Chapter 9

I said it was very trying, shopping. I also said, as he invited me, and as he appeared determined to go on talking, that I would have a brandy-and-soda. We were in the smoke-room by this time.

“There ought to be an association,” he continued, “a kind of clearing-house for the collection and distribution of Christmas presents. One would give them a list of the people from whom to collect presents, and of the people to whom to send. Suppose they collected on my account twenty Christmas presents, value, say, ten pounds, while on the other hand they sent out for me thirty presents at a cost of fifteen pounds. They would debit me with the balance of five pounds, together with a small commission. I should pay it cheerfully, and there would be no further trouble. Perhaps one might even make a profit. The idea might include birthdays and weddings. A firm would do the business thoroughly. They would see that all your friends paid up—I mean sent presents; and they would not forget to send to your most important relative. There is only one member of our family capable of leaving a shilling; and of course if I forget to send to any one it is to him. When I remember him I generally make a muddle of the business. Two years ago I gave him a bath—I don’t mean I washed him—an india-rubber thing, that he could pack in his portmanteau. I thought he would find it useful for travelling. Would you believe it, he took it as a personal affront, and wouldn’t speak to me for a month, the snuffy old idiot.”

“I suppose the children enjoy it,” I said.

“Enjoy what?” he asked.

“Why, Christmas,” I explained.

“I don’t believe they do,” he snapped; “nobody enjoys it. We excite them for three weeks beforehand, telling them what a good time they are going to have, over-feed them for two or three days, take them to something they do not want to see, but which we do, and then bully them for a fortnight to get them back into their normal condition. I was always taken to the Crystal Palace and Madame Tussaud’s when I was a child, I remember. How I did hate that Crystal Palace! Aunt used to superintend. It was always a bitterly cold day, and we always got into the wrong train, and travelled half the day before we got there. We never had any dinner. It never occurs to a woman that anybody can want their meals while away from home. She seems to think that nature is in suspense from the time you leave the house till the time you get back to it. A bun and a glass of milk was her idea of lunch for a school-boy. Half her time was taken up in losing us, and the other half in slapping us when she had found us. The only thing we really enjoyed was the row with the cabman coming home.”

I rose to go.

“Then you won’t join that symposium?” said B—. “It would be an easy enough thing to knock off—‘Why Christmas should be abolished.’”

“It sounds simple,” I answered. “But how do you propose to abolish it?” The lady editor of an “advanced” American magazine once set the discussion—“Should sex be abolished?” and eleven ladies and gentlemen seriously argued the question.

“Leave it to die of inanition,” said B—; “the first step is to arouse public opinion. Convince the public that it should be abolished.”

“But why should it be abolished?” I asked.

“Great Scott! man,” he exclaimed; “don’t you want it abolished?”

“I’m not sure that I do,” I replied.

“Not sure,” he retorted; “you call yourself a journalist, and admit there is a subject under Heaven of which you are not sure!”

“It has come over me of late years,” I replied. “It used not to be my failing, as you know.”

He glanced round to make sure we were out of earshot, then sunk his voice to a whisper.

“Between ourselves,” he said, “I’m not so sure of everything myself as I used to be. Why is it?”

“Perhaps we are getting older,” I suggested.

He said—“I started golf last year, and the first time I took the club in my hand I sent the ball a furlong. ‘It seems an easy game,’ I said to the man who was teaching me. ‘Yes, most people find it easy at the beginning,’ he replied dryly. He was an old golfer himself; I thought he was jealous. I stuck well to the game, and for about three weeks I was immensely pleased with myself. Then, gradually, I began to find out the difficulties. I feel I shall never make a good player. Have you ever gone through that experience?”

“Yes,” I replied; “I suppose that is the explanation. The game seems so easy at the beginning.”

I left him to his lunch, and strolled westward, musing on the time when I should have answered that question of his about Christmas, or any other question, off-hand. That good youth time when I knew everything, when life presented no problems, dangled no doubts before me!

