Part 2

Now the pictorial memory is a valuable thing; and this pictorial method of teaching is no doubt valuable. But surely the pictures are of no real use unless there is some inevitable connection, however slight, between the form of the thing which it is desired to impress on the memory and the picture with which it is compared. My daughter’s imagination is, of course, much more vivid than mine, but, even so, I cannot imagine her looking coolly at the naked D and saying, “Yes, that is the old man leaning on a stick.” She is more likely to say, “That is the ground-floor of the house with two windows,” for she has a logical mind. And even if she does not remember the futile picture of the old man in a long shirt with his body bent at right angles to his legs, I don’t see why, even then, she should connect him with D. There is nothing peculiarly D-ish about an old man. Yet it seems that I learned my alphabet in this way. I was a clever child, though sinful, I fear.

Then we get on to words. The book follows the first principle of all teachers of languages in arranging that among the first words which the child learns there are as many words as possible which he will never use as a child, and, indeed, will probably never encounter in his entire career. Prominent among the first words in this book are such favourites as _pap_, _bin_, _hob_, _sob_, and _sop_, _emmet_ and _tome_. Each of these is printed three times, in a column, like this:

Pat Pan Pap PAT PAN PAP pat pan pap

Over each column is a little picture. When you are teaching the child _pap_ you say to her: “P-aP, pap--do you see the pretty picture? That is a nanny with a baby in her lap. She is giving the baby a bottle. The bottle has pap in it. At least, it is not pap, really, but it is called pap for the purposes of the alphabet. You remember the letters, don’t you? First there is a big P--_you_ know, like a man with a pack on his back. Then a little a, which is like a goose on the water. Then a little p; that is like another man coming to you with a pack on his back. Now we have it all in big letters. Maggie, read them out.”

_Maggie_ (_firmly_). K.

_You._ No, no, not K. Don’t you remember the picture?

_Maggie._ Yes, it was a nanny with a baby.

_You._ No, not that one. It was a man with a pack on his back--P.

_Maggie._ P.

_You._ That’s right. What comes next?

_Maggie._ A goose on the water.

_You._ No, that was a _little_ a. This is a big letter. Don’t you remember the dear little hut with the window upstairs? What letter was that?

_Maggie._ B.

_You._ No, no, that was a _house_, not a _hut_, and it had _two_ windows. Don’t be so inaccurate. This is a big A. Now, what’s next?

_Maggie._ A little house with a nanny inside. And there’s a goose in the garden. And a baby.

_You_ (_patiently_). No, this is another P. He is like a man with a pack on his back. P-A-P pap--there you are. That’s very good.

_Maggie._ May I go into the garden now?

_You._ Yes.

After that we learn sentences, and we raise in the child’s mind a few more simple pictures of Nature by repeating several times such statements as:

A pig had a fig.

The author introduces us to Ben, who can _sup_ sop. Ben, however, has a fat pup, and this pup cannot _sip_ sop. My daughter, as I said, has a logical mind, and she immediately asked if Ben’s pup could _sup_ sop. She had perceived at once that if he could neither sip nor sup the unfortunate animal was cut off from sop altogether. I said I didn’t know. I don’t. But I see that Ben fed Poll on bun, so I expect he gave the pup some too.

It is a pity that the author could not provide pictures for some of the more striking incidents she records. Some of these would do:

I met a cat in a bog I sat in a bog A hog is in a bog A wig is in a bog A pen is in a bog I had a red bed Ten men had a pen I had a wet hen I fed ten men in a den

I should have thought that by appropriate illustrations the child might have been helped to a greater knowledge, not only of letters, but of life.

But perhaps the most vivid of all these pages is page 99, which I produce verbatim:

A bun is in a tun A gun is in a tun A dog is in a tun A hog is in a tun A pig is in a tun A wig is in a tun A hen is in a tun A pen is in a tun

NOTE.--Let the child begin the book again, if it likes.

What _is_ a tun? Until I started out to educate my daughter I did not know. But then, I am not a sinful child. For hush! it seems to be a sort of _barrel_. I have drawn rather a jolly tun myself.

