a class of men--shadowy, unhappy, unreal-looking men--who gather in
coffee-houses, and play with a desire that dieth not, and a fire that is
not quenched. These gather in clubs and play Tournaments, such
tournaments as he of the Table Round could never have imagined. But
there are others who have the vice who live in country places, in remote
situations--curates, schoolmasters, rate collectors--who go consumed
from day to day and meet no fit companion, and who must needs find some
artificial vent for their mental energy. No one has ever calculated how
many sound Problems are possible, and no doubt the Psychical Research
people would be glad if Professor Karl Pearson would give his mind to
the matter. All the possible dispositions of the pieces come to such a
vast number, however, that, according to the theory of probability, and
allowing a few thousand arrangements each day, the same problem ought
never to turn up more than twice in a century or so. As a matter of
fact--it is probably due to some flaw in the theory of probability--the
same problem has a way of turning up in different publications several
times in a month or so. It may be, of course, that, after all, quite
"sound" problems are limited in number, and that we keep on inventing
and reinventing them; that, if a record were kept, the whole system, up
to four or five moves, might be classified, and placed on record in the
course of a few score years. Indeed, if we were to eliminate those with
conspicuously bad moves, it may be we should find the number of
reasonable games was limited enough, and that even our brilliant Lasker
is but repeating the inspirations of some long-buried Persian, some mute
inglorious Hindoo, dead and forgotten ages since. It may be over every
game there watches the forgotten forerunners of the players, and that
chess is indeed a dead game, a haunted game, played out centuries ago,
even, as beyond all cavil, is the game of draughts.
The artistic temperament, the gay irresponsible cast of mind, does what
it can to lighten the gravity of this too intellectual game. To a mortal
there is something indescribably horrible in these champions with their
four moves an hour--the bare thought of the mental operations of the
fifteen minutes gives one a touch of headache. Compulsory quick moving
is the thing for gaiety, and that is why, though we revere Steinitz and
Lasker, it is Bird we love. His victories glitter, his errors are
magnificent. The true sweetness of chess, if it ever can be sweet, is to
see a victory snatched, by some happy impertinence, out of the shadow of
apparently irrevocable disaster. And talking of cheerfulness reminds me
of Lowson's historical game of chess. Lowson said he had been cheerful
sometimes--but, drunk! Perish the thought! Challenged, he would have
proved it by some petty tests of pronunciation, some Good Templar's
shibboleths. He offered to walk along the kerb, to work any problem in
mathematics we could devise, finally to play MacBryde at chess. The
other gentleman was appointed judge, and after putting the antimacassar
over his head ("jush wigsh") immediately went to sleep in a disorderly
heap on the sofa. The game was begun very solemnly, so I am told.
MacBryde, in describing it to me afterwards, swayed his hands about with
the fingers twiddling in a weird kind of way, and said the board went
like that. The game was fierce but brief. It was presently discovered
that both kings had been taken. Lowson was hard to convince, but this
came home to him. "Man," he is reported to have said to MacBryde, "I'm
just drunk. There's no doubt in the matter. I'm feeling very ashamed of
myself." It was accordingly decided to declare the game drawn. The
position, as I found it next morning, is an interesting one. Lowson's
Queen was at K Kt 6, his Bishop at Q B 3, he had several Pawns, and his
Knight occupied a commanding position at the intersection of four
squares. MacBryde had four Pawns, two Rooks, a Queen, a draught, and a
small mantel ornament arranged in a rough semicircle athwart the board.
I have no doubt chess exquisites will sneer at this position, but in my
opinion it is one of the cheerfulest I have ever seen. I remember I
admired it very much at the time, in spite of a slight headache, and it
is still the only game of chess that I recall with undiluted pleasure.
And yet I have played many games.
THE COAL-SCUTTLE
A STUDY IN DOMESTIC ÆSTHETICS
Euphemia, who loves to have home dainty and delightful, would have no
coals if she could dispense with them, much less a coal-scuttle. Indeed,
it would seem she would have no fireplace at all, if she had her will.
