Part 7
Perhaps the reason why many of us behave so much as usual is that, although there are many varieties of conduct available, we have got into a nervous habit of eliminating most of them from our list of what is possible, just as we reject many eatables which the shops would provide. But in either case it is not actually necessary to fall back on the apples or the butcher or the nice thing to say. There is plenty of variety to be had if people would stop falling back on the “old favourites” either in food or conversation. The dullest permanent officials and ladies in the world have thoughts about what is going on, if they would only allow themselves to think them: thoughts as peculiar to themselves, as different from their neighbours’, as are the curves made by two lambs jumping in the air. But they won’t tell us what these thoughts are. They push them away, saying to themselves, “No, that would never do,” and so they fall back on the apples. That is to say, they dish up the same old remarks in the same old way, until those of us who feel boredom begin to scream and cry and throw the food about. It is dreadful. I have seen people sitting round a table deliberately, wantonly refusing us the thoughts which the good God put into their heads in order that that they might share them with us. Some funny fellow on reading this will discover that it would be capital sport if we all said what we thought. He will picture insults flying like bullets, and all decency at an end. But no one is suggesting that the usual topics of conversation should be changed unless with the consent of all present. All we require is that when the scenery of Dorsetshire or the marriage of one’s son or the book which every one is reading is under discussion, the company should not limit their conversation to what it is “always as nice as anything” to say; that they should not give us “just the usual,” but try some of the other things in the shop, in season and out of season, as we have been taught. The price, of course, may be a little higher; but though some will call us vulgar if we do not fall back on the apples, others will call us dull if we do, so what does it matter? No one, however careful, can be a perfect lady to the whole world. So when Mrs. Beehive asks us what we feel about the scenery of Dorsetshire, let us be as open with her as we should be with our doctor if he suddenly lost his temper, thumped his fist on the table, and, looking us straight between the eyes, thundered, “Damn it all, madam, what have you had for breakfast?” We should tell the truth at once then, without stopping to think whether we had not better leave out the fifth cup of tea. It is just the fifth cup of tea that may be the significant note in an otherwise commonplace breakfast. It is sickeningly dull hearing you tell us, not what you noticed about the scenery of Dorsetshire, but what you decided years ago that it was a nice thing to think about the scenery of any county. The apples were all right in their place, but why fall back on them?
I once had a cook who greeted me every morning with the same remark, “There’s nothing left but just the spinach.” She pronounced it “spinack,” which made the offence worse, and she referred to the fact that we had eaten all the other vegetables in our twice-a-weekly hamper from the country. Conversation among careful people has, as a rule, very little left in it besides “just the spinack.” I mentioned this to Polly one day, and she said at once, without a moment’s reflection: “I have just had a luncheon-party, and there is nothing left of me but just the spinack, I can tell you. Another quarter of an hour and I should have fallen back on the apples.”
“I thought your party was delightful,” said Mrs. Spicer, who happened to be present.
“Of course it was,” said Polly, “because I gave you the best I had. It wasn’t much compared to the intellectual treat you might have had if I happened to be one of the Great Spirits of the Age, but it was all I had in the box; it wasn’t ‘just the spinack.’ I kept nothing from you.”
“But--” Mrs. Spicer seemed about to raise an objection, and hesitated.
“Yes?” said Polly; “don’t hover round your mind, please, rejecting things; we’re not tied to the apples.”
“You said yourself,” Mrs. Spicer reminded her boldly, “that you advised me never to say what I thought about anything--that it was not safe--that the weather was the only possible subject of conversation.”
“I never said that anything else was safe now, did I?” inquired Polly. “But you won’t make your parties a success if you go on the lines I indicated as safe. After all, what is life without risks?--especially in conversation.”
“But I don’t believe I could be interesting anyhow,” said Mrs. Spicer with a forlorn sigh. “I never can think of anything to say.”