If we could only look back into our childish minds and really recapture the impressions of life (if any) which inhabitated us at the end of a day when we had triumphantly mastered page 99 and similar pages, and if one could set those impressions down in print, what rich romances might be born into the world!

But is there no Society for the Protection of Children from This Sort of Book?

On With the Dance

I have been to a dance; or rather I have been to a fashionable restaurant where dancing is done. I was not invited to a dance--there are very good reasons for that; I was invited to dinner. But many of my fellow-guests have invested a lot of money in dancing. That is to say, they keep on paying dancing-instructors to teach them new tricks; and the dancing-instructors, who know their business, keep on inventing new tricks. As soon as they have taught everybody a new step they say it is unfashionable and invent a new one. This is all very well, but it means that, in order to keep up with them and get your money’s worth out of the last trick you learned, it is necessary during its brief life of respectability to dance at every available opportunity. You dance as many nights a week as is physically possible; you dance on week-days and you dance on Sundays; you begin dancing in the afternoon and you dance during tea in the coffee-rooms of expensive restaurants, whirling your precarious way through littered and abandoned tea-tables; and at dinner-time you leap up madly before the fish and dance like variety artistes in a highly polished arena before a crowd of complete strangers eating their food; or, as if seized with an uncontrollable craving for the dance, you fling out after the joint for one wild gallop in an outer room, from which you return, perspiring and dyspeptic, to the consumption of an ice-pudding, before dashing forth to the final orgy at a picture-gallery, where the walls are appropriately covered with pictures of barbaric women dressed for the hot weather.

That is what happened at this dinner. As soon as you had started a nice conversation with a lady a sort of roaring was heard without; her eyes gleamed, her nostrils quivered like a horse planning a gallop, and in the middle of one of your best sentences she simply faded away with some horrible man at the other end of the table who was probably “the only man in London who can do the Double Straddle properly.” This went on the whole of the meal, and it made connected conversation quite difficult. For my own part I went on eating, and when I had properly digested I went out and looked at the little victims getting their money’s worth.

From the door of the room where the dancing was done a confused uproar overflowed, as if several men of powerful physique were banging a number of pokers against a number of saucepans, and blowing whistles, and occasional catcalls, and now and then beating a drum and several sets of huge cymbals, and ceaselessly twanging at innumerable banjos, and at the same time singing in a foreign language, and shouting curses or exhortations or street cries, or imitating hunting-calls and the cry of the hyena, or uniting suddenly in the war-whoop of some pitiless Sudan tribe.

It was a really terrible noise. It hit you like the back-blast of an explosion as you entered the room. There was no distinguishable tune. It was simply an enormous noise. But there was a kind of savage rhythm about it which made one think immediately of Indians and fierce men and the native camps one used to visit at the Earl’s Court Exhibition. And this was not surprising. For the musicians included one genuine negro and three men with their faces blacked; and the noise and the rhythm were the authentic music of a negro village in South Africa, and the words which some genius had once set to the noise were an exhortation to go to the place where the negroes dwelt.

To judge by their movements, many of the dancers had, in fact, been there, and had carefully studied the best indigenous models. They were doing some quite extraordinary things. No two couples were doing quite the same thing for more than a few seconds so that there was endless variety of extraordinary postures. Some of them shuffled secretly along the edges of the room, their faces tense, their shoulders swaying like reeds in a light wind, their progress almost imperceptible; they did not rotate, they did not speak, but sometimes the tremor of a skirt or the slight stirring of a patent-leather shoe showed that they were indeed alive and in motion, though that motion was as the motion of a glacier, not to be measured in minutes or yards.

And some in a kind of fever rushed hither and thither among the thick crowd, avoiding disaster with marvellous dexterity; and sometimes they revolved slowly and sometimes quickly and sometimes spun giddily round for a moment like gyroscopic tops. Then they too would be seized with a kind of trance, or it may be with sheer shortness of breath, and hung motionless for a little in the centre of the room, while the mad throng jostled and flowed about them like the leaves in autumn round a dead bird.

