'bus, that fat man will sit down beside me as sure as houses! (_b_) If I
am sitting in a railway carriage hugging to my heart the hope that I may
have the compartment to myself throughout the long non-stop run, for a
surety, at the very last moment, the Woman-with-the-squalling-brat will
rush on the platform and head straight for me! Or, I have only to see
the Remarkably Plain Person hesitating between two tables in a restaurant
to know that she will invariably choose _mine_! (_c_) If there is a bad
oyster--_I get it_! If a wasp flies into the garden seeking repose--I
always look to it like a Chesterfield couch! If one day I have not
shaved--my latest "pash" _is sure to call_! Should I invest my
hard-earned savings in Government Stock it is a sign for an immediate
spread of Bolshevism, and consequent depreciation in all Government
securities. If one day I plan to make a voyage to Cythere--I will surely
catch a cold in my head the night before and, instead of quoting
Swinburne, shall only sneeze and say, "Dearest, I do hope I didn't splash
you!" I fully expect to wake up and find myself rich and famous--the day
I "wake up" to find myself _dead_! And of course, like everybody with a
grievance, I could go on talking about it for ever. Still, I have given
a sufficient number of instances of my ill-luck for ninety per cent. of
people to respond in sympathy. The "big things" so seldom happen that
one can live quite comfortably without them.
But the "Little Things" are like the poor--they are always with us; or
like relations--perpetually on the doorstep on washing day. Perhaps one
ought to live as if one were not aware of them. To have your eyes fixed
steadfastly on some "star" makes you oblivious, as it were, to the
creepy-crawly things which are creepy-crawling up your leg. The
unfortunate thing, however, is, that there seem so few stars on which to
fix your gaze. If you are born beautiful, or born lucky--you have no use
for "stars." To a certain extent you are a "star" in yourself. But for
_nous autres_ there only remains the exasperation of Little Things which
perpetually "go wrong." The only hope, then, for us is to cultivate that
state of despair which can view a whole accumulation of minor disasters
with indifference. When you are indifferent to "luck" it is quite
astonishing what good fortune comes your way. Luck is rather like a
woman--it is, as it were, only utterly abject before a "shrugged
shoulder."
_Wallpapers_
Life is full of minor mysteries--conundrums of the everyday which usually
centre round the problem: "Why on earth people do certain things and what
on earth makes them do them?" And one of these mysteries is that of
their choice in wallpapers. Of course some wallpapers are so pretty that
it is not at all difficult to realise why people chose them. On the
other hand, some are so extraordinarily hideous that one would really
like to see, for curiosity's sake, the artist who designed them and the
purchaser whose artistic needs they satisfied. Those bunches of
impossible flowers linked together by ribbons, the whole painted in
horrible combinations of colour--how we all know them, and how we marvel
at their creation! One imagines the mental difficulty of the purchaser
as to which among the many designs most appealed to her artistic "eye."
Then one pictures how her choice wavered among several. One figures to
oneself how she sat in consultation with that friend whom most people
take with them when they go out to choose wallpapers, asking her opinion
concerning the design which showed nightmare birds swarming about among
terrible trees, and the one which illustrated brown roses with blue buds
growing in regulated bunches on trellis-work of a most bilious green.
One can almost hear the arguments for and against, and at last, the
definite conclusion that the one with the brown roses and blue buds was
the more uncommon--therefore the better of the two. And one day fate
leads your steps towards the bedroom wherein that wallpaper hangs. As
you throw yourself into the one easy chair you take out your cigarette
case to enjoy that "just one more" which is the more enjoyable because it
symbolises that feeling of being "enfin seul" which always follows
conversations with landladies or several hours making yourselves
agreeable to hostesses.
Then you see it!
At first you are amusedly contemptuous. "How perfectly hideous," you say
to yourself. And then, in your idleness of mind, your eye follows the
roses and ribbons in horrible contortions from the skirting board to the
ceiling. Realising what you are doing, and knowing that in that
direction madness lies, you immediately turn your gaze towards the
window. You imagine that you have gained the day. But, alas! _you are
wrong_! Comes a moment in the early morning when you wake up two hours
before you wanted to, with nothing else to do except to lie awake
thinking. And all the while the brown roses with their blue buds have
unconsciously stretched their tendrils to seize your wandering regard.