In those days, wishful to give the world the benefit of my wisdom, and seeking for a candle-stick wherefrom my brilliancy might be visible and helpful unto men, I arrived before a dingy portal in Chequers Street, St. Luke’s, behind which a conclave of young men, together with a few old enough to have known better, met every Friday evening for the purpose of discussing and arranging the affairs of the universe. “Speaking members” were charged ten-and-sixpence per annum, which must have worked out at an extremely moderate rate per word; and “gentlemen whose subscriptions were more than three months in arrear,” became, by Rule seven, powerless for good or evil. We called ourselves “The Stormy Petrels,” and, under the sympathetic shadow of those wings, I laboured two seasons towards the reformation of the human race; until, indeed, our treasurer, an earnest young man, and a tireless foe of all that was conventional, departed for the East, leaving behind him a balance sheet, showing that the club owed forty-two pounds fifteen and fourpence, and that the subscriptions for the current year, amounting to a little over thirty-eight pounds, had been “carried forward,” but as to where, the report afforded no indication. Whereupon our landlord, a man utterly without ideals, seized our furniture, offering to sell it back to us for fifteen pounds. We pointed out to him that this was an extravagant price, and tendered him five.

The negotiations terminated with ungentlemanly language on his part, and “The Stormy Petrels” scattered, never to be foregathered together again above the troubled waters of humanity. Now-a-days, listening to the feeble plans of modern reformers, I cannot help but smile, remembering what was done in Chequers Street, St. Luke’s, in an age when Mrs. Grundy still gave the law to literature, while yet the British matron was the guide to British art. I am informed that there is abroad the question of abolishing the House of Lords! Why, “The Stormy Petrels” abolished the aristocracy and the Crown in one evening, and then only adjourned for the purpose of appointing a committee to draw up and have ready a Republican Constitution by the following Friday evening. They talk of Empire lounges! We closed the doors of every music-hall in London eighteen years ago by twenty-nine votes to seventeen. They had a patient hearing, and were ably defended; but we found that the tendency of such amusements was anti-progressive, and against the best interests of an intellectually advancing democracy. I met the mover of the condemnatory resolution at the old “Pav” the following evening, and we continued the discussion over a bottle of Bass. He strengthened his argument by persuading me to sit out the whole of the three songs sung by the “Lion Comique”; but I subsequently retorted successfully, by bringing under his notice the dancing of a lady in blue tights and flaxen hair. I forget her name but never shall I cease to remember her exquisite charm and beauty. Ah, me! how charming and how beautiful “artistes” were in those golden days! Whence have they vanished? Ladies in blue tights and flaxen hair dance before my eyes to-day, but move me not, unless it be towards boredom. Where be the tripping witches of twenty years ago, whom to see once was to dream of for a week, to touch whose white hand would have been joy, to kiss whose red lips would have been to foretaste Heaven. I heard only the other day that the son of an old friend of mine had secretly married a lady from the front row of the ballet, and involuntarily I exclaimed, “Poor devil!” There was a time when my first thought would have been, “Lucky beggar! is he worthy of her?” For then the ladies of the ballet were angels. How could one gaze at them—from the shilling pit—and doubt it? They danced to keep a widowed mother in comfort, or to send a younger brother to school. Then they were glorious creatures a young man did well to worship; but now-a-days—

It is an old jest. The eyes of youth see through rose-tinted glasses. The eyes of age are dim behind smoke-clouded spectacles. My flaxen friend, you are not the angel I dreamed you, nor the exceptional sinner some would paint you; but under your feathers, just a woman—a bundle of follies and failings, tied up with some sweetness and strength. You keep a brougham I am sure you cannot afford on your thirty shillings a week. There are ladies I know, in Mayfair, who have paid an extravagant price for theirs. You paint and you dye, I am told: it is even hinted you pad. Don’t we all of us deck ourselves out in virtues that are not our own? When the paint and the powder, my sister, is stripped both from you and from me, we shall know which of us is entitled to look down on the other in scorn.

