HATS
Thehat, says my copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, is “man’s, woman’s outdoor headcovering, usually with brim.” Not unto me the glory of writing about woman’s outdoor headcovering. These mysteries are too sacred to be profaned. But man’s hats are another thing. I have a number of my own. There is none of which I am not, in secret, ashamed.
Some men have the faculty of knowing what hats they can wear with credit—or, if not with credit, at least without sacrifice of self-respect. They go to the hatter, pick out a perfectly ordinary “headcovering” (usually “with brim”), and leave the shop gorgeously transformed. Their very discards can be reblocked and made to look, if anything, better than new. And I? I go from one hatter to another in an endless pilgrimage in search of something in which I shall look less ridiculous (observe I say “less ridiculous”—I am easy to please), and find it never. I follow my friends into the places where they hat themselves; I allow myself to be persuaded into buying some hateful contrivance—“a perfect fit, sir”; and in three days the damn thing shrinks so that I can’t get it on my head. Or again, I try to allow for this by ordering a larger size, whereafter, either I spend the whole of my sparetime stuffing the lining with paper or else it gradually but relentlessly sinks, and settles on the bridge of my nose.
The very brims play tricks with me. I have a bowler. I bought it, I distinctly remember, on account of the width of its brim. I have always liked a wide brim. Not that it ever keeps off the sun or rain, but somehow it gives confidence. There is something spacious about a wide brim. Something suggestive of an opulence to which I have in no other way ever pretended.
Well. Anyhow. I gave up wearing my bowler, because it insisted on shrinking. It perched itself higher and higher on my head, until I began to think it really wasn’t safe. It might fall off and get run over. Nobody wants to expose even a rebellious hat to the dangers of London traffic. I went to my hatter (why I saymyhatter I can’t think. Nobody is my hatter. Many have tried, none has succeeded). I went toahatter; bought a large brown felt hat, wore it away (like a bride setting out for the honeymoon); and arranged for the bowler to be safely conveyed to my home, hoping that all would be well.
Well? Not a bit of it. The brown hat swelled and swelled. All the newspapers in London contributed in their turn to keeping us from parting. In vain. That hat had a craving for adventure; it wanted to make its way in theworld alone; and a gust of east wind carried it (together with so much of the “Evening News” as had enabled it to maintain a precarious balance on my brow) under a passing bus. I hurried home with feelings almost of friendship for my erring bowler. I said magnanimously that forgiveness——
“In which I shall not look so ridiculous.”
“In which I shall not look so ridiculous.”
“In which I shall not look so ridiculous.”
Somehow it didn’t look the same. I was prepared to swear that when I handed it over to the hatter (myhatter, very well) it did in some sort cover my head. But now—it had diminished to the size of a child’s toy. And the brim—the brim had shrunk to the merest shadow.
I have at last given up the struggle. I wear anything that comes along. Not that it matters. People have survived their hats before now. These, after all, are the merest idiosyncrasies of head-covering. Observe, for instance, the hats of the great. There you find something of real distinction.
It is one of the curious things about really great men that they are unable to resist the bizarre in hats. They don’t turn out in strange trousers, or curiously contrived coats. You don’t see them walking about in sandals, or veldtschoons. They don’t tie up their beards with ribbon; or shave their eyebrows; or put caste-marks on their faces. Right up to their head-coverings they areindistinguishable from you and me. I don’t wish to flatter us, but very often they are less pleasant to look at ... and then their greatness declares itself, or their originality breaks loose, or some other eerie characteristic finds its appropriate expression, in the form of an article of apparel about as distinctive and ugly as Britannia’s helmet.
Not long ago I met a noble Viscount, a man who might easily become Prime Minister—I saw him, I mean; I encountered him in the street. He was wearing a hat that suggested a bowler, but was not a bowler—that might have been a “Daily Mail” hat, only it was black with a dull surface, and, if I may so put it, had soft rounded lines in place of sharp ones—that—that in fact was indescribable. The rest of his garments were those of a normal citizen. There were no unfamiliar excrescences on his coat. His collar and tie were much like my own.
Later in the day I saw in front of me a tall, hurrying figure striding towards the House of Commons. The stooping gait and sombre clothing might easily have been those of a mere scholar or clergyman. But the figure bore upon its head a shapeless contrivance of purple velvet; and by that I knew it was—(well, you know who it was as well as I do).
Look at Mr. Winston Churchill. Look atAdmiral Beatty. Whoever saw a service hat quite like Admiral Beatty’s? Though I admit, in his case, the oddity is accentuated by his way of wearing it. Look at the hats of foreign potentates. Look at——
Look at Mr. Lloyd George. I have never actually seen him in one of his “family” hats—but I know his hatted appearance intimately through a picture. It is a photograph representing “the man who won the war,” as a vigorous smiling personage in a grey tweed suit. It seems to be very much the kind of suit that you or I might select for golf. But—here distinction creeps in—the upper part of his body is swathed in something that resembles a horse blanket ... and he is crowned with the headdress of a Tyrolean brigand.
I am going to be a great man. I know it by my hats.