IV

“Whatis the time?” asked the Girton Girl.

I looked at my watch.  “Twenty past four,” I answered.

“Exactly?” demanded the Girton Girl.

“Precisely,” I replied.

“Strange,” murmured the Girton Girl.  “There is no accounting for it, yet it always is so.”

“What is there no accounting for?” I inquired.  “What is strange?”

“It is a German superstition,” explained the Girton Girl, “I learnt it at school.  Whenever complete silence falls upon any company, it is always twenty minutes past the hour.”

“Why do we talk so much?” demanded the Minor Poet.

“As a matter of fact,” observed the Woman of the World, “I don’t think we do—not we, personally, not much.  Most of our time we appear to be listening to you.”

“Then why do I talk so much, if you prefer to put it that way?” continued the Minor Poet.  “If I talked less, one of you others would have to talk more.”

“There would be that advantage about it,” agreed the Philosopher.

“In all probability, you,” returned to him the Minor Poet.  “Whether as a happy party we should gain or lose by the exchange, it is not for me to say, though I have my own opinion.  The essential remains—that the stream of chatter must be kept perpetually flowing.  Why?”

“There is a man I know,” I said; “you may have met him, a man named Longrush.  He is not exactly a bore.  A bore expects you to listen to him.  This man is apparently unaware whether you are listening to him or not.  He is not a fool.  A fool is occasionally amusing—Longrush never.  No subject comes amiss to him.  Whatever the topic, he has something uninteresting to say about it.  He talks as a piano-organ grinds out music steadily, strenuously, tirelessly.  The moment you stand or sit him down he begins, to continue ceaselessly till wheeled away in cab or omnibus to his next halting-place.  As in the case of his prototype, his rollers are changed about once a month to suit the popular taste.  In January he repeats to you Dan Leno’s jokes, and gives you other people’s opinions concerning the Old Masters at the Guild-hall.  In June he recounts at length what is generally thought concerning the Academy, and agrees with most people on most points connected with the Opera.  If forgetful for a moment—as an Englishman may be excused for being—whether it be summer or winter, one may assure oneself by waiting to see whether Longrush is enthusing over cricket or football.  He is always up-to-date.  The last new Shakespeare, the latest scandal, the man of the hour, the next nine days’ wonder—by the evening Longrush has his roller ready.  In my early days of journalism I had to write each evening a column for a provincial daily, headed ‘What People are Saying.’  The editor was precise in his instructions.  ‘I don’t want your opinions; I don’t want you to be funny; never mind whether the thing appears to you to be interesting or not.  I want it to be real, the things peoplearesaying.’  I tried to be conscientious.  Each paragraph began with ‘That.’  I wrote the column because I wanted the thirty shillings.  Why anybody ever read it, I fail to understand to this day; but I believe it was one of the popular features of the paper.  Longrush invariably brings back to my mind the dreary hours I spent penning that fatuous record.”

“I think I know the man you mean,” said the Philosopher.  “I had forgotten his name.”

“I thought it possible you might have met him,” I replied.  “Well, my cousin Edith was arranging a dinner-party the other day, and, as usual, she did me the honour to ask my advice.  Generally speaking, I do not give advice nowadays.  As a very young man I was generous with it.  I have since come to the conclusion that responsibility for my own muddles and mistakes is sufficient.  However, I make an exception in Edith’s case, knowing that never by any chance will she follow it.”

“Speaking of editors,” said the Philosopher, “Bates told me at the club the other night that he had given up writing the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ personally, since discovery of the fact that he had been discussing at some length the attractive topic, ‘Duties of a Father,’ with his own wife, who is somewhat of a humorist.”

“There was the wife of a clergyman my mother used to tell of,” said the Woman of the World, “who kept copies of her husband’s sermons.  She would read him extracts from them in bed, in place of curtain lectures.  She explained it saved her trouble.  Everything she felt she wanted to say to him he had said himself so much more forcibly.”

“The argument always appears to me weak,” said the Philosopher.  “If only the perfect may preach, our pulpits would remain empty.  Am I to ignore the peace that slips into my soul when perusing the Psalms, to deny myself all benefit from the wisdom of the Proverbs, because neither David nor Solomon was a worthy casket of the jewels that God had placed in them?  Is a temperance lecturer never to quote the self-reproaches of poor Cassio because Master Will Shakespeare, there is evidence to prove, was a gentleman, alas! much too fond of the bottle?  The man that beats the drum may be himself a coward.  It is the drum that is the important thing to us, not the drummer.”

“Of all my friends,” said the Woman of the World, “the one who has the most trouble with her servants is poor Jane Meredith.”

“I am exceedingly sorry to hear it,” observed the Philosopher, after a slight pause.  “But forgive me, I really do not see—”

“I beg your pardon,” answered the Woman of the World.  “I thought everybody knew ‘Jane Meredith.’  She writes ‘The Perfect Home’ column forThe Woman’s World.”

“It will always remain a riddle, one supposes,” said the Minor Poet.  “Which is the real ego—I, the author of ‘The Simple Life,’ fourteenth edition, three and sixpence net—”

“Don’t,” pleaded the Old Maid, with a smile; “please don’t.”

“Don’t what?” demanded the Minor Poet.

“Don’t ridicule it—make fun of it, even though it may happen to be your own.  There are parts of it I know by heart.  I say them over to myself when—  Don’t spoil it for me.”  The Old Maid laughed, but nervously.

“My dear lady,” reassured her the Minor Poet, “do not be afraid.  No one regards that poem with more reverence than do I.  You can have but small conception what a help it is to me also.  I, too, so often read it to myself; and when—  We understand.  As one who turns his back on scenes of riot to drink the moonlight in quiet ways, I go to it for sweetness and for peace.  So much do I admire the poem, I naturally feel desire and curiosity to meet its author, to know him.  I should delight, drawing him aside from the crowded room, to grasp him by the hand, to say to him: ‘My dear—my very dear Mr. Minor Poet, I am so glad to meet you!  I would I could tell you how much your beautiful work has helped me.  This, my dear sir—this is indeed privilege!’  But I can picture so vividly the bored look with which he would receive my gush.  I can imagine the contempt with which he, the pure liver, would regard me did he know me—me, the liver of the fool’s hot days.”