“Then don’t say anything,” Polly advised, “and your silence will become so rich and meaty with thought (for every one, even a canary, thinks, there can be no doubt about that), that after a time, when you have quite lost the habit of thinking what to say, a moment may come when some slight emotion will unloose your tongue and it will speak for itself, and----”
“Polly, dear,” I warned her, “you will be so sorry when you have drawn the analogy between what Mrs. Spicer will say and Balaam’s ass; it will be easier to stop now than to explain it away.”
Mrs. Spicer giggled. We know her pretty well now, and she doesn’t mind.
“I wish, Martha, that you would rely a little more on my judgment and less on my knowledge of Scripture,” said Polly. “I had quite forgotten the story you refer to. What was in my mind was a vision of what it would be like if the things we call ‘still life’ suddenly spoke and told us how the world looked to them. It would be a delightful change from hearing how it looks to clever men. As it is, we have no missing link between the unusual sincerity of some of us and the usual insincerity of the rest. What we want is the truth--the whole truth--about what people with faces like turbot and macaroons think. I should stay awake all night with the excitement of knowing Mrs. Beehive as her Maker knows her. Probably she could throw a great deal of light on all sorts of obvious things that complicated people, like Reginald, miss owing to being tangled up in their own intelligence.”
“By the way,” said Mrs. Spicer, “talking of food, isn’t it absurd how we keep on with the same dishes when the cookery books are full of different ways of cooking everything? But, somehow, if you look through the books, there are only about three things one can have, because the others either want ingredients that we haven’t got in the house, and that are not worth buying for once, or they have to be prepared the day before, or they use too many separate pans, and cook grumbles about the washing-up; but it does seem unenterprising, as you say.”
“Considering, my dear, that since the time of Noah, or thereabouts, we have been going on as usual and found it less trouble, it is not likely”--said Polly sententiously--“it is not likely, so far as I can judge by the look of you, that you will return our calls by moonlight, or go to church on a week-day, or tell me which of us you would rather ran away with Mr. Spicer----”
“But you don’t do those sort of things yourself,” protested Mrs. Spicer.
Polly said, “Excuse me a moment,” and went to answer the telephone.
“I never knew Polly do anything actually unusual,” I said to Mrs. Spicer, “but she seems to do the usual things because they have just occurred to her for the first time as a good thing to do; not because there is nothing else she can do.”
“Just fancy!” said Polly, coming back; “Reginald says that the Henrys are dreadfully upset because their cook is going to marry the chauffeur, and she won’t be able to stay on with them. It is just what always happens, isn’t it?”
“Just the usual,” I agreed, “unless you care to go to the expense of a Morganatic alliance for the chauffeur.”
We all agreed that there was no other way out of it.
_CHAPTER XIII_: HOW NAUGHTY
The deliberate pursuit of naughtiness may seem absurd to those who have a natural superfluity of it, but, all the same, it is much in vogue. And, as in other matters besides naughtiness, the amateurs who most wish to excel are those who are the least likely to do anything of the sort. Every one knows theoretically that possession is nine points of desire, that in love there is always _l’un qui baise et l’autre qui tend la joue_, but how many have realized that the Evil one is also human, and pursues those who shun him, while he turns a deaf ear to those who really long to be naughty. It is the nice, mousy dears whom he runs after with some brilliant new devilment in his pocket. When the young desperado or the middle-aged lady with nothing in particular to do runs up to him and exclaims, “Oh, Mr. Satan, do let us have some of your lovely, wicked suggestions!” he turns green, and says, “Go away to a supper club. I will send my junior assistant to you there.” And off he flies to refresh himself at the nearest rectory.
