Part 13

I have a wealthy friend. He made his money by accident during the war. The Government owed him £500. A careless clerk (who was talking to a minx at the time) added three noughts without thinking, and on his modestly pointing out the error, the department wrote back to say they never made mistakes. And so it rested at that. After long hesitation how to get rid of all this money, he is at last engaged upon what I cannot but think a very useful work. I only wish that every rich man could be inspired by similarly valuable ideas, instead of frittering away money upon buying newspapers and souls and uneatable food in noisy restaurants.

This rich friend of mine had always had the idea, when he was poor, of getting together a Cad's Encyclopædia.

All the publishers whom he approached told him (with truth) that nothing is more venturesome than an Encyclopædia, and that even when one is pretty sure of a large public for one's subject the outlay is very heavy and the risk considerable.

My friend had--in the days of his poverty--prepared a detailed memorandum in which he urged the advantage of his scheme. He pointed out that there was an enormous number of Cads in the world, and that even those who read books and could afford to buy an Encyclopædia amounted to many millions. He urged the complete novelty of the scheme, the long-felt want, and all the rest of it. But they replied to him that a fatal drawback was the name.

"No doubt," said the head of one great firm, "there is a demand, and Cads naturally desire a book of reference of their own for their guidance and instruction; even those who are not Cads, but only interested in the subject of Cads, would also want it for making research. But few would buy it under that title because it is one which men avoid applying to themselves and dislike having applied to them by others. You will have noticed," said the great man genially, "that men are eager to ascribe to themselves ignorance, fatuous good nature, even appalling vices, but never Caddishness."

My friend could not but see the justice of the last remark, but he still maintained that a thing was more successful in the long run under its true name. He persisted in his idea, and when the accident of which I speak had suddenly made him rich he proceeded to realise it.

The first volume will be out next October. It will be privately published by a new firm created for the purpose. I hope I shall receive no correspondence upon it, because I cannot be bothered to negotiate its sale, but I shall give my friend the best advice as to how to put it upon the market in the unavoidable shyness of the usual agents.

This Encyclopædia was not an easy thing to get together, apart from the expense. First of all there was the difficulty of apportioning space. That is a difficulty attaching to all Encyclopædias, but particularly to an Encyclopædia on, and for the use of, and conveying information upon, Cads. In an Encyclopædia of Agriculture, for instance, the editors can make a fair guess as to what space will be wanted for each pest attaching to particular forms of vegetation, but it was difficult indeed to determine which habits of the Cad would require most description; what should be set aside for his house, what for his clothes, what for his manners; how many pages should be allowed to the Cad in Literature; how many inches to the more exotic types of Cad, such as the Negroid Cad, the Dago Cad, the International Wagon-lit Cad, and so on.

Then there was a great debate between my friend and his sister on the vexed question of the She-Cad. I took part in this and strongly proclaimed my own opinion, which I have held for years after a very close examination of the matter, that there is no such thing as a She-Cad. A Cad is the opposite of a gentleman, just as a civilian is the opposite of a soldier, or a layman of a cleric. But there are no She-Gentlemen and therefore there are no She-Cads. To this it was objected by my friend's sister that she had personally known and handled several She-Cads, and she began to give examples. But I am glad to say my friend agreed with me that the type did not exist, and showed how every example his sister quoted was a false type and no more a She-Cad than the lemon sole is a sole, or margarine butter.

Under V. (a volume which we hope to reach--if the next great war can be staved off--round about 1930) we have, I am glad to say, a long and valuable article on the Virtues of Cads. This article is from various pens. All the introductory part has been written by an expert at party headquarters, and the diagrams have been drawn by a diner-out who has always got on well with Cads and has an exhaustive knowledge of their habits. There is a special division on the financial virtues of Cads by a banker and on the spiritual virtues of Cads by a divine of modernist complexion. But the subject is so large that we have a reference in small capitals at the end of the article to other special articles in the same department, and especially to what may be called the Calendar of Saints among Cads, that is, short biographies of Cads who have excelled in one or other of the virtues.

Among the special articles, that devoted to the Literary Cad is treated in two aspects--one by an opponent of such Cads, the other by an eminent writer who is himself a Cad. Under the same letter "L," we have a biography and bibliography of the Cad's Laureate who--thank Heaven--is still with us.

"C," which will appear in the second volume, due next December, will have under the heading "Candour" an article where the necessary presence of candour in Caddishness is developed in a masterly fashion by a psychological expert, and the fatal effect upon Caddishness of worldly wisdom and subtlety is conclusively proved by an aged novelist. No one can be a Cad (it is there clearly proved) who has not a simple heart. Under the same letter, at the word "Concert" we have "The Cads' Concert"; a full description, with a detailed bibliography of the latest development in Cad literature, which is the publication to the whole world of everything told one in private, and a great deal that has not been told one at all.