Before you realise what they are doing, your eyes are riveted on that
horrible bunch half-way up the wall which being cut in half by the sudden
termination of the width of one paper roll, does not exactly fit the
corresponding half of the other. How it suddenly begins to irritate
you--this break in the symmetry of the design! You force your eyes from
contemplating its offence, only to discover that the bunches of roses
which are exposed between the sides of the picture representing "The
Soul's Awakening" and the illuminated text painted by your hostess when
she was young, make _an exact square_. Above the pictures you perceive
that these same bunches form a "diamond," resting on one of its right
angles! That there are only five of these terrible bunches between the
side of "The Soul's Awakening" and the corner of the wall, and _six_
between that of "Trust in the Lord" and the door. And all the time you
are becoming more and more irritable. You cannot close your eyes because
you know that when you open them again the same illustrations from Euclid
will await you. The only thing that comforts you is the determination to
write immediately to your Member of Parliament insisting that he drafts a
Bill creating a censor of wallpapers, with dire penalties for any
"circumventors" of the law. That at least would put every seaside
landlady in prison.
_Our Irritating Habits_
Far more than the Big Things are the Teeny Weeny Little Ones which more
quickly divide lovers. A woman may conveniently overlook the fact that
her husband poisoned his first wife in order to marry her, when she
cannot ignore the perpetual example which he gives her of the truth that
Satan finds some evil still for idle hands to do--by always picking his
teeth. All of us possess some little irritating personal habit, which
makes for us more enemies than those faults for which, on our knees, we
beg forgiveness of Heaven. A woman can drink in the poetry of her
lover's passionate eloquence for ever and ever, amen. But if, in the
middle of the night, she wakes up to find her eloquent lover letting
forth the most stentorian snores she, metaphorically, immediately sits up
in bed and begins seriously _to wonder_. And the moment love begins to
ask itself questions, it is, as it were, turning over the leaves of the
time-table to discover the next boat for the Antipodes. As I said
before, more homes are broken up, not by the flying fire-irons, but by
the irritating little personal idiosyncrasies which men and women exhibit
when they are, so they declare, "quite natural and at their ease." Only
a mother's love can survive the accompaniment of suction noises with
soup. Vice always makes the innocent suffer, but suffering is often
bearable, and sometimes it ennobles us; but chewing raw tobacco--even
perpetually chewing chewing gum--is unbearable, and has a most ignoble
effect on the temper, especially the temper of life's Monday mornings.
Even for our virtues do we sometimes run the risk of being murdered by
those who, because they think they know us best, consequently admire us
least. Virtue which is waved overhead like a banner is always a
perpetual challenge, and the moment we seem to issue a challenge--even
though we merely challenge the surrounding ether--someone in the concrete
bends down somewhere to pick up a brickbat and, gazing at us, mutters,
"How far? Oh Lord, how far?" Even the expressions of love, in the wrong
place, have been known to hear hatred as their echo. I once knew a man
who left his wife because she could never speak to him without calling
him "darling." She had so absorbed Barrie's theory that the bravest man
is but a "child," that "home" for her husband became a kind of glorified
nursery. At last his spirit became bilious with the cloying sweetness of
it all. The climax came one evening when, after accidentally treading on
her best corn and begging her pardon, she got up, put her loving arms
around his neck and, kissing him, whispered, "_Granted_, darling,
_granted_ before you did it!" Soon after that he left her for a woman
who, herself, trod on every corn he possessed, and had not the least
inclination to say she was sorry. Of course, he lived to regret his
first wife. Most men do.
"Tact," I suppose, is at the bottom of all the difficulty--tact not only
to know instinctively what to do and when to do it, but when to realise
that a wife is still an "audience" and when to realise that, so far as
being completely natural in her company is concerned, she has absolutely
ceased to exist. But, alas! no one has the heart to teach us this
necessary lesson in "tact." We can tell a man of his sin when we dare
not tell him it were the better plan to go right away by himself when he
wishes to take his false teeth out. A wife will promote an angry scene
with her husband over the "other woman"--of whom she is not in the least
bit jealous--when she will never dream of telling him that he doesn't
sufficiently wash--which was the real cause of their early estrangement.
Everybody knows his own vices, whereas most people are blissfully
ignorant of their own irritating idiosyncrasies. I would far sooner be
told of my nasty habits than of my own special brand of original sin.
Sin has to be in very disgusting form to evoke lasting dislike, whereas a
"nasty habit" breeds DISGUST, which is a far more terrible emotion than
hatred.