Forgive me, gentle Reader, for digressing. The lady led me astray. I was speaking of “The Stormy Petrels,” and of the reforms they accomplished, which were many. We abolished, I remember, capital punishment and war; we were excellent young men at heart. Christmas we reformed altogether, along with Bank Holidays, by a majority of twelve. I never recollect any proposal to abolish anything ever being lost when put to the vote. There were few things that we “Stormy Petrels” did not abolish. We attacked Christmas on grounds of expediency, and killed it by ridicule. We exposed the hollow mockery of Christmas sentiment; we abused the indigestible Christmas dinner, the tiresome Christmas party, the silly Christmas pantomime. Our funny member was side-splitting on the subject of Christmas Waits; our social reformer bitter upon Christmas drunkenness; our economist indignant upon Christmas charities. Only one argument of any weight with us was advanced in favour of the festival, and that was our leading cynic’s suggestion that it was worth enduring the miseries of Christmas, to enjoy the soul-satisfying comfort of the after reflection that it was all over, and could not occur again for another year.

But since those days when I was prepared to put this old world of ours to rights upon all matters, I have seen many sights and heard many sounds, and I am not quite so sure as I once was that my particular views are the only possibly correct ones. Christmas seems to me somewhat meaningless; but I have looked through windows in poverty-stricken streets, and have seen dingy parlours gay with many chains of coloured paper. They stretched from corner to corner of the smoke-grimed ceiling, they fell in clumsy festoons from the cheap gasalier, they framed the fly-blown mirror and the tawdry pictures; and I know tired hands and eyes worked many hours to fashion and fix those foolish chains, saying, “It will please him—she will like to see the room look pretty;” and as I have looked at them they have grown, in some mysterious manner, beautiful to me. The gaudy-coloured child and dog irritates me, I confess; but I have watched a grimy, inartistic personage, smoothing it affectionately with toil-stained hand, while eager faces crowded round to admire and wonder at its blatant crudity. It hangs to this day in its cheap frame above the chimney-piece, the one bright spot relieving those damp-stained walls; dull eyes stare and stare again at it, catching a vista, through its flashy tints, of the far-off land of art. Christmas Waits annoy me, and I yearn to throw open the window and fling coal at them—as once from the window of a high flat in Chelsea I did. I doubted their being genuine Waits. I was inclined to the opinion they were young men seeking excuse for making a noise. One of them appeared to know a hymn with a chorus, another played the concertina, while a third accompanied with a step dance. Instinctively I felt no respect for them; they disturbed me in my work, and the desire grew upon me to injure them. It occurred to me it would be good sport if I turned out the light, softly opened the window, and threw coal at them. It would be impossible for them to tell from which window in the block the coal came, and thus subsequent unpleasantness would be avoided. They were a compact little group, and with average luck I was bound to hit one of them.

I adopted the plan. I could not see them very clearly. I aimed rather at the noise; and I had thrown about twenty choice lumps without effect, and was feeling somewhat discouraged, when a yell, followed by language singularly unappropriate to the season, told me that Providence had aided my arm. The music ceased suddenly, and the party dispersed, apparently in high glee—which struck me as curious.

One man I noticed remained behind. He stood under the lamp-post, and shook his fist at the block generally.

“Who threw that lump of coal?” he demanded in stentorian tones.

To my horror, it was the voice of the man at Eighty-eight, an Irish gentleman, a journalist like myself. I saw it all, as the unfortunate hero always exclaims, too late, in the play. He—number Eighty-eight—also disturbed by the noise, had evidently gone out to expostulate with the rioters. Of course my lump of coal had hit him—him the innocent, the peaceful (up till then), the virtuous. That is the justice Fate deals out to us mortals here below. There were ten to fourteen young men in that crowd, each one of whom fully deserved that lump of coal; he, the one guiltless, got it—seemingly, so far as the dim light from the gas lamp enabled me to judge, full in the eye.

As the block remained silent in answer to his demand, he crossed the road and mounted the stairs. On each landing he stopped and shouted—

“Who threw that lump of coal? I want the man who threw that lump of coal. Out you come.”

