Chapter II: Part 2

Oh, why did you ever let her go near the grate? It would have been chilly work making up the fire yourself, but next time--a thousand times Yes.

* * * * *

Banger, banger, banger, racker, racker, racker, PONG! racker, racker, racker, rack, rack, rack, PONG! PONG!! PONG!!! Your spinal cord splits in sympathy with the brave lump of coal which has held out so long against Maggie’s invincible poker, and which now retreats in a million fragments to the other end of the room. Shovel, ovel, ovel, ovel--shovel, ovel, ov---- “Surely that is enough, Maggie; you will make it so black,” you venture at last.

Down come the blinds with a sickening rattle, and you are left to take what comfort you can from the cold, strong tea (she has forgotten the hot water and the bell is at the other end of the room), the shivering butter, and the stern, unpopular cake. These sit on like unwelcome guests, hour after hour. There is no room for anything else on the table, and there they remain; that horrible cake staring into the fire, just like the kind of person who sits on and on after tea, and breaks your marked silence by asking, “Have you heard anything from Annie lately?” and futilities of that sort. The butter, perhaps, is prepared to leave, and says, “Well, we ought to be getting home, I suppose; we’ve paid you quite a visitation.” But the cake takes no notice whatever, and the sandwiches stand about on the tray, fingering things and asking, “That’s new, isn’t it? Who gave it you?” and so on. If Maggie had had the intuition of a louse she would have announced their cab--I mean she would have carried them away--ages and ages ago.

It is impossible to read with the cake looking like that. You doze--a feverish, thirsty doze. Dinner will have to be very tactfully presented. You wonder whether Jane will have thought of sweetbread or what. The bed is very crumby. Can that odious cake having been leaning over us to see whether we were asleep, whispering, perhaps, “Well, good-bye then, I won’t disturb you?” Probably the sandwiches giggled and said, “Don’t get up, we can let ourselves out.” The sandwiches’ names are Catherine and Agnes, and one is thirty-seven and the other thirty-one; both are unmarried and very fond of us.

* * * * *

Hang the cake! Why couldn’t it go when it saw we were asleep, without spilling those wretched crumbs. One is just in the small of our back and another is under our left leg. How hot the bed is!

* * * * *

Pop-op-op-bang! Crash!

The door-handle all but went through the looking-glass that time. Maggie pushes the door gently after her with her leg as she comes in.

“Shall I put it on the bed, m’m?”

You start up in a fright. The cake has not gone after all; it is still there, looking very hard and seedy and disapproving. And there are those silly sandwiches looking with disdain on the new tray with the new batch of arrivals. But their disdain is nothing to your disgust. Sweetbread, did you say? “It’s stewed steak, m’m,” says Maggie, “won’t you have any?”

Stewed steak! Grey, heavy, steaming, thick, nutritious, and garnished with two potatoes, very blue about the lips, and an ample supply of cabbage! “Take it away at once, please,” you say in trembling tones, “and that horrible tea too. I don’t want anything,” you add, deeply injured.

“There’s roly-poly pudding, m’m, and macaroni cheese,” says Maggie; “will you have both?”

You are very hot by the time she quite understands. The crumbs in the bed are like living coals, and Maggie was in such a hurry to get away that she did not notice the fire. You get up and remake the bed, fetch hot water, wash, and return to bed shivering. Then a kind and anxious husband, with a peculiarly pungent cigar, comes up and reports that the macaroni cheese is excellent, won’t you have some?

You drop into a sound sleep at about ten, which is the hour Maggie selects to “do” the washstand and tidy the room. If any one has not the experience or the imagination to supply details of the subdued clatter of soap-dishes and glasses, varied by heavy falls of coal and hair-brushes, or of the piercing squeak of each drawer as it opens and shuts, neither will they realize the significance of a basin-cloth left on the floor just where it catches the eye. At about eleven you probably rise, seize its clammy edge between your finger and thumb, and fling it into the passage. After this you return to the cold bottle and the hot crumbs that were not all brushed out when you remade the bed.

Morning dawns brightly with the prospect of a pleasant day of peace and leisure. You make your own bed, and perform an elaborate toilet between early tea and breakfast, so that by eight o’clock you are sitting up, good and happy, waiting for a lightly boiled egg. At eight-fifteen an agitated husband enters, looking at his watch, and says he will just go down and hurry them up. Punctuality is your especial fad, and unpunctuality is Maggie’s, so by eight-thirty you are already warm with the heat of battle. You rehearse your displeasure beforehand. Biting sarcasms, haunting home truths, pungent, pathetic appeals to humanity and reason are prepared by your active brain, already aglow with the necessity for being “after” every dratted person in the house if any hanged thing is to get done.

At half-past eight the door is flung open with the inevitable crash, and reason and eloquence give place to the stronger spirits of fear and gratitude. You mentally apologize to Maggie for all the things you were going to say. Your heart is wrung when you see her staggering under a load of silver jugs and entrée dishes, two loaves, a ham, and five plates with knives and forks to match.