_Away--Far Away!_
"The bird was there, and rose and fell as formerly, pouring out his
melody; but it was not the same. Something was missing from those last
sweet languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had been some
disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly
believe it since his mate was still sitting about thirty yards from the
tree on the five little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps his
midsummer's music had reached its highest point and was now in its
declension. And perhaps the fault was in me. The virtue that draws and
holds us does not hold us always nor very long; it departs from all
things, and we wonder why. The loss is in ourselves, although we do not
know it. Nature, the chosen mistress of our heart, does not change
towards us, yet she is now, even to-day--
Less full of purple colour and hid spice,
and smiles and sparkles in vain to allure us, and when she touches us
with her warm caressing touch, there is, compared with yesterday, only a
faint response." I cull this paragraph from Mr. W. H. Hudson's
enchanting book, "Birds in Town and Village," because, or so it seems to
me, it expresses in beautiful language a fact which has puzzled me all
through my life, making me fear to dare in many things, lest the
enthusiasm I then felt were not repeated when the time for action
arrived. We are all more or less creatures of mood, some more than
others, and I, alas! among the moodiest majority. All through the long,
dark, chilly, miserable winter I live in town, longing sadly, though
rapturously, for the summer to come again, and with its advent my own
migration into rural solitudes, far away from the crowd, surrounded by
Nature and lost in her embrace. Yet the end of each summer finds me with
my pilgrimage not yet undertaken. Something has held me back--a
friendship, business, links which were only imaginary fetters, a host of
trivial unimportances masquerading in my mood of the moment as serious
affairs. So the summer has come and gone, and only for an all-too-brief
period have I "got away." Nor have I particularly enjoyed my respite
from the roar of omnibuses, the tramp, tramp, tramp of the crowded
pavements. Somehow or other the war has robbed me of my love of solitude
Somehow or other the peace and beauty and solitude of Nature still "hurt"
me, as they used to hurt me during the years of the great world tragedy
when, across the meadows brilliant with buttercups and daisies, there
used to come the booming of the guns not so very far away "out there."
So, in order to force my mood, and perhaps deaden remembrance of its
pain, I have taken along with me some human companion, only once more to
realise that, when with Nature, each of us should be alone. One yearns
to watch and listen, listen and watch, to lie outstretched on the
hill-side, gazing lazily, yet with mind alert, at every moving thing
which happens to catch one's eye. You can rarely do this in company. So
very, very few people can simply exist silently without sooner or later
breaking into speech or falling fast asleep. Alone with Nature books are
the only possible company--books and one's own unspoken thoughts.
"_Family Skeletons_"
The worst of keeping a "Family Skeleton" shut up in a cupboard is that
the horrid thing _will insist_ on rattling its old bones at the most
inopportune moments--just, for example, when you are entertaining to tea
the nearest local thing you've got to God--whether she be an "Honourable"
(in her own right, mark you!) or merely the vicar's wife! Whatever
family skeletons do or do not possess, they most assuredly lack _tact_.
They are worse than relations for giving your "show away" at the wrong
moment. If relations do nothing else, they at any rate sit tightly
together around family skeletons, if only to hide them from full view by
the crowd. But, of course, the crowd always sees them. The crowd always
sees _everything_ you don't want it to see, and is quite blind to the
triumphal banners you are waving at it out of your top-room window.
Sometimes I think that the better plan in regard to family skeletons is
to expose them to public view without any dissembling whatsoever, crying
to the world at large, and to the "woman who lives opposite" in
particular, "There! that's _our_ family disgrace! Everybody's got one.
What's _yours_?" I believe that this method would shut most people up
quite satisfactorily. People only try to learn what they believe you do
not want them to know. If you push the truth before them, they turn away
their heads. To pretend is usually useless. Not very many of us get
through life without experiencing a desire to hide something which
everybody has already seen. Wiser far be honest, even if it costs you a
disagreeable quarter of an hour. Better one disagreeable quarter of an
hour than months and years sitting on a bombshell which any passer-by can
explode. Honesty is always one of the very few invulnerable things. No
pin-pricks can pierce it--and pin-pricks are usually the bane of life.
It's like laughter, in that nobody has yet been found to parry its blows
successfully. Shame is a sure sign of possible defeat--and the world
always ranges itself every time on the side of the probable victor. If
you once show people that you _can't_ be hurt in the way they are trying
to hurt you, they soon leave off trying, and begin to think of your
Christian virtues in general and their own more numerous ones in
particular. It's only when your courage is sheer camouflage that the
world tries to penetrate the disguise. Not until a woman dips her hair
in henna and, metaphorically speaking, cries, "See how young I look now!"
that other women begin to remark, "You know, dear, she is _not so
youthful as she was_!" It's only when the rumour goes round that a man
has had a financial misfortune that everybody to whom he owes anything
fling in their bills. And thus it is with family skeletons. If, as it
were, you ask them to live with you downstairs, everybody ignores them
and finds them "frightfully dull." But the moment you relegate them into
the topmost attic--lo and behold, every single one of your acquaintances
expresses a desire to rush upstairs, ostensibly to look at the view.