Now a good man in my place would have waited till number Eighty-eight arrived on his landing, and then, throwing open the door would have said with manly candour—

“_I_ threw that lump of coal. I was—,” He would not have got further, because at that point, I feel confident, number Eighty—eight would have punched his head. There would have been an unseemly fracas on the staircase, to the annoyance of all the other tenants and later, there would have issued a summons and a cross-summons. Angry passions would have been roused, bitter feeling engendered which might have lasted for years.

I do not pretend to be a good man. I doubt if the pretence would be of any use were I to try: I am not a sufficiently good actor. I said to myself, as I took off my boots in the study, preparatory to retiring to my bedroom—“Number Eighty-eight is evidently not in a frame of mind to listen to my story. It will be better to let him shout himself cool; after which he will return to his own flat, bathe his eye, and obtain some refreshing sleep. In the morning, when we shall probably meet as usual on our way to Fleet Street, I will refer to the incident casually, and sympathize with him. I will suggest to him the truth—that in all probability some fellow-tenant, irritated also by the noise, had aimed coal at the Waits, hitting him instead by a regrettable but pure accident. With tact I may even be able to make him see the humour of the incident. Later on, in March or April, choosing my moment with judgment, I will, perhaps, confess that I was that fellow-tenant, and over a friendly brandy-and-soda we will laugh the whole trouble away.”

As a matter of fact, that is what happened. Said number Eighty-eight—he was a big man, as good a fellow at heart as ever lived, but impulsive—“Damned lucky for you, old man, you did not tell me at the time.”

“I felt,” I replied, “instinctively that it was a case for delay.”

There are times when one should control one’s passion for candour; and as I was saying, Christmas waits excite no emotion in my breast save that of irritation. But I have known “Hark, the herald angels sing,” wheezily chanted by fog-filled throats, and accompanied, hopelessly out of tune, by a cornet and a flute, bring a great look of gladness to a work-worn face. To her it was a message of hope and love, making the hard life taste sweet. The mere thought of family gatherings, so customary at Christmas time, bores us superior people; but I think of an incident told me by a certain man, a friend of mine. One Christmas, my friend, visiting in the country, came face to face with a woman whom in town he had often met amid very different surroundings. The door of the little farmhouse was open; she and an older woman were ironing at a table, and as her soft white hands passed to and fro, folding and smoothing the rumpled heap, she laughed and talked, concerning simple homely things. My friend’s shadow fell across her work, and she looking up, their eyes met; but her face said plainly, “I do not know you here, and here you do not know me. Here I am a woman loved and respected.” My friend passed in and spoke to the older woman, the wife of one of his host’s tenants, and she turned towards, and introduced the younger—“My daughter, sir. We do not see her very often. She is in a place in London, and cannot get away. But she always spends a few days with us at Christmas.”

“It is the season for family re-unions,” answered my friend with just the suggestion of a sneer, for which he hated himself.

“Yes, sir,” said the woman, not noticing; “she has never missed her Christmas with us, have you, Bess?”

“No, mother,” replied the girl simply, and bent her head again over her work.

So for these few days every year this woman left her furs and jewels, her fine clothes and dainty foods, behind her, and lived for a little space with what was clean and wholesome. It was the one anchor holding her to womanhood; and one likes to think that it was, perhaps, in the end strong enough to save her from the drifting waters. All which arguments in favour of Christmas and of Christmas customs are, I admit, purely sentimental ones, but I have lived long enough to doubt whether sentiment has not its legitimate place in the economy of life.

ON THE TIME WASTED IN LOOKING BEFORE ONE LEAPS

HAVE you ever noticed the going out of a woman?

When a man goes out, he says—“I’m going out, shan’t be long.”

“Oh, George,” cries his wife from the other end of the house, “don’t go for a moment. I want you to—” She hears a falling of hats, followed by the slamming of the front door.

