are the "toes-es." No one ever sings about February: scarcely anyone
speaks about It. It is indeed unspeakable. Its only benefit is that,
once every four years, it keeps people younger a day longer. If you're
thirty-nine, you're thirty-nine for an extra twenty-four hours, and at
that period of life you're glad of any small mercy. It is the month
when the new-rich depart to sun themselves in their new-found sun, and
the new-poor, and others who are quite used to poverty, swear at them
in secret. Oh, yes, indeed! If the Clerk of the Weather has a left
ear it must surely at this moment be as 'ot as 'ell! Nobody likes
February--it is the step-child of the months.
One simply lives through it as one lives through a necessary duty.
It's a month--and that's all. Thank Heaven! somebody once made it the
shortest! By the end of January most people have had more than enough
of the English Winter even if the English Winter thinks we can ever
have enough of it, and comes back saying "Hello!" to us right into
Summer, and starts ringing us up, as it were, to tell us it's coming
back again as early as October. Just as if we didn't know--just as if
we ever wanted to know! The English Summer is far more modest.
Usually it's gone before we have, so to speak, washed our hands, tidied
our hair, and dressed ourselves up to meet it. But Winter in England
not only comes before it is wanted, but outstays its welcome by weeks.
And of all the months it brings with it, February, though the shortest,
seems to linger longest. March may be colder, but the first day of
Spring is marked on its calendar; and we wait for it like we wait for a
lover--a lover in whose embrace we may not yet be, but who is, as it
were, downstairs washing his hands, he has arrived, he is here--and so
we can endure the suspense of waiting for him with a grin. April may
fill the dykes fuller than February, whose skies are supposed to weep
all day long, but generally only succeed in dribbling, but April
belongs to Spring--even though our face and hands and feet are still in
Mid-Winter.
February always reminds me of the suburbs--appalling but you've got to
go through them to get to London. Were I a rich man, I would follow
Spring round the World. In that way I should be able to smile through
life like those people who, in snapshots from the Riviera, seem
composed principally of wide grins and thin legs, and whose joie de
vivre is usually published in English illustrated journals in seasons
when the English weather makes you feel that Life is just a Big Damn in
a mackintosh. To follow Spring round the world would be like following
a mistress whose charms never palled, whose welcome was never too warm
to be sultry, whose friendship was never too cold to freeze further
promise of intimacy. What a delightful chase! and what a
sweet-tempered man I should be! For, say what you will, the weather
has a lot to do with that spotless robe of white which is supposed to
envelop saints. If you can't be pure and good and generous and
altogether delightful in the Spring, you might as well write yourself
off for evermore among the ignoble army of the eternally disgruntled.
And if you _can_ be all these things in weather that is typically
English and typically February, then a hat would surely hide your halo.
And this is about all the good that February does, so far as I can see.
True, once in four years it also allows old maids to propose. But the
three years when they had to wait to be asked have usually taken all
their courage out of them. Besides, the married people and others who
are otherwise hooked and secure have turned even that benefit into a
joke--and no woman likes to place all her heart-yearnings at the mercy
of a laugh. So that, what Leap-Year once allowed, people have turned
into a jeer. But then, that is all part and parcel of February.
Somebody once tried their best to make it as attractive as possible,
even if it could only be so once every four years. But everybody else
has since done their best to rob it of its one little bit of anaemic
joy. Perhaps we ought not to blame them! Nobody ought to be blamed in
February. It is a month which brings out the very worst in everybody.
_Tub-thumpers_
I often wonder what born tub-thumpers are like in their own homes.
Perhaps they are as meek and mild as watered buttermilk. Thinking it
over, I think they must be. No self-respecting woman could be
tub-thumped at daily without eyeing furtively the nearest meat-carver.
For the genius of a tub-thumper is that he is usually born deaf. I
don't mean to say that he cannot hear, but he only hears what is
convenient for his own arguments to hear, and the more an explanation
is convincing the more he tries to shout it down, deafening himself as
well as the poor fool who is struggling to make his meaning clear.
Each one of us, I suppose, has to "let off steam" some time somewhere,
and round about the Marble Arch, where fiery orators "let themselves
go," must be the safety-valve of many an obscure home. Occasionally I
go there--just to listen to men and women giving an example of that
proverb about "a little knowledge being a dangerous thing." Moreover,
there is a certain psychological interest in this rowdy corner of a
peaceful park. It is typical of England, for one thing. I don't mean
to say that tub-thumping is typical of England, but England is
certainly the harbour of refuge of the crank. You can see there the
crankiest of cranks being as cranky as they know how to be; and you can
see also the utterly good-humoured indifference with which the crowds
who listen to them regard their crankiness--which also has its meaning.