“I am sorry the master was obliged to complain about breakfast being late, m’m,” says Maggie, looking like a thunderstorm with heart disease. She disposes the feast all over your room, plates on the top of your clothes, two entrée dishes at your feet (just where you can’t reach them without spilling the tea), and the ham on the washstand. “I had to get the extra dishes out of the plate chest,” pursues Maggie reproachfully, “and they were all to polish before I could take them down to the kitchen.”

To explain just then the ideal breakfast in bed would involve “suiting yourself” in a month, or, more probably, recantation, explanations, tears, emotions, and all sorts of luxuries in which you are unwilling to indulge Maggie at the moment, so you decide to wait for more settled weather. At ten o’clock the entrée dishes are still weighing heavily on your toes, you have heard tradesmen’s boys come and go (repeated falls of plaster from the ceiling and sudden shocks to your frame have betrayed their several applications to the bell), but cook has had no orders and it is certain that she will not act without them. This means that nothing will arrive in time for anything throughout the day, and the master will consult his watch, and your temperature will rise from nervous apprehension before every meal. Also, you would like your room tidied. Where have all those miserable women gone? They seem to disappear like worms into the sand and all is silent as the grave. You tumble out of bed again and go to the bell. If the tradesmen’s boys can raise the dead and restore the deaf to hearing, shall our efforts not be equally blessed? At last you get hold of the cook. She had not come up for fear of disturbing you. She has no ideas at all about food. “Would you fancy some stewed steak for lunch? There doesn’t seem to be much else to have, without you have the hot-pot--oh yes, of course there is the fish if you care for that; would it be substantial enough for the master? Oh, beg pardon, she understood for lunch and dinner both--quite so. Would master fancy roly-poly pudding and macaroni cheese? Yes, he had them last night, but she thought he liked them better than anything else--and there didn’t seem to be much else at this time of year, without you went to the expense of fruit----”

“Now I suppose,” you reflect afterwards, “that that ass of a doctor would say, why don’t I order what I like for myself. Could Cleopatra have had the energy to order anything but an asp for herself after she had ‘seen about’ the figs for the rest of the household?”

Clara has now been up and dusted under the bed. Does any happy, hearty, healthy person know what this means? If not, let him take the next time when he is tired and in a temper, and let him lie on two chairs and get a child to joggle all the legs of them in turn.

* * * * *

You doze.

* * * * *

Pop-op-op-op-BANG!

“If you please’m, Mrs. Jameson has rung up to say, could you lunch with her to-day at one-thirty?”

“I suppose you didn’t think of telling her I was in bed?” you suggest.

“No, m’m, I thought you might wish to speak to her yourself.”

* * * * *

You doze.

* * * * *

Pop----pop (very gently). Jane enters.

“Please’m, did you telephone for the fish?”

Any amateur can supply the answer to this question.

* * * * *

You sleep.

* * * * *

Pop-op-op-op-BANG!

You were so sound asleep that you could only catch the concluding words of Maggie’s sentence: “... and she thought, m’m, perhaps you’d like to look at the pipe where it’s burst.”

(A few minutes later) “... nor you don’t wish to see the man?”

“I think not, thank you. I could draw him with my eyes shut.”

“Would you wish me to telephone or will you?”

“!!!!--and while you are about it, Maggie, you might bring some coal.”

She brings it in three-quarters of an hour, when you have got nicely off to sleep again, and before a fresh piece of coal can be put on the fire the grate has to be raked completely to pieces and resolved into its original elements of several bars and some other pieces of very resonant iron.

Naturally lunch was late. You knew it would be, and Jane was very sorry but she had forgotten to order the cream. After lunch there was an awful row with the baby. He was left alone while nurse went down to get some drinking water, and he fell off his chair--there has to be some one always on the spot with children. You can’t turn your back a minute, etc.

Probably the doctor called at tea-time and asked why you were up, and it is improbable in the extreme that he took in one word of your lucid explanation of the facts. He would tell you, if you asked him, that women make difficulties, and that he himself once had a week in bed and that everything went on just as usual. But then doctors don’t mind the room not being “done,” and their daily work doesn’t behave like a sucking-kid after its mother. It stays where it is until its master comes to fetch it, and if it isn’t done, well then, it just isn’t, and that’s all about it.

_CHAPTER VI_: THE “WHAT THE DEVIL?” CLUB

“It wouldn’t be a bad plan, dear,” Mrs. Henry once said sarcastically to her husband, “if you were to start a ‘What the devil?’ club; you use the expression so frequently.” The club was never founded, of course, but it wouldn’t have been at all a bad plan. It would tend to clear the mind. For instance, say that at breakfast the eggs were a little underdone. If instead of exclaiming, “What the devil has cook been about?” you reflect, “What the devil does it matter whether these eggs stick together in the shell or pour over the edge? The fact that the eggs are there, and are more or less edible is enough for me,” just think of the different complexion it would put on the whole affair. But in fact it wouldn’t do, because different people have such different ideas about what they describe as “the things that matter.” The last time I called on Mrs. Henry she seemed very pleased about having had this idea of the club, and was quite excited at having used the word “devil.” She had a brother staying with her at the time, and I think it was partly his robust influence that made her break out and be so racy.

