Chapter V: Preface (5)

|A young officer in the flying service was describing to me the other day some of his recent experiences in France. They were both amusing and sensational, though told with that happy freedom from vanity and self-consciousness which is so pleasant a feature of the British soldier of all ranks. The more he has done and seen the less disposed he seems to regard himself as a hero. It is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging is a sham currency. It is the base coin with which the fraudulent pay their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big game hunter of modern times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave the impression of a man who had only been out in the back garden killing slugs. And Peary, who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had only found a new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the North Pole and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the man who talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of that commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely to be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his country would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his mother.

But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging convolvulus overgrows my garden. “Hell” was his favourite expletive, and he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.

And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only secular quality it possesses--the quality of emphasis. It is speech breaking bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the dictionary and the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord in music that in shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music which is all discord is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is deadly dull.

It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. “When I have said 'Malaga,'” says Plancus, in the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” “I am no longer a man.” He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils swell and his eyes flash fire as he cries, “Malaga.” It is a good swear word. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely what a swear word should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the passion that evokes it.

If “Malaga” has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was that defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. “'Damns' have had their day,” he said, and when he swore he used the “oath referential.” “Odds hilts and blades,” he said, or “Odds slanders and lies,” or “Odds bottles and glasses.” But when he sat down to write his challenge to Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him. “Do, Sir Lucius, let me begin with a damme,” he said. He had to give up artificial swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to something which had a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it is the idea of being a little wicked that is one of the attractions of swearing. It is a symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so. For in its origin always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates spoke “By the Gods,” he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest reverence he could command. But the oaths of to-day are not the expression of piety, but of violent passion, and the people who indulge in a certain familiar expletive would not find half so much satisfaction in it if they felt that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration of faith--“By our Lady.” That is the way our ancestors used to swear, and we have corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith and meaning.

The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of life breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is the prerogative of the soldier to be “full of strange oaths.” In this respect Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used “strange oaths.” He stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most industrious in it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that have come down to us which are not garnished with “damns” or “By Gods.” Hear him on the morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to gossip Creevey--“It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing--the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.” Or when some foolish Court flunkey appeals to him to support his claim to ride in the carriage with the young Queen on some public occasion--“Her Majesty can make you ride on the box or inside the carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's dog.” But in this he followed not only the practice of soldiers in all times, but the fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to have regarded himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at the language of the Prince Regent.

“By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,” he remarks, speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. “Then he speaks and swears so like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the room with him.” This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices, but whose recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It suggests also that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of his own comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and swore as naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that other famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy, as when, speaking of Grant, he said, “I'll tell you where he beats me, and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his sight, but it scares me like Hell.” Two centuries ago, according to Uncle Toby, our men “swore terribly in Flanders,” and they are swearing terribly there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time that the Flanders mud, which has been watered for centuries by English blood, will ensanguine the speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant young airman will talk a good deal less about “Hell” when he escapes from it to a cleaner world.

ON A HANSOM CAB

|I saw a surprising spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a hansom cab. Not a derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally see, with an obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the box, crawling along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has escaped from a cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way back--no, but a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting in the shafts and tossing its head as though it were full of beans and importance, and a slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as a sandboy as he flicked and flourished his whip, and, still more astonishing, a real passenger, a lady, inside the vehicle.

I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of the poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas of the past--sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs, the London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King Petrol, when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and the two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place then, of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver, you settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and the bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins of that “orf horse,” the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of the police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse joke to a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in the revelry. The conductor would stroll up to him and continue a conversation that had begun early in the morning and seemed to go on intermittently all day--a conversation of that jolly sort in which, as Washington Irving says, the jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.

In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside the bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It was an act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the top alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes. And even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been quite above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The hansom was a rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the thing for a lady to be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested romance, mysteries, elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of wickednesses. A staid, respectable “growler” was much more fitting for so delicate an exotic as Woman. If she began riding in hansoms alone anything might happen. She might want to go to public dinners next--think of it!--she might be wanting to ride a bicycle--horrors!--she might discover a shameless taste for cigarettes, or demand a living wage, or University degrees, or a vote, just for all the world as though she was the equal of Man, the Magnificent....

As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to the coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy, and impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable, mighty, but blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets, reeling from right to left like a drunken giant, encountering the kerb-stone, skimming the lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of boorish revolt, standing obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the street or across the street amidst the derision and rejoicing of those whose empire he threatened, and who saw in these pranks the assurance of his ultimate failure. Memory went back to the old One a.m. from the Law Courts, and to one night that sums up for me the spirit of those days of the great transition....

It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to start from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew his power. He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along the Edgeware Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men who wrote him down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles

(from Our Peking Correspondent)

in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience; chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was “full up” hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded in with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen--yes, cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end of the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the tipsy gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at Baker Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is being swept on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are exchanged, what jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the top hat, under the impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the floor--oh, then the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy gentleman opens his dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these revels soon are ended.

An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:

First a shiver, and then a thrill,

Then something decidedly like a spill--

O. W. Holmes,

_The Deacon's Masterpiece_ (DW)

and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with the clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.

It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not a humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?

We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.

The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two or three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who cares?

Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.

“'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?” he asks the conductor with tears in his voice.

The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work pumps, they probe here and thump there.

They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They have the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that move--cab drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.

If, when looking well won't move thee.

Looking ill prevail?

So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it again.

Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us, like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that, and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.

“Look 'ere,” says one, pulling up. “Why don't yer take the genelmen where they want to go? That's what I asks yer. Why--don't--yer--take--the--genelmen--where--they--want--to go? It's only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't want to go.”

For the cabman is like “the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.”

“'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!” cries another.

“We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,” says a third feelingly.

“Well, you keep on larfin',” says the chauffeur looking up from the inside of One a.m. “It suits your style o' beauty.”

A mellow voice breaks out:

We won't go home till morning,

Till daylight does appear.

And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus. Those who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor whistle, croak.

We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.

He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.

The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts his head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:

“It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.”

We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is that of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart. He is like Dick Steele--“when he was sober he was delightful; when he was drunk he was irresistible.”

“She won't go any more to-night,” says the conductor.

So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem that looks insoluble.

Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the shoal of sharks.

“Drive up West End Lane.”

“Right, sir.”

Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles, beams down on us.

“I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,” he savs. “I see the petrol was on fire.”

“Ah!”

“Yus,” he says. “Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.”

“Ah!”

“No good, motors,” he goes on, cheerfully. “My opinion is they'll go out as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are giving 'em up and goin' back to 'orses.”

“Hope they'll get better horses than this,” for we are crawling painfully up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.

“Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's the cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather as makes 'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after all, even if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that there motor-bus.”

We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of quiet triumph.

And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road with the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in the corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a tall hat finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a policeman.

Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like a king. Gone is the “orf horse” with all its sins; gone is the rosy-cheeked driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his tales of the streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your ticket, talked to you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the weather, the Boat Race, or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We amble no more. We have banished laughter and leisure from the streets, and the face of the motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol of the change. We have passed into a breathless world, a world of wonderful mechanical contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life and will soon have made the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow or the wherry that used to be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan London. As I watched the hansom bowling along Regent Street until it was lost in the swirl of motor-buses and taxis I seemed to see in it the last straggler of an epoch passing away into oblivion. I am glad it went so gallantly, and I am half sorry I did not give the driver a parting cheer as he flicked his whip in the face of the night.

ON MANNERS