up and saw that I was shining again, without the vestige of a cloud to
bother me, and he felt his little body to see how hot it was, and was
quite sure that at last he was normal again, but he couldn't tell until
his mother was up and about. The weary hours went by, and at last she
came in just before breakfast with the thermometer in her hand.
"'I'm certain I'm all right to-day,' I heard Nobby say. 'I feel quite
cool everywhere.'
"But, alas and alack," said the Sun, "he was a hundred still.
"'My poor mite!' his mother exclaimed, and Nobby burst into tears.
"'Mayn't I get up? Mayn't I get up?' he moaned; 'I feel so frightfully
fit,' But his mother said no, not till the temperature had gone down.
You see," added the Orb of Day, "when Nobbies are only-sons and those
only-sons' fathers are fighting the enemy, mothers have to be more than
commonly cautious and particular. You will wonder perhaps why she
didn't send for the doctor, but it was for two reasons, both womanly
ones, and these were that (_a_) she didn't like the _locum_, her own
doctor being also at the War, and (_b_) she believed in bed and nursing
as the best cure for everything.
"And so all through another long day--and when you are vigorous and
robust, like Nobby, and accustomed to every kind of impulsive and
adventurous activity, day can be, in bed, appallingly long--Nobby was
kept a prisoner, always with his temperature at a hundred, and always
with nothing to bite, and growing steadily more and more peevish and
difficult, so much so that his mother became quite happy again, because
it is very well known that when human invalids are testy and impatient
with their nurses they are getting better.
"But when on the third morning, although Nobby's temper had become too
terrible for words, his temperature was still a hundred, his mother
began to be alarmed again. 'It's very strange,' she said to her sister,
'but he seems perfectly well and cool, and yet the thermometer makes him
still a hundred. What do you think we ought to do?'
"Nobby's aunt, who was a wise woman, although unmarried, went up and
examined her nephew for herself. 'He certainly looks all right to me,'
she said, 'and he feels all right too. Do you think that the thermometer
might he faulty? Let me try it'; and with these words Nobby's aunt shook
the thermometer down and then put it under her tongue and gave it a good
two minutes, and behold it said a hundred; and then Nobby's mother shook
it down and tried it and gave it a good two minutes, and behold it said
a hundred; and the cook was a hundred too, and the gardener was a
hundred, and the girl who came in to help was a hundred, and probably
the donkey would have been a hundred, and the pony a hundred, if they
had been tested, because a hundred was the thermometer's humorous idea
of normal; and so," added the Sun, "Nobby's mother and aunt rushed
upstairs two or three at a time, having a great sense of justice, and
pulled him out of bed and dressed him and hugged him and told him to be
happy once more.
"And a couple of seconds after this," said the Sun, bringing the story
to a close, "I saw him again."
TWO OF MARTHA'S SONS
Mr. Kipling, dividing, in that fine poem, men into the Sons of Martha
and the Sons of Mary--the Sons of Martha being the servants and the Sons
of Mary the served--characteristically lays his emphasis on those who
make machinery to move. Thus:
The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part,
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and
the troubled heart;
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to
the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve or rest.
It is their care, in all the ages, to take the buffet
and cushion the shock.
It is their care that the gear engages--it is their care that
the switches lock.
It is their care that the wheels run truly--it is their care
to embark and entrain,
Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.
Mr. Kipling, as I say, is thinking more of highly trained and efficient
operatives than of the quieter ministrants; but, after all, some of
Mary's Sons--possibly the majority of them--stay at home and refrain
from running the Empire, and these too count upon their cousins for
assistance.