“Henry’s perfectly right, Maria, though he doesn’t know it,” said this brother. “There must be at least fifty occasions a day for saying ‘What the devil?’ in your house.”

“Whatever do you mean, William?” said Mrs. Henry indulgently. He is her favourite brother.

“I’ll show you as we go along,” he answered, “I dare say the opportunities will turn up.”

“I can’t believe that France will go to war,” observed Mrs. Henry a little later.

“What the devil does that matter?” replied William. “I beg your pardon, Maria, but it was your own idea. You see it is really of no consequence whether you believe it or not; it won’t alter the fact.”

“Oh, of course, if you look at it like that, William,” said Mrs. Henry a little huffily, “it doesn’t matter what you believe. You might apply your theory to anything.”

William said calmly, “It doesn’t matter, except that your beliefs affect your character; they don’t affect facts.”

“In that case, I suppose you wouldn’t have sided with Mr. Sprigger who used to be curate here. He left the Church of England because he couldn’t bring himself to believe the story of John the Baptist and the locusts. He had had a medical training to begin with, as he thought of being a doctor, and he was convinced that some particular part of the locust--I forget which it was exactly--would have been absolutely impossible to digest.”

“There you are!” said William. “Either John digested those locusts or he didn’t. You can’t possibly alter the fact anyhow, and thinking about them was bad for Mr. Sprigger, because it got him into the habit of taking a lawyer’s view of life; arguing for the argument’s sake.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Mrs. Henry coldly.

“Well, a lawyer will argue that a man is guilty or not guilty, whichever way he is paid to, won’t he?” said William. “He doesn’t want to get at the facts; indeed, he refuses to be told sometimes for fear the knowledge should bias his mind. Now Sprigger can’t get at his facts, which is the same as if he wouldn’t, and so he can only be arguing for argument’s sake, and he will never develop his soul in that way.”

“Mr. William,” I was moved to suggest later, “if I put my foot through that picture you have been working at this morning, would you say, ‘what the devil did it matter?’”

“No, certainly not, because it would matter.”

“Of course it would be very annoying,” said Mrs. Henry, “but I can’t see, myself, that it would matter more than that Mr. Sprigger’s beliefs should be undermined. You talk about facts, but Henry said only the other day, that your pictures were misrepresentations of fact.”

“Did he?” said William. “I’ll have to talk that over with him when he comes in. Anyhow, I don’t see what the devil it matters what Henry or anybody else thinks about my pictures so long as they don’t put their feet through them. They are definite creations--facts.”

“Henry says not,” she insisted. Henry came in just then and they began all over again.

“Well, now, about babies----” William was still pursuing his argument when we went in to dinner.

“Dear me, William,” said Mrs. Henry tightly. William waved her aside with his knife. “Now I think, for my part,” he said in loud, burly tones, “that it doesn’t matter who the father is----”

“You needn’t wait, Janet, we’ll ring,” said Mrs. Henry.

William paid the girl the graceful compliment of waiting until the door closed behind her, and then added, “So long as the thing is a fact, it doesn’t matter a hang how it became so. The question is, there’s a baby; that’s all that is of interest to us, isn’t it, so long as it is strong and well?”

“Henry, dear, do you care for more beetroot?” said his wife, and then there was silence.

“Then there’s another silly thing you women do to confound issues and obscure points,” continued William. “When some one comes to the place--some poor girl newly married--and you are asked to call on her, the first thing you ask is, ‘And--er--who _was_ she?’ Now what the devil does it matter who she was? Who _is_ she? you might perhaps ask if you want to know, though it is not of much importance. All you want to find out, to my thinking, is just this: _is_ she, or is she _not_?”

“Is she, or is she not _what_, William?” his sister asked almost impatiently. “I don’t follow you.”

“Good Lord! is she _what_! That’s just it. Is she _anything_, my dear girl; is she anything with human blood, and bones, and a presentable face in front of it, or is she simply a mass of slowly decaying matter, endowed with the gift of moving from one chair to another? That’s the very thing I want to know.”

“What girl in particular were you speaking of, William?” said Mrs. Henry with forced patience. “If I know to whom you refer, perhaps I shall be able to tell you whether she is--what did you say? decaying? or not. Cheese, Henry?”

We were destined to see a good deal of William. He was trying to run some scheme or other in the neighbourhood, and he went into rooms for a time. He was asked out a good deal at first, but not so much later on. To me he became a sort of Eulenspiegel, and I delighted to hear of his progress in the town. But I believe that was not the light in which he regarded himself; he quite intended to be a serious reformer. One good thing he did; he stimulated industry in the neighbourhood. Ladies almost invariably took up a piece of knitting or work of some kind when he came near them, and men would go off to their studies, saying, “I’ll leave you to have a chat with my wife while I just finish a bit of work.” It interested him more than anything to find out what were the various landmarks in their past lives to which other people attached importance. There were some, he discovered, who thought that what they called “sound principles” were of importance, and when he pressed them to describe by what process a principle became sound, they nearly always said that it was sound if the best men held it. It took him many an hour’s hard work running the old ladies of Millport to ground on the point who the best men were. They dodged and doubled, burrowed and soared, fluttering, on to fences, which gave way under them when they sat for a moment to take breath. They took sanctuary in all sorts of funny little temples, which they had built, from time to time, of precepts gathered here and there. I remember seeing Mrs. Beehive flee, breathless, into one of these, and remain for a long time, while William stood, so to speak, baying at the door. It was the temple of “Woman being a good influence over man.”

