wicket breathless but triumphant. Next comes a bye, and then over. The
misguided cleric, ever pursuing a theory of foolish condescension to his
betters at the game, and to show there is no offence at the "Yaaps,"
takes the opportunity, although panting, of asking my ancient if his
chicks--late threatened with staggers--are doing well. What would he
think if my cricketer retaliated by asking, in the pause before the
sermon, how the vicarage pony took his last bolus? The two men do not
understand one another. My cricketer waves the hens aside, and revenges
himself, touching his hat at intervals, by some offensively obvious
remarks--as to a mere beginner--about playing with a straight bat. And
the field sniggers none too furtively. I sympathise with his malice.
Cricket is an altogether too sacred thing to him to be tampered with on
merely religious grounds. However, our vicar gets himself caught at the
first opportunity, and so being removed from my veteran's immediate
environment, to their common satisfaction, the due ritual of the great
game is resumed.
My ancient cricketer abounds in reminiscence of the glorious days that
have gone for ever. He can still recall the last echoes of the
"throwing" controversy that agitated Nyren, when over-arm bowling began,
and though he never played himself in a beaver hat, he can, he says,
recollect seeing matches so played. In those days everyone wore tall
hats--the policeman, the milkman, workmen of all sorts. Some people I
fancy must have bathed in them and gone to bed wearing them. He recalls
the Titans of that and the previous age, and particularly delights in
the legend of Noah Mann, who held it a light thing to walk twenty miles
from Northchapel to Hambledon to practise every Tuesday afternoon, and
wander back after dark. He himself as a stripling would run a matter of
four miles, after a day's work in the garden where he was employed, to
attend an hour's practice over the downs before the twilight made the
balls invisible. And afterwards came Teutonic revelry or wanderings
under the summer starlight, as the mood might take him. For there was a
vein of silent poetry in the youth of this man.
He hates your modern billiard-table pitch, and a batting of dexterous
snickery. He likes "character" in a game, gigantic hitting forward,
bowler-planned leg catches, a cunning obliquity in a wicket that would
send the balls mysteriously askew. But dramatic breaks are now a thing
unknown in trade cricket. One legend of his I doubt; he avers that once
at Brighton, in a match between Surrey and Sussex, he saw seven wickets
bowled by some such aid in two successive overs. I have never been able
to verify this. I believe that, as a matter of fact, the thing has never
occurred, but he tells it often in a fine crescendo of surprise, and the
refrain, "Out HE came." His first beginning is a cheerful
anecdote of a crew of "young gentlemen" from Cambridge staying at the
big house, and a challenge to the rustic talent of "me and Billy Hall,"
who "played a bit at that time," "of me and Billy Hall" winning the
pitch and going in first, of a memorable if uncivil stand at the wickets
through a long hot afternoon, and a number of young gentlemen from
Cambridge painfully discovering local talent by exhaustive fielding in
the park, a duty they honourably discharged.
I am fond of my old cricketer, in spite of a certain mendacious and
malign element in him. His yarns of gallant stands and unexpected turns
of fortune, of memorable hits and eccentric umpiring, albeit tending
sometimes incredibly to his glory, are full of the flavour of days well
spent, of bright mornings of play, sunlit sprawlings beside the score
tent, warmth, the flavour of bitten grass stems, and the odour of
crushed turf. One seems to hear the clapping hands of village ancients,
and their ululations of delight. One thinks of stone jars with cool
drink swishing therein, of shouting victories and memorable defeats, of
eleven men in a drag, and tuneful and altogether glorious home-comings
by the light of the moon. His were the Olympian days of the sport, when
noble squires were its patrons, and every village a home and nursery of
stalwart cricketers, before the epoch of special trains, gate-money,
star elevens, and the tumultuous gathering of idle cads to jabber at a
game they cannot play.
CONCERNING A CERTAIN LADY
This lady wears a blue serge suit and a black hat, without flippancy;
she is a powerfully built lady and generally more or less flushed, and
she is aunt, apparently, to a great number of objectionable-looking
people. I go in terror of her. Yet the worm will turn at last, and so
will the mild, pacific literary man. Her last outrage was too much even
for my patience. It was committed at Gloucester Road Station the other
afternoon. I was about to get into a train for Wimbledon,--and there are
only two of them to the hour,--and, so far as I could see, the whole
world was at peace with me. I felt perfectly secure. The ægis of the
_pax Britannica_--if you will pardon the expression--was over me. For
the moment the thought of the lady in the blue serge was quite out of my
mind. I had just bought a newspaper, and had my hand on the carriage
door. The guard was fluttering his flag.