A very large number of Martha's Sons, for example, become waiters; and
waiters are a race to whom insufficient justice has been done by men of
letters. There should be a Book of Waiters, as there was a Book of
Doctors and a Book of Lawyers by the late Cordy Jeaffreson, and a Book
of the Table by the late Dr. Doran. Old waiters for choice: men who have
mellowed in their calling; men who have tasted wines for themselves and
studied human nature when it eats and is vulnerable. I wish somebody
would compile it. It should be a cosmopolitan work: England's old
waiters must be there, and France's, upon whom most clubmen of any age
ought to be able to enlarge fruitily. In fact, all well-stored Bohemian
memories in London and Paris should yield much. And Ireland's old
waiters most conspicuously must be there; but whoever is to write this
book must hasten to collect the material, for in Ireland, I am told, the
old waiter is vanishing. An elderly Irish gentleman with whom I was
talking recently--or, rather, to whom I was listening as he searched his
memory for drolleries of the past--said that the disappearance, under
modern conditions, of the old humorous independent waiters of his
earlier day is the one which he personally most regretted. No longer,
said he, are to be found, except very occasionally, these worthy friends
of the traveller--Martha's Sons at their best, or, at any rate, at their
most needed. Slow they may have been, not always strictly sober, and
often despotic; but they were to be counted upon as landmarks: they
extended a welcome, they fed the hungry (in time), they slaked the
thirsty (more quickly), and they made remarks amusing enough to fortify
their good points and palliate their bad. "There was an old fellow named
Terence at Limerick," said my friend, and there followed two or three
characteristic anecdotes of old Terence at Limerick. "There was old Tim
at Tralee," and he painted old Tim for me in a few swift strokes--red
nose, creaking legs, and all. What though his nose was red and his legs
creaked, Tralee is no longer worth visiting, because Tim is not there.
That was the burden of the lament. These old fellows have passed, and
the new waiters, most of whom are foreigners or girls, can never mature
into anything comparable with them.
Two of my friend's stories I may tell. One is of old Dennis at Mallow,
who on being asked if the light in the coffee-room could not be made
brighter, said, in that charming definitive Irish way, that it could
not. "Is it always like this?" my friend then inquired. "It is not,
sorr," said old Dennis; "it is often worse." Not a great anecdote, but
you must brave the horrors of St. George's Channel to meet with these
alluring unexpectednesses of speech. Imagine an English waiter thus
surprising one! The other story is of old Florence, head waiter at a
certain Irish yacht club. Some sojourners in the neighbourhood, having
been elected honorary members for the period of their visit, asked a few
American friends to dine there, and then, even while in the boat on
their way to dinner, suddenly realised that honorary members are
entitled to no such privileges. It was decided to put the case to old
Florence. "Have you a rule against honorary members inviting guests?"
"We have, sorr," said he. "Is it very strictly enforced? I mean, would
there be any risk in breaking it?" "There would not, sorr. The only rule
in this club that is never broken, sorr, is the one which forbids
gratuities to be given to the waiters."
For those Sons of Martha who make their living--and not a bad one--by
ministering to their hungry fellow-creatures there is no call to feel
sorry. They are often not only richer but happier than their customers,
and when the time comes they retire to snug little houses (of which
they not infrequently own a row) with a competence, and pass the evening
of life with their pipe and glass, their friends and grandchildren,
moving serenely, if perhaps with a shade too plantigrade a step (the
waiters' heritage), to the grave. No call, as I say, to feel sorry for
them; but what of those other Sons of Martha, the railway porters, who
while helping us to travel and get away from home never travel or get
away from home themselves, and for ever are carrying or wheeling heavy
trunks or searching for visionary cabs?
The mere fact of never having a holiday is not in itself distressing.
Holidays often are overrated disturbances of routine, costly and
uncomfortable, and they usually need another holiday to correct their
ravages. Men who take no holidays must not, therefore, necessarily
become objects of our pity. But I confess to feeling sorry for those
servants of the public who apparently not only never take a holiday
themselves, but who spend all their lives in assisting others to get
away.