“A short French story I once read somewhere,” I said, “rather impressed me.  A poet or dramatist—I am not sure which—had married the daughter of a provincial notary.  There was nothing particularly attractive about her except herdot.  He had run through his own small fortune and was in some need.  She worshipped him and was, as he used to boast to his friends, the ideal wife for a poet.  She cooked admirably—a useful accomplishment during the first half-dozen years of their married life; and afterwards, when fortune came to him, managed his affairs to perfection, by her care and economy keeping all worldly troubles away from his study door.  An idealHausfrau, undoubtedly, but of course no companion for our poet.  So they went their ways; till, choosing as in all things the right moment, when she could best be spared, the good lady died and was buried.

“And here begins the interest of the story, somewhat late.  One article of furniture, curiously out of place among the rich appointments of their finehôtel, the woman had insisted on retaining, a heavy, clumsily carved oak desk her father had once used in his office, and which he had given to her for her own as a birthday present back in the days of her teens.

“You must read the story for yourselves if you would enjoy the subtle sadness that surrounds it, the delicate aroma of regret through which it moves.  The husband finding after some little difficulty the right key, fits it into the lock of the bureau.  As a piece of furniture, plain, solid, squat, it has always jarred upon his artistic sense.  She too, his good, affectionate Sara, had been plain, solid, a trifle squat.  Perhaps that was why the poor woman had clung so obstinately to the one thing in the otherwise perfect house that was quite out of place there.  Ah, well! she is gone now, the good creature.  And the bureau—no, the bureau shall remain.  Nobody will need to come into this room, no one ever did come there but the woman herself.  Perhaps she had not been altogether so happy as she might have been.  A husband less intellectual—one from whom she would not have lived so far apart—one who could have entered into her simple, commonplace life! it might have been better for both of them.  He draws down the lid, pulls out the largest drawer.  It is full of manuscripts, folded and tied neatly with ribbons once gay, now faded.  He thinks at first they are his own writings—things begun and discarded, reserved by her with fondness.  She thought so much of him, the good soul! Really, she could not have been so dull as he had deemed her.  The power to appreciate rightly—this, at least, she must have possessed.  He unties the ribbon.  No, the writing is her own, corrected, altered, underlined.  He opens a second, a third.  Then with a smile he sits down to read.  What can they be like, these poems, these stories?  He laughs, smoothing the crumpled paper, foreseeing the trite commonness, the shallow sentiment.  The poor child!  So she likewise would have been alittérateure.  Even she had her ambition, her dream.

“The sunshine climbs the wall behind him, creeps stealthily across the ceiling of the room, slips out softly by the window, leaving him alone.  All these years he had been living with a fellow poet.  They should have been comrades, and they had never spoken.  Why had she hidden herself?  Why had she left him, never revealing herself?  Years ago, when they were first married—he remembers now—she had slipped little blue-bound copy-books into his pocket, laughing, blushing, asking him to read them.  How could he have guessed?  Of course, he had forgotten them.  Later, they had disappeared again; it had never occurred to him to think.  Often in the earlier days she had tried to talk to him about his work.  Had he but looked into her eyes, he might have understood.  But she had always been so homely-seeming, so good.  Who would have suspected?  Then suddenly the blood rushes into his face.  What must have been her opinion of his work?  All these years he had imagined her the amazed devotee, uncomprehending but admiring.  He had read to her at times, comparing himself the while with Molière reading to his cook.  What right had she to play this trick upon him?  The folly of it!  The pity of it!  He would have been so glad of her.”

Comparing himself the while with Molière reading to his cook

“What becomes, I wonder,” mused the Philosopher, “of the thoughts that are never spoken?  We know that in Nature nothing is wasted; the very cabbage is immortal, living again in altered form.  A thought published or spoken we can trace, but such must only be a small percentage.  It often occurs to me walking down the street.  Each man and woman that I pass by, each silently spinning his silken thought, short or long, fine or coarse.  What becomes of it?”

“I heard you say once,” remarked the Old Maid to the Minor Poet, “that ‘thoughts are in the air,’ that the poet but gathers them as a child plucks wayside blossoms to shape them into nosegays.”

“It was in confidence,” replied the Minor Poet.  “Please do not let it get about, or my publisher will use it as an argument for cutting down my royalties.”

“I have always remembered it,” answered the Old Maid.  “It seemed so true.  A thought suddenly comes to you.  I think of them sometimes, as of little motherless babes creeping into our brains for shelter.”

“It is a pretty idea,” mused the Minor Poet.  “I shall see them in the twilight: pathetic little round-eyed things of goblin shape, dimly luminous against the darkening air.  Whence come you, little tender Thought, tapping at my brain?  From the lonely forest, where the peasant mother croons above the cradle while she knits?  Thought of Love and Longing: lies your gallant father with his boyish eyes unblinking underneath some tropic sun?  Thought of Life and Thought of Death: are you of patrician birth, cradled by some high-born maiden, pacing slowly some sweet garden?  Or did you spring to life amid the din of loom or factory?  Poor little nameless foundlings!  I shall feel myself in future quite a philanthropist, taking them in, adopting them.”

“You have not yet decided,” reminded him the Woman of the World, “which you really are: the gentleman we get for three and sixpence net, or the one we are familiar with, the one we get for nothing.”

“Please don’t think I am suggesting any comparison,” continued the Woman of the World, “but I have been interested in the question since George joined a Bohemian club and has taken to bringing down minor celebrities from Saturday to Monday.  I hope I am not narrow-minded, but there is one gentleman I have been compelled to put my foot down on.”

“I really do not think he will complain,” I interrupted.  The Woman of the World possesses, I should explain, the daintiest of feet.

“It is heavier than you think,” replied the Woman of the World.  “George persists I ought to put up with him because he is a true poet.  I cannot admit the argument.  The poet I honestly admire.  I like to have him about the place.  He lies on my drawing-room table in white vellum, and helps to give tone to the room.  For the poet I am quite prepared to pay the four-and-six demanded; the man I don’t want.  To be candid, he is not worth his own discount.”