Then suddenly she swooped out of space, out of the infinite unknown, and
hit me. She always hits me when she comes near me, and I infer she hits
everyone she comes across. She hit me this time in the chest with her
elbow and knocked me away from the door-handle. She hit me very hard;
indeed, she was as fierce as I have ever known her. With her there were
two nieces and a nephew, and the nephew hit me too. He was a horrid
little boy in an Eton suit of the kind that they do not wear at Eton,
and he hit me with his head and pushed at me with his little pink hands.
The nieces might have been about twenty-two and thirteen respectively,
and I infer that they were apprenticed to her. All four people seemed
madly excited. "It's just starting!" they screamed, and the train was,
indeed, slowly moving. Their object--so far as they had an object and
were not animated by mere fury--appeared to be to assault me and then
escape in the train. The lady in blue got in and then came backwards out
again, sweeping the smaller girl behind her upon the two others, who
were engaged in hustling me. "It's 'smoking!'" she cried. I could have
told her that, if she had asked instead of hitting me. The elder girl,
by backing dexterously upon me, knocked my umbrella out of my hand, and
when I stooped to pick it up the little boy knocked my hat off. I will
confess they demoralised me with their archaic violence. I had some
thought of joining in their wild amuck, whooping, kicking out madly,
perhaps assaulting a porter,--I think the lady in blue would have been
surprised to find what an effective addition to her staff she had picked
up,--but before I could collect my thoughts sufficiently to do any
definite thing the whole affair was over. A porter was slamming doors on
them, the train was running fast out of the station, and I was left
alone with an unmannerly newsboy and an unmannerly porter on the
platform. I waited until the porter was out of the way, and then I hit
the newsboy for laughing at me, but even with that altercation it was a
tedious wait for the next train to Wimbledon.
This is the latest of my encounters with this lady, but it has decided
me to keep silence no longer. She has been persecuting me now for years
in all parts of London. It may be I am her only victim, but, on the
other hand, she may be in the habit of annoying the entire class of
slender and inoffensive young men. If so, and they will communicate with
me through the publishers of this little volume, we might do something
towards suppressing her, found an Anti-Energetic-Lady-League, or
something of that sort. For if there was ever a crying wrong that
clamoured for suppression it is this violent woman.
She is, even now, flagrantly illegal. She might be given in charge for
hitting people at any time, and be warned, or fined, or given a week.
But somehow it is only when she is overpast and I am recovering my wits
that I recollect that she might be dealt with in this way. She is the
chartered libertine of British matrons, and assaulteth where she
listeth. The blows I have endured from her? She fights people who are
getting into 'buses. It is no mere accidental jostling, but a deliberate
shouldering, poking with umbrellas, and clawing. It is her delight to go
to the Regent Circus corner of Piccadilly, about half-past seven in the
evening, accompanied by a genteel rout of daughters, and fill up whole
omnibuses with them. At that hour there are work-girls and tired clerks,
and the like worn-out anæmic humanity trying to get home for an hour or
so of rest before bed, and they crowd round the 'buses very eagerly.
They are little able to cope with her exuberant vitality, being
ill-nourished and tired from the day's work, and she simply mows through
them and fills up every vacant place they covet before their eyes. Then,
I can never count change even when my mind is tranquil, and she knows
that, and swoops threateningly upon me in booking offices and
stationers' shops. When I am dodging cabs at crossings she will appear
from behind an omnibus or carriage and butt into me furiously. She holds
her umbrella in her folded arms just as the Punch puppet does his staff,
and with as deadly effect. Sometimes she discards her customary navy
blue and puts on a glittering bonnet with bead trimmings, and goes and
hurts people who are waiting to enter the pit at theatres, and
especially to hurt me. She is fond of public shows, because they afford
such possibilities of hurting me. Once I saw her standing partly on a
seat and partly on another lady in the church of St. George's, Hanover
Square, partly, indeed, watching a bride cry, but chiefly, I expect,
scheming how she could get round to me and hurt me. Then there was an
occasion at the Academy when she was peculiarly aggressive. I was
sitting next my lame friend when she marked me. Of course she came at
once and sat right upon us. "Come along, Jane," I heard her say, as I
struggled to draw my flattened remains from under her; "this gentleman
will make room."