Under "I" there will be an equally interesting and lengthy article upon the Iconography of Cads, with a list of their principal portraits and busts, including public statues of London and other great cities; and under "T" a short, but very illuminating, essay upon the Theology of Cads, illustrated by experts from the whole range of apologetics, beginning with the opinions of the Early Fathers on the matter, and ending, at any rate for the moment, with those of Mr. Wells.

A number of details which would hardly occur to the general reader have been picked out with singular accuracy of judgment by my friend, whose industry and zeal I cannot over-praise. For instance, he himself deals, under "S," with the Cad and Spurs--showing why Cads hate Spurs when they do not wear them themselves, and why when they do wear them themselves they wear them too often and in incongruous surroundings.

Similarly we have the Cad and Checks--divided into cheques on a bank and checks which you wear, the latter coming first for alphabetical reasons. This should, perhaps, appear in the article on Cads and Apparel, under "A," but though the article "Apparel" is exhaustive in its way, readers are referred to special departments of this sort for more detailed acquaintance with their subject. Among other points the famous sentence: "_In colour he affected the maroon, in pattern a quiet check_," is exhaustively discussed by various hands and its disputed authorship finally established.

Under "A," by the way, we also have Cad's Architecture--a very difficult subject--and a more general psychological and medical heading of Animosity in Cads. The colouring of Cads, natural and artificial, we have, after some debate, put forward to the letter "P" under Pigment, because "C" was getting unwieldy. But Cad Catching or the art of hunting and tracking down a Cad will be included in its natural place with many diagrams and a list of the principal drugs, wines and tobaccos used in the trade.

Cad Curing, on the other hand--that is, the art of curing a Cad of his Caddishness--has been rejected from the heading "C" under the very just decision that it is a false category. There is, properly speaking, no curing of a Cad, because Caddishness is not a disease but a condition which we are perfectly open to accept and even to admire if we please. The whole subject has therefore been relegated to "E," where it is dealt with under the rubric "Elimination." It also appears in the first volume briefly by way of cross-reference under Auto-suggestion with formulæ for daily repetition, such as "_Whatever else I am, I am a gentleman_," or again, "_It is all imagination. I didn't really offend them at all._" In this department we have valuable exercises described, one of the most original of which is the setting apart of certain streets in London of a particular length (among others, Gower Street and the Cromwell Road) down which the patient is advised to walk at his ordinary gait, repeating the formula, over and over again just after he has paid a call at some house where he found himself coldly received.

The Encyclopædia can be bought at a reduction of 20 per cent. by those who pay for the whole twelve volumes in advance. My friend, who has already learned the elements of finance (he got his fortune a full six years ago), has calculated that at the present rate of 7 per cent. which any fool can obtain upon good security to-day, he is up about 13_s._ 2_d._ a copy on each subscriber who falls into the trap. He is preparing a cheaper edition to appear immediately after the lists of the first expensive edition are closed. This cheaper edition will consist of the unsold sheets of the first, cut down and put into new cases. I forgot to add that there are a certain number of coloured plates in each volume and a very thorough and exhaustive index, on the new American system, known technically as "The Labyrinth." There is also a number of very handsome maps showing the geographical distribution of Cads and elaborate curves, giving their vital statistics, growth and decay. Every set has attached to it a general "All In" policy of insurance with two new clauses specially drawn up, one for the use of Cads threatened by the various dangers peculiar to their rank, and the other for Non-Cads, ensuring them against the various dangers peculiar to the Cad's approach and neighbourhood. All this insurance is free.

ON THE MELTING OF THE ICE

I wish I had been there when the ice melted; in the days when the great river valleys were formed, when the rich meadows were laid down from the mud of the flooded rivers, and when the gravels were rolled along, forming beaches one below the other as the waters subsided, when Northern Europe was carved.

Men were there and saw it. Some say it was so little a while ago that the great monarchies of the hot places, Egypt and Assyria, were in their splendour, and there is something to be said for that saying.

It was an Englishman, spontaneous, individual, but at the same time exact, who started that hare. And the hare may be more than a phantasm. When you read the arguments it looks as though he were right. And if he were right, what an explanation of history!... The Ice Melting but 5 or 6,000 years ago.