“It is hardly fair,” urged the Minor Poet, “to confine the discussion to poets.  A friend of mine some years ago married one of the most charming women in New York, and that is saying a good deal.  Everybody congratulated him, and at the outset he was pleased enough with himself.  I met him two years later in Geneva, and we travelled together as far as Rome.  He and his wife scarcely spoke to one another the whole journey, and before I left him he was good enough to give me advice which to another man might be useful.  ‘Never marry a charming woman,’ he counselled me.  ‘Anything more unutterably dull than “the charming woman” outside business hours you cannot conceive.’”

“I think we must agree to regard the preacher,” concluded the Philosopher, “merely as a brother artist.  The singer may be a heavy, fleshy man with a taste for beer, but his voice stirs our souls.  The preacher holds aloft his banner of purity.  He waves it over his own head as much as over the heads of those around him.  He does not cry with the Master, ‘Come to Me,’ but ‘Come with me, and be saved.’  The prayer ‘Forgive them’ was the prayer not of the Priest, but of the God.  The prayer dictated to the Disciples was ‘Forgive us,’ ‘Deliver us.’  Not that he should be braver, not that he should be stronger than they that press behind him, is needed of the leader, but that he should know the way.  He, too, may faint, he, too, may fall; only he alone must never turn his back.”

The singer may be a heavy, fleshy man with a taste for beer

“It is quite comprehensible, looked at from one point of view,” remarked the Minor Poet, “that he who gives most to others should himself be weak.  The professional athlete pays, I believe, the price of central weakness.  It is a theory of mine that the charming, delightful people one meets with in society are people who have dishonestly kept to themselves gifts entrusted to them by Nature for the benefit of the whole community.  Your conscientious, hard-working humorist is in private life a dull dog.  The dishonest trustee of laughter, on the other hand, robbing the world of wit bestowed upon him for public purposes, becomes a brilliant conversationalist.”

“But,” added the Minor Poet, turning to me, “you were speaking of a man named Longrush, a great talker.”

“A long talker,” I corrected.  “My cousin mentioned him third in her list of invitations.  ‘Longrush,’ she said with conviction, ‘we must have Longrush.’  ‘Isn’t he rather tiresome?’ I suggested.  ‘He is tiresome,’ she agreed, ‘but then he’s so useful.  He never lets the conversation drop.’”

“Why is it?” asked the Minor Poet.  “Why, when we meet together, must we chatter like a mob of sparrows?  Why must every assembly to be successful sound like the parrot-house of a zoological garden?”

“I remember a parrot story,” I said, “but I forget who told it to me.”

“Maybe one of us will remember as you go on,” suggested the Philosopher.

“A man,” I said—“an old farmer, if I remember rightly—had read a lot of parrot stories, or had heard them at the club.  As a result he thought he would like himself to be the owner of a parrot, so journeyed to a dealer and, according to his own account, paid rather a long price for a choice specimen.  A week later he re-entered the shop, the parrot borne behind him by a boy.  ‘This bird,’ said the farmer, ‘this bird you sold me last week ain’t worth a sovereign!’  ‘What’s the matter with it?’ demanded the dealer.  ‘How do I know what’s the matter with the bird?’ answered the farmer.  ‘What I tell you is that it ain’t worth a sovereign—’tain’t worth a half a sovereign!’  ‘Why not?’ persisted the dealer; ‘it talks all right, don’t it?’  ‘Talks!’ retorted the indignant farmer, ‘the damn thing talks all day, but it never says anything funny!’”

“A friend of mine,” said the Philosopher, “once had a parrot—”

“Won’t you come into the garden?” said the Woman of the World, rising and leading the way.

“Myself,” said the Minor Poet, “I read the book with the most intense enjoyment.  I found it inspiring—so inspiring, I fear I did not give it sufficient attention.  I must read it again.”

“I understand you,” said the Philosopher.  “A book that really interests us makes us forget that we are reading.  Just as the most delightful conversation is when nobody in particular appears to be talking.”

“Do you remember meeting that Russian man George brought down here about three months ago?” asked the Woman of the World, turning to the Minor Poet.  “I forget his name.  As a matter of fact, I never knew it.  It was quite unpronounceable and, except that it ended, of course, with a double f, equally impossible to spell.  I told him frankly at the beginning I should call him by his Christian name, which fortunately was Nicholas.  He was very nice about it.”

“I remember him distinctly,” said the Minor Poet.  “A charming man.”

“He was equally charmed with you,” replied the Woman of the World.

“I can credit it easily,” murmured the Minor Poet.  “One of the most intelligent men I ever met.”

“You talked together for two hours in a corner,” said the Woman of the World.  “I asked him when you had gone what he thought of you.  ‘Ah! what a talker!’ he exclaimed, making a gesture of admiration with his hands.  ‘I thought maybe you would notice it,’ I answered him.  ‘Tell me, what did he talk about?’  I was curious to know; you had been so absorbed in yourselves and so oblivious to the rest of us.  ‘Upon my word,’ he replied, ‘I really cannot tell you.  Do you know, I am afraid, now I come to think of it, that I must have monopolised the conversation.’  I was glad to be able to ease his mind on that point.  ‘I really don’t think you did,’ I assured him.  I should have felt equally confident had I not been present.”

“You were quite correct,” returned the Minor Poet.  “I have a distinct recollection of having made one or two observations myself.  Indeed, if I may say so, I talked rather well.”

“You may also recollect,” continued the Woman of the World, “that the next time we met I asked you what he had said, and that your mind was equally a blank on the subject.  You admitted you had found him interesting.  I was puzzled at the time, but now I begin to understand.  Both of you, no doubt, found the conversation so brilliant, each of you felt it must have been your own.”

“A good book,” I added—“a good talk is like a good dinner: one assimilates it.  The best dinner is the dinner you do not know you have eaten.”

“A thing will often suggest interesting thought,” observed the Old Maid, “without being interesting.  Often I find the tears coming into my eyes as I witness some stupid melodrama—something said, something hinted at, will stir a memory, start a train of thought.”