And some did not revolve at all, but charged straightly up and down; and some of these thrust their loves forever before them, as the Prussians thrust the villagers in the face of the enemy, and some forever navigated themselves backwards like moving breakwaters to protect their darlings from the rude, precipitate seas.

Some of them kept themselves as upright as possible, swaying slightly like willows from the hips, and some of them contorted themselves into strange and angular shapes, now leaning perilously forward till they were practically lying upon their terrified partners, and now bending sideways as a man bends who has water in one ear after bathing. All of them clutched each other in a close and intimate manner, but some, as if by separation to intensify the joy of their union, or perhaps to secure greater freedom for some particular spacious manœuvre, would part suddenly in the middle of the room and, clinging distantly with their hands, execute a number of complicated side-steps in opposite directions, or aim a series of vicious kicks at each other, after which they would reunite in a passionate embrace and gallop in a frenzy round the room, or fall into a trance, or simply fall down. If they fell down they lay still for a moment in the fearful expectation of death, as men lie who fall under a horse; and then they would creep on hands and knees to the wall through the whirling and indifferent crowd.

Watching them, you could not tell what any one couple would do next. The most placid and dignified among them might at any moment fling a leg out behind them and almost kneel in mutual adoration, and then, as if nothing unusual had happened, shuffle onward through the press; or, as though some electric mechanism had been set in motion, they would suddenly lift a foot sideways and stand on one leg. Poised pathetically, as if waiting for the happy signal when they might put the other leg down, these men looked very sad, and I wished that the Medusa’s head might be smuggled somehow into the room for their attitudes to be imperishably recorded in cold stone; it would have been a valuable addition to modern sculpture.

Upon this whirlpool I embarked with the greatest misgiving and a strange young woman clinging to my person. The noise was deafening. The four black men were now all shouting at once and playing all their instruments at once, working up to the inconceivable uproar of the finale; and all the dancers began to dance with a last desperate fury. Bodies buffeted one from behind, and while one was yet looking round in apology or anger more bodies buffeted one from the flank. It was like swimming in a choppy sea, where there is no time to get the last wave out of your mouth before the next one hits you.

Close beside us a couple fell down with a great crash. I looked at them with concern, but no one else took any notice. On with the dance! Faster and faster the black men played. I was dimly aware now that they were standing on their chairs, bellowing, and fancied the end must be near. Then we were washed into a quiet backwater, in a corner, and from here I determined never to issue until the Last Banjo should indeed sound. Here I sidled vaguely about for a long time, hoping that I looked like a man preparing for some culminating feat, a side-step or a buzz or a double Jazz-spin or an ordinary fall down.

The noise suddenly ceased; the four black men had exploded.

“Very good exercise,” my partner said.

“Quite,” said I.

The Autobiography

John Antony Grunch was one of the mildest, most innocent men I ever knew. He had a wife to whom he was devoted with a dog-like devotion; he went to church; he was shy and reserved, and he held a mediocre position in a firm of envelope-makers in the City. But he had a romantic soul, and whenever the public craving for envelopes fell off--and that is seldom--he used to allay his secret passion for danger, devilry and excitement by writing sensational novels. One of these was recently published, and John Antony is now dead. The novel did it.

Yet it was a very mild sort of “shocker,” about a very ordinary murder. The villian simply slew one of his typists in the counting-house with a sword-umbrella and concealed his guilt by putting her in a pillar-box. But it had “power,” and it was very favourably reviewed. One critic said that “the author, who was obviously a woman, had treated with singular delicacy and feeling the ever-urgent problem of female employment in our great industrial centres.” Another said that the book was “a brilliant burlesque of the fashionable type of detective fiction.” Another wrote that “it was a conscientious analysis of a perplexing phase of agricultural life.” John thought that must refer to the page where he had described the allotments at Shepherd’s Bush. But he was pleased and surprised by what they said.