Equally incomprehensible are certain other folk who, themselves incapable of any vice, set forth armed to the teeth against a spiritual enemy who knows them not; just as innocent old ladies in silk mantles cling together at railway stations for fear of being abducted to San Francisco. Many sensitive young clergymen have been known to speak in an uncommonly plucky way about a hot bath as if it were a sporting enterprise; showing no delicacy whatever on the subject, but attacking it as man to man, without any of that nonsensical reserve which, as they say, drives so many good people out of the Church. It is difficult to explain why boasting of having had a hot bath should imply a defensive attitude towards Satan; but, in fact, these heroes seem to cry aloud, “Parsons are not such old ladies as you think. I could ruffle it with the best of you dog foxes if I chose, and, as it is, a feller gets jolly hot sprintin’ round the parish if he’s not in good condition, I can tell you.” When they behave in this wild fashion they are consciously playing with danger. Not exactly ringing Satan’s front-door bell and then running away as one type of woman does, but rather showing how, properly armed, one may walk through his domains and take no harm. But suppose that after coming down from the heights of the life apart, and proclaiming himself an ordinary person, he should discover that he may walk in “the flesh” all day and be as safe as if he were in the Albert Hall. If it is “influence” that he wants, shall we suggest that man’s respect is more easily roused by something different from himself than by a half-baked imitation; that non-churchgoers are not really surprised into admiration by learning that a clergyman washes more than his hands; and that a sailor who is already intimate with the reckless elements will not believe more readily in God because His exponent has been seen to gather up his petticoats and play football or to take a hand at whist? In fact, if details of the toilet are to come into it at all, a verminous hermit must seem almost more spiritually detached than a young gentleman who makes such a fuss about “boiling himself” after a game of tennis.
This dare-devil attitude has perhaps been adopted by some men who have taken to the profession of the Church partly because their natural inclination is towards a life so harmless that they might feel it to be not quite manly unless it were supposed to be compulsory. So they hide their mildness by eating a bun as if it were horseflesh, assuring the bad boys that their own tastes are extremely dashing, but that they have chosen to throw away the forbidden fruit and keep only the skin; to reject the germinating kernel and nibble the husks, which are really most enjoyable. The truth being that the fruit as the boys eat it would give our friends “with no nonsense about them” the most horrible indigestion. There are of course others who passionately loved the fruit and threw it away deliberately; but you never find them nibbling the husks, any more than Brutus would have had his son whom he sacrificed stuffed for a drawing-room ornament. It is quite one thing for a lion to find a baby in its path, and to refuse, from conscientious motives, to eat it, and another for a chicken to plume itself on having had such a jolly run after the cat without killing it.
We have referred, in passing, to the lady who rings Satan’s front-door bell and then runs away. In considering what Miss Corelli has taught us to call the “Sorrows of Satan,” even so small an annoyance as this very hackneyed trick must have its place. The ladies who practise it are those who make an appointment with a man whom they know to be in love with them, and then--turn up with a chaperon. They are the ladies who like their relatives to be respectable and their friends to be disreputable, so that they may have all the fun and none of the responsibility; who devour all the indecent books they can get hold of during the week, and then go to church on Sunday; who would run miles to be introduced to a murderer at dinner, but would feel really hurt if their parlour-maid so much as cracked the commandment which comes next to the one about murder.
People of such various types, those who wheedle the Devil for no particular purpose, those who assume the defensive when the poor fellow wasn’t looking at them, and those who call him down from his study to answer the bell and then make a bolt for sanctuary, are examples of a class whom the Evil one leaves to his subordinates.
A promising young assistant of his works, disguised as a waiter, at one of the supper clubs to which we have supposed the naughty ladies to be so contemptuously relegated. I caught his eye one night when he was cynically winding up the strands of coloured paper that are sometimes thrown about at the end of the proceedings. “Another evening wasted!” he exclaimed with uncontrollable displeasure, “They might be a lot of blooming anarchists for all the harm they’ve done to-night. And here am I, who have waited on the House of Commons from its earliest years, and put ’em up to all their best tricks, literally throwing myself away.” He stopped to brush aside a yellowish tear. “Mr. Satan himself,” he continued, “won’t come down here at all; he says they’re not worth it. Look at that there innocent mother of a family a-dancing the Tango! We’ll never do any good with her, yet she likes to come here and waste my time a-calling for cigarettes. Look at her and her party now, Miss--turn your head so--now then you see? One of our clients is there, with the bald head, behind the pillar. We’d have had him anyhow, without the club, so it doesn’t even pay us that way. Hair, did you say, Miss? No, the gentlemen with a good deal of hair aren’t as a rule much good to us, and they encourage the women.”