“Now, seriously,” I heard William say, “do you think that you are a good influence for your husband to have about him? Remember, he is a very shrewd man, and knows what he is about.”

Mrs. Beehive for the moment completely filled the temple, she swelled so much as she replied, “I hope, indeed, that I am, Mr.--er--”

“Why? in what way?” demanded deep-throated William.

“It is not for me to describe in what way,” answered Mrs. Beehive, “but there are many ways. Perhaps you will find out some day for yourself when you are married!” she added, artfully drawing another bolt across the door.

He went round to the back of the temple and shouted through the window, “Isn’t it more likely that the influence of the Almighty keeps your husband friendly with you, rather than that your influence keeps him friendly with the Almighty? Not of course that it matters either way; the result is the same. He is a good honest man. But it is worth getting at the facts.”

“Wait till you are married,” repeated Mrs. Beehive shrilly, and I have no doubt that soon he had her fluttering before him once more, but I was obliged to leave them.

“What the devil do these people think they are doing, leading the moral tone of the town?” he once said to Mrs. Henry. “Women who don’t understand the rudiments of morality.”

“Well, I am sure the men are no better, William,” said poor Mrs. Henry, who, as I have said, really admires her brother, and would like her sex to stand well with him.

“They are better in this way,” observed William, “that they treat their own morals as what they are, manners suitable and appropriate to the society in which they live; they don’t take them seriously as you do, as if they were ordained by Divine inspiration.”

“Do you mean to say that Henry, for instance, is not in earnest in the things which he believes to be right?” said Mrs. Henry, indignant at last. “Really, William, I can’t make you out at all.”

“Henry’s all right,” said William, “leave him out of it. What I mean is that when I see that woman, Beehive, for instance----”

“Oh, William, do be careful. I feel sure they can hear in the pantry----”

“That woman, Beehive, I repeat,” pursued William, “walking about and pretending that she knows for certain that it is wrong for other people to keep later hours and to use more varied language than she herself cares to do, I feel that I must somehow compel her to look at the facts, and to justify the high moral position she has usurped, before I can allow her to remain seated there unchallenged.”

William’s progress through the town was as easily marked as that of a tornado. I could always track him by a glance at the faces of people in the streets. Where he had passed there would inevitably be one or more injured-looking persons, readjusting their expressions and muttering indignantly to themselves. Sometimes a knot of women would be seen gibbering at a street corner, their individual disorders gathering them together by a natural process like that which goes to form an abscess. And when Mrs. Beehive was so far off as to be scarcely visible to the naked eye, I could tell by the angle at which she rolled whether or no she had fallen in with William.

Dear William and his facts were most enjoyable when taken together with Henry’s quiet visions, and when Mrs. Beehive crossed the field of their united activities there was indeed a rare sight. For William, in his relentless pursuit of Mrs. Beehive’s fallacies, had overlooked one most important fact, that so fast as you disperse matter in one direction it gathers together again in another. Henry was a persevering visionary, and no sooner had William scattered Mrs. Beehive to the four winds, than Henry built her up again, so that in the end one was forced to the conclusion that the poor lady had no independent existence at all. When Henry expressed his belief in any of her assertions, she swelled larger than any frog; and when William ran at her in order to get at the facts, she crumbled to pieces like any other act of faith. The marvel is that William himself lived with a vitality independent of facts, and no “getting at the facts” had any destructive power over Henry. But that, as William explained when it was pointed out to him, was just as it should be. “There is better stuff in me,” he assured us, “than the mere fact of my existence, and the fact about Henry is that he is a good man. You can’t do away with that.”

Mrs. Beehive overheard this unintelligible remark, and immediately, I believe, put on more weight.