Everybody has something which they do not want to expose--like dirty
linen. But everybody's linen gets dirty--that is always something to
remember. There are some poor old fools, however, who really do seem to
imagine that they and theirs are alone immaculate. How they manage to do
so I can never for the life of me imagine. They must be very stupid.
But stupid people are a very great factor in life's everyday, and we must
always try to do something with them, like the left-over remnants of
Sunday's dinner. And, unless we do something with them, they--like
Sunday's dinner--meet our gaze every time we go into the kitchen. At
last we hate the sight of them. But, just as the remnants clinging to an
old mutton-bone lose their terror when Monday arrives without the
butcher, so these interfering old fools sometimes fade away into harmless
acquaintances when you show them that you and your family skeleton are
part and parcel of the same thing, and if they wish to know the one
they'll have to accept the other. In any case, it's usually useless to
try and pretend that Uncle George died of heart failure when he really
died of drink, or that the young girl whom Aunt Maria "adopted" was a
waif-and-stray, when everybody knows she is her own daughter; or that
your first wife isn't still alive--probably kicking--or that your only
child suddenly went to Australia because he was seized by the
wander-lust, when everybody knows he had to go there or go to prison.
You may, of course, pretend these things, and if you don't mind the
perpetual worry of always pretending, well and good. But if you imagine
for one instant that your pretending deceives the gallery, you'll be
extremely silly. Why, every time they speak of you behind your back
they'll preface their remarks with information of this kind: "Yes,
yes . . . a _charming_ family. What a thousand pities it is that they
all _drink_!"
But the "skeletons" of our own character--_they_ are the ones which no
cupboard can hold, nor any key lock in. Some time, sooner or later, out
they will come to do a jazz in front of the whole world. The life we
lead in the secret chambers of our own hearts we shall one day enact on
the house-roof. Strive as we may to conform to the conventional ideal of
public opinion, we cannot conform _all_ the time, and our lapses are our
undoing--or maybe, our happy emancipation, who knows? We cannot hide the
pettiness of our nature, even though we profess the broadest principles.
Only one thing can save the ungenerous spirit, and that is to be up
against life single-handed and alone. To know suffering, spiritual as
well as physical; to know poverty, to know loneliness, sometimes to know
disgrace, broadens the heart and mind more than years spent in the study
of Greek philosophy. Life is the only real education, and the philosophy
which we evolve through living the only philosophy of any real importance
in the evolution of "souls."
_The Dreariness of One Line of Conduct_
We have lots of ways of expressing that a man is in a "rut" without ever
giving the real reason of our adverse criticisms. An author who has
"written himself out," an artist whose pictures we can recognise without
ever looking at the catalogue, the "conventional," the "dull," the lovers
who have fallen out of love--these are all so many victims of the "rut"
in life. It is not their fault either. "Ruts" seem so safe, so
delightful--_at the beginning_. We rush into them as we would rush into
Heaven--and Heaven surely will be a terrible "rut" unless people have
described it wrongly! But, although "ruts" may often mean a comfortable
existence, they are the end of all progress. We dig ourselves in, and
make for ourselves a dug-out. But people in dug-outs are only _safe_;
they've got to come out of them some time and go "over the top" if they
want to win a war. Unfortunately, in everyday life, the people who
deliberately leave their dug-outs generally get fired at, not only by
their enemies but also by their friends. But they have to risk that. So
few people can realise the terrible effect which "staleness" has upon
certain minds. Staleness is the breeding ground for all sorts of social
diseases which most people attribute to quite other causes. There is a
staleness in work as well as in amusement, in love as well as in hate.
Variety is the only real happiness--variety, and a longing for the
improbable. What we have we never appreciate after we have had it for
any length of time. Doctors will tell you that an illness every nine
years is a great benefit to a man. It makes him appreciate his health
when it returns to him; it gives his body that complete rest which it can
only obtain, as a rule, during a long convalescence, while "spiritually"
it brings him face to face with death--which is quite the finest thing
for clearing away the cobwebs which are so apt to smother the joy and
beauty of life. In the same way a complete change in the mode of living
keeps a man's sympathies alive, his mental outlook clear, his enthusiasms
bright; it gives him understanding, and a keener appreciation of the
essentials which go to make up the real secret of happiness, the real joy
of living. The people we call "narrow" are always the people whose life
is deliberately passed in a "rut." They may have health, and wealth, and
nearly all those other things which go to make a truce in this battle we
call Life, but because they have been used to all these blessings so
long, they have ceased to regard them. And a man who is not keenly alive
to his own blessings is a man who is neither happy nor of much good to
the world in which he lives. You have to be able to appreciate your own
good fortune in order to realise the tragedy of the less fortunate.
_The Happy Discontent_