My friend was not so entangled and had escaped on the other side. She
noticed his walk. "Oh, don't _you_ get up," she said. "_This_
gentleman," she indicated my convulsive struggles to free myself, "will
do that. _I did not see that you were a cripple._"
It may be some of my readers will recognise the lady now. It can be--for
the honour of womankind--only one woman. She is an atavism, a survival
of the age of violence, a Palæolithic squaw in petticoats. I do not know
her name and address or I would publish it. I do not care if she kills
me the next time she meets me, for the limits of endurance have been
passed. If she kills me I shall die a martyr in the cause of the Queen's
peace. And if it is only one woman, then it was the same lady, more than
half intoxicated, that I saw in the Whitechapel Road cruelly
ill-treating a little costermonger. If it was not she it was certainly
her sister, and I do not care who knows it.
What to do with her I do not know. A League, after all, seems
ineffectual; she would break up any League. I have thought of giving her
in charge for assault, but I shrink from the invidious publicity of
that. Still, I am in grim earnest to do something. I think at times that
the compulsory adoption of a narrow doorway for churches and places of
public entertainment might be some protection for quiet, inoffensive
people. How she would rage outside to be sure! Yet that seems a great
undertaking.
But this little paper is not so much a plan of campaign as a preliminary
defiance. Life is a doubtful boon while one is never safe from assault,
from hitting and shoving, from poking with umbrellas, being sat upon,
and used as a target for projectile nephews and nieces. I warn
her--possibly with a certain quaver in my voice--that I am in revolt. If
she hits me again----I will not say the precise thing I will do, but I
warn her, very solemnly and deliberately, that she had better not hit me
again.
And so for the present the matter remains.
THE SHOPMAN
If I were really opulent, I would not go into a shop at all--I would
have a private secretary. If I were really determined, Euphemia would do
these things. As it is, I find buying things in a shop the most
exasperating of all the many trying duties of life. I am sometimes
almost tempted to declare myself Adamite to escape it. The way the
shopman eyes you as you enter his den, the very spread of his fingers,
irritate me. "What can I have the pleasure?" he says, bowing forward at
me, and with his eye on my chin--and so waits.
Now I hate incomplete sentences, and confound his pleasure! I don't go
into a shop to give a shopman pleasure. But your ordinary shopman must
needs pretend you delight and amuse him. I say, trying to display my
dislike as plainly as possible, "Gloves." "Gloves, yessir," he says. Why
should he? I suppose he thinks I require to be confirmed in my
persuasion that I want gloves. "Calf--kid--dogskin?" How should _I_ know
the technicalities of his traffic? "Ordinary gloves," I say, disdaining
his petty distinctions. "About what price, sir?" he asks.
Now that always maddens me. Why should I be expected to know the price
of gloves? I'm not a commercial traveller nor a wholesale dealer, and I
don't look like one. Neither am I constitutionally parsimonious nor
petty. I am a literary man, unworldly, and I wear long hair and a soft
hat and a peculiar overcoat to indicate the same to ordinary people.
Why, I say, should I know the price of gloves? I know they are some
ordinary price--elevenpence-halfpenny, or three-and-six, or
seven-and-six, or something--one of those prices that everything is
sold at--but further I don't go. Perhaps I say elevenpence-halfpenny at
a venture.
His face lights up with quiet malice. "Don't keep them, sir," he says. I
can tell by his expression that I am ridiculously low, and so being
snubbed. I think of trying with three-and-six, or seven-and-six; the
only other probable prices for things that I know, except a guinea and
five pounds. Then I see the absurdity of the business, and my anger
comes surging up.
"Look here!" I say, as bitterly as possible. "I don't come here to play
at Guessing Games. Never mind your prices. I want some gloves. Get me
some!"
This cows him a little, but very little. "May I ask your size, sir?" he
says, a trifle more respectfully.
One would think I spent all my time remembering the size of my gloves.
However, it is no good resenting it. "It's either seven or nine," I say
in a tired way.
