the more he thinks of Julia, the more he is drawn towards Ann.  So Tom marries Julia and the brewery fails, and Julia, on a holiday, contracts rheumatic fever, and is a helpless invalid for life; while Ann comes in for ten thousand pounds left to her by an Australian uncle no one had ever heard of.

I have been told of a young man, who chose his wife with excellent care.  Said he to himself, very wisely, “In the selection of a wife a man cannot be too circumspect.”  He convinced himself that the girl was everything a helpmate should be.  She had every virtue that could be expected in a woman, no faults, but such as are inseparable from a woman.  Speaking practically, she was perfection.  He married her, and found she was all he had thought her.  Only one thing could he urge against her—that he did not like her.  And that, of course, was not her fault.

How easy life would be did we know ourselves.  Could we always be sure that to-morrow we should think as we do to-day.  We fall in love during a summer holiday; she is fresh, delightful, altogether charming; the blood rushes to our head every time we think of her.  Our ideal career is one of perpetual service at her feet.  It seems impossible that Fate could bestow upon us any greater happiness than the privilege of cleaning her boots, and kissing the hem of her garment—if the hem be a little muddy that will please us the more.  We tell her our ambition, and at that moment every word we utter is sincere.  But the summer holiday passes, and with it the holiday mood, and winter finds us wondering how we are going to get out of the difficulty into which we have landed ourselves.  Or worse still, perhaps, the mood lasts longer than is usual.  We become formally engaged.  We marry—I wonder how many marriages are the result of a passion that is burnt out before the altar-rails are reached?—and three months afterwards the little lass is broken-hearted to find that we consider the lacing of her boots a bore.  Her feet seem to have grown bigger.  There is no excuse for us, save that we are silly children, never sure of what we are crying for, hurting one another in our play, crying very loudly when hurt ourselves.

I knew an American lady once who used to bore me with long accounts of the brutalities exercised upon her by her husband.  She had instituted divorce proceedings against him.  The trial came on, and she was highly successful.  We all congratulated her, and then for some months she dropped out of my life.  But there came a day when we again found ourselves together.  One of the problems of social life is to know what to say to one another when we meet; every man and woman’s desire is to appear sympathetic and clever, and this makes conversation difficult, because, taking us all round, we are neither sympathetic nor clever—but this by the way.

Of course, I began to talk to her about her former husband.  I asked her how he was getting on.  She replied that she thought he was very comfortable.

“Married again?” I suggested.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Serve him right,” I exclaimed, “and his wife too.”  She was a pretty, bright-eyed little woman, my American friend, and I wished to ingratiate myself.  “A woman who would marry such a man, knowing what she must have known of him, is sure to make him wretched, and we may trust him to be a curse to her.”

My friend seemed inclined to defend him.

“I think he is greatly improved,” she argued.

“Nonsense!” I returned, “a man never improves.  Once a villain, always a villain.”

“Oh, hush!” she pleaded, “you mustn’t call him that.”

“Why not?” I answered.  “I have heard you call him a villain yourself.”

“It was wrong of me,” she said, flushing.  “I’m afraid he was not the only one to be blamed; we were both foolish in those days, but I think we have both learned a lesson.”

I remained silent, waiting for the necessary explanation.

“You had better come and see him for yourself,” she added, with a little laugh; “to tell the truth, I am the woman who has married him.  Tuesday is my day, Number 2, K— Mansions,” and she ran off, leaving me staring after her.

I believe an enterprising clergyman who would set up a little church in the Strand, just outside the Law Courts, might do quite a trade, re-marrying couples who had just been divorced.  A friend of mine, a respondent, told me he had never loved his wife more than on two occasions—the first when she refused him, the second when she came into the witness-box to give evidence against him.

“You are curious creatures, you men,” remarked a lady once to another man in my presence.  “You never seem to know your own mind.”

