to see one. It is said that a Scotsman "jokes wi' deeficulty." What we
really mean is that it is often difficult to see a Scotsman's jokes or
even to know whether he is joking or being serious. As a matter of
fact, the Scots are an unusually humorous race. They make jokes,
however, with the long faces of undertakers, and one is sometimes
afraid to laugh for fear of appearing frivolous on a solemn occasion.
I have in mind one brilliant Scottish professor who, whether he is
jocular or serious, invariably monologises in the tones of a man
condoling with a widow. He half-shuts his eyes and folds his hands,
and, for the first minute or two, takes an evil delight in leaving you
in doubt whether he is launching into a tragic narrative or whether he
will suddenly look up through his spectacles and expect to see you
laughing. His English friends are in a constant state of embarrassment
because they know that he is a humorist of genius, but his humour is
so subtle that they do not trust themselves to see the point when it
comes and laugh at the right place. Now, there are only two things
that can make the professor look sterner than he looks while giving
birth to a joke. One is, if you laugh too early: the other is, if the
great moment comes and you don't laugh at all. He makes no complaint,
but he sits back in his chair, looking like an embittered owl. And
everybody else in the room has a sense of ghastly failure--his own
failure, not the professor's. To miss seeing a joke is, in some
circumstances, far worse than to miss making the point of a joke
visible. If one were in the position of a Queen Victoria, one might,
of course, quench the professor by merely saying: "We are not amused."
But even Queen Victoria, when she said this, did not mean that she had
not seen the joke but that she had seen it and didn't like it. It is
not only the subtle and Scottish jokes, however, that are at times
difficult to see with the naked eye. There is also the joke that hits
you in the eye like a blow and blinds you. Captain Wedgwood Benn
referred to a joke of this kind in the House of Commons on the
authority of Mr Stephen Gwynn. A judge of the Irish High Court, he
related, was recently travelling on a tram which was held up by
Black-and-Tans. The Black-and-Tans, who, like the Most High, are no
respecters of persons, called on the judge to descend, using the
quaint colloquial formula: "Come down, you Irish bastard; put up your
hands." Captain Wedgwood Benn does not unfortunately possess a
twentieth-century sense of humour, and he did not see this particular
joke. The comedy of a judge's being addressed as an Irish bastard did
not strike him. I doubt if half-a-dozen members of the House of
Commons realised the beauty of the joke till Sir Hamar Greenwood got
up and explained it. "I happen to know the judge," said the twinkling
Chief Secretary. "He told the story himself with great glee, and here
it is. Mr Justice Wylie, the last, and one of the best judges
appointed in Ireland, was riding on a tramcar to a hunting meet. When
he got to the end of his ride, there were some policemen on duty, and
they did use a word which, I trust, no hon. Member of this House will
ever use in calling him down from the tram. They did him no harm. He
treated it as a joke, and he would be the man most surprised to find
it quoted in the House and in the _Observer_ as an example of the
decadence of the Irish police." I agree with Sir Hamar. A joke is a
joke, and many Irishmen, unlike Mr Justice Wylie, are unduly
thin-skinned. The only criticism I would make on Sir Hamar Greenwood's
idea of a joke is that he appears to suggest that it would have been
less funny if the Black-and-Tans had done the judge some harm. I
should have expected him rather to dilate on the attractions of life
in the Irish police force for men with a sense of humour. Suppose the
judge had been robbed of his watch, or had had his front teeth broken
with the muzzle of a revolver like the University Professor at Cork,
would not that have made the incident still funnier? Suppose he had
been carried round as a hostage on a motor-lorry, or shot with a
bucket over his head, as has happened to other innocent men, would it
not have been a theme for Aristophanes, who got so much fun out of the
idea of one person's being beaten in mistake for another?