The other evening a middle aged woman of untidy locks was crying that
England alone was responsible for the war. Another--in this instance a
young man--was deploring the recent blockade of Germany, viewing at the
same time in quite a tender light the Zeppelin raids on towns and
villages and the bombardment of undefended ports. In any other
country, I think, these people would have been lynched. But D.O.R.A.,
as a strenuous female, is now as dead as 1914 fashions, and the people
who heard these friends or Germany crying out their friendliness
listened to them in laughing tolerance, which must have annoyed the
speakers considerably, seeing that laughter renders unconvincing the
very fiercest argument. But they laughed, and, passing on their way,
heard God being described as an "old scoundrel," and this seemed to
amuse them even more.
_I Wonder If . . ._
But I sometimes wonder if this indifference towards the facts which are
"big" to so many people and ought, perhaps, to be "big" to everybody, be
a sign of national weakness or of national strength. Personally, I
longed, metaphorically speaking, to tear that female limb from limb and
send that young man to a village under bombardment, there to make him
stay a week in the very hottest portion of Hell's Corner. But had I done
so, I realised that I should not have accomplished the very slightest
good. The moment that you take a crank seriously, from that very moment
he imagines that his "crankiness" is divinely inspired. Far better laugh
at him and let him alone. Laughter is the one unanswerable
contradiction, and ridicule is a far more deadly thing to fight against
than fury, no matter if fury wields a hatchet. Perhaps this utter
indifference to the firebrand is our national strength--even though it
comes from a too-sluggish imagination, a too great imperviousness to new
dangers. English people possess too great a sense of humour ever to
become Bolshevik. They may not be witty and vivacious and effervescingly
bright, but they possess an innate sense of the ridiculous which is their
national safeguard against any very bloody form of revolution. So we
suffer infuriated cranks--if not gladly, at least, in the same manner as
we suffer baboons in the Zoo--interesting, and even amusing in their
proper place, but to be shot at sight should they venture to play the
"baboon" amid those hideous red-brick villas which have been termed an
Englishman's castle and his home. After all, every new system has its
ridiculous side, and strangely enough, it is this ridiculous side which
is most apparent at the outset. Only after you have delved below the
"comic froth" do you begin to realise that there is a very vital truth
hidden beneath. Well, a sense of humour blows away that froth in time,
and then--as for example after the Suffragette antics--the real argument
behind the capers and the words becomes known. Thus in England all
revolutions are gradual, and in their very slowness lies their
incalculable strength of purpose.
_Types of Tub-thumpers_
But the various types of cranks always provide a psychological interest
to the student of intellectual freakishness. There are the "cranks" you
laugh at; others who make you wish to murder them outright. Then there
are a few pathetic cases--elderly men, who bring their own little wooden
box as well as the vast majority of their own audience, including a wife,
a sister, and a convert in spectacles--men who, in a mild tone of voice,
earnestly strive to paint as a real story the fable of Jonah and the
Whale to a few casual passers-by--those same passers-by who, because
there is no real "fun" to be got out of such lecturers, pass by with such
unsympathetic rapidity. Yet I always love to listen to these speakers.
They are such an illustration of "a voice crying in the wilderness," and
they are so dead-in earnest, and they mean so well--two direct
invitations, as it were, to the world's ridicule. You can't help
admiring them, although mingled with your admiration there is a strong
streak of pity. The simplicity of their faith is colossal. They believe
_everything_. They believe in the miraculous conversion of drunkards in
a single night through one verse of the Gospel; they believe that we
shall all rise again and sing on and on eternally; they believe that all
men and women are born to evil, and they would feel positively indignant
were not the whitest soul among us really steeped in double-dyed sin.
And how they believe in God!--Oh, yes, how they do believe in God! I
cannot say whether they bring God into their daily lives, but they
certainly drag Him to the Marble Arch. And all the while a very sedate,
middle-aged woman and a grim bespectacled maiden of forty-five try their
utmost--or seem so to do--to look as if they had led lives of the most
scarlet sinfulness until they had heard their elderly friend preach The
Word. Nothing ever disturbs these meetings. They just go on to their
appointed close, when the "stand" is promptly taken by someone who
believes in nothing at all, God least of all, and will tell you the
reasons of his disbelief for hours and hours, and still leave you
unconvinced.
_If Age only Practised what it Preached!_
The Boy Scouts have, I believe, a moral injunction to do at least one
good action every day. Older people applaud that injunction wildly. It
is so admirable--_for Boy Scouts_. They consider it to be so admirable,
indeed, that they declare it should form part of the moral curriculum of
every young boy and girl. In fact, they declare it to be applicable to
everyone--everyone except themselves. Personally, I think it would be
even more admirable when followed by grown-up people. But most grown-up
people seem to consider that they have done their one world-beneficial
action when they get out of bed in the morning. The rest of the day they
will be unselfish--if it suits their purpose. If only grown-up people
practised what they preached to children we should have the millennium
next Monday. If the world is still "wicked," it isn't because there are
not enough moral precepts being flung about all over it. The trouble is
that the people to whom they most apply pass them on. They consider they
don't apply to them at all.