She was feeling annoyed with men generally.  I do not blame her, I feel annoyed with them myself sometimes.  There is one man in particular I am always feeling intensely irritated against.  He says one thing, and acts another.  He will talk like a saint and behave like a fool, knows what is right and does what is wrong.  But we will not speak further of him.  He will be all he should be one day, and then we will pack him into a nice, comfortably-lined box, and screw the lid down tight upon him, and put him away in a quiet little spot near a church I know of, lest he should get up and misbehave himself again.

The other man, who is a wise man as men go, looked at his fair critic with a smile.

“My dear madam,” he replied, “you are blaming the wrong person.  I confess I do not know my mind, and what little I do know of it I do not like.  I did not make it, I did not select it.  I am more dissatisfied with it than you can possibly be.  It is a greater mystery to me than it is to you, and I have to live with it.  You should pity not blame me.”

There are moods in which I fall to envying those old hermits who frankly, and with courageous cowardice, shirked the problem of life.  There are days when I dream of an existence unfettered by the thousand petty strings with which our souls lie bound to Lilliputia land.  I picture myself living in some Norwegian sater, high above the black waters of a rockbound fiord.  No other human creature disputes with me my kingdom.  I am alone with the whispering fir forests and the stars.  How I live I am not quite sure.  Once a month I could journey down into the villages and return laden.  I should not need much.  For the rest, my gun and fishing-rod would supply me.  I would have with me a couple of big dogs, who would talk to me with their eyes, so full of dumb thought, and together we would wander over the uplands, seeking our dinner, after the old primitive fashion of the men who dreamt not of ten-course dinners and Savoy suppers.  I would cook the food myself, and sit down to the meal with a bottle of good wine, such as starts a man’s thoughts (for I am inconsistent, as I acknowledge, and that gift of civilization I would bear with me into my hermitage).  Then in the evening, with pipe in mouth, beside my log-wood fire, I would sit and think, until new knowledge came to me.  Strengthened by those silent voices that are drowned in the roar of Streetland, I might, perhaps, grow into something nearer to what it was intended that a man should be—might catch a glimpse, perhaps, of the meaning of life.

No, no, my dear lady, into this life of renunciation I would not take a companion, certainly not of the sex you are thinking of, even would she care to come, which I doubt.  There are times when a man is better without the woman, when a woman is better without the man.  Love drags us from the depths, makes men and women of us, but if we would climb a little nearer to the stars we must say good-bye to it.  We men and women do not show ourselves to each other at our best; too often, I fear, at our worst.  The woman’s highest ideal of man is the lover; to a man the woman is always the possible beloved.  We see each other’s hearts, but not each other’s souls.  In each other’s presence we never shake ourselves free from the earth.  Match-making mother Nature is always at hand to prompt us.  A woman lifts us up into manhood, but there she would have us stay.  “Climb up to me,” she cries to the lad, walking with soiled feet in muddy ways; “be a true man that you may be worthy to walk by my side; be brave to protect me, kind and tender, and true; but climb no higher, stay here by my side.”  The martyr, the prophet, the leader of the world’s forlorn hopes, she would wake from his dream.  Her arms she would fling about his neck holding him down.

To the woman the man says, “You are my wife.  Here is your America, within these walls, here is your work, your duty.”  True, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand, but men and women are not made in moulds, and the world’s work is various.  Sometimes to her sorrow, a woman’s work lies beyond the home.  The duty of Mary was not to Joseph.

The hero in the popular novel is the young man who says, “I love you better than my soul.”  Our favourite heroine in fiction is the woman who cries to her lover, “I would go down into Hell to be with you.” There are men and women who cannot answer thus—the men who dream dreams, the women who see visions—impracticable people from the Bayswater point of view.  But Bayswater would not be the abode of peace it is had it not been for such.

Have we not placed sexual love on a pedestal higher than it deserves?  It is a noble passion, but it is not the noblest.  There is a wider love by the side of which it is but as the lamp illumining the cottage, to the moonlight bathing the hills and valleys.  There were two women once.  This is a play I saw acted in the daylight.  They had been friends from girlhood, till there came between them the usual trouble—a man.  A weak, pretty creature not worth a thought from either of them; but women love the unworthy; there would be no over-population problem did they not; and this poor specimen, ill-luck had ordained they should contend for.