“Oh, George, you’re not gone!” she wails. It is but the voice of despair. As a matter of fact, she knows he is gone. She reaches the hall, breathless.

“He might have waited a minute,” she mutters to herself, as she picks up the hats, “there were so many things I wanted him to do.”

She does not open the door and attempt to stop him, she knows he is already half-way down the street. It is a mean, paltry way of going out, she thinks; so like a man.

When a woman, on the other hand, goes out, people know about it. She does not sneak out. She says she is going out. She says it, generally, on the afternoon of the day before; and she repeats it, at intervals, until tea-time. At tea, she suddenly decides that she won’t, that she will leave it till the day after to-morrow instead. An hour later she thinks she will go to-morrow, after all, and makes arrangements to wash her hair overnight. For the next hour or so she alternates between fits of exaltation, during which she looks forward to going out, and moments of despondency, when a sense of foreboding falls upon her. At dinner she persuades some other woman to go with her; the other woman, once persuaded, is enthusiastic about going, until she recollects that she cannot. The first woman, however, convinces her that she can.

“Yes,” replies the second woman, “but then, how about you, dear? You are forgetting the Joneses.”

“So I was,” answers the first woman, completely non-plussed. “How very awkward, and I can’t go on Wednesday. I shall have to leave it till Thursday, now.”

“But _I_ can’t go Thursday,” says the second woman.

“Well, you go without me, dear,” says the first woman, in the tone of one who is sacrificing a life’s ambition.

“Oh no, dear, I should not think of it,” nobly exclaims the second woman. “We will wait and go together, Friday!”

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” says the first woman. “We will start early” (this is an inspiration), “and be back before the Joneses arrive.”

They agree to sleep together; there is a lurking suspicion in both their minds that this may be their last sleep on earth. They retire early with a can of hot water. At intervals, during the night, one overhears them splashing water, and talking.

They come down very late for breakfast, and both very cross. Each seems to have argued herself into the belief that she has been lured into this piece of nonsense, against her better judgment, by the persistent folly of the other one. During the meal each one asks the other, every five minutes, if she is quite ready. Each one, it appears, has only her hat to put on. They talk about the weather, and wonder what it is going to do. They wish it would make up its mind, one way or the other. They are very bitter on weather that cannot make up its mind. After breakfast it still looks cloudy, and they decide to abandon the scheme altogether. The first woman then remembers that it is absolutely necessary for her, at all events, to go.

“But there is no need for you to come, dear,” she says.

Up to that point the second woman was evidently not sure whether she wished to go or whether she didn’t. Now she knows.

“Oh yes, I’ll come,” she says, “then it will be over!”

“I am sure you don’t want to go,” urges the first woman, “and I shall be quicker by myself. I am ready to start now.”

The second woman bridles.

“_I_ shan’t be a couple of minutes,” she retorts. “You know, dear, it’s generally _I_ who have to wait for _you_.”

“But you’ve not got your boots on,” the first woman reminds her.

“Well, they won’t take _any_ time,” is the answer. “But of course, dear, if you’d really rather I did not come, say so.” By this time she is on the verge of tears.

“Of course, I would like you to come, dear,” explains the first in a resigned tone. “I thought perhaps you were only coming to please me.”

“Oh no, I’d _like_ to come,” says the second woman.

“Well, we must hurry up,” says the first; “I shan’t be more than a minute myself, I’ve merely got to change my skirt.”

Half-an-hour later you hear them calling to each other, from different parts of the house, to know if the other one is ready. It appears they have both been ready for quite a long while, waiting only for the other one.

“I’m afraid,” calls out the one whose turn it is to be down-stairs, “it’s going to rain.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” calls back the other one.

“Well, it looks very like it.”

“What a nuisance,” answers the up-stairs woman; “shall we put it off?”

“Well, what do _you_ think, dear?” replies the down-stairs.

They decide they will go, only now they will have to change their boots, and put on different hats.

For the next ten minutes they are still shouting and running about. Then it seems as if they really were ready, nothing remaining but for them to say “Good-bye,” and go.