“I once,” I said, “sat next to a country-man in the pit of a music-hall some years ago.  He enjoyed himself thoroughly up to half-past ten.  Songs about mothers-in-law, drunken wives, and wooden legs he roared at heartily.  At ten-thirty entered a well-knownartistewho was then giving a series of what he called ‘Condensed Tragedies in Verse.’  At the first two my country friend chuckled hugely.  The third ran: ‘Little boy; pair of skates: broken ice; heaven’s gates.’  My friend turned white, rose hurriedly, and pushed his way impatiently out of the house.  I left myself some ten minutes later, and by chance ran against him again in the bar of the ‘Criterion,’ where he was drinking whisky rather copiously.  ‘I couldn’t stand that fool,’ he explained to me in a husky voice.  ‘Truth is, my youngest kid got drowned last winter skating.  Don’t see any sense making fun of real trouble.’”

“I can cap your story with another,” said the Philosopher.  “Jim sent me a couple of seats for one of his first nights a month or two ago.  They did not reach me till four o’clock in the afternoon.  I went down to the club to see if I could pick up anybody.  The only man there I knew at all was a rather quiet young fellow, a new member.  He had just taken Bates’s chambers in Staple Inn—you have met him, I think.  He didn’t know many people then and was grateful for my invitation.  The play was one of those Palais Royal farces—it cannot matter which, they are all exactly alike.  The fun consists of somebody’s trying to sin without being found out.  It always goes well.  The British public invariably welcomes the theme, provided it be dealt with in a merry fashion.  It is only the serious discussion of evil that shocks us.  There was the usual banging of doors and the usual screaming.  Everybody was laughing around us.  My young friend sat with rather a curious fixed smile upon his face.  ‘Fairly well constructed,’ I said to him, as the second curtain fell amid yells of delight.  ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I suppose it’s very funny.’  I looked at him; he was little more than a boy.  ‘You are rather young,’ I said, ‘to be a moralist.’  He gave a short laugh.  ‘Oh! I shall grow out of it in time,’ he said.  He told me his story later, when I came to know him better.  He had played the farce himself over in Melbourne—he was an Australian.  Only the third act had ended differently.  His girl wife, of whom he was passionately fond, had taken it quite seriously and had committed suicide.  A foolish thing to do.”

“Man is a beast!” said the Girton Girl, who was prone to strong expression.

“I thought so myself when I was younger,” said the Woman of the World.

“And don’t you now, when you hear a thing like that?” suggested the Girton Girl.

“Certainly, my dear,” replied the Woman of the World; “there is a deal of the animal in man; but—well, I was myself expressing that same particular view of him, the brute, to a very old lady with whom I was spending a winter in Brussels, many years ago now, when I was quite a girl.  She had been a friend of my father’s, and was one of the sweetest and kindest—I was almost going to say the most perfect woman I have ever met; though as a celebrated beauty, stories, dating from the early Victorian era, were told about her.  But myself I never believed them.  Her calm, gentle, passionless face, crowned with its soft, silver hair—I remember my first sight of the Matterhorn on a summer’s evening; somehow it at once reminded me of her.”

“My dear,” laughed the Old Maid, “your anecdotal method is becoming as jerky as a cinematograph.”

“I have noticed it myself,” replied the Woman of the World; “I try to get in too much.”

“The art of theraconteur,” observed the Philosopher, “consists in avoiding the unessential.  I have a friend who never yet to my knowledge reached the end of a story.  It is intensely unimportant whether the name of the man who said the thing or did the deed be Brown or Jones or Robinson.  But she will worry herself into a fever trying to recollect.  ‘Dear, dear me!’ she will leave off to exclaim; ‘I know his name so well.  How stupid of me!’  She will tell you why she ought to recollect his name, how she always has recollected his name till this precise moment.  She will appeal to half the people in the room to help her.  It is hopeless to try and induce her to proceed, the idea has taken possession of her mind.  After a world of unnecessary trouble she recollects that it was Tomkins, and is delighted; only to be plunged again into despair on discovery that she has forgotten his address.  This makes her so ashamed of herself she declines to continue, and full of self-reproach she retires to her own room.  Later she re-enters, beaming, with the street and number pat.  But by that time she has forgotten the anecdote.”

“Well, tell us about your old lady, and what it was you said to her,” spoke impatiently the Girton Girl, who is always eager when the subject under discussion happens to be the imbecility or criminal tendency of the opposite sex.

“I was at the age,” continued the Woman of the World, “when a young girl tiring of fairy stories puts down the book and looks round her at the world, and naturally feels indignant at what she notices.  I was very severe upon both the shortcomings and the overgoings of man—our natural enemy.  My old friend used to laugh, and that made me think her callous and foolish.  One day ourbonne—like all servants, a lover of gossip—came to us delighted with a story which proved to me how just had been my estimate of the male animal.  The grocer at the corner of ourrue, married only four years to a charming and devoted little wife, had run away and left her.

“‘He never gave her even a hint, the pretty angel!’so Jeanne informed us.  ‘Had had his box containing his clothes and everything he wanted ready packed for a week, waiting for him at the railway station—just told her he was going to play a game of dominoes, and that she was not to sit up for him; kissed her and the child good-night, and—well, that was the last she ever saw of him.  Did Madame ever hear the like of it?’ concluded Jeanne, throwing up her hands to heaven.  ‘I am sorry to say, Jeanne, that I have,’ replied my sweet Madame with a sigh, and led the conversation by slow degrees back to the subject of dinner.  I turned to her when Jeanne had left the room.  I can remember still the burning indignation of my face.  I had often spoken to the man myself, and had thought what a delightful husband he was—so kind, so attentive, so proud, seemingly, of his daintyfemme.  ‘Doesn’t that prove what I say,’ I cried, ‘that men are beasts?’  ‘I am afraid it helps in that direction,’ replied my old friend.  ‘And yet you defend them,’ I answered.  ‘At my age, my dear,’ she replied, ‘one neither defends nor blames; one tries to understand.’  She put her thin white hand upon my head.  ‘Shall we hear a little more of the story?’ she said.  ‘It is not a pleasant one, but it may be useful to us.’  ‘I don’t want to hear any more of it,’ I answered; ‘I have heard enough.’  ‘It is sometimes well,’ she persisted, ‘to hear the whole of a case before forming our judgment.’  And she rang the bell for Jeanne.  ‘That story about our little grocer friend,’ she said—‘it is rather interesting to me.  Why did he leave her and run away—do you know?’  Jeanne shrugged her ample shoulders.  ‘Oh! the old story, Madame,’ she answered, with a short laugh.  ‘Who was she?’ asked my friend.  ‘The wife of Monsieur Savary, the wheelwright, as good a husband as ever a woman had.  It’s been going on for months, the hussy!’  ‘Thank you, that will do, Jeanne.’  She turned again to me so soon as Jeanne had left the room.  ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘whenever I see a bad man, I peep round the corner for the woman.  Whenever I see a bad woman, I follow her eyes; I know she is looking for her mate.  Nature never makes odd samples.’”