Their rivalry brought out all that was worst in both of them.  It is a mistake to suppose love only elevates; it can debase.  It was a mean struggle for what to an onlooker must have appeared a remarkably unsatisfying prize.  The loser might well have left the conqueror to her poor triumph, even granting it had been gained unfairly.  But the old, ugly, primeval passions had been stirred in these women, and the wedding-bells closed only the first act.

The second is not difficult to guess.  It would have ended in the Divorce Court had not the deserted wife felt that a finer revenge would be secured to her by silence.

In the third, after an interval of only eighteen months, the man died—the first piece of good fortune that seems to have occurred to him personally throughout the play.  His position must have been an exceedingly anxious one from the beginning.  Notwithstanding his flabbiness, one cannot but regard him with a certain amount of pity—not unmixed with amusement.  Most of life’s dramas can be viewed as either farce or tragedy according to the whim of the spectator.  The actors invariably play them as tragedy; but then that is the essence of good farce acting.

Thus was secured the triumph of legal virtue and the punishment of irregularity, and the play might be dismissed as uninterestingly orthodox were it not for the fourth act, showing how the wronged wife came to the woman she had once wronged to ask and grant forgiveness.  Strangely as it may sound, they found their love for one another unchanged.  They had been long parted: it was sweet to hold each other’s hands again.  Two lonely women, they agreed to live together.  Those who knew them well in this later time say that their life was very beautiful, filled with graciousness and nobility.

I do not say that such a story could ever be common, but it is more probable than the world might credit.  Sometimes the man is better without the woman, the woman without the man.

An old Anglicized Frenchman, I used to meet often in my earlier journalistic days, held a theory, concerning man’s future state, that has since come to afford me more food for reflection than, at the time, I should have deemed possible.  He was a bright-eyed, eager little man.  One felt no Lotus land could be Paradise to him.  We build our heaven of the stones of our desires: to the old, red-bearded Norseman, a foe to fight and a cup to drain; to the artistic Greek, a grove of animated statuary; to the Red Indian, his happy hunting ground; to the Turk, his harem; to the Jew, his New Jerusalem, paved with gold; to others, according to their taste, limited by the range of their imagination.

Few things had more terrors for me, when a child, than Heaven—as pictured for me by certain of the good folks round about me.  I was told that if I were a good lad, kept my hair tidy, and did not tease the cat, I would probably, when I died, go to a place where all day long I would sit still and sing hymns.  (Think of it! as reward to a healthy boy for being good.)  There would be no breakfast and no dinner, no tea and no supper.  One old lady cheered me a little with a hint that the monotony might be broken by a little manna; but the idea of everlasting manna palled upon me, and my suggestions, concerning the possibilities of sherbet or jumbles, were scouted as irreverent.  There would be no school, but also there would be no cricket and no rounders.  I should feel no desire, so I was assured, to do another angel’s “dags” by sliding down the heavenly banisters.  My only joy would be to sing.

“Shall we start singing the moment we get up in the morning?” I asked.

“There won’t be any morning,” was the answer.  “There will be no day and no night.  It will all be one long day without end.”

“And shall we always be singing?” I persisted.

“Yes, you will be so happy, you will always want to sing.”

“Shan’t I ever get tired?”

“No, you will never get tired, and you will never get sleepy or hungry or thirsty.”

“And does it go on like that for ever?”

“Yes, for ever and ever.”

“Will it go on for a million years?”

“Yes, a million years, and then another million years, and then another million years after that.  There will never be any end to it.”

I can remember to this day the agony of those nights, when I would lie awake, thinking of this endless heaven, from which there seemed to be no possible escape.  For the other place was equally eternal, or I might have been tempted to seek refuge there.