I am confident that distinguished Englishmen will behave in the spirit
of Mr Justice Wylie, when there is an outbreak of humour among the
English police. Mr Justice Darling will, no doubt, enjoy himself
hugely on the day on which an armed policeman first holds up his
motor-car, and addresses him: "'Ullo, you blasted old Bolshevik, come
off the perch, and quick about it, and put up the 'Idden 'And!" There
are some judges who would complain to the Home Office, if such a thing
happened to them. Mr Justice Darling, however, has a keen sense of
humour. I feel certain that on arriving in Court after his experiences
he would tell the story with great glee. He would turn up his face
sideways, as he does when he is amused, and say to the jury: "A most
amusing thing happened to me this morning, by the way ..." There is no
end, indeed, to the directions in which a police force saturated with
the Greenwoodian sense of fun might add to the gaiety of nations. They
might arm themselves with squirts, and laughing Cabinet ministers
would have to duck as they passed down Whitehall in order to avoid a
drenching. Pluffing peas at the bishops on their way to the House of
Lords would also be good sport, so long as they did not really hurt
any of them. To bash the Lord Chancellor's hat over his eyes would be
going too far, as it involves a money loss, but a harmless blow on the
crown with a bladder would be rather amusing. It would also be amusing
if a number of policemen were told off to greet Mr Lloyd George with
cries of "Welsh attorney," and to chaff him with genial scurrilities
on his arrival at the House. If these things happened, there are
killjoys, I know, who would immediately set up a clamour for the
restoration of discipline in the police force. Mr Lloyd George,
however, has always been a man who can not only make a joke but take
one, and I am sure that he at least would defend the democratic right
of the policeman to a bit of chaff.
Nor would I confine the right of chaff to the police force. I would
make it universal. I should like to see it introduced into the Church
itself. Even the dullest sermon would become entertaining if the
verger had the right and the habit of interpolating such remarks as:
"Cheese it, Pussyfoot!" or "Ring off, you bleedin' old bore, ring
off!" There has been too little of this sort of popular raillery in
recent years. The bus-drivers used to be past masters at it, poking
their quiet fun impartially at their fellow-drivers and ordinary
citizens. Whether it is that the drivers of motor-buses realise that
no joke could be heard above the din, or whether it is that they feel
as ill-tempered as they look, their arrival has made fatal inroads on
the geniality of London. An artist with uncut hair can still awaken a
spark of the old wit if he goes down a back street, and women and
children will revive for his benefit the venerable witticism: "Get
your hair cut!" But, generally speaking, there has been a notable
decline in the humours of insult within living memory. The Germans,
always fond of a joke, made an effort to revive it during the war. It
was a common thing for them, we are told, on capturing a prisoner, to
address him as "Schweinhund" or "Verdammte Engländer," or by some
other good-humoured phrase of the same kind. I regret to say that some
Englishmen were so deficient in the sense of humour that, instead of
taking this in the spirit in which it was offered, they bitterly
resented it. I cannot, indeed, recall a single instance of an
Englishman who properly appreciated the joke of being called a
"Schweinhund" by a man he had never seen before. You will seek in vain
through the literature of prisoners of war for a returned soldier who
tells the story of the names he was called with the glee that it
deserves. And yet, no doubt, the Germans enjoyed the joke thoroughly,
and would have been surprised to find it quoted in the _Observer_ as
an example of the decadence of the German Army.
Perhaps, however, the "Schweinhund" joke does not afford an entirely
fair comparison. It is a simple joke, whereas in the Greenwood joke
there are two elements. There is the element of insult, and there is
the element of mistaken identity. It is not merely that somebody or
other was called "You Irish bastard," but that the wrong person was
called "You Irish bastard." Thus, if a policeman addressed a woman in
Oxford Street in the words: "'Op it, you old bitch," it would be only
mildly funny, if the woman were a poor woman. But it would be
immensely funny if she turned out to be a marchioness. The
marchioness, no doubt, would be enchanted, and would tell the story
with great glee. If she were a sentimentalist, she might say to
herself:
"Is this really the way in which ordinary human beings are
treated by the police? This is a hideous state of affairs in
which bullies in uniform are allowed to address foul insults
to whom they please. Thank heaven, it has happened to
someone like me. Now, I can tell the Home Secretary, and he
will put an end to the whole system."
One never knows what a modern Home Secretary might do, but I doubt if
one could be found who would reply to the marchioness: "Well, he did
you no harm. You know, to me it all seems rather funny." And yet most
things have their funny side if you look on them in the right spirit.
It would have been a funny thing if the hangman had executed the wrong
prisoner instead of Crippen. The hanged man would not have seen the
joke, but impartial onlookers would have seen it, and Crippen would
have seen it. Similarly, if a drunken man threw a brick at his wife
and hit the missionary by mistake, who could help laughing? Even the
wife, if she had a sense of humour, would have to join in.
Over-sensitive souls, such as Shelley was might view the incident with
pain and mourn over a world in which human beings treated each other
in such a way. But life is a hard school, and it is not well to be
over-sensitive. After all, if we all became angels, there would be no
jokes left. We should have no clowns in the music-halls--no comic
boxing-turns with glorious thumpings on unexpecting noses. Heaven is a
place without laughter because there is no cruelty in it--no insults
and no accidents. As for us, we are children of earth, and may as well
enjoy the advantages of our position. So let us laugh, "Ha, ha!"--let
us laugh, "Ho, ho!"