“I cannot help thinking,” said the Philosopher, “that a good deal of harm is being done to the race as a whole by the overpraise of women.”

“Who overpraises them?” demanded the Girton Girl.  “Men may talk nonsense to us—I don’t know whether any of us are foolish enough to believe it—but I feel perfectly sure that when they are alone most of their time is occupied in abusing us.”

“That is hardly fair,” interrupted the Old Maid.  “I doubt if they do talk about us among themselves as much as we think.  Besides, it is always unwise to go behind the verdict.  Some very beautiful things have been said about women by men.”

“Well, ask them,” said the Girton Girl.  “Here are three of them present.  Now, honestly, when you talk about us among yourselves, do you gush about our virtue, and goodness, and wisdom?”

“‘Gush,’” said the Philosopher, reflecting, “‘gush’ would hardly be the correct word.”

“In justice to the truth,” I said, “I must admit our Girton friend is to a certain extent correct.  Every man at some time of his life esteems to excess some one particular woman.  Very young men, lacking in experience, admire perhaps indiscriminately.  To them, anything in a petticoat is adorable: the milliner makes the angel.  And very old men, so I am told, return to the delusions of their youth; but as to this I cannot as yet speak positively.  The rest of us—well, when we are alone, it must be confessed, as our Philosopher says, that ‘gush’ is not the correct word.”

“I told you so,” chortled the Girton Girl.

“Maybe,” I added, “it is merely the result of reaction.  Convention insists that to her face we show her a somewhat exaggerated deference.  Her very follies we have to regard as added charms—the poets have decreed it.  Maybe it comes as a relief to let the pendulum swing back.”

“But is it not a fact,” asked the Old Maid, “that the best men and even the wisest are those who have held women in most esteem?  Do we not gauge civilization by the position a nation accords to its women?”

“In the same way as we judge them by the mildness of their laws, their tenderness for the weak.  Uncivilised man killed off the useless numbers of the tribe; we provide for them hospitals, almshouses.  Man’s attitude towards woman proves the extent to which he has conquered his own selfishness, the distance he has travelled from the law of the ape: might is right.

“Please don’t misunderstand me,” pleaded the Philosopher, with a nervous glance towards the lowering eyebrows of the Girton Girl.  “I am not saying for a moment woman is not the equal of man; indeed, it is my belief that she is.  I am merely maintaining she is not his superior.  The wise man honours woman as his friend, his fellow-labourer, his complement.  It is the fool who imagines her unhuman.”

It is the fool who imagines her inhuman

“But are we not better,” persisted the Old Maid, “for our ideals?  I don’t say we women are perfect—please don’t think that.  You are not more alive to our faults than we are.  Read the women novelists from George Eliot downwards.  But for your own sake—is it not well man should have something to look up to, and failing anything better—?”

“I draw a very wide line,” answered the Philosopher, “between ideals and delusions.  The ideal has always helped man; but that belongs to the land of his dreams, his most important kingdom, the kingdom of his future.  Delusions are earthly structures, that sooner or later fall about his ears, blinding him with dust and dirt.  The petticoat-governed country has always paid dearly for its folly.”

“Elizabeth!” cried the Girton Girl.  “Queen Victoria!”

“Were ideal sovereigns,” returned the Philosopher, “leaving the government of the country to its ablest men.  France under its Pompadours, the Byzantine Empire under its Theodoras, are truer examples of my argument.  I am speaking of the unwisdom of assuming all women to be perfect.  Belisarius ruined himself and his people by believing his own wife to be an honest woman.”

“But chivalry,” I argued, “has surely been of service to mankind?”

“To an immense extent,” agreed the Philosopher.  “It seized a natural human passion and turned it to good uses.  Then it was a reality.  So once was the divine right of kings, the infallibility of the Church, for cumbering the ground with the lifeless bodies of which mankind has paid somewhat dearly.  Not its upstanding lies—they can be faced and defeated—but its dead truths are the world’s stumbling-blocks.  To the man of war and rapine, trained in cruelty and injustice, the woman was the one thing that spoke of the joy of yielding.  Woman, as compared with man, was then an angel: it was no mere form of words.  All the tender offices of life were in her hands.  To the warrior, his life divided between fighting and debauchery, his womenfolk tending the sick, helping the weak, comforting the sorrowing, must have moved with white feet across a world his vices had made dark.  Her mere subjection to the priesthood, her inborn feminine delight in form and ceremony—now an influence narrowing her charity—must then, to his dim eyes, trained to look upon dogma as the living soul of his religion, have seemed a halo, deifying her.  Woman was then the servant.  It was naturally to her advantage to excite tenderness and mercy in man.  Since she has become the mistress of the world.  It is no longer her interested mission to soften his savage instincts.  Nowadays, it is the women who make war, the women who exalt brute force.  Today, it is the woman who, happy herself, turns a deaf ear to the world’s low cry of pain; holding that man honoured who would ignore the good of the species to augment the comforts of his own particular family; holding in despite as a bad husband and father the man whose sense of duty extends beyond the circle of the home.  One recalls Lady Nelson’s reproach to her lord after the battle of the Nile.  ‘I have married a wife, and therefore cannot come,’ is the answer to his God that many a woman has prompted to her lover’s tongue.  I was speaking to a woman only the other day about the cruelty of skinning seals alive.  ‘I feel so sorry for the poor creatures,’ she murmured; ‘but they say it gives so much more depth of colour to the fur.’  Her own jacket was certainly a very beautiful specimen.”