We grown-up folk, our brains dulled by the slowly acquired habit of not thinking, do wrong to torture children with these awful themes.  Eternity, Heaven, Hell are meaningless words to us.  We repeat them, as we gabble our prayers, telling our smug, self-satisfied selves that we are miserable sinners.  But to the child, the “intelligent stranger” in the land, seeking to know, they are fearful realities.  If you doubt me, Reader, stand by yourself, beneath the stars, one night, and solve this thought, Eternity.  Your next address shall be the County Lunatic Asylum.

My actively inclined French friend held cheerier views than are common of man’s life beyond the grave.  His belief was that we were destined to constant change, to everlasting work.  We were to pass through the older planets, to labour in the greater suns.

But for such advanced career a more capable being was needed.  No one of us was sufficient, he argued, to be granted a future existence all to himself.  His idea was that two or three or four of us, according to our intrinsic value, would be combined to make a new and more important individuality, fitted for a higher existence.  Man, he pointed out, was already a collection of the beasts.  “You and I,” he would say, tapping first my chest and then his own, “we have them all here—the ape, the tiger, the pig, the motherly hen, the gamecock, the good ant; we are all, rolled into one.  So the man of the future, he will be made up of many men—the courage of one, the wisdom of another, the kindliness of a third.”

“Take a City man,” he would continue, “say the Lord Mayor; add to him a poet, say Swinburne; mix them with a religious enthusiast, say General Booth.  There you will have the man fit for the higher life.”

Garibaldi and Bismarck, he held, should make a very fine mixture, correcting one another; if needful, extract of Ibsen might be added, as seasoning.  He thought that Irish politicians would mix admirably with Scotch divines; that Oxford Dons would go well with lady novelists.  He was convinced that Count Tolstoi, a few Gaiety Johnnies (we called them “mashers” in those days), together with a humourist—he was kind enough to suggest myself—would produce something very choice.  Queen Elizabeth, he fancied, was probably being reserved to go—let us hope in the long distant future—with Ouida.  It sounds a whimsical theory, set down here in my words, not his; but the old fellow was so much in earnest that few of us ever thought to laugh as he talked.  Indeed, there were moments on starry nights, as walking home from the office, we would pause on Waterloo Bridge to enjoy the witchery of the long line of the Embankment lights, when I could almost believe, as I listened to him, in the not impossibility of his dreams.

Even as regards this world, it would often be a gain, one thinks, and no loss, if some half-dozen of us were rolled together, or boiled down, or whatever the process necessary might be, and something made out of us in that way.

Have not you, my fair Reader, sometimes thought to yourself what a delightful husband Tom this, plus Harry that, plus Dick the other, would make?  Tom is always so cheerful and good-tempered, yet you feel that in the serious moments of life he would be lacking.  A delightful hubby when you felt merry, yes; but you would not go to him for comfort and strength in your troubles, now would you?  No, in your hour of sorrow, how good it would be to have near you grave, earnest Harry.  He is a “good sort,” Harry.  Perhaps, after all, he is the best of the three—solid, staunch, and true.  What a pity he is just a trifle commonplace and unambitious.  Your friends, not knowing his sterling hidden qualities, would hardly envy you; and a husband that no other girl envies you—well, that would hardly be satisfactory, would it?  Dick, on the other hand, is clever and brilliant.  He will make his way; there will come a day, you are convinced, when a woman will be proud to bear his name.  If only he were not so self-centred, if only he were more sympathetic.

But a combination of the three, or rather of the best qualities of the three—Tom’s good temper, Harry’s tender strength, Dick’s brilliant masterfulness: that is the man who would be worthy of you.