_CHAPTER VII_: THE MYSTERIOUS MUNCHERS

Surely there is something in Shakespeare about somebody who “munched and munched and munched.” If so, it is there because Shakespeare had to do with theatres and evidently knew. When you look at all the pansy-faces together, munching, munching, munching, you begin to wonder why it is that persons who normally go for at least two hours at a time without food require so much extra nourishment all of a sudden. Sarah Jane, we know, gets through a morning’s hard work with no other encouragement than a cup of inky tea at eleven. Miss Simmons, the typist, does not, surely, tick away at all that important stuff with her cheeks bulging like a monkey’s over a hidden store of refreshment. In the showroom you never hear such an apology as, “Sorry, Moddum, the young lady’s sweetmeat is unusually sticky for the time of year; she will answer your question in one moment.” Therefore it cannot be that they eat because listening to the play is hard work and they need support. Can it be to cause anæmia of the brain by directing the flow of blood to--etc.? But then why desire to cause anæmia? They do not look as if their brains were in a fatally active condition; in fact, no one in the audience ever looks quite right in the head. But, indeed, I have a theory that people are no longer themselves when they enter a theatre. Otherwise how is it possible to account for the fact that all our friends go constantly to the play and we go there ourselves, and yet we never, never meet one another; at least hardly ever? Isn’t it a bewildering surprise to recognize a friend between the acts? It seems to take at least five minutes peering and goggling before it is possible to believe the glad thing. And then what a waving and commotion! “The Prenderbursts! Just fancy! In the third row but two--yes, quite sure--that’s Effie! just turning round now--behind the lady with the orange scarf.” Personally I go in just any old thing, because I never expect to be recognized; and I hate leaving my seat, because I generally have on an evening top and thick boots, and it looks so bad if you go out and the lights are up.

Being, like all idle people, an intolerable wonderer, I have wondered for years “who the people are who go to the theatre.” One thing is quite certain, and that is that the people who go are not the same as the people who have been. Every day one knocks against the people who have been, but the people who go one has never seen before--except at the theatre--and will never see again until the next time we go. Where they live between the performances is a mystery. My own belief is that they disappear into their holes in the town, and there sleep until the next performance; they eat at the theatre, as we have seen. As soon as you get a hypothesis started the whole thing begins to work out together, and all sorts of details arrange themselves. The only doubtful point now is how far the theatre managers are in the secret as regards the origin of their audiences, or whether they suppose them to be ordinary persons.

According to my hypothesis the munchers are a race of people apart, like the troglodytes, with physiological and social laws of their own, of which we know nothing. They are unknown to the police because they look more or less like human beings and behave quietly. They come to the box-office and book seats like you and I do, and the man in the box is in a hurry and doesn’t notice any difference. But it is owing to their numbers that you and I can never get just the seats we want.

The most curious thing about the whole business is the munchers’ power of turning human beings into fairy changelings. It is owing to this power that we hardly ever meet our friends at the theatre. An instance that absolutely proves this theory occurred the other day, and it at once threw light on what has been an irritating mystery to me for years. The Blots were dining with us, and some one mentioned a play then running at our principal theatre.

“Oh, were you there?” said Amy Blot, “so were we. Where were you sitting? We never saw you.”

“Second row of the dress circle,” I answered, “fourth from the end.”

“But so were we,” protested Amy, “at least we were sixth from the end--on the right facing the stage.” That had certainly been our side. “Oh, well, it’s too queer,” Amy decided. She is a very striking-looking woman; you couldn’t mistake her; and her husband is really remarkably fat; you would pick him out at once. I thought it over for a few minutes, and then said quite definitely, “My dear Amy, you must be wrong, because I remember exactly who were in those seats. There was a girl with her hair parted on one side; it looked very well in front, but it was scrabbly at the back, as if it had been eaten by rats. She had on a pink silk blouse of the new shape, but beyond that I couldn’t see. There was an old lady with her, who had loose cheeks and a small cap with a butterfly in it--your husband wasn’t dressed up in any way, was he?”

“How absurd,” said Amy, “of course not. But those were our seats, and we never saw you either. There were two minxes and two pasty-faced young men where you say you were.”

I remember that I wrote to Sir Oliver Lodge about it that evening, but tore up the letter on my husband’s advice, as he thought the matter might get taken up, and we should have men calling with notebooks. It wouldn’t have done. But, all the same, this is probably what poor Shakespeare meant when he wrote about the lady who munched and munched and munched.

Looked at from the point of view of psychical research, munchers are extremely interesting. Any natives with horrible ways are all right if viewed scientifically. Munchers have many offensive habits which one might be inclined to resent were it not that it is nice to know how different we are. For instance, this sort of thing. You may be sitting enraptured, the tears streaming down your face, and the hobgoblin behind you starts her reminiscences:

“Something the same sort of story as Hindle Wakes, isn’t it, Lizzie?”

“Yes, did you see that?”

“My word, yes! A funny sort of story, wasn’t it, didn’t you think?”

“Yes, do you remember where she comes on in the first act? Something the same sort of thing, wasn’t it?”

“Were you ever at Blackpool?”

“Oh yes--hush; look at him--there now--pity he don’t move up a bit sharper--we were at Blackpool a week, and mother, she----” etc.

The munchers have almost nerveless fingers, and drop their possessions a good deal. “I wonder if you’d mind, one moment----?” is the sort of thing they ask just when some climax or other is being reached. “I’ve dropped my hat under your seat.” When the wretch by your side has dropped an umbrella, and the two at the back have dropped a purse and a spectacle case, and have put a muff down your neck, and got some beads entangled in your hair; when eighteen of them have squeezed over you during each interval in order to reach seats that are next the gangway on the other side; when the one who looks like a debilitated porpoise has clapped his hands down your ear for ten minutes, and succeeded in recalling the singer whom you were so glad to get rid of; and when laughter, which is about as harmless and irritating as eggs shot from a cannon, has at last died away into mere sniggering at some homely detail in a tragedy: then, if you still feel cross, you must try to divert yourself with the mystery of the munchers, and remember that one of your dearest friends may be sitting next to you, disguised by the spell. The debilitated porpoise may be your friend De Vere, whose manners are so perfect, whose social sense is so developed that we none of us know what clods we are when we go to tea with him. It is only afterwards that we realize our deficiencies: when the Prenderbursts come to tea and we want to make our party feel like De Vere’s. And he may think he was sitting next to a lemon-coloured lady with an angry face and a box of chocolates.

