Part 4
Dear William and his facts were most enjoyable when taken together with Henry’s quiet visions, and when Mrs. Beehive crossed the field of their united activities there was indeed a rare sight. For William, in his relentless pursuit of Mrs. Beehive’s fallacies, had overlooked one most important fact, that so fast as you disperse matter in one direction it gathers together again in another. Henry was a persevering visionary, and no sooner had William scattered Mrs. Beehive to the four winds, than Henry built her up again, so that in the end one was forced to the conclusion that the poor lady had no independent existence at all. When Henry expressed his belief in any of her assertions, she swelled larger than any frog; and when William ran at her in order to get at the facts, she crumbled to pieces like any other act of faith. The marvel is that William himself lived with a vitality independent of facts, and no “getting at the facts” had any destructive power over Henry. But that, as William explained when it was pointed out to him, was just as it should be. “There is better stuff in me,” he assured us, “than the mere fact of my existence, and the fact about Henry is that he is a good man. You can’t do away with that.”
Mrs. Beehive overheard this unintelligible remark, and immediately, I believe, put on more weight.
_CHAPTER VII_: THE MYSTERIOUS MUNCHERS
Surely there is something in Shakespeare about somebody who “munched and munched and munched.” If so, it is there because Shakespeare had to do with theatres and evidently knew. When you look at all the pansy-faces together, munching, munching, munching, you begin to wonder why it is that persons who normally go for at least two hours at a time without food require so much extra nourishment all of a sudden. Sarah Jane, we know, gets through a morning’s hard work with no other encouragement than a cup of inky tea at eleven. Miss Simmons, the typist, does not, surely, tick away at all that important stuff with her cheeks bulging like a monkey’s over a hidden store of refreshment. In the showroom you never hear such an apology as, “Sorry, Moddum, the young lady’s sweetmeat is unusually sticky for the time of year; she will answer your question in one moment.” Therefore it cannot be that they eat because listening to the play is hard work and they need support. Can it be to cause anæmia of the brain by directing the flow of blood to--etc.? But then why desire to cause anæmia? They do not look as if their brains were in a fatally active condition; in fact, no one in the audience ever looks quite right in the head. But, indeed, I have a theory that people are no longer themselves when they enter a theatre. Otherwise how is it possible to account for the fact that all our friends go constantly to the play and we go there ourselves, and yet we never, never meet one another; at least hardly ever? Isn’t it a bewildering surprise to recognize a friend between the acts? It seems to take at least five minutes peering and goggling before it is possible to believe the glad thing. And then what a waving and commotion! “The Prenderbursts! Just fancy! In the third row but two--yes, quite sure--that’s Effie! just turning round now--behind the lady with the orange scarf.” Personally I go in just any old thing, because I never expect to be recognized; and I hate leaving my seat, because I generally have on an evening top and thick boots, and it looks so bad if you go out and the lights are up.
Being, like all idle people, an intolerable wonderer, I have wondered for years “who the people are who go to the theatre.” One thing is quite certain, and that is that the people who go are not the same as the people who have been. Every day one knocks against the people who have been, but the people who go one has never seen before--except at the theatre--and will never see again until the next time we go. Where they live between the performances is a mystery. My own belief is that they disappear into their holes in the town, and there sleep until the next performance; they eat at the theatre, as we have seen. As soon as you get a hypothesis started the whole thing begins to work out together, and all sorts of details arrange themselves. The only doubtful point now is how far the theatre managers are in the secret as regards the origin of their audiences, or whether they suppose them to be ordinary persons.
According to my hypothesis the munchers are a race of people apart, like the troglodytes, with physiological and social laws of their own, of which we know nothing. They are unknown to the police because they look more or less like human beings and behave quietly. They come to the box-office and book seats like you and I do, and the man in the box is in a hurry and doesn’t notice any difference. But it is owing to their numbers that you and I can never get just the seats we want.
The most curious thing about the whole business is the munchers’ power of turning human beings into fairy changelings. It is owing to this power that we hardly ever meet our friends at the theatre. An instance that absolutely proves this theory occurred the other day, and it at once threw light on what has been an irritating mystery to me for years. The Blots were dining with us, and some one mentioned a play then running at our principal theatre.
“Oh, were you there?” said Amy Blot, “so were we. Where were you sitting? We never saw you.”
“Second row of the dress circle,” I answered, “fourth from the end.”
“But so were we,” protested Amy, “at least we were sixth from the end--on the right facing the stage.” That had certainly been our side. “Oh, well, it’s too queer,” Amy decided. She is a very striking-looking woman; you couldn’t mistake her; and her husband is really remarkably fat; you would pick him out at once. I thought it over for a few minutes, and then said quite definitely, “My dear Amy, you must be wrong, because I remember exactly who were in those seats. There was a girl with her hair parted on one side; it looked very well in front, but it was scrabbly at the back, as if it had been eaten by rats. She had on a pink silk blouse of the new shape, but beyond that I couldn’t see. There was an old lady with her, who had loose cheeks and a small cap with a butterfly in it--your husband wasn’t dressed up in any way, was he?”