All the summer she is happy, and the fireplace is anything but the place
for a fire; the fender has vanished, the fireirons are gone, it is
draped and decorated and disguised. So would dear Euphemia drape and
disguise the whole iron framework of the world, with that decorative and
decent mind of hers, had she but the scope. There are exotic ferns
there, spreading their fanlike fronds, and majolica glows and gleams;
and fabrics, of which Morris is the actual or spiritual begetter,
delight the eye. In summer-time our fireplace is indeed a thing of
beauty, but, alas for the solar system! it is not a joy for ever. The
sun at last recedes beyond the equinoxes, and the black bogey who has
slept awakens again. Euphemia restores the fender kerb and the brazen
dogs and the fireirons that will clatter; and then all the winter,
whenever she sits before the fire, her trouble is with her. Even when
the red glow of the fire lights up her features most becomingly, and
flattery is in her ear, every now and then a sidelong glance at her ugly
foe shows that the thought of it is in her mind, and that the crumpled
roseleaf, if such a phrase may be used for a coal-scuttle, insists on
being felt. And she has even been discovered alone, sitting elbows on
knees, and chin on her small clenched fist, frowning at it, puzzling how
to circumvent the one enemy of her peace.
"_It_" is what Euphemia always calls this utensil, when she can bring
herself to give the indescribable an imperfect vent in speech. But
commonly the feeling is too deep for words. Her war with this foeman in
her household, this coarse rebel in her realm of soft prettiness, is one
of those silent ones, those grim struggles without outcry or threat or
appeal for quarter that can never end in any compromise, never find a
rest in any truce, except the utter defeat of her antagonist. And how
she has tried--the happy thoughts, the faint hopes, the new departures
and outflanking movements! And even to-day there the thing defies her--a
coal-box, with a broad smile that shows its black teeth, thick and
squat, filling a snug corner and swaggering in unmanly triumph over the
outrage upon her delicacy that it commits.
One of Euphemia's brightest ideas was to burn wood. Logs make even a
picturesque pile in a corner--look "uncommon." But there are objections
to wood. Wood finely divided burns with gay quirks and jets of flame,
and making cheerful crackling noises the while; but its warmth and
brightness are as evanescent as love's young dream. And your solid log
has a certain irritating inertness. It is an absentee fuel, spending its
fire up the chimney, and after its youthful clouds of glory turns but a
cheerless side of black and white char towards the room. And, above all,
the marital mind is strangely exasperated by the log. Smite it with the
poker, and you get but a sullen resonance, a flight of red sparks, a
sense of an unconquerable toughness. It is worse than coke. The crisp
fracture of coal, the spitting flames suddenly leaping into existence
from the shiny new fissures, are altogether wanting. Old-seasoned timber
burns indeed most delightfully, but then it is as ugly as coal, and
withal very dear. So Euphemia went back to coal again with a sigh.
Possibly if Euphemia had been surrounded by the wealth she deserves this
trouble would not have arisen. A silent servant, bearing the due dose of
fresh fuel, would have come gliding from a mysterious Beneath, restored
the waning animation of the grate, and vanished noiselessly again. But
this was beyond the range of Euphemia's possibilities. And so we are
face to face with this problem of the scuttle again.
At first she would feign there was no such thing as coal. It was too
horrible. Only a Zola would admit it. It was the epoch of concealment.
The thing purchased was like a little cupboard on four legs; it might
have held any convenient trifle; and there was a shelf upon the top and
a book of poetry and a piece of crackled Satsuma. You took a little
brass handle and pulled it down, and the front of the little cupboard
came forward, and there you found your coal. But a dainty little
cupboard can no more entertain black coal and inelegant firewood and
keep its daintiness than a mind can entertain black thoughts and yet be
sweet. This cabinet became demoralised with amazing quickness; it became
incontinent with its corruptions, a hinge got twisted, and after a time
it acquired the habit of suddenly, and with an unpleasant oscillatory
laughing noise, opening of its own accord and proclaiming its horrid
secret to Euphemia's best visitors. An air of wickedness, at once
precocious and senile, came upon it; it gaped and leered at Euphemia as
the partner of her secret with such a familiar air of "I and you" that
she could stand it no longer, and this depraved piece of furniture was
banished at last from her presence, and relegated to its proper sphere
of sham gentility below stairs, where it easily passed itself upon the
cook as an exquisite. Euphemia tried to be sensible then, and
determined, since she must have coal in her room, to let no false
modesty intervene, but to openly proclaim its presence to all the world.
The next thing, therefore, was a cylinder of brass, broadly open above,
saying to the world, as it were, "Look! I contain coal." And there were
brass tongs like sugar tongs wherewith Euphemia would regale the fire
and brighten it up, handing it a lump at a time in the prettiest way.