It seized a natural human passion and turned it to good uses

“When I was editing a paper,” I said, “I opened my columns to a correspondence on this very subject.  Many letters were sent to me—most of them trite, many of them foolish.  One, a genuine document, I remember.  It came from a girl who for six years had been assistant to a fashionable dressmaker.  She was rather tired of the axiom that all women, at all times, are perfection.  She suggested that poets and novelists should take service for a year in any large drapery or millinery establishment where they would have an opportunity of studying woman in her natural state, so to speak.”

She suggested that poets and novelists should take service for a year in any large drapery or millinery establishment

“It is unfair to judge us by what, I confess, is our chief weakness,” argued the Woman of the World.  “Woman in pursuit of clothes ceases to be human—she reverts to the original brute.  Besides, dressmakers can be very trying.  The fault is not entirely on one side.”

“I still fail to be convinced,” remarked the Girton Girl, “that woman is over-praised.  Not even the present conversation, so far as it has gone, altogether proves your point.”

“I am not saying it is the case among intelligent thinkers,” explained the Philosopher, “but in popular literature the convention still lingers.  To woman’s face no man cares to protest against it; and woman, to her harm, has come to accept it as a truism.  ‘What are little girls made of?  Sugar and spice and all that’s nice.’  In more or less varied form the idea has entered into her blood, shutting out from her hope of improvement.  The girl is discouraged from asking herself the occasionally needful question: Am I on the way to becoming a sound, useful member of society?  Or am I in danger of degenerating into a vain, selfish, lazy piece of good-for-nothing rubbish?  She is quite content so long as she can detect in herself no tendency to male vices, forgetful that there are also feminine vices.  Woman is the spoilt child of the age.  No one tells her of her faults.  The World with its thousand voices flatters her.  Sulks, bad temper, and pig-headed obstinacy are translated as ‘pretty Fanny’s wilful ways.’  Cowardice, contemptible in man or woman, she is encouraged to cultivate as a charm.  Incompetence to pack her own bag or find her own way across a square and round a corner is deemed an attraction.  Abnormal ignorance and dense stupidity entitle her to pose as the poetical ideal.  If she give a penny to a street beggar, selecting generally the fraud, or kiss a puppy’s nose, we exhaust the language of eulogy, proclaiming her a saint.  The marvel to me is that, in spite of the folly upon which they are fed, so many of them grow to be sensible women.”

“Myself,” remarked the Minor Poet, “I find much comfort in the conviction that talk, as talk, is responsible for much less good and much less harm in the world than we who talk are apt to imagine.  Words to grow and bear fruit must fall upon the earth of fact.”

“But you hold it right to fight against folly?” demanded the Philosopher.

“Heavens, yes!” cried the Minor Poet.  “That is how one knows it is Folly—if we can kill it.  Against the Truth our arrows rattle harmlessly.”

“Butwhat is her reason?” demanded the Old Maid.

“Reason!  I don’t believe any of them have any reason.”  The Woman of the World showed sign of being short of temper, a condition of affairs startlingly unusual to her.  “Says she hasn’t enough work to do.”

“She must be an extraordinary woman,” commented the Old Maid.

“The trouble I have put myself to in order to keep that woman, just because George likes her savouries, no one would believe,” continued indignantly the Woman of the World.  “We have had a dinner party regularly once a week for the last six months, entirely for her benefit.  Now she wants me to give two.  I won’t do it!”

“If I could be of any service?” offered the Minor Poet.  “My digestion is not what it once was, but I could make up in quality—arecherchélittle banquet twice a week, say on Wednesdays and Saturdays, I would make a point of eating with you.  If you think that would content her!”

“It is really thoughtful of you,” replied the Woman of the World, “but I cannot permit it.  Why should you be dragged from the simple repast suitable to a poet merely to oblige my cook?  It is not reason.”

“I was thinking rather of you,” continued the Minor Poet.

“I’ve half a mind,” said the Woman of the World, “to give up housekeeping altogether and go into an hotel.  I don’t like the idea, but really servants are becoming impossible.”

“It is very interesting,” said the Minor Poet.

“I am glad you find it so!” snapped the Woman of the World.

“What is interesting?” I asked the Minor Poet.

“That the tendency of the age,” he replied, “should be slowly but surely driving us into the practical adoption of a social state that for years we have been denouncing the Socialists for merely suggesting.  Everywhere the public-houses are multiplying, the private dwellings diminishing.”

“Can you wonder at it?” commented the Woman of the World.  “You men talk about ‘the joys of home.’  Some of you write poetry—generally speaking, one of you who lives in chambers, and spends two-thirds of his day at a club.”  We were sitting in the garden.  The attention of the Minor Poet became riveted upon the sunset.  “‘Ethel and I by the fire.’  Ethel never gets a chance of sitting by the fire.  So long as you are there, comfortable, you do not notice that she has left the room to demand explanation why the drawing-room scuttle is always filled with slack, and the best coal burnt in the kitchen range.  Home to us women is our place of business that we never get away from.”

“I suppose,” said the Girton Girl—to my surprise she spoke with entire absence of indignation.  As a rule, the Girton Girl stands for what has been termed “divine discontent” with things in general.  In the course of time she will outlive her surprise at finding the world so much less satisfactory an abode than she had been led to suppose—also her present firm conviction that, given a free hand, she could put the whole thing right in a quarter of an hour.  There are times even now when her tone suggests less certainty of her being the first person who has ever thought seriously about the matter.  “I suppose,” said the Girton Girl, “it comes of education.  Our grandmothers were content to fill their lives with these small household duties.  They rose early, worked with their servants, saw to everything with their own eyes.  Nowadays we demand time for self-development, for reading, for thinking, for pleasure.  Household drudgery, instead of being the object of our life, has become an interference to it.  We resent it.”