What he did _not_ like was the interpretation offered by his family and his friends, who at once decided that the work was the autobiography of John Antony. You see, the scene was laid in London, and John lived in London; the murdered girl was a typist, and there were two typists in John’s office; and, to crown all, the villian in the book had a boar-hound, and John himself had a Skye terrier. The thing was as plain as could be. Men he met in the City said, “How’s that boar-hound of yours?” or “I like that bit where you hit the policeman. When did you do that?” “_You_,” mark you. Old friends took him aside and whispered, “Very sorry to hear you don’t hit it off with Mrs. Grunch; I always thought you were such a happy couple.” His wife’s family said, “Poor Gladys! what a life she must have had!” His own family said, “Poor John! what a life she must have led him to make him go off with that adventuress!” Several people identified the adventuress as Miss Crook, the Secretary of the local Mother’s Welfare League, of which John was a vice-president.

The fog of suspicion swelled and spread and penetrated into every cranny and level of society. No servants would come near the house, of if they did they soon stumbled on a copy of the shocker while doing the drawing-room, read it voraciously and rushed screaming out of the front door. When he took a parcel of washing to the post-office the officials refused to accept it until he had opened it and shown that there were no bodies in it.

The animal kingdom is very sensitive to the suspicion of guilt. John noticed that dogs avoided him, horses neighed at him, earwigs fled from him in horror, caterpillars madly spun themselves into cocoons as he approached, owls hooted, snakes hissed. Only Mrs. Grunch remained faithful.

But one morning at breakfast Mrs. Grunch said, “Pass the salt, please, John.” John didn’t hear. He was reading a letter. Mrs. Grunch said again, “Pass the salt, please, John.” John was still engrossed. Mrs. Grunch wanted the salt pretty badly, so she got up and fetched it. As she did so she noticed that the handwriting of the letter was the handwriting of A Woman. Worse, it was written on the embossed paper of the Mother’s Welfare League. It must be from Miss Crook. _And it was._ It was about the annual outing. “Ah, ha!” said Mrs. Grunch. (I am afraid that “Ah, ha!” doesn’t really convey to you the sort of sound she made, but you must just imagine.) “Ah, ha! So _that_’s why you couldn’t pass the salt!”

Mad with rage, hatred, fear, chagrin, pique, jealousy and indigestion, John rushed out of the house and went to the office. At the door of the office he met one of the typists. He held the door open for her. She simpered and refused to go in front of him. Being still mad with rage, hatred, chagrin and all those other things, John made a cross gesture with his umbrella. With a shrill, shuddering shriek of “Murder!” the girl cantered violently down Ludgate Hill and was never seen again. Entering the office, John found two detectives waiting to ask him a few questions in connection with the Newcastle Pig-sty Murder, which had been done with some pointed instrument, probably an umbrella.

After that _The Daily Horror_ rang up and asked if he would contribute an article to their series on “Is Bigamy Worth While?”

Having had enough rushing for one day John walked slowly out into the street, trying to remember the various ways in which his characters had committed suicide. He threw himself over the Embankment wall into the river, but fell in a dinghy which he had not noticed; he bought some poison, but the chemist recognised his face from a photograph in the Literary Column of _The Druggist_ and gave him ipecacuanha (none of you can spell that); he thought of cutting his throat, but broke his thumb-nail trying to open the big blade, and gave it up. Desperate, he decided to go home. At Victoria he was hustled along the platform on the pretence that there is more room in the rear of trains. Finally he was hustled on to the line and electrocuted.

And everybody said, “So it _was_ true.”

The White Spat

When it is remembered how large a part has been played in history by revolutionary and political songs it is both lamentable and strange that at the present time only one of the numerous political faiths has a hymn of its own--“The Red Flag.” The author of the words owes a good deal, I should say, to the author of “Rule Britannia,” though I am inclined to think he has gone one better. The tune is that gentle old tune which we used to know as “Maryland,” and by itself it rather suggests a number of tired sheep waiting to go through a gate than a lot of people thinking very redly. I fancy the author realised this, and he has got over it by putting in some good powerful words like “scarlet,” “traitors,” “flinch” and “dungeon,” whenever the tune is particularly sheepish. The effect is effective. Just imagine if the Middle Classes Union could march down the middle of the Strand singing that fine chorus:--

“Then raise the scarlet standard high Beneath its shade we’ll live and die; Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer We’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.”