The woman David Copperfield wanted was Agnes and Dora rolled into one.  He had to take them one after the other, which was not so nice.  And did he really love Agnes, Mr. Dickens; or merely feel he ought to?  Forgive me, but I am doubtful concerning that second marriage of Copperfield’s.  Come, strictly between ourselves, Mr. Dickens, was not David, good human soul! now and again a wee bit bored by the immaculate Agnes?  She made him an excellent wife, I am sure.  She never ordered oysters by the barrel, unopened.  It would, on any day, have been safe to ask Traddles home to dinner; in fact, Sophie and the whole rose-garden might have accompanied him, Agnes would have been equal to the occasion.  The dinner would have been perfectly cooked and served, and Agnes’ sweet smile would have pervaded the meal.  But after the dinner, when David and Traddles sat smoking alone, while from the drawing-room drifted down the notes of high-class, elevating music, played by the saintly Agnes, did they never, glancing covertly towards the empty chair between them, see the laughing, curl-framed face of a very foolish little woman—one of those foolish little women that a wise man thanks God for making—and wish, in spite of all, that it were flesh and blood, not shadow?

Oh, you foolish wise folk, who would remodel human nature!  Cannot you see how great is the work given unto childish hands?  Think you that in well-ordered housekeeping and high-class conversation lies the whole making of a man?  Foolish Dora, fashioned by clever old magician Nature, who knows that weakness and helplessness are as a talisman calling forth strength and tenderness in man, trouble yourself not unduly about those oysters nor the underdone mutton, little woman.  Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us; and, now and then, when a windfall comes our way, we will dine together at a moderate-priced restaurant where these things are managed even better.  Your work, Dear, is to teach us gentleness and kindliness.  Lay your curls here, child.  It is from such as you that we learn wisdom.  Foolish wise folk sneer at you; foolish wise folk would pull up the useless lilies, the needless roses, from the garden, would plant in their places only serviceable wholesome cabbage.  But the Gardener knowing better, plants the silly short-lived flowers; foolish wise folk, asking for what purpose.

As for Agnes, Mr. Dickens, do you know what she always makes me think of?  You will not mind my saying?—the woman one reads about.  Frankly, I don’t believe in her.  I do not refer to Agnes in particular, but the woman of whom she is a type, the faultless woman we read of.  Women have many faults, but, thank God, they have one redeeming virtue—they are none of them faultless.

But the heroine of fiction! oh, a terrible dragon of virtue is she.  May heaven preserve us poor men, undeserving though we be, from a life with the heroine of fiction.  She is all soul, and heart, and intellect, with never a bit of human nature to catch hold of her by.  Her beauty, it appals one, it is so painfully indescribable.  Whence comes she, whither goes she, why do we never meet her like?  Of women I know a goodish few, and I look among them for her prototype; but I find it not.  They are charming, they are beautiful, all these women that I know.  It would not be right for me to tell you, Ladies, the esteem and veneration with which I regard you all.  You yourselves, blushing, would be the first to cheek my ardour.  But yet, dear Ladies, seen even through my eyes, you come not near the ladies that I read about.  You are not—if I may be permitted an expressive vulgarism—in the same street with them.  Your beauty I can look upon, and retain my reason—for whatever value that may be to me.  Your conversation, I admit, is clever and brilliant in the extreme; your knowledge vast and various; your culture quite Bostonian; yet you do not—I hardly know how to express it—you do not shine with the sixteen full-moon-power of the heroine of fiction.  You do not—and I thank you for it—impress me with the idea that you are the only women on earth.  You, even you, possess tempers of your own.  I am inclined to think you take an interest in your clothes.  I would not be sure, even, that you do not mingle a little of “your own hair” (you know what I mean) with the hair of your head.  There is in your temperament a vein of vanity, a suggestion of selfishness, a spice of laziness.  I have known you a trifle unreasonable, a little inconsiderate, slightly exacting.  Unlike the heroine of fiction, you have a certain number of human appetites and instincts; a few human follies, perhaps, a human fault, or shall we say two?  In short, dear Ladies, you also, even as we men, are the children of Adam and Eve.  Tell me, if you know, where I may meet with this supernatural sister of yours, this woman that one reads about.  She never keeps any one waiting while she does her back hair, she is never indignant with everybody else in the house because she cannot find her own boots, she never scolds the servants, she is never cross with the children, she never slams the door, she is never jealous of her younger sister, she never lingers at the gate with any cousin but the right one.