But brass dints. The brazen thing was quiet and respectable enough
upstairs, but ever and again it went away to be filled. What happened on
these holiday jaunts Euphemia has never ascertained. But a chance blow
or worse cause ran a crease athwart the forehead of the thing, and
below an almost imperceptible bulging hinted at a future corpulency. And
there was complaint of the quantity of polishing it needed, and an
increasing difficulty in keeping it bright. And except when it was full
to the brim, the lining was unsightly; and this became more so. One day
Ithuriel must have visited Euphemia's apartment, and the tarnished
brilliancy of the thing stood confessed. For some days there was an
interregnum, and a coal-scuttle from downstairs--a black unstable thing
on flat foot and with a vast foolish nether lip--did its duty with
inelegant faithfulness.
Then Euphemia had a really pretty fancy. She procured one of those big
open garden baskets and painted it a pleasant brown, and instead of a
garden fork she had a little half horticultural scoop. In this basket
she kept her coals, and she tied a pink ribbon on the handle. One might
fancy she had been in some dewy garden and had dug a few coals as one
might dig up bulbs, and brought them in and put them down. It attracted
attention from all her visitors, and set a kind of fashion in the
neighbourhood. For a time Euphemia was almost contented. But one day a
malignant woman called, and looked at this device through her gilt
eye-glasses, while she secretly groped in the dark of her mind for an
unpleasant thing to say. Then suddenly she remarked, "Why not put your
coal in a bassinette? Or keep it _all_ on the floor?" Euphemia's face
fell. The thing was undeniably very like a cradle, in the light of this
suggestion; the coal certainly did seem a little out of place there; and
besides, if there were more than three or four lumps they had a way of
tumbling over the edge upon the carpet when the fire was replenished.
The tender shoot of Euphemia's satisfaction suddenly withered and died.
So the struggle has gone on. Sometimes it has been a wrought iron tripod
with a subtle tendency to upset in certain directions; sometimes a
coal-box; once even the noisy old coal-box of japanned tin, making more
noise than a Salvation Army service, and strangely decorated with "art"
enamels, had a turn. At present Euphemia is enduring a walnut "casket,"
that since its first week of office has displayed an increasing
indisposition to shut. But things cannot stay like this. The worry and
anxiety and vexation, Euphemia declares, are making her old before her
time. A delicate woman should not be left alone to struggle against
brazen monsters. A closed gas stove is happily impossible, but the
husband of the household is threatened with one of those beastly sham
fires, wherein gas jets flare among firebrick--a mechanical fire without
vitality or variety, that never dances nor crackles nor blazes, a
monotonous horror, a fire you cannot poke. That is what it will
certainly come to if the problem remains unsolved.
BAGARROW
Frankly, I detest this Bagarrow. Yet it is quite generally conceded that
Bagarrow is a very well-meaning fellow. But the trouble is to understand
him. To do that I have been at some pains, and yet I am still a mere
theorist. An anthropometric estimate of the man fails to reveal any
reason for the distinction of my aversion. He is of passable height,
breadth, and density, and, save for a certain complacency of expression,
I find no salient objection in his face. He has bluish eyes and a
whitish skin, and average-coloured hair--none of them distinctly
indictable possessions. It is something in his interior and unseen
mechanism, I think, that must be wrong; some internal lesion that finds
expression in his acts.
His mental operations, indeed, were at first as inconceivable to me as a
crab's or a cockchafer's. That is where all the trouble came in. For
that reason alone they fascinated me and aggrieved me. From the
conditions of our acquaintance--we were colleagues--I had to study him
with some thoroughness, observing him under these circumstances and
those. I have, by the bye, sometimes wondered idly how he would react to
alcohol--a fluid he avoids. It would, I am sure, be an entirely novel
and remarkable kind of Drunk, and I am also certain it would be an
offensive one. But I can't imagine it; I have no data. I could as soon
evolve from my inner consciousness an intoxicated giraffe. But, as I
say, this interesting experience has hitherto been denied me.
Now my theory of Bagarrow is this, that he has a kind of disease in his
ideals, some interruption of nutrition that has left them small and
emasculate. He aims, it appears, at a state called "Really Nice" or the
"True Gentleman," the outward and visible signs of which are a
conspicuous quietness of costume, gloves in all weathers, and a
tightly-rolled umbrella. But coupled in some way with this is a queer
smack of the propagandist, a kind of dwarfed prophetic passion. That is
the particular oddness of him. He displays a timid yet persistent desire
to foist this True Gentleman of his upon an unwilling world, to make you
Really Nice after his own pattern. I always suspect him of trying to
convert me by stealth when I am not looking.