“How absurd,” said Amy, “of course not. But those were our seats, and we never saw you either. There were two minxes and two pasty-faced young men where you say you were.”
I remember that I wrote to Sir Oliver Lodge about it that evening, but tore up the letter on my husband’s advice, as he thought the matter might get taken up, and we should have men calling with notebooks. It wouldn’t have done. But, all the same, this is probably what poor Shakespeare meant when he wrote about the lady who munched and munched and munched.
Looked at from the point of view of psychical research, munchers are extremely interesting. Any natives with horrible ways are all right if viewed scientifically. Munchers have many offensive habits which one might be inclined to resent were it not that it is nice to know how different we are. For instance, this sort of thing. You may be sitting enraptured, the tears streaming down your face, and the hobgoblin behind you starts her reminiscences:
“Something the same sort of story as Hindle Wakes, isn’t it, Lizzie?”
“Yes, did you see that?”
“My word, yes! A funny sort of story, wasn’t it, didn’t you think?”
“Yes, do you remember where she comes on in the first act? Something the same sort of thing, wasn’t it?”
“Were you ever at Blackpool?”
“Oh yes--hush; look at him--there now--pity he don’t move up a bit sharper--we were at Blackpool a week, and mother, she----” etc.
The munchers have almost nerveless fingers, and drop their possessions a good deal. “I wonder if you’d mind, one moment----?” is the sort of thing they ask just when some climax or other is being reached. “I’ve dropped my hat under your seat.” When the wretch by your side has dropped an umbrella, and the two at the back have dropped a purse and a spectacle case, and have put a muff down your neck, and got some beads entangled in your hair; when eighteen of them have squeezed over you during each interval in order to reach seats that are next the gangway on the other side; when the one who looks like a debilitated porpoise has clapped his hands down your ear for ten minutes, and succeeded in recalling the singer whom you were so glad to get rid of; and when laughter, which is about as harmless and irritating as eggs shot from a cannon, has at last died away into mere sniggering at some homely detail in a tragedy: then, if you still feel cross, you must try to divert yourself with the mystery of the munchers, and remember that one of your dearest friends may be sitting next to you, disguised by the spell. The debilitated porpoise may be your friend De Vere, whose manners are so perfect, whose social sense is so developed that we none of us know what clods we are when we go to tea with him. It is only afterwards that we realize our deficiencies: when the Prenderbursts come to tea and we want to make our party feel like De Vere’s. And he may think he was sitting next to a lemon-coloured lady with an angry face and a box of chocolates.
Now and again, of course, one sees an acquaintance or two, but they are nearly always rather dry and emphatic people, who have evidently escaped the power of the spell. You see them standing up, peering through glasses, and saying how odd it is that there seems to be no one here. When they read this they will say that they have not the least idea what it is all about.
Music seems to have some power of disenchantment, because at a concert, though the munchers fill a good part of the building, there are always dozens and dozens of people whom one knows. It may be that the awful weariness paralyses the hypnotic power of the munchers. They are there just the same, with their vacant faces, and their queer screws of hair, and their unsuitable clothes, but they are almost too weak to chew from their packets of refreshment. In fact, no one chews at a concert, except surreptitiously in a box.
There is a special subdivision of munchers who frequent the boxes both in theatres and at concerts. They are like the queen bees in the hive of theatre-goers. They are monstrously fat, female, and innocently foolish. Instead of having a pinched and wispy appearance, they are like the plump, precocious, affected, happy-looking children who perform on the music-hall stage. It is possible that the inferior munchers rear and keep these immense females to decorate the boxes, feeding them luxuriously at all hours, while they themselves subsist on their timid feasts of chocolate that tastes of hair oil.
The right attitude for the box can, surely, only be acquired by special culture and constant practice. To begin with there must always be a huge white arm with a podgy little hand on the end of it draped along the edge of the box. The gigantic body, squeezed like blancmange into whatever mould the latest fashion dictates, is turned towards the stage. The round, good-natured face, with its natural vulgarity breaking through the assumed air of the Princess of Many Sorrows (imagine a jolly country butcher’s wife in a tableau as “Our Lady of Pain”), is directed down and towards the auditorium at the angle of a turnip about to fall from a shelf. Bless the dears! It is a treat to see anyone so happy. But that is what the munchers are, depend upon it.