“The present revolt of woman,” continued the Minor Poet, “will be looked back upon by the historian of the future as one of the chief factors in our social evolution.  The ‘home’—the praises of which we still sing, but with gathering misgiving—depended on her willingness to live a life of practical slavery.  When Adam delved and Eve span—Adam confining his delving to the space within his own fence, Eve staying her spinning-wheel the instant the family hosiery was complete—then the home rested upon the solid basis of an actual fact.  Its foundations were shaken when the man became a citizen and his interests expanded beyond the domestic circle.  Since that moment woman alone has supported the institution.  Now she, in her turn, is claiming the right to enter the community, to escape from the solitary confinement of the lover’s castle.  The ‘mansions,’ with common dining-rooms, reading-rooms, their system of common service, are springing up in every quarter; the house, the villa, is disappearing.  The story is the same in every country.  The separate dwelling, where it remains, is being absorbed into a system.  In America, the experimental laboratory of the future, the houses are warmed from a common furnace.  You do not light the fire, you turn on the hot air.  Your dinner is brought round to you in a travelling oven.  You subscribe for your valet or your lady’s maid.  Very soon the private establishment, with its staff of unorganised, quarrelling servants, of necessity either over or underworked, will be as extinct as the lake dwelling or the sandstone cave.”

“I hope,” said the Woman of the World, “that I may live to see it.”

“In all probability,” replied the Minor Poet, “you will.  I would I could feel as hopeful for myself.”

“If your prophecy be likely of fulfilment,” remarked the Philosopher, “I console myself with the reflection that I am the oldest of the party.  Myself; I never read these full and exhaustive reports of the next century without revelling in the reflection that before they can be achieved I shall be dead and buried.  It may be a selfish attitude, but I should be quite unable to face any of the machine-made futures our growing guild of seers prognosticate.  You appear to me, most of you, to ignore a somewhat important consideration—namely, that mankind is alive.  You work out your answers as if he were a sum in rule-of-three: ‘If man in so many thousands of years has done so much in such a direction at this or that rate of speed, what will he be doing—?’ and so on.  You forget he is swayed by impulses that can enter into no calculation—drawn hither and thither by powers that can never be represented in your algebra.  In one generation Christianity reduced Plato’s republic to an absurdity.  The printing-press has upset the unanswerable conclusions of Machiavelli.”

“I disagree with you,” said the Minor Poet.

“The fact does not convince me of my error,” retorted the Philosopher.

“Christianity,” continued the Minor Poet, “gave merely an added force to impulses the germs of which were present in the infant race.  The printing-press, teaching us to think in communities, has nonplussed to a certain extent the aims of the individual as opposed to those of humanity.  Without prejudice, without sentiment, cast your eye back over the panorama of the human race.  What is the picture that presents itself?  Scattered here and there over the wild, voiceless desert, first the holes and caves, next the rude-built huts, the wigwams, the lake dwellings of primitive man.  Lonely, solitary, followed by his dam and brood, he creeps through the tall grass, ever with watchful, terror-haunted eyes; satisfies his few desires; communicates, by means of a few grunts and signs, his tiny store of knowledge to his offspring; then, crawling beneath a stone, or into some tangled corner of the jungle, dies and disappears.  We look again.  A thousand centuries have flashed and faded.  The surface of the earth is flecked with strange quivering patches: here, where the sun shines on the wood and sea, close together, almost touching one another; there, among the shadows, far apart.  The Tribe has formed itself.  The whole tiny mass moves forward, halts, runs backwards, stirred always by one common impulse.  Man has learnt the secret of combination, of mutual help.  The City rises.  From its stone centre spreads its power; the Nation leaps to life; civilisation springs from leisure; no longer is each man’s life devoted to his mere animal necessities.  The artificer, the thinker—his fellows shall protect him.  Socrates dreams, Phidias carves the marble, while Pericles maintains the law and Leonidas holds the Barbarian at bay.  Europe annexes piece by piece the dark places of the earth, gives to them her laws.  The Empire swallows the small State; Russia stretches her arm round Asia.  In London we toast the union of the English-speaking peoples; in Berlin and Vienna we rub a salamander to thedeutscher Bund; in Paris we whisper of a communion of the Latin races.  In great things so in small.  The stores, the huge Emporium displaces the small shopkeeper; the Trust amalgamates a hundred firms; the Union speaks for the worker.  The limits of country, of language, are found too narrow for the new Ideas.  German, American, or English—let what yard of coloured cotton you choose float from the mizzenmast, the business of the human race is their captain.  One hundred and fifty years ago old Sam Johnson waited in a patron’s anteroom; today the entire world invites him to growl his table talk the while it takes its dish of tea.  The poet, the novelist, speak in twenty languages.  Nationality—it is the County Council of the future.  The world’s high roads run turnpike-free from pole to pole.  One would be blind not to see the goal towards which we are rushing.  At the outside it is but a generation or two off.  It is one huge murmuring Hive—one universal Hive just the size of the round earth.  The bees have been before us; they have solved the riddle towards which we in darkness have been groping.”

The Old Maid shuddered visibly.  “What a terrible idea!” she said.

“To us,” replied the Minor Poet; “not to those who will come after us.  The child dreads manhood.  To Abraham, roaming the world with his flocks, the life of your modern City man, chained to his office from ten to four, would have seemed little better than penal servitude.”

“My sympathies are with the Abrahamitical ideal,” observed the Philosopher.

“Mine also,” agreed the Minor Poet.  “But neither you nor I represent the tendency of the age.  We are its curiosities.  We, and such as we, serve as the brake regulating the rate of progress.  The genius of species shows itself moving in the direction of the organised community—all life welded together, controlled by one central idea.  The individual worker is drawn into the factory.  Chippendale today would have been employed sketching designs; the chair would have been put together by fifty workers, each one trained to perfection in his own particular department.  Why does the hotel, with its five hundred servants, its catering for three thousand mouths, work smoothly, while the desirable family residence, with its two or three domestics, remains the scene of waste, confusion, and dispute?  We are losing the talent of living alone; the instinct of living in communities is driving it out.”