It is probably no privation to a bathing-machine man never to enter the
sea; uproariously happy in that element as his clients can be, their
pleasure, in which he has no share, does not, I imagine, embitter his
existence. Similarly, since a waiter either has eaten or is soon to
eat, we need not waste sympathy on his unending task of setting
seductive dishes before others. But it is conceivable that some of those
weary and dejected men whom one sees at Victoria Station, for example,
in the summer, eternally making an effort, however unsuccessful, to cope
with the exodus of Londoners to the south coast, really would like also
to repose on Brighton beach. But they may not. Their destiny is for ever
to help others to that paradise, and remain at Victoria themselves. Just
as Moses was denied the Children of Israel's Promised Land, so are the
porters. The engine-driver can go, the stoker can go, the guard can
go,--indeed, they must go,--but the porters get no nearer than the
carriage doors and then wheel back again. And if the plight of the
porters at Victoria is unenviable, think of that of the porters at the
big termini on the other side of London and elsewhere when they read the
labels on the luggage which they handle!--labels for the west, for the
land of King Arthur; labels for the north, for delectable Highland
retreats; labels for Northumberland and Yorkshire; labels for the east
coast; labels for Kerry and Galway and Connemara.
FREAKS OF MEMORY
It was my fortune not long since to meet again, in the flesh, the most
famous of our prophets--Old Moore, whose cautious vaticination is on
sale even in the streets. To my dismay he did not recognise me. Not that
a want of recognition is so rare--very far from it--but the surprise is
that a being gifted with such preternatural vision should thus fail,
when I, who am only an ordinary person, knew him again instantly. Long
habits of fixing his penetrating gaze on the murky future have no doubt
rendered the backward look less simple to him. Anyway, there we stood, I
challenging him to remember me and he failing to do so. This momentary
superiority of my own poor wits over those of a man who (undismayed by
the refusal of events always to fall into line) foretells so much,
uplifted me; but the untrustworthiness of memory is so constant and
lands one in such embarrassments that it is foolish for anyone to boast.
Among the marvels of the human machine, memory is, indeed, strangest.
The great bewildering fact of memory at all--of the miracle of the
brain--is, of course, as far beyond our finite apprehension as the
starry heavens. Of this? I never dare to think. But the minor caprices
of memory may, fittingly enough, engage our wonder. The lawlessness of
our prehensile apparatus, for example--the absurdly unreasoning system
of selection of such things as are to be permanent--how explain these?
And why should memory be subject also to that downward tendency in life
which forces us always to fight if we would save the best? It would have
been just as easy, at the start, when the whole affair was in the
making, to have given an upward impulse. That was not done, but the
memory, at any rate, being all spirit, might have been exempted from the
general law. But no; as we grow older, not only do we remember with less
and less accuracy, but of what we retain much is inferior to that which
once we had but now have lost.
I, for example, who once had long passages not only from the great
poets, but also from the less great but often more intimate poets,--such
as Matthew Arnold and William Cory, to mention two favourites,--at the
tip of the tongue, now have to recite myself to sleep with a Bab Ballad.
That piece of nonsense never fails me, but I cannot at this moment give
the right sequence of any two of the quatrains of the "Rubaiyat" of Omar
Khayyam, although once, and for years, I had the whole poem complete
too. I would rather have been left the wistful Persian than Gilbert's
"Etiquette," but the jade Memory had other views.
Any prose that I might once have learned naturally faded first, because
there was no rhyme or metre to assist retention; but why is it that
there is one sentence which, never wholly mine, flits so often before
the inward eye? It is in that story of Mr. Kipling's of the mutinous
elephant who refused to work because his master was too long absent.
This master, one Dheesa (you will remember), having obtained leave for a
jaunt, exceeded his term; and the sentence which recurs to me, hazily
and hauntingly, often twice a day and usually once, with no apparent
reason or provocation, is this: "Dheesa had vagabonded along the roads
till he met a marriage procession of his own caste, and drinking,
dancing, and tippling, had drifted past all knowledge of the lapse of
time." Now, surely, out of all the thousands of books which I have read
and more or less dimly remember, it is very strange that this should be
almost the only sentence that is photographed on the mind.