Well, I have set myself to supply some other parties with songs, and I have begun with “The White Spat,” which is to be the party-hymn of the High Tories (if any). I have written it to the same tune as “The Red Flag,” because, when the lion finally does lie down with the lamb, it will be much more convenient if they can bleat and roar in the same metre, and I shall hope to hear Mr. Robert Williams and Lord Robert Cecil singing these two songs at once one day. I am not wholly satisfied with “The White Spat,” but I think I have caught the true spirit, or, at any rate, the proper inconsequence of these things:--

THE WHITE SPAT.

Air--_Maryland_.

The spats we wear are pure as snow-- We are so careful where we go; We don’t go near the vulgar bus Because it always splashes us.

_Chorus._ We take the road with trustful hearts, Avoiding all the messy parts; However dirty you may get We’ll keep the White Spat spotless yet.

At night there shines a special star To show us where the puddles are; The crossing-sweeper sweeps the floor-- That’s what the crossing-sweeper’s for.

_Chorus._ Then take the road, etc., etc.

I know it doesn’t look much, just written down on paper; but you try singing it and you’ll find you’re carried away.

Of course there ought to be an international verse, but I’m afraid I can’t compete with the one in my model:--

“Look round: the Frenchman loves its blaze, The sturdy German chants its praise; In Moscow’s vaults its hymns are sung; Chicago swells the surging throng.”

“From Russia’s snows to Afric’s sun The race of spatriots is one; One faith unites their alien blood-- There’s nothing to be said for mud.”

Now we have the song of the Wee Frees. I wanted this to be rather pathetic, but I’m not sure that I haven’t overdone it. The symbolism, though, is well-nigh perfect, and, after all, the symbolism is the chief thing. This goes to the tune of “Annie Laurie”:--

THE OLD BLACK BROLLY.

Air--_Annie Laurie_

Under the Old Umbrella, Beneath the leaking gamp, Wrapped up in woolly phrases We battle with the damp. Come, gather round the gamp! Observe, it is pre-war; And beneath the old Black Brolly There’s room for several more.

Shameless calumniators Calumniate like mad; Detractors keep detracting; It really is too bad; It really is too bad. To show we’re not quite dead, We wave the old Black Brolly And hit them on the head.

Then we have the Nationalist Party. I am rather vague about the National Party, but I know they are frightfully military, and they keep on having Mass Rallies in Kensington--complete with drums, I expect. Where all the masses come from I don’t quite know, as a prolonged search has failed to reveal anyone who knows anyone who is actually a member of the party. Everybody tells me, though, that there is at least one Brigadier-General (Tempy.) mixed up with it, if not two, and at least one Lord, though possibly one of the Brigadiers is the same as the Lord; but after all they represent the Nation, so they ought to have a song. They have nothing but “Rule Britannia” now, I suppose.

Their song goes to the tune of “The British Grenadiers.” I have written it as a duet, but no doubt other parts could be added if the occasion should ever arise.[2]

[2] I understand that it has not arisen. On the contrary....

THE NATIONAL.

Air--_The British Grenadiers_.

Some talk of Coalitions, Of Tories and all that; They are but cheap editions Of the one and only Nat.; Our Party has no equals, Though of course it has its peers, With a tow, row, row, row, row, row For the British Brigadiers.

You have no idea how difficult it is to write down the right number of _rows_ first time; however I daresay the General wouldn’t mind a few extra ones.

We represent the Nation As no one else can do; Without exaggeration Our membership is two, We rally in our masses And give three hearty cheers, With a tow, row, row, row, row, row For the National Brigadiers.

There could be a great deal more of that, but perhaps you have had enough.