and munched and munched.” If so, it is there because Shakespeare had
to do with theatres and evidently knew. When you look at all the
pansy-faces together, munching, munching, munching, you begin to wonder
why it is that persons who normally go for at least two hours at a
time without food require so much extra nourishment all of a sudden.
Sarah Jane, we know, gets through a morning’s hard work with no other
encouragement than a cup of inky tea at eleven. Miss Simmons, the
typist, does not, surely, tick away at all that important stuff with
her cheeks bulging like a monkey’s over a hidden store of refreshment.
In the showroom you never hear such an apology as, “Sorry, Moddum,
the young lady’s sweetmeat is unusually sticky for the time of year;
she will answer your question in one moment.” Therefore it cannot be
that they eat because listening to the play is hard work and they
need support. Can it be to cause anæmia of the brain by directing the
flow of blood to--etc.? But then why desire to cause anæmia? They do
not look as if their brains were in a fatally active condition; in
fact, no one in the audience ever looks quite right in the head. But,
indeed, I have a theory that people are no longer themselves when
they enter a theatre. Otherwise how is it possible to account for the
fact that all our friends go constantly to the play and we go there
ourselves, and yet we never, never meet one another; at least hardly
ever? Isn’t it a bewildering surprise to recognize a friend between
the acts? It seems to take at least five minutes peering and goggling
before it is possible to believe the glad thing. And then what a waving
and commotion! “The Prenderbursts! Just fancy! In the third row but
two--yes, quite sure--that’s Effie! just turning round now--behind the
lady with the orange scarf.” Personally I go in just any old thing,
because I never expect to be recognized; and I hate leaving my seat,
because I generally have on an evening top and thick boots, and it
looks so bad if you go out and the lights are up.
Being, like all idle people, an intolerable wonderer, I have wondered
for years “who the people are who go to the theatre.” One thing is
quite certain, and that is that the people who go are not the same as
the people who have been. Every day one knocks against the people who
have been, but the people who go one has never seen before--except
at the theatre--and will never see again until the next time we go.
Where they live between the performances is a mystery. My own belief
is that they disappear into their holes in the town, and there sleep
until the next performance; they eat at the theatre, as we have seen.
As soon as you get a hypothesis started the whole thing begins to work
out together, and all sorts of details arrange themselves. The only
doubtful point now is how far the theatre managers are in the secret as
regards the origin of their audiences, or whether they suppose them to
be ordinary persons.
According to my hypothesis the munchers are a race of people apart,
like the troglodytes, with physiological and social laws of their own,
of which we know nothing. They are unknown to the police because they
look more or less like human beings and behave quietly. They come to
the box-office and book seats like you and I do, and the man in the box
is in a hurry and doesn’t notice any difference. But it is owing to
their numbers that you and I can never get just the seats we want.
The most curious thing about the whole business is the munchers’ power
of turning human beings into fairy changelings. It is owing to this
power that we hardly ever meet our friends at the theatre. An instance
that absolutely proves this theory occurred the other day, and it at
once threw light on what has been an irritating mystery to me for
years. The Blots were dining with us, and some one mentioned a play
then running at our principal theatre.
“Oh, were you there?” said Amy Blot, “so were we. Where were you
sitting? We never saw you.”
“Second row of the dress circle,” I answered, “fourth from the end.”
“But so were we,” protested Amy, “at least we were sixth from the
end--on the right facing the stage.” That had certainly been our side.
“Oh, well, it’s too queer,” Amy decided. She is a very striking-looking
woman; you couldn’t mistake her; and her husband is really remarkably
fat; you would pick him out at once. I thought it over for a few
minutes, and then said quite definitely, “My dear Amy, you must be
wrong, because I remember exactly who were in those seats. There was a
girl with her hair parted on one side; it looked very well in front,
but it was scrabbly at the back, as if it had been eaten by rats. She
had on a pink silk blouse of the new shape, but beyond that I couldn’t
see. There was an old lady with her, who had loose cheeks and a small
cap with a butterfly in it--your husband wasn’t dressed up in any way,
was he?”
“How absurd,” said Amy, “of course not. But those were our seats, and
we never saw you either. There were two minxes and two pasty-faced
young men where you say you were.”
I remember that I wrote to Sir Oliver Lodge about it that evening, but
tore up the letter on my husband’s advice, as he thought the matter
might get taken up, and we should have men calling with notebooks.