Once I knew many psalms: I know them no longer, but I have never
forgotten a ridiculous piece of dialogue in a book called "The World of
Wit and Humour," which I was studying, on weekdays, at the same time,
how many years ago:
"Father, I have spilt the butter. What shall I do?"
"Rub it briskly with a woollen fabric."
"Why?"
"Because friction generates caloric, which volatises the
oleaginous particles of the stearine matter."
--And once I knew many psalms.
One of the odd things about what we call loss of memory is that it is
catching. How often when one person forgets a name well known to him
does his companion, to whom it is equally well known, forget it too. Why
is that? The other day I had an excellent example of this curious
epidemic. It was necessary for the name of a certain actor--not a star,
but a versatile repertory actor of distinction--to be recalled in order
that a letter to him might quickly be despatched. I had forgotten his
name, but I described him and his methods with sufficient accuracy for
every one (there were about six of us) to recognise him. Some of us
could even say in what parts we had seen him and compare notes as to his
excellence, and yet his name absolutely eluded one and all. Why? We all
knew it; why did we unanimously fail to know it then?
We parted intent upon obtaining this necessary information, my last
sapient words being that to the best of my belief his first name was
Joseph and his second began with P. On meeting again the next day, each
of us had it pat enough, and it had broken upon each, more or less
suddenly, during the night. Since the name was Michael Sherbrooke, you
will understand why, in my case, its arrival was peculiarly gratifying.
If I am not now known to those others as Mrs. Nickleby, it is only
because they are so kind-hearted.
The great mystery is, Where, while one is forgetting them, are the
things one forgets, but suddenly will remember again? Where are they
lurking? This problem of their whereabouts, their capacity to hide and
elude, distresses me far more than one's inability to call them from the
vasty deep of the brain. Or are they, perhaps, not there at all? Do they
not, perhaps, have evenings out, times off for lunch and so forth, and
thus we sometimes miss them? Or can there perhaps be some vast
extra-mural territory of the brain from which facts have to be
fetched--as, if one would consult old newspapers at the British Museum,
one must wait until the volumes can be brought from Hendon? The fact
that they always, or nearly always, return, sooner or later, rather
supports these theories.
THE MORAL DRESSING-TABLE
The prettiest little book that ever I saw lies before me. It is called
"The Toilet," and was published by the author in 1821 and sold by Mr.
Sams, bookseller to H.R.H. the Duke of York, at No. 1 St. James's
Street; for princes in those days had their own booksellers no less than
their own wine-cellars. Times have changed, and to-day No. 1 St. James's
Street is a block of flats, and the Duke surveys London from the top of
a column of stone.
The author of "The Toilet" was "S. G." (standing for Stacey Grimaldi),
and the purpose of his book--so laudable then and how unnecessary
now!--was to make young women better. This task was to be performed by
means of a preface and a number of verses, but chiefly by a series of
copperplate engravings with movable covers. I have seen old gardening
books on this principle, by Capability Brown and others, in which the
potentialities of gentlemen's places are made evident by the same
mechanical means. Thus, by lifting up one clump of trees you see where
the house could most advantageously stand, and by lifting up another
you gaze along the lovely avenue that ought to be planted there, and so
forth; but I never saw good manners and high ideals inculcated in this
way. That they can be "The Toilet" proves.
But let me explain. The articles illustrated are those that are found in
ladies' boudoirs, such as mirrors, and jewel case, and bottles of
essence--all very charmingly designed as though by a Chippendale.
Indeed, the copy which lies before me--as pretty a little book, did I
say? as ever I saw--is known by its owner as "The Chippendale Book"; and
never could the effort to get gentleness and the best manners into an
impressionable female nature be more ingeniously or ingratiatingly made.