Dear me, where do they keep them, these women that one reads about?  I suppose where they keep the pretty girl of Art.  You have seen her, have you not, Reader, the pretty girl in the picture?  She leaps the six-barred gate with a yard and a half to spare, turning round in her saddle the while to make some smiling remark to the comic man behind, who, of course, is standing on his head in the ditch.  She floats gracefully off Dieppe on stormy mornings.  Her baigneuse—generally of chiffon and old point lace—has not lost a curve.  The older ladies, bathing round her, look wet.  Their dress clings damply to their limbs.  But the pretty girl of Art dives, and never a curl of her hair is disarranged.  The pretty girl of Art stands lightly on tip-toe and volleys a tennis-ball six feet above her head.  The pretty girl of Art keeps the head of the punt straight against a stiff current and a strong wind.  She never gets the water up her sleeve, and down her back, and all over the cushions.  Her pole never sticks in the mud, with the steam launch ten yards off and the man looking the other way.  The pretty girl of Art skates in high-heeled French shoes at an angle of forty-five to the surface of the ice, both hands in her muff.  She never sits down plump, with her feet a yard apart, and says “Ough.” The pretty girl of Art drives tandem down Piccadilly, during the height of the season, at eighteen miles an hour.  It never occurs to her leader that the time has now arrived for him to turn round and get into the cart.  The pretty girl of Art rides her bicycle through the town on market day, carrying a basket of eggs, and smiling right and left.  She never throws away both her handles and runs into a cow.  The pretty girl of Art goes trout fishing in open-work stockings, under a blazing sun, with a bunch of dew-bespangled primroses in her hair; and every time she gracefully flicks her rod she hauls out a salmon.  She never ties herself up to a tree, or hooks the dog.  She never comes home, soaked and disagreeable, to tell you that she caught six, but put them all back again, because they were merely two or three-pounders, and not worth the trouble of carrying.  The pretty girl of Art plays croquet with one hand, and looks as if she enjoyed the game.  She never tries to accidentally kick her ball into position when nobody is noticing, or stands it out that she is through a hoop that she knows she isn’t.

She is a good, all-round sportswoman, is the pretty girl in the picture.  The only thing I have to say against her is that she makes one dissatisfied with the girl out of the picture—the girl who mistakes a punt for a teetotum, so that you land feeling as if you had had a day in the Bay of Biscay; and who, every now and again, stuns you with the thick end of the pole: the girl who does not skate with her hands in her muff; but who, throwing them up to heaven, says, “I’m going,” and who goes, taking care that you go with her: the girl who, as you brush her down, and try to comfort her, explains to you indignantly that the horse took the corner too sharply and never noticed the mile-stone; the girl whose hair sea water does not improve.

There can be no doubt about it: that is where they keep the good woman of Fiction, where they keep the pretty girl of Art.

Does it not occur to you, Messieurs les Auteurs, that you are sadly disturbing us?  These women that are a combination of Venus, St. Cecilia, and Elizabeth Fry! you paint them for us in your glowing pages: it is not kind of you, knowing, as you must, the women we have to put up with.