It wouldn’t have done. But, all the same, this is probably what poor
Shakespeare meant when he wrote about the lady who munched and munched
and munched.
Looked at from the point of view of psychical research, munchers are
extremely interesting. Any natives with horrible ways are all right if
viewed scientifically. Munchers have many offensive habits which one
might be inclined to resent were it not that it is nice to know how
different we are. For instance, this sort of thing. You may be sitting
enraptured, the tears streaming down your face, and the hobgoblin
behind you starts her reminiscences:
“Something the same sort of story as Hindle Wakes, isn’t it, Lizzie?”
“Yes, did you see that?”
“My word, yes! A funny sort of story, wasn’t it, didn’t you think?”
“Yes, do you remember where she comes on in the first act? Something
the same sort of thing, wasn’t it?”
“Were you ever at Blackpool?”
“Oh yes--hush; look at him--there now--pity he don’t move up a bit
sharper--we were at Blackpool a week, and mother, she----” etc.
The munchers have almost nerveless fingers, and drop their possessions
a good deal. “I wonder if you’d mind, one moment----?” is the sort of
thing they ask just when some climax or other is being reached. “I’ve
dropped my hat under your seat.” When the wretch by your side has
dropped an umbrella, and the two at the back have dropped a purse and a
spectacle case, and have put a muff down your neck, and got some beads
entangled in your hair; when eighteen of them have squeezed over you
during each interval in order to reach seats that are next the gangway
on the other side; when the one who looks like a debilitated porpoise
has clapped his hands down your ear for ten minutes, and succeeded in
recalling the singer whom you were so glad to get rid of; and when
laughter, which is about as harmless and irritating as eggs shot from
a cannon, has at last died away into mere sniggering at some homely
detail in a tragedy: then, if you still feel cross, you must try to
divert yourself with the mystery of the munchers, and remember that
one of your dearest friends may be sitting next to you, disguised by
the spell. The debilitated porpoise may be your friend De Vere, whose
manners are so perfect, whose social sense is so developed that we none
of us know what clods we are when we go to tea with him. It is only
afterwards that we realize our deficiencies: when the Prenderbursts
come to tea and we want to make our party feel like De Vere’s. And he
may think he was sitting next to a lemon-coloured lady with an angry
face and a box of chocolates.
[Illustration]
Now and again, of course, one sees an acquaintance or two, but they
are nearly always rather dry and emphatic people, who have evidently
escaped the power of the spell. You see them standing up, peering
through glasses, and saying how odd it is that there seems to be no one
here. When they read this they will say that they have not the least
idea what it is all about.
Music seems to have some power of disenchantment, because at a concert,
though the munchers fill a good part of the building, there are always
dozens and dozens of people whom one knows. It may be that the awful
weariness paralyses the hypnotic power of the munchers. They are there
just the same, with their vacant faces, and their queer screws of hair,
and their unsuitable clothes, but they are almost too weak to chew
from their packets of refreshment. In fact, no one chews at a concert,
except surreptitiously in a box.
There is a special subdivision of munchers who frequent the boxes
both in theatres and at concerts. They are like the queen bees in
the hive of theatre-goers. They are monstrously fat, female, and
innocently foolish. Instead of having a pinched and wispy appearance,
they are like the plump, precocious, affected, happy-looking children
who perform on the music-hall stage. It is possible that the inferior
munchers rear and keep these immense females to decorate the boxes,
feeding them luxuriously at all hours, while they themselves subsist on
their timid feasts of chocolate that tastes of hair oil.
[Illustration]
The right attitude for the box can, surely, only be acquired by special
culture and constant practice. To begin with there must always be a
huge white arm with a podgy little hand on the end of it draped along
the edge of the box. The gigantic body, squeezed like blancmange
into whatever mould the latest fashion dictates, is turned towards
the stage. The round, good-natured face, with its natural vulgarity
breaking through the assumed air of the Princess of Many Sorrows
(imagine a jolly country butcher’s wife in a tableau as “Our Lady of
Pain”), is directed down and towards the auditorium at the angle of a
turnip about to fall from a shelf. Bless the dears! It is a treat to
see anyone so happy. But that is what the munchers are, depend upon it.
_CHAPTER VIII_: SHEER TEMPER
Justice and Generosity are often supposed to be a pair of excellent
friends who have an influence for good on one another’s character.
