I have been following with interest my friend Mr. Robert Lynd's quest
of a soft job in the columns of _The Daily News_. I have been
following it with interest, not only because I never willingly miss
anything which that most witty and wise of writers pens, but also
because the subject is near my heart. I say this without shame.
There is nothing discreditable in desiring an agreeable occupation,
light in labour and heavy in rewards. I do not pretend to have any
passion for work, I know very few people who have, and I confess that
I find most of those few very undesirable companions. If I were put
upon oath I think I should have to admit that my impulse to work is
the same humble one as Mr. Chesterton confessed to--
When I myself perceived that I
Must work or I should shortly die--
well, then he worked. And when he had driven off the shadow of death
far enough to feel comfortable, no doubt he left off and did
something pleasant. And so with most of us. It is only our dislike
of the undertaker and all that he connotes that sucks us into the
tubes in the morning and spews us out at night, and keeps us in the
interval counting figures, serving out "sausage and mash," measuring
yards of silk, tapping typewriters, saying "Walk this way, ma'am,"
trying boots on other people's feet, shouting "Full up" on buses, and
"Stand clear of the gates" in lifts, and a thousand other things that
make you tired to think of--things that have to be done, but are not
a man's job to do.
Most of our work in this artificial civilisation of ours is like
that. The shepherd who keeps sheep on the hillside and the labourer
who tills the soil are living a noble life compared with the tawdry
little things most of us are condemned to do in cities. We have to
do them to keep the undertaker at bay, and we are not to be blamed if
we go about with Mr. Lynd looking at other people's jobs and wishing
we had got them. Thus he stands in front of the motor show-room,
with his face glued to the window, envying the lucky salesman inside,
who only has one customer in an hour to attend to, makes a pot of
money out of him, and has all the rest of the day in which to smoke
and gossip at the door and think about things. In the same way I
never pass down Charing Cross Road without pausing in front of the
book-shops and thinking what an agreeable time those fellows inside
have. Why, my idea of happiness is to leave this tiresome world and
go into a library and be forgotten, and here are lucky fellows who
have to live in a library to earn their living.
But I daresay it is all an illusion. It is an illusion, no doubt,
even in the case of postmen, for whom most of us retain a romantic
and indestructible affection. They belong to the earliest of our
memories, and get entangled in the clouds of glory, which, according
to the poet, we trail into this world with us from afar. The clouds
of glory fade, but the postman remains as a reminder that we once
lived in the Golden Age. Next to the muffin-man, he seemed the most
entirely enviable and likeable creature in trousers. The muffin-man,
of course, had advantages. There were his muffins to begin with.
And there was his bell. To have a bell of your own and to have the
privilege of going down any street you liked ringing it as hard as
you liked and scattering the good tidings of muffins put a man in a
class by himself.
But the postman, if on a lower plane than the muffin-man, had a more
continuous joy. He had not a bell of his own, but he had the run of
other people's bells. He could ring any bell he liked and bang any
knocker as hard as he chose without a thought of running away. And
these delights he had every day and several times a day. He could go
on ringing bells and knocking at doors till his arm ached. Nobody
objected. On the contrary, you looked out for him, hoping that he
would come and bang at your door in that breezy way of his. The
longer he paused before banging, the better you liked him. It
meant--it could only mean--that he had such a lot of letters for you
that it took him a long time to find them all.
And, of course, the more letters there were the more joy there must
be. That is the miracle with the postman. He brings bad news and
good news and indifferent news, but we only remember him by his good
news. Like the sun-dial, he only records the sunny hours. He is the
hope that springs eternal in the human breast. He comes up the path,
probably with a handful of accounts you have not paid, income tax
demands, offers from kind gentlemen to lend you ten thousand pounds
on your note of hand, applications for subscriptions, and other
things that you would be pleased to do without. But no experience of
the Barmecide feasts he is capable of offering you affects your faith
in him and his good intentions. If he were to turn back in the
middle of the path you would be disappointed. If he pass by your
gate you are not grateful that he has not brought you ill-news. You
suspect that something pleasant has unaccountably gone astray.
That is as it should be. When we have ceased to want to hear the
postman's knock we may conclude that we have seen the best of the
day, and that the demon of disillusion has us in thrall. It is to
have given up hope that that legendary ship of our childhood will
ever come home. It was that admirable vessel that made the future
such an agreeable prospect. Everything would be possible when our
ship came home. That it was a very rich ship and that it was on its
way we did not doubt, for we had the word of most responsible people,
mothers and aunts and grandmothers, on the subject. We could not
understand why it tarried so long, but we did not suspect its _bona
fides_ any more than its seaworthiness. Some day--it might be any
day, possibly even to-morrow--the postman would come and knock
lustily at the door and bring news that the ship was in port or, at
least, had been sighted from the shore.
And though we have since discovered that those responsible people
were talking less literally than we thought, and that that magic
ship, with its golden argosy, was a thing of the fancy, we still see
the postman turn in at the gate with a mild flutter of expectation.
He is himself a sort of ship, laden with merchandise from afar. In
his bag there must be incredible things, and some of them may be for
us. It might be assumed that men whose coming gives so much joy are
themselves joyful, that they love their calling so much that they
would not change with kings, but experience reveals to us the
melancholy truth that postmen are as afflicted with the discontents
of life as the common run of mortals.
I fancy that if that motor salesman had come to the door and opened
out his mind to Mr. Lynd he would have told him that selling motors
was all right, but that not selling them, which occupied about
nineteen hours out of twenty, was the most sickening job under the
sun, and that the thing he really yearned after was to be literary
critic, like that Mr. Robert Lynd, who wrote such stunning reviews in
the papers. Now that was a job. There he sat, in an arm-chair
before a ripping fire, surrounded by all the latest books, with his
feet on the mantel-piece and no reason to put on his boots from
morning to night, reading books and smoking his hardest, and then
taking the author up, as it were, between thumb and forefinger and
showing the world what an ugly guy of a fellow he was. Fancy being
paid to read books and lamm the writers. Fancy being paid for having
your name in the paper in big type that anybody could read half a
dozen yards away. Yes, that was the sort of soft job he would like.
Motors ...
That is the way of things. We are all apt to think we should be
happy if we were doing somebody else's work--the king's, for example.
Even the nursery rhyme inculcates in us the notion that kings are
happy as the day is long, yet no intelligent coal-heaver who knew the
blessings of liberty and obscurity would be able to endure the
boredom and routine of a calling which compels a man to live as
publicly as a bee in an observation hive. I have known people even
envy a bishop's gaiters, but I should be surprised to learn that
there was a single bishop on the bench who did not wish he could go
about in trousers again, and take up a plain hum-drum occupation in
which he could be as good as he liked without announcing it about the
legs. The truth probably is that all these dreams of soft jobs are
vanity and that the canker and the worm can gnaw at the heart of the
best of them. I offer this modest reflection to Mr. Lynd in the hope
that he will not cease to write beautiful articles in order to be an
incompetent motor salesman or to mix drugs in a chemist's shop. I do
not think he is the sort of man who could sell anything, and I fancy
he is just the sort of man who would mix the drugs more than they
ought to be mixed.