If only children could chastise their parents for telling lies, and being
greedy and selfish, and doing the hundred and one things which they ought
not to have done, ninety-nine per cent. of the mothers and fathers,
spiritual pastors and masters, and "all those who are set in authority
over them"--would not be able to sit down without an "Oo-er!" for weeks.
Happily children are born actors, and can simulate an air of belief, even
in the face of their elders' most bare-faced inconsistency. But--if you
can cast back your memory into long ago--you will remember that one of
the most "shattering" moments or your youth was the time when it first
burst upon your inner vision that all men, and especially grown-up men,
are liars. Certainly, if we really do come "trailing clouds of glory,"
the clouds soon evaporate and we lose the glory, not through listening to
what men tell us, but in watching what men _do_.
Selfishness is surely of the deadly sins the most deadly. Yet
selfishness is what elder people tell youth to avoid most carefully. If
everyone only lived up to half the moral "fineness" which they find so
admirable in the tenets of the Boy Scouts, the world would be worth
living in to-morrow. Think of the hundreds of millions of unselfish acts
which would then take place every day! In a short time there would
surely be hardly any more good to do! As it is, a few kind-hearted,
generous, sympathetic people are kept so busy trying to leaven the
selfishness, the hardness, the all-uncharitableness of those who are out
to live entirely for themselves, that, poor things, they are usually worn
to a shadow long before their time!
The virtues are very badly distributed. Some people have so many, and in
such "chunks," and others possess so few and even seem determined to get
rid of those they have as soon as they can. If only youth had a sense or
humour it would surely die from laughing. But it hasn't. It has only
faith. Besides, as I said before, it is a born actor--and in face of the
big stick it is far safer to pretend faith than show ridicule. If we can
have children in the next world--and I have just received a communication
from an ardent spiritualist informing me that an earthly wife can become
a mother through keeping in touch with her dead husband--I think that,
metaphorically speaking, the paternal cane will be "sloshed" both ways.
That is to say, Little Johnny, who has been laid across mother's knee and
beaten by her with a slipper for stealing jam, will, in his turn, strike
mother across the knuckles with a ruler when she, too, is caught
"pinching" half-a-crown out of father's trouser pocket. If heaven be
nothing else, it will surely be a place of justice. The trouble with
this old earth is that justice is only meted out by those who have not
yet been found out. In heaven I hope that people who preach will be
punished if they do not put their preaching into practice. It will, I
fear, empty any number of pulpits--alike in the churches, the public
parks, and the home.
But heaven will be none the worse for a little silence. As it is, we
earth-wallahs hear such a lot of high-falutin and observe so much low
cunning that no wonder youth, as it grows more "knowing," becomes more
cynical. It is only when a young man has arrived at years of discretion
that he realises that the most discreet thing to do is to be indiscreet
while holding a moral mask up. When he realises this, he will find it
more politic to keep one eye closed. Brotherly love has to be blind in
one eye. Justice finds it safer to be blind in both. And the fool is he
who keeps both eyes open, yet sees nothing. And so most grown-up people
are fools! That is why they stick together in war-time and always
_quarrel_ at a Peace Conference.
_Beginnings_
Beginnings are always difficult--when they are not merely dull. People
worth knowing are always hard to get to know. On the other hand, people
with whom you become friendly at once usually end by boring you unto
death by the end of the first fortnight. People whom it is easy to get
to know, as a rule know so many people that to be counted among their
acquaintances is like belonging to a friendly host, each one of whom
ought to wear around his neck a regimental number to differentiate him
from his neighbour. But the friend who is born a friend--and some people
are born friends, just as other people are born married--dislikes to be
one of a herd. Friendship, like love, is among autocrats, the most
autocratic. There is no such thing as communism among the passions.
But, as I said before, the people worth getting to know are so difficult
to get to know. One has to hack away, as it were, and keep on hacking
away, until one breaks through the crusts of reserve and prejudice and
shyness which always surround the "soul" of pure gold--or, in fact, the
"soul" of any type or quality. But "to hack" is a very dull occupation:
that is why I say all beginnings are difficult when they are not merely
drab. I always secretly envy the people who let themselves be known
quite easily, although I realise that, when you get to know them, there
is usually very little worth knowing. But there are so many lonely men
and women wandering through this sad old world of ours who are lonely,
not because there is not plenty of sympathy and understanding ready, as
it were, to be tapped by the rod of friendship and love, but because they
are too shy to make friends, too reserved to show the genius of
friendship which burns within them. So they go through the world with
open arms which merely clasp thin air. They are too difficult to get to
know, and they do not possess the key which unlocks the secret of
dignified "self-revelation." Between them and the world there is thrust
a mask of reserve and shyness--a mask the expression of which they
positively hate, but are unable to tear it down from their faces. Thus
they live lonely in a world of other lonely souls; no one can help them,
and they are too timid of rebuff to help themselves.