Then indeed could we explain how it is that the North was unheard of during all these early centuries, and how it was that an increasing field increasingly breeding men, expanded towards the North, and how it is that you have no records of the North before the first movements of tribes 3,000 years ago, and their greater movement 2,000 years ago, and then at last the very late story of the brief Scandinavian adventure with its marvellous epics. And it would explain also the very small numbers of the North and the way in which the North got its language so largely from the South--for what we call the "Teutonic languages" to-day (of which we have no appreciable record till about Charlemagne's time), turn out to be for half their matter at least (and research will increase the proportion) built up of words from the Mediterranean. [Read Wiener, his revolutionary book and the collapse of the "Early Gothic" fraud.]

But apart from what it would explain in history, what a vision it must have been whenever it took place! For the melting of the ice was very rapid. The geologists do not always use their eyes. Look at those great scoops in the chalk hills shorn out by the water as it swung from left to right through the valleys, and see those enormous floods racing down.

See how those huge stones were rolled along which form the gravels of the higher levels, and ask yourselves in what a current they drove! Or wonder at the great sawings through the rock which unite and drain the old lakes of the Pyrenees! That was a sight to see! It is just possible that some one recorded it. Some traveller thrust up northward by exile or by avarice may have come with his slaves and his retinue to the edges of the enormous thing. He may have seen the Rhone tumbling like a sea released through the gap of the Jura. Or he may have seen the white seething at the mouths of the river which laid down the Camargue.

We see no such things nowadays.

Imagine yourself in a galley bowling westward under the Levanter compelled to go further north than you had wished: the wind dropping. Then your hanging about all night off the coast of what is now the Stes. Maries, and then at morning hearing with fright, but with wonder, on your starboard beam to the North, the enormous noise of waters, and seeing the flecks of foam go by you, and catching on the horizon a sort of low tumble or cataract or flood reaching the sea over twenty miles of beach and carrying with it half a county of stones from the hills. There the stones are to this day--a vast plain of sterile pebbles from a fist to a pea. The ancients said that Hercules once passed that way.

Or think what it must have been to stand on the Ventoux and see the melting of the ice from Auvergne. Or to stand driven upward on to the hills of the Artois, and to see the waters rising in the Dover strait below.

For the thing went very quickly, make no doubt of that.

There is a superstition for the moment in favour of slow, very slow, changes in the affairs of this earth. I think that superstition has arisen from a muddle-headed hope that slow work can exclude a Creator and Will. At any rate there is no proof for it. Some of the processes have been very slow (they are exceedingly slow to-day), but some jerks have been rapid enough: revolutionary: catastrophic: and the last melting of the ice was of these.

And what do you suppose happened in the splendid valleys of Norway? To-day they are drowned. What recession of the ice filled them more full? How did man come to occupy the land released? During what intermission of time, during what generations (few and creative) did the tall fair race, for a moment wanderers, build their little simple structure of a religion which we know so little (because what we have of it is wholly intermixed with the Roman) and of a language which we know still less (for that also is mixed with the South), but at any rate of a special culture common to but a few thousands of men. How came these Scandinavians to copy Roman ships? It all came after the melting of the ice.

Then I ask myself what men saw, and what they felt as they saw, the waterfalls. For those marked all Europe also. Glaciers we know to-day. We have but to imagine them expanded, and the landscape is the same. Stand on the Maladetta and conceive the field of ice holding not only the shoulder of the mountain but all the valley below and out to the plain of France, and you only have the replica of what a man may see from Mont Blanc. Or stand on an Alpine peak and imagine the sheets of ice and snow below you, spread, covering every rock for as far as the eye can reach, and you only have a repetition of what men still see in Greenland. But we have no modern parallel (save in perhaps half a dozen places on the whole earth) by which to reconstruct the enormity of the waterfalls of those days.

For there were not only these swirling waters carving out the great valleys, there was the thundering of water down over the ledges, thousand upon thousand. Perhaps they helped to scoop out the smaller lakes more than did the ice before them. There must have been some such sight above Grenoble when the great lake which burst seven hundred years ago was forming. For in the beginning that lake basin in which Bourg d'Oisans now stands must have been a mass of ice, and then as the ice melted and as the glacier above it melted all the way up to La Grave, up to the very shoulders of the Pelvoux, what mighty armies of water must have roared down to the trench of the Isere! And wherever there is to-day a gorge (or, at least, in the most of these cuttings) you must have had the same sight. Their little dwindling descendants now and then show a trickle of water for our amusement and we are still astonished. But the grandfathers of these were giants!

They say also that the sea rose. It may have done so. Perhaps it must have done so. And if it did so what a sight must that also not have been: the cutting of the straits.

I have read of but one part of the world in which a tradition remains of such a change, and in that case it may have been an earthquake rather than a rising of the waters: I mean the Straits of Messina. Of the water flooding in here there is a legend; but there is none remaining of the cutting of the chalk between Kent and the Artois; or of the flooding, if it were flooded, of the channel between the Pillars of Hercules; or of the slower lap which gradually just covered the entrances of the Baltic--a fresh-water lake.