Now and again, of course, one sees an acquaintance or two, but they are nearly always rather dry and emphatic people, who have evidently escaped the power of the spell. You see them standing up, peering through glasses, and saying how odd it is that there seems to be no one here. When they read this they will say that they have not the least idea what it is all about.

Music seems to have some power of disenchantment, because at a concert, though the munchers fill a good part of the building, there are always dozens and dozens of people whom one knows. It may be that the awful weariness paralyses the hypnotic power of the munchers. They are there just the same, with their vacant faces, and their queer screws of hair, and their unsuitable clothes, but they are almost too weak to chew from their packets of refreshment. In fact, no one chews at a concert, except surreptitiously in a box.

There is a special subdivision of munchers who frequent the boxes both in theatres and at concerts. They are like the queen bees in the hive of theatre-goers. They are monstrously fat, female, and innocently foolish. Instead of having a pinched and wispy appearance, they are like the plump, precocious, affected, happy-looking children who perform on the music-hall stage. It is possible that the inferior munchers rear and keep these immense females to decorate the boxes, feeding them luxuriously at all hours, while they themselves subsist on their timid feasts of chocolate that tastes of hair oil.

The right attitude for the box can, surely, only be acquired by special culture and constant practice. To begin with there must always be a huge white arm with a podgy little hand on the end of it draped along the edge of the box. The gigantic body, squeezed like blancmange into whatever mould the latest fashion dictates, is turned towards the stage. The round, good-natured face, with its natural vulgarity breaking through the assumed air of the Princess of Many Sorrows (imagine a jolly country butcher’s wife in a tableau as “Our Lady of Pain”), is directed down and towards the auditorium at the angle of a turnip about to fall from a shelf. Bless the dears! It is a treat to see anyone so happy. But that is what the munchers are, depend upon it.

_CHAPTER VIII_: SHEER TEMPER

Justice and Generosity are often supposed to be a pair of excellent friends who have an influence for good on one another’s character. But Generosity has a still closer friend whom she says nothing about, namely Injustice. She cannot always behave as freely as she would like when Justice is there, explaining things and being so absolutely right. But when Injustice has been to tea with her, talking his bad, unscrupulous talk, making everything so gay, and putting the blame on all the wrong people, then Generosity has a free hand and can be as lavish as she likes.

“Come in here for a minute,” said Reginald to Percy one morning in the City, “I want to get this hat ironed.”

There was some delay, and Reginald was both clear and original in what he said. Percy was lost in admiration. The shopman, expert in silence, by long practice, forbore to reply except by deprecating sounds which but served to inspire Reginald to a richer eloquence. At last the hat was brought in, ironed to perfection. Reginald finished his sentence, which glowed with the imaginative splendour of a Turner sunset.

“Oh, we never make any charge, sir, for ironing a hat,” said the expertly silent shopman.

* * * * *

“I don’t agree with you,” said Percy, removing from his coat the little tufts of hair which his friend had flung about in his careless agony. “You had the ball at your toe; then was the time to express a large, generous forgiveness for the unconscionable delay.”

Unless we are unpleasant sort of people we cannot be generous about an injury unless we have first been mollified to some extent; and what more mollifying than to find that the supposed injury has never been done? Percy saw this more clearly than Reginald, who was quite morbid about wanting to be in the right, always.

It is an interesting question what stupid persons find to get in a temper about, because, if you come to think of it, there is nothing in the world except stupidity (our own or other people’s) to make anyone fractious, and, of course, stupid people cannot mind or they wouldn’t be stupid. Good, just people may be angered by the wilful wickedness of some one who is determined not to do the thing required; but anger is not temper. Temper, that horrible itching and pain in one’s social sense, can only be brought on by stupidity, real or imagined, in other people (I count inanimate objects such as shirt studs and hair as people because they can be just as irritating). Consider for a moment the persons who cause temper in a household: husbands, wives, children, and servants. Wives and servants, on an average, probably cause more temper because, on an average, they are stupider than husbands and children. Relations are apt to be very thick-headed--perhaps because blood is thicker than water--almost as bad as tradesmen at the telephone. Friends are practically never stupid, while acquaintances often reach the extreme limit of what it is possible to bear. Compared to relations, who, as we have said, are as bad as tradesmen at the telephone, acquaintances are as bad as the half-witted boy who is usually left in charge of the station-master’s office.

Talking of station-masters, and _à propos_ of wives being stupider than husbands, I feel absolutely certain that no station-master has ever spent such a day as would be inevitable for him if he were a wife, and his staff were nice, hardworking girls.