_CHAPTER VIII_: SHEER TEMPER
Justice and Generosity are often supposed to be a pair of excellent friends who have an influence for good on one another’s character. But Generosity has a still closer friend whom she says nothing about, namely Injustice. She cannot always behave as freely as she would like when Justice is there, explaining things and being so absolutely right. But when Injustice has been to tea with her, talking his bad, unscrupulous talk, making everything so gay, and putting the blame on all the wrong people, then Generosity has a free hand and can be as lavish as she likes.
“Come in here for a minute,” said Reginald to Percy one morning in the City, “I want to get this hat ironed.”
There was some delay, and Reginald was both clear and original in what he said. Percy was lost in admiration. The shopman, expert in silence, by long practice, forbore to reply except by deprecating sounds which but served to inspire Reginald to a richer eloquence. At last the hat was brought in, ironed to perfection. Reginald finished his sentence, which glowed with the imaginative splendour of a Turner sunset.
“Oh, we never make any charge, sir, for ironing a hat,” said the expertly silent shopman.
* * * * *
“I don’t agree with you,” said Percy, removing from his coat the little tufts of hair which his friend had flung about in his careless agony. “You had the ball at your toe; then was the time to express a large, generous forgiveness for the unconscionable delay.”
Unless we are unpleasant sort of people we cannot be generous about an injury unless we have first been mollified to some extent; and what more mollifying than to find that the supposed injury has never been done? Percy saw this more clearly than Reginald, who was quite morbid about wanting to be in the right, always.
It is an interesting question what stupid persons find to get in a temper about, because, if you come to think of it, there is nothing in the world except stupidity (our own or other people’s) to make anyone fractious, and, of course, stupid people cannot mind or they wouldn’t be stupid. Good, just people may be angered by the wilful wickedness of some one who is determined not to do the thing required; but anger is not temper. Temper, that horrible itching and pain in one’s social sense, can only be brought on by stupidity, real or imagined, in other people (I count inanimate objects such as shirt studs and hair as people because they can be just as irritating). Consider for a moment the persons who cause temper in a household: husbands, wives, children, and servants. Wives and servants, on an average, probably cause more temper because, on an average, they are stupider than husbands and children. Relations are apt to be very thick-headed--perhaps because blood is thicker than water--almost as bad as tradesmen at the telephone. Friends are practically never stupid, while acquaintances often reach the extreme limit of what it is possible to bear. Compared to relations, who, as we have said, are as bad as tradesmen at the telephone, acquaintances are as bad as the half-witted boy who is usually left in charge of the station-master’s office.
Talking of station-masters, and _à propos_ of wives being stupider than husbands, I feel absolutely certain that no station-master has ever spent such a day as would be inevitable for him if he were a wife, and his staff were nice, hardworking girls.
Imagine a platform full of people waiting for the 9·45 express to Holyhead. “Oh no, m’m,” says the female station-master’s second-in-command, with a silly smile, “the 9·45 hasn’t come up yet. I expect it’ll be just coming now. I’ve sent to tell the engine-driver that you’re waiting, and she says that she was a bit late this morning, as they hadn’t brought the coal.” She observes the infuriated passengers and beams upon them with her mouth open. “It is a pity, isn’t it, keeping them waiting! They do seem upset! Just fancy! What a shame!!” (It will be such a help to everyone connected with this book if all the capable ladies who run their houses to perfection will just begin to skip here, and not say anything more about it; because we know the other side of the question quite well, and the whole thing is hardly serious enough for argument.) When the matter of the 9·45 has been sifted to the bottom, it is found that the coal was only an excuse; the engine-driver really hadn’t an idea of the time. She was just washing out a few handkerchiefs in the waiting-room, where the old lady in charge never noticed her doing it; she thought she had come about the windows.
Or, again, what would happen if a man of business told his clerk to telephone for a hundredweight of grey blotting-paper, and while he wrote at his desk he had to endure this sort of thing (as we do when we ask our maids to send a telephone message): “Is that Hoggins’s? I say, is that Hoggins’s? _Hoggins_. Aren’t you a stationer? Beppardon?--yes, a stationer--oh, well, we want a hundredweight of blotting-paper at once, please. Beppardon? This is Mr. Beadle’s. Beadle and Sons--J. J. Beadle and Sons--will you send it at once, please. Beppardon? Beadle and Sons--Oh yes, I’m sorry--I thought you knew--44 Dacre Street--Dacre Street--No, not Baker--Dacre. [The man of business growls from his desk, “You didn’t tell him _grey_ blotting-paper.”] What’s that? Beppardon? Yes, Dacre Street. A hundredweight of blotting-paper at once. [The man of business intervenes again, gnashing his teeth, “_Grey_ blotting-paper.”] Beppardon? Pink or white? Oh, either, thank you--yes, please. Good morning. [Rings off.] Beppardon, sir? Did you speak?”