So far as I can see, Bagarrow's conception of this True Gentleman of his
is at best a compromise, mainly holiness, but a tinted kind of
holiness--goodness in clean cuffs and with something neat in ties. He
renounces the flesh and the devil willingly enough, but he wants to keep
up a decent appearance. Now a stark saint I can find sympathy for. I
respect your prophet unkempt and in a hair shirt denouncing Sin--and
mundane affairs in general--with hoarse passion and a fiery hate. I
would not go for my holidays with nor make a domestic pet of such a man,
but I respect him. But Bagarrow's pose is different. Bagarrow would call
that carrying things to extremes. His is an unobtrusive virtue, a
compromising dissent, inaggressive aggressions on sin. So I take it. And
at times he puts it to you in a drawling argument, a stream of
Bagarrowisms, until you have to hurt his feelings--happily he is always
getting his feelings hurt--just to stop the flow of him.
"Life," said Bagarrow, in a moment of expansiveness, "is scarcely worth
living unless you are doing good to someone." That I take to be the
keystone of him. "I want to be a Good Influence upon all the people I
meet." I do not think it has ever dawned upon him that he himself is any
way short of perfection; and, so far as I can see, the triumph and end
of his good influence is cleanliness of cuff, compactness of umbrella,
and general assimilation to the Bagarrow ideal.
Hear him upon one's social duties--this living soul in this world of
wonders! "In moderation," said Bagarrow, opening out to questions on
that matter, "social relaxation is desirable, and I will even go so far
as to admit that I think it well to have at hand some pleasant expedient
for entertaining people and passing the time. A humorous song or a
recitation--provided it is in really good taste--is harmless enough, and
sometimes it may even be turned to good account. And everyone should try
to master some instrument or other. The flute, perhaps, is as convenient
as any; for the fiddle and piano, you know, are difficult and expensive
to learn, and require constant practice. A little legerdemain is also a
great acquisition for a man. Some may differ from me in that," continued
Bagarrow, "but I see no harm in it. There are hundreds of perfectly
proper and innocent tricks with coins and bits of paper, and pieces of
string, that will make an evening pass most delightfully. One may get
quite a little reputation as an entertainer with these things."
"And it is," pursued Bagarrow, quite glowing with liberality, "just a
little pharisaical to object to card tricks. There are quantities of
really quite clever and mathematical things that one may do with a
chosen card, dealing the pack into heaps and counting slowly. Of course
it is not for mere pleasuring that I learn these things. It gives anyone
with a little tact an opportunity for stopping card-playing. When the
pack is brought in, and all the party are intent upon gaming, you may
seize your opportunity and take the cards, saying, 'Let me show you a
little trick,' or, 'Have you seen Maskelyne's new trick with the cards?'
Before anyone can object you are displaying your skill to their
astonished eyes, and in their wonder at your cleverness the
objectionable game may be indefinitely postponed."
"Yet so set at times is your gambler upon his abominable pursuit," says
Bagarrow, "that in practice even this ingenious expedient has been known
to fail." He tried it once, it seems, in a race train to Kempton Park,
and afterwards he had to buy a new hat. That incident, indeed, gives you
the very essence of Bagarrow in his insidious attacks on evil. I
remember that on another occasion he went out of his way to promise a
partially intoxicated man a drink; and taking him into a public-house
ordered two lemon squashes! Drinks! He liked lemon squash himself and he
did not like beer, and he thought he had only to introduce the poor
fallen creature to the delights of temperance to ensure his conversion
there and then. I think he expected the man to fall upon him, crying "My
benefactor!" But he did not say "My benefactor," at anyrate, though he
fell upon him, cheerfully enough.
To avoid the appearance of priggishness, which he dreads with some
reason, he even went so far as to procure a herb tobacco, which he
smokes with the help of frequent sulphur matches. This he recommends to
us strongly. "Won't you try it?" he says, with a winning smile. "Just
once." And he is the only man I ever met who drinks that facetious
fluid, non-alcoholic beer. Once he proposed to wean me upon that from my
distinctive vice, which led indeed to our first rupture. "_I_ find it
delicious," he said in pathetic surprise.
It is one of his most inveterate habits to tell you quietly what he
does, or would do under the circumstances. Seeing you at Kipling, he
will propound the proposition that "all true literature has a distinct
aim." His test of literary merit is "What good does it do you?" He is a
great lender of books, especially of Carlyle and Ruskin, which authors
for some absolutely inscrutable reason he considers provocative of
Bagarrowism, and he goes to the County Council lectures on dairy-work,
because it encourages others to improve themselves. But I have said
enough to display him, and of Bagarrow at least--as I can well
testify--it is easy to have more than enough. Indeed, after whole days
with him I have gone home to dream of the realisation of his ideals, a
sort of Bagarrow millennium, a world of Bagarrows. All kinds of
men--Falstaffs, Don Quixotes, Alan Stewarts, John the Baptists, John
Knoxes, Quilps, and Benvenuto Cellinis--all, so to speak, Bagarrowed,
all with clean cuffs, tight umbrellas, and temperate ways, passing to
and fro in a regenerate earth.