The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
And never was it so full of a number of things as since a Coalition
Government came into power--queer, delightful things, for instance,
like policemen who call judges "bastard," as who should say: "Cheerio,
old thing!" Our grandfathers would not have seen that joke. That is
one of the things that convince me of the reality of progress.
XXV
GOING TO THE DERBY
"Do they have as much fun at the Derby as they used to?" I heard an
old gentleman in a white hat, canary gloves, and buttoned boots asking
a fellow-passenger in a London train. Fun? No; one would hardly call
it that. Looking back on it after forty years one will no doubt call
it fun. But it is certainly not fun while it lasts.
The two most important features of the Derby are getting there and
getting away again. Getting there is harder work than bricklaying or
journalism. You may ride in a motor-car, but your motor will be as
useless to you as a submarine in a swimming bath. From Sutton to Epsom
and from Epsom to the Downs a long procession of motor-cars, buses,
waggonettes, greengrocers' carts, lorries, school carts, drays, and
human beings stretches like a serpent of infinite length--a serpent
that is apparently too sick to move. One thinks of it as an old
serpent that has made itself very ill by swallowing machinery.
Every few minutes it gives the machinery in its inward parts a shake,
and makes one more effort to crawl. A queer rattle, shiver, and groan
run through it from tip to tail. But the effort is too much for it. It
immediately subsides on a lame and impotent stomach, and hour after
hour passes with no other diversion except the antics of an occasional
nervous horse that rises on his hind legs and waves his forefeet in
the back of your neck over the hood of the motor.
There is a common belief that the crowd that goes to the Derby is a
cheerful crowd--that it sings and plays concertinas and changes hats.
There could not be a greater delusion. It is as quiet and determined
as a procession of men and women going to hear Dr Horton preaching at
Hampstead. Not a song--well, one song. Not a joke--well, one joke,
when a fat man saw a poor brown lop-eared ass in a field of daisies,
and called out: "There's the winner o' the Durby!" He apparently felt
it was a very good joke, for he repeated it to parties on the tops of
buses and parties on greengrocers' carts and parties in furniture
vans.
The sun, however, was unpropitious for jokes. Even the East Ender, who
had worked an edging of red and white wool into his pony's mane and
hung rosettes of red, white, and blue at its ears, was too busy
perspiring and hating his hundred thousand neighbours to smile. He was
also busy weighing his chances of getting to Epsom Downs before
Judgment Day. I admired his spirit in waving a whip with a knot of
coloured ribbons. There was little other colour to be seen. We were a
procession of victims--red as beef, steaming like the window of a
fried-fish shop, dusty, swollen-veined--and we could only sink back
helpless and gasping in the grip of the monstrous procession of
wheeled things that advanced more slowly than any snail that was ever
known on this side of the Ural Mountains.
I doubt if that procession ever reached Epsom Downs. I did so only
because I got out and walked; and even then the first two races were
over. Half England seemed already to have arrived on the hills, and to
have pitched its wigwams there. The other half was blocking up the
road for ten miles back, and could not possibly arrive in time for the
Derby; but the half who had arrived had already set up a city of
booths and flags on hill after hill as far as the eye could see.
There may have been encampments of this vastness in the days of
Xerxes, but surely never since. It was oppressive, overwhelming. There
were so many people there that there was no room for anybody. There
was no room, so far as I could see, for the man who plays the
three-card trick on the top of an open umbrella, or for the man with
the tape and pencil, and even the beggars who prayed by the roadside
for your success were few. There was simply a crush--an enormous,
sweltering, and appallingly silent crush. Even the bookmakers seemed
to be awed by it. They stood on their stands beside blackboards full
of horses' names and mystical figures, but they did not yell at you
hoarsely, bullyingly, as bookmakers ought to do. If, having looked at
the elephantine portrait advertisement of one of them, you wished to
bet with him, he would consent in a listless way, and say wearily to
his clerk: "Nine-nine-one, seventy shillings to a dollar Polumetis,"
as he handed you a blue, red, and green card.