But Generosity has a still closer friend whom she says nothing about,
namely Injustice. She cannot always behave as freely as she would
like when Justice is there, explaining things and being so absolutely
right. But when Injustice has been to tea with her, talking his bad,
unscrupulous talk, making everything so gay, and putting the blame on
all the wrong people, then Generosity has a free hand and can be as
lavish as she likes.
“Come in here for a minute,” said Reginald to Percy one morning in the
City, “I want to get this hat ironed.”
There was some delay, and Reginald was both clear and original in what
he said. Percy was lost in admiration. The shopman, expert in silence,
by long practice, forbore to reply except by deprecating sounds which
but served to inspire Reginald to a richer eloquence. At last the hat
was brought in, ironed to perfection. Reginald finished his sentence,
which glowed with the imaginative splendour of a Turner sunset.
“Oh, we never make any charge, sir, for ironing a hat,” said the
expertly silent shopman.
* * * * *
“I don’t agree with you,” said Percy, removing from his coat the little
tufts of hair which his friend had flung about in his careless agony.
“You had the ball at your toe; then was the time to express a large,
generous forgiveness for the unconscionable delay.”
Unless we are unpleasant sort of people we cannot be generous about an
injury unless we have first been mollified to some extent; and what
more mollifying than to find that the supposed injury has never been
done? Percy saw this more clearly than Reginald, who was quite morbid
about wanting to be in the right, always.
It is an interesting question what stupid persons find to get in a
temper about, because, if you come to think of it, there is nothing in
the world except stupidity (our own or other people’s) to make anyone
fractious, and, of course, stupid people cannot mind or they wouldn’t
be stupid. Good, just people may be angered by the wilful wickedness
of some one who is determined not to do the thing required; but anger
is not temper. Temper, that horrible itching and pain in one’s social
sense, can only be brought on by stupidity, real or imagined, in other
people (I count inanimate objects such as shirt studs and hair as
people because they can be just as irritating). Consider for a moment
the persons who cause temper in a household: husbands, wives, children,
and servants. Wives and servants, on an average, probably cause more
temper because, on an average, they are stupider than husbands and
children. Relations are apt to be very thick-headed--perhaps because
blood is thicker than water--almost as bad as tradesmen at the
telephone. Friends are practically never stupid, while acquaintances
often reach the extreme limit of what it is possible to bear. Compared
to relations, who, as we have said, are as bad as tradesmen at the
telephone, acquaintances are as bad as the half-witted boy who is
usually left in charge of the station-master’s office.
Talking of station-masters, and _à propos_ of wives being stupider than
husbands, I feel absolutely certain that no station-master has ever
spent such a day as would be inevitable for him if he were a wife, and
his staff were nice, hardworking girls.
[Illustration]
Imagine a platform full of people waiting for the 9·45 express
to Holyhead. “Oh no, m’m,” says the female station-master’s
second-in-command, with a silly smile, “the 9·45 hasn’t come up yet. I
expect it’ll be just coming now. I’ve sent to tell the engine-driver
that you’re waiting, and she says that she was a bit late this
morning, as they hadn’t brought the coal.” She observes the infuriated
passengers and beams upon them with her mouth open. “It is a pity,
isn’t it, keeping them waiting! They do seem upset! Just fancy! What
a shame!!” (It will be such a help to everyone connected with this
book if all the capable ladies who run their houses to perfection will
just begin to skip here, and not say anything more about it; because
we know the other side of the question quite well, and the whole thing
is hardly serious enough for argument.) When the matter of the 9·45
has been sifted to the bottom, it is found that the coal was only an
excuse; the engine-driver really hadn’t an idea of the time. She was
just washing out a few handkerchiefs in the waiting-room, where the
old lady in charge never noticed her doing it; she thought she had come
about the windows.
[Illustration]
Or, again, what would happen if a man of business told his clerk to
telephone for a hundredweight of grey blotting-paper, and while he
wrote at his desk he had to endure this sort of thing (as we do when we
ask our maids to send a telephone message): “Is that Hoggins’s? I say,
is that Hoggins’s? _Hoggins_. Aren’t you a stationer? Beppardon?--yes,
a stationer--oh, well, we want a hundredweight of blotting-paper at
once, please. Beppardon? This is Mr. Beadle’s. Beadle and Sons--J.