Would we not be happier, we men and women, were we to idealize one another less?  My dear young lady, you have nothing whatever to complain to Fate about, I assure you.  Unclasp those pretty hands of yours, and come away from the darkening window.  Jack is as good a fellow as you deserve; don’t yearn so much.  Sir Galahad, my dear—Sir Galahad rides and fights in the land that lies beyond the sunset, far enough away from this noisy little earth where you and I spend much of our time tittle-tattling, flirting, wearing fine clothes, and going to shows.  And besides, you must remember, Sir Galahad was a bachelor: as an idealist he was wise.  Your Jack is by no means a bad sort of knight, as knights go nowadays in this un-idyllic world.  There is much solid honesty about him, and he does not pose.  He is not exceptional, I grant you; but, my dear, have you ever tried the exceptional man?  Yes, he is very nice in a drawing-room, and it is interesting to read about him in the Society papers: you will find most of his good qualities there: take my advice, don’t look into him too closely.  You be content with Jack, and thank heaven he is no worse.  We are not saints, we men—none of us, and our beautiful thoughts, I fear, we write in poetry not action.  The White Knight, my dear young lady, with his pure soul, his heroic heart, his life’s devotion to a noble endeavour, does not live down here to any great extent.  They have tried it, one or two of them, and the world—you and I: the world is made up of you and I—has generally starved, and hooted them.  There are not many of them left now: do you think you would care to be the wife of one, supposing one were to be found for you?  Would you care to live with him in two furnished rooms in Clerkenwell, die with him on a chair bedstead?  A century hence they will put up a statue to him, and you may be honoured as the wife who shared with him his sufferings.  Do you think you are woman enough for that?  If not, thank your stars you have secured, for your own exclusive use, one of us unexceptional men, who knows no better than to admire you.  You are not exceptional.

And in us ordinary men there is some good.  It wants finding, that is all.  We are not so commonplace as you think us.  Even your Jack, fond of his dinner, his conversation four-cornered by the Sporting Press—yes, I agree he is not interesting, as he sits snoring in the easy-chair; but, believe it or not, there are the makings of a great hero in Jack, if Fate would but be kinder to him, and shake him out of his ease.

Dr. Jekyll contained beneath his ample waist-coat not two egos, but three—not only Hyde but another, a greater than Jekyll—a man as near to the angels as Hyde was to the demons.  These well-fed City men, these Gaiety Johnnies, these plough-boys, apothecaries, thieves! within each one lies hidden the hero, did Fate, the sculptor, choose to use his chisel.  That little drab we have noticed now and then, our way taking us often past the end of the court, there was nothing by which to distinguish her.  She was not over-clean, could use coarse language on occasion—just the spawn of the streets: take care lest the cloak of our child should brush her.

One morning the district Coroner, not, generally speaking, a poet himself, but an adept at discovering poetry buried under unlikely rubbish-heaps, tells us more about her.  She earned six shillings a week, and upon it supported a bed-ridden mother and three younger children.  She was housewife, nurse, mother, breadwinner, rolled into one.  Yes, there are heroines out of fiction.

So loutish Tom has won the Victoria Cross—dashed out under a storm of bullets and rescued the riddled flag.  Who would have thought it of loutish Tom?  The village alehouse one always deemed the goal of his endeavours.  Chance comes to Tom and we find him out.  To Harry the Fates were less kind.  A ne’er-do-well was Harry—drank, knocked his wife about, they say.  Bury him, we are well rid of him, he was good for nothing.  Are we sure?

Let us acknowledge we are sinners.  We know, those of us who dare to examine ourselves, that we are capable of every meanness, of every wrong under the sun.  It is by the accident of circumstance, aided by the helpful watchfulness of the policeman, that our possibilities of crime are known only to ourselves.  But having acknowledged our evil, let us also acknowledge that we are capable of greatness.  The martyrs who faced death and torture unflinchingly for conscience’ sake, were men and women like ourselves.  They had their wrong side.  Before the small trials of daily life they no doubt fell as we fall.  By no means were they the pick of humanity.  Thieves many of them had been, and murderers, evil-livers, and evil-doers.  But the nobility was there also, lying dormant, and their day came.  Among them must have been men who had cheated their neighbours over the counter; men who had been cruel to their wives and children; selfish, scandal-mongering women.  In easier times their virtue might never have been known to any but their Maker.

In every age and in every period, when and where Fate has called upon men and women to play the man, human nature has not been found wanting.  They were a poor lot, those French aristocrats that the Terror seized: cowardly, selfish, greedy had been their lives.  Yet there must have been good, even in them.  When the little things that in their little lives they had thought so great were swept away from them, when they found themselves face to face with the realities; then even they played the man.  Poor shuffling Charles the First, crusted over with weakness and folly, deep down in him at last we find the great gentleman.