That is the sort of occasion when Generosity does not care to hear what Justice has to say. If an angel came down from heaven and unjustly beat the offending clerk, the man of business would find it easy to say, “Poor fellow, he was doing his best,” and to give him half a crown for a new hat.
If all the efficient females will sit down quite quietly we will add what we were about to say, that men are just as irritating, but they don’t mean so inexcusably well. Take, for instance, the man at an inquiry office; he doesn’t mean well. “I want a ticket to Leamington,” you say. He gives you a first-class ticket, and you remonstrate. “You didn’t say which you wanted,” he retorts, getting impudent at once. “You never asked,” is your very natural reply.
Or, take a conjurer or magic-lantern man. You say, “I want you to be very careful, please, not to do anything to frighten the children. There will be some quite little ones, and they don’t like anything at all alarming.” “Oh, we understand children perfectly, Madam,” he says, “I know exactly the sort of thing you require.”
The first picture that he puts on the screen is of a child awakened from its sleep by an enormous beetle with coloured eyes and a walking-stick. When the commotion and the screaming are over, the smaller children are brought back and sit sobbing on their nurses’ knees, somewhere near the door. The proceedings are a trifle damped, but the babies promise, with a catch in their voices, to be very good as they know it is funny. The next picture shows a happy family party at breakfast. There enters a policeman, who by carrying papa away to prison leaves the family in tears, and the breakfast spilled on the cloth. The arrest is found to be a humorous mistake, and papa is brought home after a painful scene in the prison, but the story proves beyond a doubt that no one is safe, even in their own nursery with both parents present. Here, however, our argument seems to break down, because it is probable that the man meant well.
But in the upper classes take, for instance, Reginald himself. He is sometimes appallingly dense, and can be very intelligently tiresome. He lived, until quite lately, with three unmarried sisters, and sometimes when he came home it happened that none of them had been out, and all were eagerly sociable.
“Well, dear, what’s the news?” Louisa might ask.
“Oh, nothing,” Reginald would reply.
“I thought that cook said she had seen posters about a railway accident,” said Agnes.
“Possibly,” replied Reginald, “there may have been.”
“Didn’t you see anything about it?” asked Theresa wistfully.
“It was all in the paper I got coming home----[Chorus: “Where, oh, where is it?”] Sorry, I left it in the train,” said Reginald, and then he would go off to dress. Or the same thing might happen the other way round. Louisa had been out to tea on Saturday afternoon, and seen the paper at a friend’s house. Reginald had been playing golf and was lying half asleep in his chair.
“Such an awful thing has happened,” announced Louisa, very properly, the moment she came in.
“Oh,” said Reginald.
“A frightful railway accident; four killed, and sixteen taken to the hospital.”
“Who are the four?” Reginald inquired, putting his bottom leg on the top one and knocking out his pipe.
“Oh, no one we know; but just think!” I actually heard all this one afternoon, and it is perfectly true that Reginald replied in the following way:
“At least four people whom you don’t know die every day, anyhow, so to-day is no worse than yesterday.”
Really, it is impossible to know whether they do it on purpose or not; especially Reginald, who is supposed to be clever. However, it all just shows that it is stupidity that makes one get in a temper. There is often nothing to get angry about, but the whole thing gets on one’s nerves. But there is worse to come. So far we have only touched the fringe of what is bad for the temper. We will now visit a land of torture, parts of which are, I believe, untrodden by the male sex.
Has any man ever had to defend his own self--his ego--call it anything you like, from the pursuing eye of a friend? Has he ever been obliged to draw a veil over the process of his living and say politely, “Excuse me, my ego I think?” It has become the custom for people to go about in society more or less clothed, and we get to know our friends fairly well, even when thus attired; indeed, it is unusual to insist on a complete deshabille before we can enjoy a pleasant chat. But it would be very tiresome if we were obliged to cover up our face and hands with a mask and thick gloves because our friends insisted on examining the pores of our skin through a magnifying glass. Some women habitually treat those whom they love to such a dreadful moral scrutiny. Men don’t do it to each other. Has any man ever gone to his work and been met by a fellow labourer who gazed into his eyes and said in a voice that seemed to lift his spinal cord and search beneath it, “You are looking tired to-day.”
Now that is a remark which, except it be made in the most casual and perfunctory manner, is intolerable from any one but a member of the opposite sex, with whom we are passionately in love. Women seldom understand that it is not enough that they love the person whom they examine in this way. The victim must be deeply in love with his tormentor before he can bear it, and even then it is a risk. For of course the rash loveress, emboldened by silence, goes on to ask, “What’s the matter?” and if it happens that the Beloved is wearing boots of which he is immoderately anxious to be rid, the loveress is almost bound to be the victim of Injustice before she obtains anything from Generosity.