J. Beadle and Sons--will you send it at once, please. Beppardon?
Beadle and Sons--Oh yes, I’m sorry--I thought you knew--44 Dacre
Street--Dacre Street--No, not Baker--Dacre. [The man of business growls
from his desk, “You didn’t tell him _grey_ blotting-paper.”] What’s
that? Beppardon? Yes, Dacre Street. A hundredweight of blotting-paper
at once. [The man of business intervenes again, gnashing his teeth,
“_Grey_ blotting-paper.”] Beppardon? Pink or white? Oh, either, thank
you--yes, please. Good morning. [Rings off.] Beppardon, sir? Did you
speak?”
That is the sort of occasion when Generosity does not care to hear what
Justice has to say. If an angel came down from heaven and unjustly beat
the offending clerk, the man of business would find it easy to say,
“Poor fellow, he was doing his best,” and to give him half a crown for
a new hat.
If all the efficient females will sit down quite quietly we will add
what we were about to say, that men are just as irritating, but they
don’t mean so inexcusably well. Take, for instance, the man at an
inquiry office; he doesn’t mean well. “I want a ticket to Leamington,”
you say. He gives you a first-class ticket, and you remonstrate. “You
didn’t say which you wanted,” he retorts, getting impudent at once.
“You never asked,” is your very natural reply.
Or, take a conjurer or magic-lantern man. You say, “I want you to be
very careful, please, not to do anything to frighten the children.
There will be some quite little ones, and they don’t like anything at
all alarming.” “Oh, we understand children perfectly, Madam,” he says,
“I know exactly the sort of thing you require.”
The first picture that he puts on the screen is of a child awakened
from its sleep by an enormous beetle with coloured eyes and a
walking-stick. When the commotion and the screaming are over, the
smaller children are brought back and sit sobbing on their nurses’
knees, somewhere near the door. The proceedings are a trifle damped,
but the babies promise, with a catch in their voices, to be very good
as they know it is funny. The next picture shows a happy family party
at breakfast. There enters a policeman, who by carrying papa away
to prison leaves the family in tears, and the breakfast spilled on
the cloth. The arrest is found to be a humorous mistake, and papa is
brought home after a painful scene in the prison, but the story proves
beyond a doubt that no one is safe, even in their own nursery with
both parents present. Here, however, our argument seems to break down,
because it is probable that the man meant well.
But in the upper classes take, for instance, Reginald himself. He is
sometimes appallingly dense, and can be very intelligently tiresome. He
lived, until quite lately, with three unmarried sisters, and sometimes
when he came home it happened that none of them had been out, and all
were eagerly sociable.
“Well, dear, what’s the news?” Louisa might ask.
“Oh, nothing,” Reginald would reply.
“I thought that cook said she had seen posters about a railway
accident,” said Agnes.
“Possibly,” replied Reginald, “there may have been.”
“Didn’t you see anything about it?” asked Theresa wistfully.
“It was all in the paper I got coming home----[Chorus: “Where, oh,
where is it?”] Sorry, I left it in the train,” said Reginald, and then
he would go off to dress. Or the same thing might happen the other way
round. Louisa had been out to tea on Saturday afternoon, and seen the
paper at a friend’s house. Reginald had been playing golf and was lying
half asleep in his chair.
“Such an awful thing has happened,” announced Louisa, very properly,
the moment she came in.
“Oh,” said Reginald.
“A frightful railway accident; four killed, and sixteen taken to the
hospital.”
“Who are the four?” Reginald inquired, putting his bottom leg on the
top one and knocking out his pipe.
“Oh, no one we know; but just think!” I actually heard all this one
afternoon, and it is perfectly true that Reginald replied in the
following way:
“At least four people whom you don’t know die every day, anyhow, so
to-day is no worse than yesterday.”
Really, it is impossible to know whether they do it on purpose or
not; especially Reginald, who is supposed to be clever. However, it
all just shows that it is stupidity that makes one get in a temper.
There is often nothing to get angry about, but the whole thing gets on
one’s nerves. But there is worse to come. So far we have only touched
the fringe of what is bad for the temper. We will now visit a land of
torture, parts of which are, I believe, untrodden by the male sex.
Has any man ever had to defend his own self--his ego--call it anything
you like, from the pursuing eye of a friend? Has he ever been obliged
to draw a veil over the process of his living and say politely, “Excuse
me, my ego I think?” It has become the custom for people to go about
in society more or less clothed, and we get to know our friends fairly
well, even when thus attired; indeed, it is unusual to insist on a
complete deshabille before we can enjoy a pleasant chat. But it would
be very tiresome if we were obliged to cover up our face and hands with
a mask and thick gloves because our friends insisted on examining the
pores of our skin through a magnifying glass. Some women habitually
treat those whom they love to such a dreadful moral scrutiny. Men don’t
do it to each other. Has any man ever gone to his work and been met
by a fellow labourer who gazed into his eyes and said in a voice that
seemed to lift his spinal cord and search beneath it, “You are looking
tired to-day.”