I do not blame him for not being enthusiastic. I am myself no longer
enthusiastic about Polumetis. Still, one wished for a little violence
besides the violence of the sun and of the man who tried to sell you a
shilling's worth of sausage and who said he was "the only firm, the
only firm in the place." Camden Town on a Saturday night could give
points to Derby Day for colour and uproar. Derby Day is so big,
perhaps, that it is frightened of itself. But I forgot. There was one
violent man. He was fat, hatless, and sweating, and he was hoarse with
shouting superlatives about his tips to a circle of poor old men,
"dunchers" in caps, small boys in jerseys, and tired-looking country
girls.
"If only I could tell you where I got my information," he declared,
"you'd--you'd be s'prised. If any of you has got twenty-five pahnd
abaht him--if you've got even a tenner--why, you've only got ten
bob--well, you can't exactly have a gamble for ten bob, but you can
'ave a bit o' fun, anyway. If you take my advice--it's 'ere on this
bit o' paper--you can 'ave it for a bob--I can give you three 'orses
that'll turn your ten bob into a tenner see? Some people tell you
Tetratema's going to win."
He made a face of disgust, popularly known as giving Tetratema the
raspberry, "Don't you believe it. Didn't I tell you Tagrag? Didn't I
tell you Arion? 'Ere, take my tip, and you'll dance all the w'y 'ome
with joy tonight. Dance? Why, you'll go 'ome jazzin' all the w'y."
And he spread out his fat hands and threw out his fat stomach, and
danced on the grass, just to show one how one ought to behave if one
backed a Derby winner.
Meanwhile, his partner, dressed as a red and white jockey, in a peaked
cap and incongruous puttees, moved round the circle thrusting his
slips of tips almost angrily on us. "Go on," he ordered us. "What's a
bob to a gambler? You people read the papers and believe what you see
in 'em. The papers! I tell you stryte--the worst pack of rogues and
bookmakers in England." A simple old man of ninety, who had lost his
teeth, beckoned to him and paid him a shilling for his tip. The jockey
took him aside and whispered impressively into his ear. Then he said,
in a loud voice: "Are you satisfied, sir?" "Quite satisfied," quavered
the old man. I wish I could have stayed near him. I should like to
have seen him jazzing later in the evening.
Sausages, lemonade, fried fish, chewing gum, bets, ladies standing on
the roofs of taxis, a try-your-strength machine, extemporised
conveniences of civilisation, with youths standing by them and yelling
"Commodytion!" hills of humanity in all attitudes of dazedness and
despair, the thunder and the shouting of the distant bookmakers under
the stands, the quiet of the ten thousand free-lance bookmakers who
were, I suppose, breaking the law in the open spaces; the dust, the
sun, the smell, faces smeary with fruit, the cunning tinker in an old
khaki hat with striped ribbon, who was selling some twopenny
instrument that was supposed to imitate either the bark of a dog or
the song of a nightingale--one could not tell which from the noise he
made with it; stand after stand packed to the sky with what are called
serried ranks of human beings, who looked like immense banks of
many-coloured shingle, and who, as they raised a million pairs of
field-glasses to two million eyes, scintillated in the distance like a
bank of shingle after a wave has broken on it on a tropical noon--it
was certainly an amazing medley of spectacle and odour.
It is said that an important horse-race took place. It is even said
that Polumetis ran in it. I looked for him everywhere--over people's
heads, under people's heads, through motor-buses, round the corners of
refreshment tents, in the sky above, and on the earth beneath. But no
Polumetis was to be seen anywhere--except on my race-card, where I
read about his lilac-coloured jockey. A jockey in lilac--how
beautiful, how Japanese! And, indeed, all the jockeys as they paraded
down the field before the race seemed to have robbed a rainbow.
They brought meaning and beauty into an otherwise bald and
unconvincing mob. I assure you I love horse-racing--if I could see it.
But of all the people who congregated the little crooked hills of
Epsom, I doubt if ten people in a hundred saw it. You knew that the
horses had started only because, as you lay dreaming, the million
people on the stands suddenly made you jump with a loud, sharp, and
terrifying bark, which said: "They're off!" in one syllable.
Then there was deep silence, and somebody near me said: "The favourite
can't be leading, or they would be shouting." Then from the stands
came a murmur like bees, a muttering as of a man talking in his sleep,
a growling as of wind in a cave. This only served to intensify the
silence of a defeated people. One knew that something awful must be
happening. Perhaps even Polumetis was winning.
Above the heads of the crowd the heads of jockeys began to be visible.
A fool cried out: "The favourite wins." Another: "Allenby has it."
