I said: "Mrs. Cutting, I am trying to think of a subject the discussion
of which will come upon the world in the nature of a startler--some
subject upon which no previous human being has ever said a word--some
subject that will attract by its novelty, invigorate by its surprising
freshness."
She laughed and said I was a funny gentleman.
That's my luck again. When I make serious observations people chuckle;
when I attempt a joke nobody sees it. I had a beautiful one last week.
I thought it so good, and I worked it up and brought it in artfully at
a dinner-party. I forget how exactly, but we had been talking about the
attitude of Shakespeare toward the Reformation, and I said something and
immediately added, "Ah, that reminds me; such a funny thing happened the
other day in Whitechapel." "Oh," said they, "what was that?" "Oh, 'twas
awfully funny," I replied, beginning to giggle myself; "it will make you
roar;" and I told it them.
There was dead silence when I finished--it was one of those long jokes,
too--and then, at last, somebody said: "And that was the joke?"
I assured them that it was, and they were very polite and took my word
for it. All but one old gentleman at the other end of the table, who
wanted to know which was the joke--what he said to her or what she said
to him; and we argued it out.
Some people are too much the other way. I knew a fellow once whose
natural tendency to laugh at everything was so strong that if you wanted
to talk seriously to him, you had to explain beforehand that what you
were going to say would not be amusing. Unless you got him to clearly
understand this, he would go off into fits of merriment over every word
you uttered. I have known him on being asked the time stop short in the
middle of the road, slap his leg, and burst into a roar of laughter.
One never dared say anything really funny to that man. A good joke would
have killed him on the spot.
In the present instance I vehemently repudiated the accusation of
frivolity, and pressed Mrs. Cutting for practical ideas. She then became
thoughtful and hazarded "samplers;" saying that she never heard them
spoken much of now, but that they used to be all the rage when she was a
girl.
I declined samplers and begged her to think again. She pondered a long
while, with a tea-tray in her hands, and at last suggested the weather,
which she was sure had been most trying of late.
And ever since that idiotic suggestion I have been unable to get the
weather out of my thoughts or anything else in.
It certainly is most wretched weather. At all events it is so now at the
time I am writing, and if it isn't particularly unpleasant when I come
to be read it soon will be.
It always is wretched weather according to us. The weather is like the
government--always in the wrong. In summer-time we say it is stifling;
in winter that it is killing; in spring and autumn we find fault with it
for being neither one thing nor the other and wish it would make up its
mind. If it is fine we say the country is being ruined for want of rain;
if it does rain we pray for fine weather. If December passes without
snow, we indignantly demand to know what has become of our good
old-fashioned winters, and talk as if we had been cheated out of
something we had bought and paid for; and when it does snow, our
language is a disgrace to a Christian nation. We shall never be content
until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself.
If that cannot be arranged, we would rather do without it altogether.
Yet I think it is only to us in cities that all weather is so unwelcome.
In her own home, the country, Nature is sweet in all her moods. What
can be more beautiful than the snow, falling big with mystery in silent
softness, decking the fields and trees with white as if for a fairy
wedding! And how delightful is a walk when the frozen ground rings
beneath our swinging tread--when our blood tingles in the rare keen air,
and the sheep-dogs' distant bark and children's laughter peals faintly
clear like Alpine bells across the open hills! And then skating!
scudding with wings of steel across the swaying ice, making whirring
music as we fly. And oh, how dainty is spring--Nature at sweet eighteen!
When the little hopeful leaves peep out so fresh and green, so pure and
bright, like young lives pushing shyly out into the bustling world; when
the fruit-tree blossoms, pink and white, like village maidens in their
Sunday frocks, hide each whitewashed cottage in a cloud of fragile
splendor; and the cuckoo's note upon the breeze is wafted through the
woods! And summer, with its deep dark green and drowsy hum--when the
rain-drops whisper solemn secrets to the listening leaves and the
twilight lingers in the lanes! And autumn! ah, how sadly fair, with its
golden glow and the dying grandeur of its tinted woods--its blood-red
sunsets and its ghostly evening mists, with its busy murmur of reapers,
and its laden orchards, and the calling of the gleaners, and the
festivals of praise!
The very rain, and sleet, and hail seem only Nature's useful servants
when found doing their simple duties in the country; and the East Wind
himself is nothing worse than a boisterous friend when we meet him
between the hedge-rows.
But in the city where the painted stucco blisters under the smoky sun,
and the sooty rain brings slush and mud, and the snow lies piled in
dirty heaps, and the chill blasts whistle down dingy streets and shriek
round flaring gas lit corners, no face of Nature charms us. Weather in
towns is like a skylark in a counting-house--out of place and in the
way. Towns ought to be covered in, warmed by hot-water pipes, and
lighted by electricity. The weather is a country lass and does not
appear to advantage in town. We liked well enough to flirt with her in
the hay-field, but she does not seem so fascinating when we meet her
in Pall Mall. There is too much of her there. The frank, free laugh
and hearty voice that sounded so pleasant in the dairy jars against the
artificiality of town-bred life, and her ways become exceedingly trying.
Just lately she has been favoring us with almost incessant rain for
about three weeks; and I am a demned damp, moist, unpleasant body, as
Mr. Mantalini puts it.
Our next-door neighbor comes out in the back garden every now and then
and says it's doing the country a world of good--not his coming out into
the back garden, but the weather. He doesn't understand anything about
it, but ever since he started a cucumber-frame last summer he has
regarded himself in the light of an agriculturist, and talks in this
absurd way with the idea of impressing the rest of the terrace with the
notion that he is a retired farmer. I can only hope that for this once
he is correct, and that the weather really is doing good to something,
because it is doing me a considerable amount of damage. It is spoiling
both my clothes and my temper. The latter I can afford, as I have a good
supply of it, but it wounds me to the quick to see my dear old hats and
trousers sinking, prematurely worn and aged, beneath the cold world's
blasts and snows.
There is my new spring suit, too. A beautiful suit it was, and now it is
hanging up so bespattered with mud I can't bear to look at it.
That was Jim's fault, that was. I should never have gone out in it that
night if it had not been for him. I was just trying it on when he came
in. He threw up his arms with a wild yell the moment he caught sight of
it, and exclaimed that he had "got 'em again!"