Imagine a platform full of people waiting for the 9·45 express to Holyhead. “Oh no, m’m,” says the female station-master’s second-in-command, with a silly smile, “the 9·45 hasn’t come up yet. I expect it’ll be just coming now. I’ve sent to tell the engine-driver that you’re waiting, and she says that she was a bit late this morning, as they hadn’t brought the coal.” She observes the infuriated passengers and beams upon them with her mouth open. “It is a pity, isn’t it, keeping them waiting! They do seem upset! Just fancy! What a shame!!” (It will be such a help to everyone connected with this book if all the capable ladies who run their houses to perfection will just begin to skip here, and not say anything more about it; because we know the other side of the question quite well, and the whole thing is hardly serious enough for argument.) When the matter of the 9·45 has been sifted to the bottom, it is found that the coal was only an excuse; the engine-driver really hadn’t an idea of the time. She was just washing out a few handkerchiefs in the waiting-room, where the old lady in charge never noticed her doing it; she thought she had come about the windows.

Or, again, what would happen if a man of business told his clerk to telephone for a hundredweight of grey blotting-paper, and while he wrote at his desk he had to endure this sort of thing (as we do when we ask our maids to send a telephone message): “Is that Hoggins’s? I say, is that Hoggins’s? _Hoggins_. Aren’t you a stationer? Beppardon?--yes, a stationer--oh, well, we want a hundredweight of blotting-paper at once, please. Beppardon? This is Mr. Beadle’s. Beadle and Sons--J. J. Beadle and Sons--will you send it at once, please. Beppardon? Beadle and Sons--Oh yes, I’m sorry--I thought you knew--44 Dacre Street--Dacre Street--No, not Baker--Dacre. [The man of business growls from his desk, “You didn’t tell him _grey_ blotting-paper.”] What’s that? Beppardon? Yes, Dacre Street. A hundredweight of blotting-paper at once. [The man of business intervenes again, gnashing his teeth, “_Grey_ blotting-paper.”] Beppardon? Pink or white? Oh, either, thank you--yes, please. Good morning. [Rings off.] Beppardon, sir? Did you speak?”

That is the sort of occasion when Generosity does not care to hear what Justice has to say. If an angel came down from heaven and unjustly beat the offending clerk, the man of business would find it easy to say, “Poor fellow, he was doing his best,” and to give him half a crown for a new hat.

If all the efficient females will sit down quite quietly we will add what we were about to say, that men are just as irritating, but they don’t mean so inexcusably well. Take, for instance, the man at an inquiry office; he doesn’t mean well. “I want a ticket to Leamington,” you say. He gives you a first-class ticket, and you remonstrate. “You didn’t say which you wanted,” he retorts, getting impudent at once. “You never asked,” is your very natural reply.

Or, take a conjurer or magic-lantern man. You say, “I want you to be very careful, please, not to do anything to frighten the children. There will be some quite little ones, and they don’t like anything at all alarming.” “Oh, we understand children perfectly, Madam,” he says, “I know exactly the sort of thing you require.”

The first picture that he puts on the screen is of a child awakened from its sleep by an enormous beetle with coloured eyes and a walking-stick. When the commotion and the screaming are over, the smaller children are brought back and sit sobbing on their nurses’ knees, somewhere near the door. The proceedings are a trifle damped, but the babies promise, with a catch in their voices, to be very good as they know it is funny. The next picture shows a happy family party at breakfast. There enters a policeman, who by carrying papa away to prison leaves the family in tears, and the breakfast spilled on the cloth. The arrest is found to be a humorous mistake, and papa is brought home after a painful scene in the prison, but the story proves beyond a doubt that no one is safe, even in their own nursery with both parents present. Here, however, our argument seems to break down, because it is probable that the man meant well.

But in the upper classes take, for instance, Reginald himself. He is sometimes appallingly dense, and can be very intelligently tiresome. He lived, until quite lately, with three unmarried sisters, and sometimes when he came home it happened that none of them had been out, and all were eagerly sociable.

“Well, dear, what’s the news?” Louisa might ask.

“Oh, nothing,” Reginald would reply.

“I thought that cook said she had seen posters about a railway accident,” said Agnes.

“Possibly,” replied Reginald, “there may have been.”

“Didn’t you see anything about it?” asked Theresa wistfully.

“It was all in the paper I got coming home----[Chorus: “Where, oh, where is it?”] Sorry, I left it in the train,” said Reginald, and then he would go off to dress. Or the same thing might happen the other way round. Louisa had been out to tea on Saturday afternoon, and seen the paper at a friend’s house. Reginald had been playing golf and was lying half asleep in his chair.

“Such an awful thing has happened,” announced Louisa, very properly, the moment she came in.

“Oh,” said Reginald.

“A frightful railway accident; four killed, and sixteen taken to the hospital.”

“Who are the four?” Reginald inquired, putting his bottom leg on the top one and knocking out his pipe.

“Oh, no one we know; but just think!” I actually heard all this one afternoon, and it is perfectly true that Reginald replied in the following way:

“At least four people whom you don’t know die every day, anyhow, so to-day is no worse than yesterday.”