He just begins another question, and then he catches my eye and stops
and goes away to obtain some gloves, and I get a breathing space. But
why do they keep on with this cross-examination? If I knew exactly what
I wanted--description, price, size--I should not go to a shop at all, it
would save me such a lot of trouble just to send a cheque to the Stores.
The only reason why I go into a tradesman's shop is because I don't know
what I want exactly, am in doubt about the name or the size, or the
price, or the fashion, and want a specialist to help me. The only reason
for having shopmen instead of automatic machines is that one requires
help in buying things. When I want gloves, the shopman ought to
understand his business sufficiently well to know better than I do what
particular kind of gloves I ought to be wearing, and what is a fair
price for them. I don't see why I should teach him what is in fashion
and what is not. A doctor does not ask you what kind of operation you
want and what price you will pay for it. But I really believe these
outfitter people would let me run about London wearing white cotton
gloves and a plaid comforter without lifting a finger to prevent me.
And, by the bye, that reminds me of a scandalous trick these salesmen
will play you. Sometimes they have not the thing you want, and then they
make you buy other things. I happen to have, through no fault of my own,
a very small head, and consequently for one long summer I wore a little
boy's straw hat about London with the colours of a Paddington Board
School, simply because a rascal outfitter hadn't my size in a proper
kind of headgear, and induced me to buy the thing by specious
representations. He must have known perfectly well it was not what I
ought to wear. It seems never to enter into a shopman's code of honour
that he ought to do his best for his customer. Since that, however, I
have noticed lots of people about who have struck me in a new light as
triumphs of the salesman, masterpieces in the art of incongruity; age in
the garb of youth, corpulence put off with the size called "slender
men's"; unhappy, gentle, quiet men with ties like oriflammes, breasts
like a kingfisher's, and cataclysmal trouser patterns. Even so, if the
shopkeeper had his will, should we all be. Those poor withered maiden
ladies, too, who fill us with a kind of horror, with their juvenile
curls, their girlish crudity of colouring, their bonnets, giddy,
tottering, hectic. It overcomes me with remorse to think that I myself
have accused them of vanity and folly. It overcomes me with pain to hear
the thoughtless laugh aloud after them, in the public ways. For they are
simply short-sighted trustful people, the myopic victims of the salesman
and saleswoman. The little children gibe at them, pelt even.... And
somewhere in the world a draper goes unhung.
However, the gloves are bought. I select a pair haphazard, and he
pretends to perceive they fit perfectly by putting them over the back of
my hand. I make him assure me of the fit, and then buy the pair and
proceed to take my old ones off and put the new on grimly. If they split
or the fingers are too long--glovemakers have the most erratic
conceptions of the human finger--I have to buy another pair.
But the trouble only begins when you have bought your thing. "Nothing
more, sir?" he says. "Nothing," I say. "Braces?" he says. "No, thank
you," I say. "Collars, cuffs?" He looks at mine swiftly but keenly, and
with an unendurable suspicion.
He goes on, item after item. Am I in rags, that I should endure this
thing? And I get sick of my everlasting "No, thank you"--the monotony
shows up so glaringly against his kaleidoscope variety. I feel all the
unutterable pettiness, the mean want of enterprise of my poor little
purchase compared with the catholic fling he suggests. I feel angry with
myself for being thus played upon, furiously angry with him. "_No, no_!"
I say.
"These tie-holders are new." He proceeds to show me his infernal
tie-holders. "They prevent the tie puckering," he says with his eye on
mine. It's no good. "How much?" I say.
This whets him to further outrage. "Look here, my man!" I say at last,
goaded to it, "I came here for gloves. After endless difficulties I at
last induced you to let me have gloves. I have also been intimidated, by
the most shameful hints and insinuations, into buying that _beastly_
tie-holder. I'm not a child that I don't know my own needs. Now _will_
you let me go? How much do you want?"
That usually checks him.
The above is a fair specimen of a shopman--a favourable rendering. There
are other things they do, but I simply cannot write about them because
it irritates me so to think of them. One infuriating manoeuvre is to
correct your pronunciation. Another is to make a terrible ado about your
name and address--even when it is quite a well-known name.