Imagine, now, the fair one opening at the preface, where she reads at
once these words: "I request your acceptance of a few appendages to your
toilet, of extreme beauty and value, though some of them may be at
variance with modern fashions." She then turns on and finds that the
appendages consist of an Enchanting Mirror, a Wash to Smooth Wrinkles,
some Superior Rouge, some Matchless Ear Rings, a Fine Lip Salve, a
Mixture to Sweeten the Voice, and so forth--each delicately drawn.
Before lifting the cover of the mirror she reads that it is long since
many of the gay inhabitants of the town have decorated themselves before
it, and then, lifting the cover, discovers the word "Humility" on the
glass. Fancy the shock to the frivolous and vain! But humility is not
all; Uriah Heep had that and still was a most undesirable person, and so
she must read on, all recipiency. Doing so she learns that it is
singular that although we do generally wear ear-rings similar to those
in the jewel case in the presence of a superior, we are apt to cast them
off in the company of our inferiors; and, lifting the lid of the case,
she finds the word "Attention" within. And so on through the book. The
Wash to Smooth Wrinkles turns out to be Contentment; the Universal
Beautifier is Good Humour; the Best White Paint is Innocence; the
Superior Rouge is Modesty; the Mixture giving Sweetness to the Voice is
Mildness and Truth (where is the young woman who any longer wants
mildness?), and the Finest Lip Salve is Cheerfulness.
Finally we come to a very beautiful flowered pot--I wish you could see
it--containing "The Late King's Eye Water"--the late King being George
III, the father of the Prince whose own particular bookseller put forth
this little volume. All the time, from the first moment of opening it, I
had the feeling that somewhere hovering around or over "The Toilet" was
the spirit of the courtier. Its blend of discretion and elegance is such
as a palace mentor could hardly be without, and the description of the
Late King's Eye Water settled it. "You are perhaps aware that our late
much-beloved King possessed bad sight, and, doubtless, many different
eye waters were prescribed for his use; but I can assure you, that
whatever else the good Monarch might have used, he invariably possessed
some of the accompanying description; it was by him recommended to our
present Sovereign [George the Fourth], as also to his own beloved and
illustrious Daughters; it has been by them constantly used, and their
example has diffused it throughout the British Empire." On lifting the
cover of the pot containing the Late King's Eye Water (which he
recommended to his eldest son) we find it to contain "Benevolence"; but
a certain poem by Moore, addressed to George IV after the death of
Sheridan, would suggest that the collyrium was not at any rate
"constantly" used.
THACKERAY'S SCHOOLFELLOW
If the measure of an artist is the accuracy with which the life of his
times is reflected in his work, and the width of his range, then John
Leech, the centenary of whose birth was August 29, 1917, is the greatest
artist that England has produced. But since such a claim as that would
submerge us in controversial waters, let it rather be said that Leech is
the most representative artist that England has produced. The
circumstances that he worked in black and white and was chiefly
concerned with the humorous aspect of men and manners do not affect the
position.
The outlines of Leech's life are very simple. He was born in London on
August 29, 1817, the son of John Leech, proprietor of the once very
prosperous London Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill, who was said to be
something of a draughtsman and was also a Shakespeare enthusiast. The
child took early to the pencil; and it is recorded that Flaxman, a
friend of the family, found him at a tender age, on his mother's knee,
drawing well enough to be encouraged. The great sculptor's advice was
that the boy, whom he thought to be clearly destined for an artist,
should be permitted to follow his own bent. Three years later Flaxman
seems to have repeated this counsel. At seven, Leech was sent to school
at Charterhouse, then in its old London quarters; and the story is told
that Mrs. Leech, who probably thought seven far too young, took a room
which over-looked the playground in order secretly to watch her little
son, thus displaying a sympathetic solicitude which that son inherited
and carried through life. At Charterhouse Leech remained until he was
sixteen, among his school-fellows being Thackeray; but as Thackeray was
six years his senior it is unlikely that they saw much of each other as
boys, although they were always glad later in life, when they became
very intimate colleagues on _Punch_, to recall their schooldays and
extol their school.