But Friendship cannot be cultivated and tended by a third party--that is
an axiom. It either springs to life inevitably or, metaphorically
speaking, it doesn't turn a hair. The well-meaning person who introduces
one friend to another with the supreme assurance that they will both get
on splendidly together, usually begins by making two people enemies. The
friends of friends are very rarely friends with one another. And
jealousy is not entirely the cause of this immediate estrangement. One
friend appeals to one side of your nature and another friend appeals to a
different side, but very, very rarely do you find two people who make the
same appeal--since Heaven only knows how great is the physical attraction
in Friendship as well as in Love! On the whole, then, the wise man and
woman keep their friends apart. And this for the very good reason, that,
either the two friends will become friends with each other, leaving you
out of their soul-communion altogether, or else they will wonder in a
loud voice what on earth you can find in your other friend to make him
seem so attractive to you! In any case, a tiny thread or malignity is
woven into that fabric of an inner life in which there should be nothing
whatever malign.
Friendship resembles Love in the fact that there are usually three
stages. The first stage seems thrilling--but how thankful you are, when
you look back upon it, that it is over! The second stage is full of
disappointment--how different the friendship realised is from the
friendship anticipated! The third stage is philosophical, peaceful, and
so happy!--since the worst is known and the best is known, but how
immeasurably the best outweighs the worst! and how deliciously restful it
is to realise that you, too, are loved, as it were, in spite of yourself
and for those qualities in you which are the _real_ you, although you
need must hide them under so much dross. Thus you both find happiness
and peace. And surely friendship--true friendship--is the happiest and
most peaceful state in life? It is the happiest and most peaceful part
of Love: it is the one thing which, if you really find it, makes the
Everyday of life seem worth the while; seem worth the laughter and the
tears, the failures and the victories, the dull beginnings, and the even
more tedious beginnings-over-again, which are, alas! inevitable, except
in the Human Turnip, who, in parenthesis, is too pompously inert ever to
make a start.
A very well-known actress once confessed to me that, no matter how warm
had been her welcome, she invariably felt a feeling of hostility between
the audience and herself when she first walked on the stage. But I
rather think that everyone, except the Human Turnip, who feels nothing
except thirst and hunger and cold, has that feeling at the beginning. No
matter if your advent has been heralded by a fanfare of trumpets, you
invariably feel within yourself that your _début_ has been accompanied by
the unuttered exclamation: "Oh, my dear! Is that all?" It wears off in
time, of course; but it only bears out my theory that beginnings are
always difficult--when they are not merely dull. I can quite imagine
that the first day in Heaven will be extremely uncomfortable. I know
there is no day so long as the first day of a holiday--or any day which
seems so short as the last one. For one thing, at the beginning of
anything you are never your true, natural self. The "pose," which you
carry about with you amid strange surroundings, hangs like a pall upon
your spirits, to bore you as much as it bores those on whom you wish to
make the most endearing impression. Later on, it wears off--and what you
are--_you are_! and for what you are--you are either disliked intensely
or adored. But you are never completely happy until you are completely
natural, and you are never natural at the beginning. That is why you
should forgive beginnings, as you, yourself, hope to be forgiven when
you, yourself, begin.
_Unlucky in Little Things_
They say it is better to be born lucky than beautiful. Which contains,
by the way, only small consolation for those of us who have been born
both lucky and ugly. For, after all, to have been born beautiful is a
nice "chunk" of good luck to build upon, and anyway, if you are a woman,
constitutes a fine capital for the increase of future business. But to
have been born lucky is much more exciting than to have been born
beautiful; moreover the capital reserve does not diminish with time. All
the same, I don't want to write about either lucky people or beautiful
ones. There are already too many people writing about them as it is. I
want to write about the _unlucky_ ones--because I consider myself one of
them. I do so in the hope that my tears will find their tears, and, it
we must drown, metaphorically speaking, it is a crumb of comfort to drown
in company.
Most unlucky people when they speak about their ill-luck always refer to
such incidents as when they backed the Derby "favourite" and it fell down
within a yard of the winning post. True, that is ill-luck amounting
almost to tragedy. But there is another kind of unlucky person--and
about him I can write from experience, because it is my special brand of
misfortune. He is the unlucky person who is unlucky in _little things_.
After all, not many of us back horses, and presently fewer of us than
ever will be able to do more in the gambling line than play
Beg-o'-my-Neighbour with somebody's old aunt for a thr'penny-bit stake.
Let me give a few instances of this ill-luck, in the hope that my plaint
will strike a responsive chord in the hearts of those who read this page.