After I have bought things at a shop I am quite unfit for social
intercourse. I have to go home and fume. There was a time when Euphemia
would come and discuss my purchase with a certain levity, but on one
occasion....
Some day these shopmen will goad me too far. It's almost my only
consolation, indeed, to think what I am going to do when I do break out.
There is a salesman somewhere in the world, he going on his way and I
on mine, who will, I know, prove my last straw. It may be he will read
this--amused--recking little of the mysteries of fate.... Is killing a
salesman murder, like killing a human being?
THE BOOK OF CURSES
Professor Gargoyle, you must understand, has travelled to and fro in the
earth, culling flowers of speech: a kind of recording angel he is, but
without any sentimental tears. To be plain, he studies swearing. His
collection, however, only approaches completeness in the western
departments of European language. Going eastward he found such an
appalling and tropical luxuriance of these ornaments as to despair at
last altogether of even a representative selection. "They do not curse,"
he says, "at door-handles, and shirt-studs, and such other trifles as
will draw down the meagre discharge of an Occidental, but when they do
begin----
"I hired a promising-looking man at Calcutta, and after a month or so
refused to pay his wages. He was unable to get at me with the big knife
he carried, because the door was locked, so he sat on his hams outside
under the verandah, from a quarter-past six in the morning until nearly
ten, cursing--cursing in one steady unbroken flow--an astonishing spate
of blasphemy. First he cursed my family, from me along the female line
back to Eve, and then, having toyed with me personally for a little
while, he started off along the line of my possible posterity to my
remotest great-grandchildren. Then he cursed me by this and that. My
hand ached taking it down, he was so very rich. It was a perfect
anthology of Bengali blasphemy--vivid, scorching, and variegated. Not
two alike. And then he turned about and dealt with different parts of
me. I was really very fortunate in him. Yet it was depressing to think
that all this was from one man, and that there are six hundred million
people in Asia."
"Naturally," said the Professor in answer to my question, "these
investigations involve a certain element of danger. The first condition
of curse-collecting is to be unpopular, especially in the East, where
comminatory swearing alone is practised, and you have to offend a man
very grievously to get him to disgorge his treasure. In this country,
except among ladies in comparatively humble circumstances, anything like
this fluent, explicit, detailed, and sincere cursing, aimed,
missile-fashion, at a personal enemy, is not found. It was quite common
a few centuries ago; indeed, in the Middle Ages it was part of the
recognised procedure. Aggrieved parties would issue a father's curse,
an orphan's curse, and so forth, much as we should take out a county
court summons. And it played a large part in ecclesiastical policy too.
At one time the entire Church militant here on earth was swearing in
unison, and the Latin tongue, at the Republic of Venice--a very splendid
and imposing spectacle. It seems to me a pity to let these old customs
die out so completely. I estimate that more than half these Gothic forms
have altogether passed out of memory. There must have been some splendid
things in Erse and Gaelic too; for the Celtic mind, with its more vivid
sense of colour, its quicker transitions, and deeper emotional quality,
has ever over-cursed the stolid Teuton. But it is all getting forgotten.
"Indeed, your common Englishman now scarcely curses at all. A more
colourless and conventional affair than what in England is called
swearing one can scarcely imagine. It is just common talk, with some
half-dozen orthodox bad words dropped in here and there in the most
foolish and illogical manner. Fancy having orthodox unorthodox words! I
remember one day getting into a third-class smoking carriage on the
Metropolitan Railway about one o'clock, and finding it full of rough
working men. Everything they said was seasoned with one incredibly
stupid adjective, and no doubt they thought they were very desperate
characters. At last I asked them not to say that word again. One
forthwith asked me 'What the ----'--I really cannot quote these
puerilities--'what the idiotic _cliché_ that mattered to me?' So I
looked at him quietly over my glasses, and I began. It was a revelation
to these poor fellows. They sat open-mouthed, gasping. Then those that
were nearest me began to edge away, and at the very next station they
all bundled out of the carriage before the train stopped, as though I
had some infectious disease. And the thing was just a rough imperfect
rendering of some mere commonplaces, passing the time of day as it were,
with which the heathen of Aleppo used to favour the servants of the
American missionary. Indeed," said Professor Gargoyle, "if it were not
for women there would be nothing in England that one could speak of as
swearing at all."
"I say," said I, "is not that rather rough on the ladies?"