Then one had a glimpse of three horses close--well, fairly close--on
each other's tails, and none of them the grey Tetratema. I noticed
that on one of them crouched a jockey in exquisite grass-green. He
passed like a fine phrase out of a poem of which one does not know the
rest. But I did not really know who had won till the numbers were put
up on the board. Then a badly shaven man in a bowler cried: "Spion Kop
has won! Bravo!" and clapped his friend on the back. The rest of us
looked at him with contempt. The tinker-nosed man who played the
instrument that sang like a dog or barked like a nightingale began to
squeak it into people's ears.
The crowd began pouring itself through itself, and the dust from its
feet rose like a cloud till it was difficult to see across the course.
And the motor-car broke down on the way home.
And Polumetis didn't win.
And I'm as tired as a dog....
And so say all of us.
XXVI
THIS BLASTED WORLD
Everything has begun to have a blasted look till the sun shines. The
ferns have been beaten down by the wind and the rain, and lie withered
and broken-backed among the brambles, waiting till some poor man
thinks it worth his while to go off with a load of them on his back
for bedding. The brambles, too, all hoops and arches, have the air of
dying things, though white blossoms still continue to appear, and the
fruit is not yet all ripened and many of the leaves are as red and
bright as flowers. The edges of most of the leaves have began to
crumple: they are victims of a creeping sickness that eats into them
and dirties them, and makes bramble and fern together an inextricable
wilderness of refuse.
This, however, is only if one looks too closely. The hill that loses
itself among the rocks on the sea-shore is capped and patched with
just such refuse as this, but how happily the rust-colour of dying
things is broken by the grey of the loose stone walls--"hedges," they
call them in Cornwall--that seem to totter up the hill like old men!
The mist of rain that leaves each individual plant bedraggled seems to
make the red and green and grey pattern of the patched hill only more
beautiful and mysterious. The truth is, winter speaks with two voices
even in these early days. She has one voice that sends cold shivers
down our backs. She has another voice that is refreshment like water
from a spring. She speaks with the first voice in the crooked trees.
In the summer they were cloaked and glorious. Now, when their cloaks
seem so much more necessary, they are left naked, poor creatures,
their backs to the sea-wind, with the air of runaways unable to
escape. They seem bent and poised for flight, but when a blast of wind
comes and tugs at them they are as the stump of a tooth that will not
move, and the leaves (such of them as are left), which in summer made
a music as pleasant as that of windbells, rattle in their branches
like the laughter of a skeleton. The oak and the thorn-bush could
scarcely writhe more if they were crippled by rheumatism. Every leaf
on the sycamore is spotted as if with some foul black acid.
Here, too, however, as soon as the leaves have fallen, the world is
restored to cheerfulness. The withering tree seems a sufferer. The
fallen leaf is an imp, an adventurer. As the wind sweeps round a bend
in the road, leaf after leaf is up and performing cart-wheels down the
road as if Christmas Day had come. Thousands of them, borne along in a
dance of this kind, advance with the beflustered, orderly air of a
procession of starlings. The world ceases to be a universal grave. It
is at the very least a dance and a dust-storm.
There are some days, no doubt, on which the chill damp in the air
seems to terrify almost every living thing into hiding, and the
stillness of the dead world is not disturbed by any bird or insect.
Even the jackdaws have mysteriously disappeared like melted snow. But
no sooner does the storm in the sky break up into floating islands of
cloud and the sun shine than all the world begins to glitter again,
bramble and ivy and stone, and a host of tiny and coloured creatures
resume their game of an infinite general post in the bright air. The
ivy especially is a little continent of life where-ever it grows.
Clambering over a wall or climbing up among the sloes in a blackthorn
it attracts bee and wasp and fly, blue fly and grey fly and green fly,
to graze on the pollen of its late flowers. The ivy is the last of the
plants to flower, and insects come to it as from the ends of the earth
in rejoicing myriads. Among the berries in the hedges the birds, too,
rejoice. The robin, though for the most part, I believe, a meat-eater,
becomes unambiguously happy at this time of year. He has usurped the
morning, and, while one is lying in bed, he is boasting in the trees
outside where the thrush and the blackbird will in a few months be
boasting with their scarcely more beautiful voices. I am half
persuaded that his song becomes different at this season. As he sits
and sways on the top of a cypress and looks down on a rich and eatable
world, he seems to have cast every note of pensive sadness out of his
being and to sing aloud the rapture of a happy stomach. He is no
longer the singer of elegy but of ecstasy. He is as unlike his old
simple, friendly, appealing, pathetic self as a beggar who has come
into a fortune. He actually swaggers, and, as he does so, he can fill
a garden or a wood at the end of October with the pleasure of spring.