And so he goes on his way through this wonderful universe with his eyes
fixed upon two or three secondary things, without the lust or pride of
life, without curiosity or adventure, a mere timid missionary of a
religion of "Nicer Ways," a quiet setter of a good example. I can assure
you this is no exaggeration, but a portrait. It seems to me that the
thing must be pathological, that he and this goodness of his have
exactly the same claim upon Lombroso, let us say, as the born criminal.
He is born good, a congenital good example, a sufferer from atrophy of
his original sin. The only hope I can see for Bagarrow, short of murder,
is forcible trepanning. He ought to have the seat of his ideals lanced,
and all this wash about doing good to people by stealth taken away. It
may be he might prove a very decent fellow then--if there was anything
left of him, that is.
THE BOOK OF ESSAYS DEDICATORY
I have been bothered about this book this three months. I have written
scarcely anything since Llewellyn asked me for it, for when he asked me
I had really nothing on hand. I had just published every line I had ever
written, at my own expense, with Prigsbys. Yet three months should
suffice for one of Llewellyn's books, which consist chiefly of decorous
fly-leaves and a dedication or so, and margins. Of course you know
Llewellyn's books--the most delightful things in the market: the
sweetest covers, with little gilt apples and things carelessly
distributed over luminous grey, and bright red initials, and all these
delightful fopperies. But it was the very slightness of these bibelots
that disorganised me. And perhaps, also, the fact that no one has ever
asked me for a book before.
I had no trouble with the title though--"Lichens." I have wondered the
thing was never used before. Lichens, variegated, beautiful, though on
the most arid foundations, half fungoid, half vernal--the very name for
a booklet of modern verse. And that, of course, decided the key of the
cover and disposed of three or four pages. A fly-leaf, a leaf with
"Lichens" printed fair and beautiful a little to the left of the centre,
then a title-page--"Lichens. By H.G. Wells. London: MDCCCXCV. Stephen
Llewellyn." Then a restful blank page, and then--the Dedication. It was
the dedication stopped me. The title-page, it is true, had some points
of difficulty. Should the Christian name be printed in full or not, for
instance; but it had none of the fatal fascination of the dedicatory
page. I had, so to speak, to look abroad among the ranks of men, and
make one of those fretful forgotten millions--immortal. It seemed a
congenial task.
I went to work forthwith.
It was only this morning that I realised the magnitude of my
accumulations. Ever since then--it was three months ago--I have been
elaborating this Dedication. I turned the pile over, idly at first.
Presently I became interested in tracing my varying moods, as they had
found a record in the heap.
This struck me--
[Illustration: A Handwritten dedication, "To my Dearest Friend"
followed by three successive names, two crossed out, then the whole
dedication struck out]
Then again, a little essay in gratitude came to hand--
TO
PROFESSOR AUGUSTUS FLOOD,
Whose Admirable Lectures on
Palæontology
First turned my Attention to
Literature.
There was a tinge of pleasantry in the latter that pleased me very
greatly when I wrote it, and I find immediately overlying it another
essay in the same line--
To the Latter-day Reviewer,
These Pearls.
For some days I was smitten with the idea of dedicating my little
booklet to one of my numerous personal antagonists, and conveying some
subtly devised insult with an air of magnanimity. I thought, for
instance, of Blizzard--
SIR JOSEPH BLIZZARD,
The most distinguished, if not the greatest, of contemporary
anatomists.
I think it was "X.L.'s" book, _Aut Diabolus aut Nihil_, that set me upon
another line. There is, after all, your reader to consider in these
matters, your average middle-class person to impress in some way. They
say the creature is a snob, and absolutely devoid of any tinge of
humour, and I must confess that I more than half believe it. At anyrate,
it was that persuasion inspired--
To the Countess of X.,
In Memory of Many Happy Days.
I know no Countess of X., as a matter of fact, but if the public is such
an ass as to think better of my work for the suspicion, I do not care
how soon I incur it. And this again is a pretty utilisation of the waste
desert of politics--
MY DEAR SALISBURY,--Pray accept this unworthy tribute of
my affectionate esteem.