“So much the worse for the community,” was the comment of the Philosopher.  “Man, as Ibsen has said, will always be at his greatest when he stands alone.  To return to our friend Abraham, surely he, wandering in the wilderness, talking with his God, was nearer the ideal than the modern citizen, thinking with his morning paper, applauding silly shibboleths from a theatre pit, guffawing at coarse jests, one of a music-hall crowd?  In the community it is the lowest always leads.  You spoke just now of all the world inviting Samuel Johnson to its dish of tea.  How many read him as compared to the number of subscribers to theHa’penny Joker?  This ‘thinking in communities,’ as it is termed, to what does it lead?  To mafficking and Dreyfus scandals.  What crowd ever evolved a noble idea?  If Socrates and Galileo, Confucius and Christ had ‘thought in communities,’ the world would indeed be the ant-hill you appear to regard as its destiny.”

“In balancing the books of life one must have regard to both sides of the ledger,” responded the Minor Poet.  “A crowd, I admit, of itself creates nothing; on the other hand, it receives ideals into its bosom and gives them needful shelter.  It responds more readily to good than to evil.  What greater stronghold of virtue than your sixpenny gallery?  Your burglar, arrived fresh from jumping on his mother, finds himself applauding with the rest stirring appeals to the inborn chivalry of man.  Suggestion that it was right or proper under any circumstances to jump upon one’s mother he would at such moment reject with horror.  ‘Thinking in communities’ is good for him.  The hooligan, whose patriotism finds expression in squirting dirty water into the face of his coster sweetheart: theboulevardière, primed with absinth, shouting ‘Conspuez les Juifs!’—the motive force stirring them in its origin was an ideal.  Even into making a fool of itself, a crowd can be moved only by incitement of its finer instincts.  The service of Prometheus to mankind must not be judged by the statistics of the insurance office.  The world as a whole has gained by community, will attain its goal only through community.  From the nomadic savage by the winding road of citizenship we have advanced far.  The way winds upward still, hidden from us by the mists, but along its tortuous course lies our track into the Promised Land.  Not the development of the individual—that is his own concern—but the uplifting of the race would appear to be the law.  The lonely great ones, they are the shepherds of the flock—the servants, not the masters of the world.  Moses shall die and be buried in the wilderness, seeing only from afar the resting-place of man’s tired feet.  It is unfortunate that theHa’penny Jokerand its kind should have so many readers.  Maybe it teaches those to read who otherwise would never read at all.  We are impatient, forgetting that the coming and going of our generations are but as the swinging of the pendulum of Nature’s clock.  Yesterday we booked our seats for gladiatorial shows, for the burning of Christians, our windows for Newgate hangings.  Even the musical farce is an improvement upon that—at least, from the humanitarian point of view.”

“In the Southern States of America,” observed the Philosopher, sticking to his guns, “they run excursion trains to lynching exhibitions.  The bull-fight is spreading to France, and English newspapers are advocating the reintroduction of bear-baiting and cock-fighting.  Are we not moving in a circle?”

“The road winds, as I have allowed,” returned the Minor Poet; “the gradient is somewhat steep.  Just now, maybe, we are traversing a backward curve.  I gain my faith by pausing now and then to look behind.  I see the weary way with many a downward sweep.  But we are climbing, my friend, we are climbing.”

“But to such a very dismal goal, according to your theory,” grumbled the Old Maid.  “I should hate to feel myself an insect in a hive, my little round of duties apportioned to me, my every action regulated by a fixed law, my place assigned to me, my very food and drink, I suppose, apportioned to me.  Do think of something more cheerful.”

The Minor Poet laughed.  “My dear lady,” he replied, “it is too late.  The thing is already done.  The hive already covers us, the cells are in building.  Who leads his own life?  Who is master of himself?  What can you do but live according to your income in, I am sure, a very charming little cell; buzz about your little world with your cheerful, kindly song, helping these your fellow insects here, doing day by day the useful offices apportioned to you by your temperament and means, seeing the same faces, treading ever the same narrow circle?  Why do I write poetry?  I am not to blame.  I must live.  It is the only thing I can do.  Why does one man live and die upon the treeless rocks of Iceland, another labour in the vineyards of the Apennines?  Why does one woman make matches, ride in a van to Epping Forest, drink gin, and change hats with her lover on the homeward journey; another pant through a dinner-party and half a dozen receptions every night from March to June, rush from country house to fashionable Continental resort from July to February, dress as she is instructed by her milliner, say the smart things that are expected of her?  Who would be a sweep or a chaperon, were all roads free?  Who is it succeeds in escaping the law of the hive?  The loafer, the tramp.  On the other hand, who is the man we respect and envy?  The man who works for the community, the public-spirited man, as we call him; the unselfish man, the man who labours for the labour’s sake and not for the profit, devoting his days and nights to learning Nature’s secrets, to acquiring knowledge useful to the race.  Is he not the happiest, the man who has conquered his own sordid desires, who gives himself to the public good?  The hive was founded in dark days before man knew; it has been built according to false laws.  This man will have a cell bigger than any other cell; all the other little men shall envy him; a thousand fellow-crawling mites shall slave for him, wear out their lives in wretchedness for him and him alone; all their honey they shall bring to him; he shall gorge while they shall starve.  Of what use?  He has slept no sounder in his foolishly fanciful cell.  Sleep is to tired eyes, not to silken coverlets.  We dream in Seven Dials as in Park Lane.  His stomach, distend it as he will—it is very small—resents being distended.  The store of honey rots.  The hive was conceived in the dark days of ignorance, stupidity, brutality.  A new hive shall arise.”

Who is it succeeds in escaping the law of the hive?

“I had no idea,” said the Woman of the World, “you were a Socialist.”

“Nor had I,” agreed the Minor Poet, “before I began talking.”

“And next Wednesday,” laughed the Woman of the World; “you will be arguing in favour of individualism.”

“Very likely,” agreed the Minor Poet.  “‘The deep moans round with many voices.’”

“I’ll take another cup of tea,” said the Philosopher.

Back to IndexNext