Now that is a remark which, except it be made in the most casual
and perfunctory manner, is intolerable from any one but a member
of the opposite sex, with whom we are passionately in love. Women
seldom understand that it is not enough that they love the person
whom they examine in this way. The victim must be deeply in love with
his tormentor before he can bear it, and even then it is a risk. For
of course the rash loveress, emboldened by silence, goes on to ask,
“What’s the matter?” and if it happens that the Beloved is wearing
boots of which he is immoderately anxious to be rid, the loveress is
almost bound to be the victim of Injustice before she obtains anything
from Generosity.
All personal remarks are to imaginative persons a heavy strain on
endurance. Their imagination at once conjures up a loathly picture
of themselves in the circumstances suggested by the remark. It also
mentally fits the remark with an answer, and another offensive picture
results. For instance, there is the question, “Are you very tired?”
The imagined answer, in a tone to fit the question, is, “Yes, dear,
very.” Plop! You immediately see yourself as a great, fat, loose body
dropping into an arm-chair. You see a luscious smile spread over your
imagined face as the kindly solicitous one unlaces your boots--you
feel mushy all over. “Damn!” is probably your ungracious reply as you
hurriedly put the mask over your normally apparent fatigue. “What
the deuce should I be tired for? You’re tired yourself--I’ll take
your boots off.” So you divert attention from the anxious scrutiny of
commonplace blemishes which in tactful circles “we don’t notice.” Then
you feel a brute, and you get in a temper at having been made to feel
a brute when you were not really one at all; and you were already in a
temper before, because you had seen an incorrect vision of yourself as
a juicy fool. And yet there was nothing in any of it to get in a temper
about. There are scores of harmless remarks that have this irritating,
personal effect. “Is your head very bad?” is a ticklish question for
anybody but one’s old nurse to take upon themselves. It is not often
that there are more than three people in the world who may ask it.
You see, the only possible answer, “Yes, very,” is so silly. What a
thing to be asked to say! The next move on the part of the dear enemy
can only be, “Would you like anything for it?” and what on earth could
one like for it that one has not already done of one’s own accord?
Even if we haven’t put on a wet handkerchief with eau-de-Cologne it is
unthinkable to have any but one of the possible three persons fiddling
with wet things about our head. Our forehead would, to a certainty,
be shiny and the hair pushed the wrong way. The wretch would probably
smooth back the curls behind our ears, and we should know what a
hideous fright we looked and that they loved us just as well like
that--No, three people is too many. No one but our nurse who was there
from the very first can be suffered to deface our beauty and not know
what they have done.
All sensible people will have abandoned this chapter long ago, so I
may as well finish it for the morbid delectation of the neurotic, or
for those perfectly sane, yet kind-hearted sufferers, who have not yet
dared to speak of their sorrows, even to themselves. Let us collect
some other impossible, searching remarks and leave them to soak in
without comment. “My darling’s eyes look heavy to-day”--(if you are not
very careful the adjective may quite well be “puffy”)--“perhaps you
have eaten something that has disagreed with you.” I had to write this
in a great hurry for fear I thought about it and began to get furious
again.
“You must tell me when you are tired of me, and I’ll go.”
[Illustration]
Murder is too good for the inquisitress who subjects one to this last
torture; and yet she sins in the name of Love, and we dare not complain
for fear of angering the god, who employs the weak-minded as often as
not. I never heard one man say to another, “Your beard has lost its
pretty colour since you were ill. I wonder if you tried vaseline--”
or, “I can’t bear to see you wear those trousers; they are too loose
on the hips; they make you look quite stout. You don’t mind my saying
so, do you?” This would entail a searching finger through the beard or
a playful pinch on the hips. No, men don’t do it. They have to bear it
sometimes, but they don’t do it. Decidedly the fringe of aggravation
is male and female in fairly equal proportion; but when you get to the
very heart of it, you will find a lady sitting there as sure as fate.
And it is only after you have been thoroughly unjust that you can begin
to lavish affection on her with a generous hand.
_CHAPTER IX_: THE ROYAL VISIT