And by the way, what made that most amazing issue whereby the Black Sea feeds the Eastern Mediterranean with a continuous stream? I have read so many guesses, and they have not satisfied me. It is so long, so narrow, so artificial, and double at that. Very changed would the history of the world have been--of the modern world--if Nature had played some freak of the same sort to join the central Atlantic and the central Pacific Seas, or if the low sand between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean had not run dry, or if by some shock the Mediterranean had poured into the Jordan valley.

There is much else in the melting of the ice. Was it then that Northern Africa dried up? Was it then that the old watercourses which are now desert and in which you can still find proof of the habitations of men, and the stranded beasts and fishes of old rivers, were in full spate?

Who lived there? What did they in the story of mankind? And did Egypt when it was already able to build and to carve men out of stone, look out from the head of the Delta upon a shallow sea?

I think the greater part of the story of the world's landscape has been lost to us for ever.

ON THE HATRED OF NUMBERS

I knew a man once who was the head of his college and very famous as a scholar; because, although he had no learning, he was very kind and witty. But this man had one thing upon which he never jested, and that was his hatred (which he pretended to be a contempt) of numbers.

He would say, not as a curiosity, still less as an apology, that he was quite incapable of "doing sums"; and as I met him in early youth the example has influenced the whole of my life. I have known all my life what I think many people do not know, or at least not many people of those engaged in exposition, that a large part of educated people feel thus about numbers. They neglect them, or hate them, or despise them, and in any case cannot and will not deal with them.

Now when one learns a thing like that early in life, when one early discovers that a thing apparently ridiculous is quite common, the mind sets to work at once to try and find out an explanation. For a very long time I could pretend to none, but I think I am at last beginning to see my way in the matter and to grasp why it is that so many people avoid the prime measure of reality.

On the face of it one would say that the thing was impossible, for one can do nothing without numbers. The human life is distinguished from the bestial chiefly by the use and knowledge of numbers. Which reminds me that I once went to see in Berlin a horse of which it was said by its owner that it could count up to ten. This was before the war. I do not know what may have happened since. It was all nonsense; the horse could not count up to ten. What it could do was to move its foot round, tapping it along a row of large numbers, and when it got to the number which the owner wanted it to indicate he spoke to the horse and the horse stopped moving. But to return from Berlin.

Everything done by a human being all day long, even sleeping, is based upon numbers: all his observation and all his action. To be the enemy of numbers is like being the enemy of the air one breathes or of the necessity of human speech. Why, then, is it that this enmity arises, or at any rate has arisen to-day, rather late perhaps in modern history, and especially here in England?

I think it is due to the convergence of a great number of tendencies.

In the first place, numbers always involve _some_ act of thought, just as progress always involves _some_ action of the body. And people fight shy of numbers just as they tend to fight shy of exertion. If you have four people to dinner, and you ask three more, that makes seven. It is quite a little sum, and may be compared to the exertion of crossing a room. Still, very often one does not like even to cross the room, but prefers sitting in one's chair to getting up to take a book.

If you are rich enough to be overdrawn at the bank, and then lucky enough to get a sum of money larger than your overdraft, and then honest enough to pay it in, it is your duty to make a little calculation on the back of the counterfoil, turning a minus into a plus, and you have to carry pence into shillings and shillings into pounds. It is quite a little exertion, like going up a flight of stairs.... I fancy that more than half the people who have bank accounts shirk that duty. Yet it is a plain duty, for if you do not know your balance at the bank you may inadvertently smash a stumer, _si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi_.

There is another cause for this fear of numbers, and that is their absolute quality. They have no penumbra. You cannot play the fool with words when they refer to numbers as you can in matters where measure is not exact. You cannot combine a part of reality with a part of illusion, which is the very essence of æsthetic enjoyment. Numbers are thus heartless, and the heart loves to ignore them. If your country is losing population but gaining trade you may boycott the population statistics and dwell lovingly upon the trade statistics. But it is more comfortable still to indulge in a vague vision of your country thoroughly prosperous all round and happy. You see this cause of the hatred of numbers coming out very strongly in the case of people who are losing money. Either they stop keeping accounts or they falsify the accounts by hiding sheer loss under some fancy name, such as Goodwill, or Office Furniture, or "Estimated Value." That is an extreme case, but I am sure that in all cases a part of the dislike of numbers comes from this absolute, bullying quality they have.

Nor is it wholly an unreasonable attitude, for the functions of the mind not only include appreciations and creative acts which escape rigid measure, but indeed those acts are the most important.