“Encourage them in what?” I asked.
“Toasting their toes at the mouth of hell, they thinks, Miss, though it’s nothing of the kind really; it’s just pestering Mr. Satan something awful.”
“Then where does your real work lie?” I asked. “Where is hell?”
It was some moments before I could get an answer, as the noise suddenly became terrific. A negro at the piano had begun to play, accompanied by guitars, tambourines, and a howling chorus of tired-looking equatorials of some sort. Three or four scandalous old women, with transformations on their heads, and trophies from the bargain sales on their backs, were joylessly smoking and applauding in a frightful state of nerves. They looked fish-out-of-wool-shops, and my heart ached to pop them gently back behind the counter and draw down the blinds while they had a little nap. My friend was very busy opening bottles of champagne. Presently he stood beside me once more, napkin on arm.
“What was that you asked me just now, Miss?” he said.
“I asked you where hell was,” I replied.
“Well, I couldn’t say exactly, Miss. Mr. Satan, like, he takes the interesting cases--very quiet folk mostly; you’d hardly believe what a powerful lot of harm they do in a lifetime. A different lot altogether from these ’ere naughty cards, Miss. They ain’t no manner of good to us.”
He disappeared then, but I met him again later. He was still a waiter, brought in on the occasion of a small dinner-party in the suburbs of London. I thought he looked much happier, but I wondered what he found worth his attention in the present company. My host I knew to be an angel, scarcely disguised, as incorruptible as fire. The guests seemed nothing in particular. They left at the hour decreed by good taste; we left an hour later. I had a moment’s conversation in the hall with my friend, while my husband was saying his last “Well now, look here,” over a drink.
“Who is it to-night?” I said. “Do tell me before they come out.”
“A gentleman as Mr. Satan has set his heart on, Miss,” he replied, with a careful eye on the open door of the smoking-room. “Third on your left as you sat at dinner. [I remembered his face after we got home, a blue-eyed, nervous little father with a drooping moustache.] He’s a gentleman in business, Miss, and would like to do right, I feel sure of that. That’s why I’ve been sent. Fortunately for us his trade’s a speculative one, in which it’s easy to make suggestions. A little intelligence is all that’s needed, and that, as a rule, they haven’t got. Mr. Satan’s a good deal interested in this case because of the gentleman’s principles. He’s been brought up with a great fear of anything like dishonesty. I’m afraid it’s upsetting his health a good deal. Good night, Miss; here they come. Your carriage up now, sir.”
_CHAPTER XIV_: ELECTIONEERING
I turned the corner of the street in a tremendous hurry and ran into Reginald and Polly. They both looked as if they had had news of a death, although they did not actually show signs of grief. It was a peculiar look they had, half importance, half vexation. I stopped for a moment in surprise, and Polly said to her husband, “I think we shall want Martha, Reginald.”
“Now, be careful,” I said, a little shortly. “I have had almost enough of you two. If you want to have your photographs taken again you must go by yourselves. Polly! [It was a dreadful idea, but quite likely.] You weren’t going to ask me to help you to have the baby taken?”
“Baby!” Polly said contemptuously. “It will be a long time before I think of having baby taken anywhere. I certainly won’t take it round canvassing with a blue ribbon round its neck like those other dreadful people did.”
“I have got to have an election, Martha,” Reginald explained. “It is my turn to come out, and they are going to oppose me. It is nothing personal; they are fighting all they can this year all over the town.”
“I forgot that you were on the City Council,” I said.
“You wouldn’t forget if you were me,” observed Polly. “Here, come into this café and have tea, and we’ll make things as clear as possible to you.”