Really, it is impossible to know whether they do it on purpose or not; especially Reginald, who is supposed to be clever. However, it all just shows that it is stupidity that makes one get in a temper. There is often nothing to get angry about, but the whole thing gets on one’s nerves. But there is worse to come. So far we have only touched the fringe of what is bad for the temper. We will now visit a land of torture, parts of which are, I believe, untrodden by the male sex.

Has any man ever had to defend his own self--his ego--call it anything you like, from the pursuing eye of a friend? Has he ever been obliged to draw a veil over the process of his living and say politely, “Excuse me, my ego I think?” It has become the custom for people to go about in society more or less clothed, and we get to know our friends fairly well, even when thus attired; indeed, it is unusual to insist on a complete deshabille before we can enjoy a pleasant chat. But it would be very tiresome if we were obliged to cover up our face and hands with a mask and thick gloves because our friends insisted on examining the pores of our skin through a magnifying glass. Some women habitually treat those whom they love to such a dreadful moral scrutiny. Men don’t do it to each other. Has any man ever gone to his work and been met by a fellow labourer who gazed into his eyes and said in a voice that seemed to lift his spinal cord and search beneath it, “You are looking tired to-day.”

Now that is a remark which, except it be made in the most casual and perfunctory manner, is intolerable from any one but a member of the opposite sex, with whom we are passionately in love. Women seldom understand that it is not enough that they love the person whom they examine in this way. The victim must be deeply in love with his tormentor before he can bear it, and even then it is a risk. For of course the rash loveress, emboldened by silence, goes on to ask, “What’s the matter?” and if it happens that the Beloved is wearing boots of which he is immoderately anxious to be rid, the loveress is almost bound to be the victim of Injustice before she obtains anything from Generosity.

All personal remarks are to imaginative persons a heavy strain on endurance. Their imagination at once conjures up a loathly picture of themselves in the circumstances suggested by the remark. It also mentally fits the remark with an answer, and another offensive picture results. For instance, there is the question, “Are you very tired?” The imagined answer, in a tone to fit the question, is, “Yes, dear, very.” Plop! You immediately see yourself as a great, fat, loose body dropping into an arm-chair. You see a luscious smile spread over your imagined face as the kindly solicitous one unlaces your boots--you feel mushy all over. “Damn!” is probably your ungracious reply as you hurriedly put the mask over your normally apparent fatigue. “What the deuce should I be tired for? You’re tired yourself--I’ll take your boots off.” So you divert attention from the anxious scrutiny of commonplace blemishes which in tactful circles “we don’t notice.” Then you feel a brute, and you get in a temper at having been made to feel a brute when you were not really one at all; and you were already in a temper before, because you had seen an incorrect vision of yourself as a juicy fool. And yet there was nothing in any of it to get in a temper about. There are scores of harmless remarks that have this irritating, personal effect. “Is your head very bad?” is a ticklish question for anybody but one’s old nurse to take upon themselves. It is not often that there are more than three people in the world who may ask it. You see, the only possible answer, “Yes, very,” is so silly. What a thing to be asked to say! The next move on the part of the dear enemy can only be, “Would you like anything for it?” and what on earth could one like for it that one has not already done of one’s own accord? Even if we haven’t put on a wet handkerchief with eau-de-Cologne it is unthinkable to have any but one of the possible three persons fiddling with wet things about our head. Our forehead would, to a certainty, be shiny and the hair pushed the wrong way. The wretch would probably smooth back the curls behind our ears, and we should know what a hideous fright we looked and that they loved us just as well like that--No, three people is too many. No one but our nurse who was there from the very first can be suffered to deface our beauty and not know what they have done.

All sensible people will have abandoned this chapter long ago, so I may as well finish it for the morbid delectation of the neurotic, or for those perfectly sane, yet kind-hearted sufferers, who have not yet dared to speak of their sorrows, even to themselves. Let us collect some other impossible, searching remarks and leave them to soak in without comment. “My darling’s eyes look heavy to-day”--(if you are not very careful the adjective may quite well be “puffy”)--“perhaps you have eaten something that has disagreed with you.” I had to write this in a great hurry for fear I thought about it and began to get furious again.

“You must tell me when you are tired of me, and I’ll go.”

Murder is too good for the inquisitress who subjects one to this last torture; and yet she sins in the name of Love, and we dare not complain for fear of angering the god, who employs the weak-minded as often as not. I never heard one man say to another, “Your beard has lost its pretty colour since you were ill. I wonder if you tried vaseline--” or, “I can’t bear to see you wear those trousers; they are too loose on the hips; they make you look quite stout. You don’t mind my saying so, do you?” This would entail a searching finger through the beard or a playful pinch on the hips. No, men don’t do it. They have to bear it sometimes, but they don’t do it. Decidedly the fringe of aggravation is male and female in fairly equal proportion; but when you get to the very heart of it, you will find a lady sitting there as sure as fate. And it is only after you have been thoroughly unjust that you can begin to lavish affection on her with a generous hand.

_CHAPTER IX_: THE ROYAL VISIT