That is it, you see. Sweating is the great criterion of usefulness to-day.
If you cannot show that you have sweated in the past, you must at least
show that you are sweating now, or have every intention of sweating in a
moment or two. Personally, as a private secretary, I find it very
difficult, though I do my best. As a private secretary I labour in a rich
house in the notoriously idle neighbourhood of South Kensington, where
nobody would believe that anybody laboured, much less perspired over it. So
when I pass, on the way to my rich house, a builder's labourer or a milkman
or a dustman, I have to exhibit as clearly as I can all the signs of a
harsh employment and industrial fatigue. I take great pains about this; I
walk much faster; I frown heavily and I look as pale as possible. In the
Tube I close my eyes. I hope all this is effective, but as far as I can see
the milkman never looks at me, and the builder is always saying to another
builder, "'E says to me, 'Wot abaht it?' 'e says, and I says to 'im, 'Yus,
wot abaht it?' I says." But it is worth the effort.
Well, that is why that poor man was carrying a typewriter. I wonder why
everybody else in the Tube carries an "attache-case." It has been
calculated that if all the attache-cases which get on to the train at
Hammersmith at 9 A.M. were left on the platform, six men or twelve women or
three horses could take their place in every car. That means about ninety
more men or one-hundred-and-eighty more women or forty-five more horses
could leave Hammersmith between 9 A.M. and 9.30. So that if attache-cases
were forbidden the traffic problem would be practically solved.
Why shouldn't they be forbidden? It depends, of course, on what is inside
the cases; and nobody knows that for certain. But one can guess. I have
been guessing for a long time. At first I thought they were full of very
confidential papers. In the old days the attache-case was the peculiar
trademark of private secretaries and diplomats and high-up people like
that. Even attaches carried them sometimes. The very lowest a man with an
attache-case could be was a First-Class Civil Servant; and one was
justified in imagining confidential papers inside, or, at any rate,
home-work of the first importance. But nowadays there are too many of them
for that. The attache-case has been degraded; it is universal. This might
be because there is practically no male person alive just now who has not
been an adjutant at one time or another, and pinched at least one
attache-case from the orderly-room. But most of the cases in the Tube are
carried by females, so that theory is no good.
Well, then, I imagined sandwiches or knitting or powder-puffs or tea; but
those also are rotten hypotheses. I have too much faith in the good sense
of my fellow-countrywomen to believe that they would cart a horrible thing
like a cheap attache-case about simply in order to convey a sandwich or a
powder-puff from one end of London to the other. So I had to fall back on
my own experience.
I know, at any rate, what is inside mine. There are some rather grubby
envelopes which I borrowed from the House of Commons, and some very grubby
blotting-paper from the same source, and either a ream of foolscap or a
quire of foolscap, whichever is which; some pipe-cleaners and a few pieces
of milk-chocolate; and a letter from the Amalgamated Association of
Fish-Friers which ought to have been answered a long time ago; and a
memorandum on Hog-Importing which I am always going to read while waiting
at the station; and a nice piece of thick string with which I have tied a
bowline on a bight; and two broken pencils and some more envelopes; and a
Parliamentary Whip of last year and a stationery bill of the year before;
and several bills of my employer, not to mention a cheque for ninety-seven
pounds which I suppose he would like me to send to the bank; and a great
deal of fluff and a pipe or two and four or five stamped letters which it
is now too late to post. That is all there is in my case.
But I carry it backwards and forwards, in and out, to and fro, day after
day; and the only time it is ever opened at either end of the journey is
when, in addition to the articles previously mentioned, it contains
bottles. But I do not carry it for the sake of bottles; far from it. I am
one of those men who do not mind going about with a comparatively naked
bottle. I carry it simply because it is the tool of my trade, and because,
if you don't carry a tool of some kind on the Underground, at any moment
you may be taken for an idle rich, if not actually a parasite, who never
sweated in his life.
And that, I am persuaded, is why everybody else carries theirs.
But this is a very serious conclusion. It will be a terrible thing if
everyone is going to carry the tools of his trade about with him to show
that he has a trade; the barrister his briefs, the doctor his stethoscope
or his shiny black bag; the butcher his chopper; the dentist--but no, we
cannot have that. There must be other ways. We might wear badges, as we did
in the War, only they would be office badges and trade badges, instead of
regimental badges or discharged badges. Then we should have again the dear
old war-game of trying to read what was on them without being rude. That is
what one really misses in public places in these days of Peace--that and
the uniforms.
It was easy to make conversation in a restaurant in the old days, when
people kept on coming in in curious uniforms, and the ladies wondered what
they were and the men pretended they knew all about them. But all that is
dead now, and I think these sweat-badges would supply a serious want.
But what will the author wear? And who will believe that he ever breaks
into beads of perspiration at his labour?