It was a large café, with a band, where you get the kind of tea that doesn’t include bread-and-butter. You can get tea-cake that is like hot skin and oil, and you can put aniline raspberry jam on it, and follow it down with dandelion-coloured cake that has a suspicious flavour. But if you ask for bread-and-butter, the rather spent young person with the apron says, “Cut bread-and-butter, did you mean?” and makes it sound like a faddy temperance food. If you are brave enough to admit that you do mean cut bread-and-butter, she brings something thin and mottled like German sausage. But it was only for convenience that we turned in there; it is not like criticizing Polly’s tea.
“We have only got a week or two to do it in,” said Reginald, “and there is a lot to do. The organization is not up to much.”
“But look here,” I said; “I don’t know anything at all about politics, and I can’t argue, because I always agree with what anybody says; it always seems so sensible until one thinks it over quietly at home.”
“Well, common sense will teach you the main line of what you have got to drum into them,” said Reginald. “You see, there are always no end of things that they want ‘put down.’ Very well, then. I am the man to put them down, whatever they are, because I have a good deal of time to give to the job, see? Then there’s the Church. There’s Canon Black--you know the man I mean--they all know him, and he’s very much liked. If he speaks for me, we’ll get a lot of votes; do you know him, by the way?”
“No,” I said, “I’ve never heard of him.”
“Yes, you have,” Reginald corrected me, “because I have just told you about him; so you can say that you know he approves of me--he does, really--I’m not joking. Well then, you know, I haven’t got any fads--temperance or such things--but if any one wants you to say that I’ll support their fads, you must just use tact, and, if necessary, say I’ll call. You write on the card--here, I’ll show you.”
He pulled a card out of his pocket and showed it to me. It was a drab little article, with the mysteriously depressing influence which always accompanies a space for a name and address. Anything which emphasizes the fact that we are one of millions of similar works of the Almighty has the same dingy effect. To be one of numberless leaves on a tree is delightful enough, but to have a caterpillar come round with a note-book and enter, “Name of tree, number of branch, time of fall in preceding year,” etc., gives an air of squalor to the whole tree. There was, unhappily for my peculiar talent, no space in which to record the appearance of the voter, but the canvasser was instructed to classify her victims as “Conservative,” “Liberal,” or “doubtful,” and was encouraged, besides, to add such code signals of distress as “Mr. ---- call,” “won’t say,” “dead,” “at sea,” “carriage on day of election,” or anything else likely to be helpful in the committee rooms.
For the benefit of those who have never canvassed, I here explain the spiritual meaning of these different signals. “Mr. ---- call” means that it is impossible for the candidate to blandish each of his four thousand or so of voters, so he reserves himself for the very good and the very bad, and those who are described in the jargon of the committee rooms as “the doubtful ones.” But beware of the trap which underlies the fair word “doubtful”! There are no doubtful ones. People who express doubts on any subject are rarely concerned with the merits of the case on either side. All they are waiting for is something that will turn up to give a picturesque glow to whichever side their instinct favours; and they are seldom disappointed. Except in certain spots, where some common interest--like nationality or sectarianism, or the nature of their employment--makes a group of people definite and outspoken in their political feelings, it is remarkable what a lot of ratepayers one may fawn upon without being thrown off the door-step or welcomed with open arms. This alleged indecision is a pastime and a trap which the canvasser provides and falls into with unfailing regularity. The attitude of the voter is generally that of the tease among school-children. “Ticky, ticky, tack, which hand will you have?” he asks, and the coveted apple or vote shifts about with hardly a show of deception. Now and then they are secret, like a dog with a bone. “We have the benefit of the ballot,” they say, with the most aggressive purity-in-politics face, all pursed up. But if no one came prying to find out where their sympathies were hidden, they would be the first to throw out hints of “hot and cold” to promote the game. The voters who throw the “benefit of the ballot” in our teeth are regular old chase-me-Charlies.