 7. On the minding of other people's business. I walked one bright September morning in the Strand. I love London best in the autumn. Then only can one see the gleam of its white pavements, the bold, unbroken outline of its streets. I love the cool vistas one comes across of mornings in the parks, the soft twilight that lingered in the empty by-streets. In June the restaurant manager is off-hand with me. I feel I am but in his way. In August he spreads for me the table by the window, pours out for me my wine with his own fat hands. I cannot doubt his regard for me. My foolish jealousies are stilled. Do I care for a drive after dinner through the caressing night air? I can climb the omnibus stair without a preliminary fight upon the curb. Can sit with easy conscience and unsquashed body, not feeling I have deprived some hot-tired woman of a seat. Do I desire the play? No harsh forbidding house-full-board repels me from the door. During her season, London, a harassed hostess, has no time for us, her intimates. Her rooms are overcrowded. Her servants overworked. Her dinners hurriedly cooked. Her tone insincere. In the spring, to be truthful, the great lady condescends to be somewhat vulgar, noisy and ostentatious. Not till the guests are departed is she herself again, the London that we, her children, love. Have you, gentle reader, ever seen London? Not the London of the waking day coated with crawling life as a blossom with blight, but the London of the morning, freed from her rags, the patient city, clad in mists. Get you up with the dawn one Sunday in summertime. Wake none else, but creep down stealthily into the kitchen, and make your own tea and toast. Be careful you stumble not over the cat. She will worm herself insidiously between your legs. It is her way, she means it in friendship. Neither bark your shins against the coal-box. Why the kitchen coal-box has its fixed place in the direct line between the kitchen door and the gas-bracket, I cannot say. I merely know it as an universal law. And I would that you escape to that coal-box, lest the frame of mind I desire for you on this Sabbath morning be dissipated. A spoon to stir your tea, I fear you must dispense with. Knives and forks you will discover in plenty. Blacking-brushers you will put your hand upon in every drawer. Of emery-paper did one require it. There are reams. But it is a point with every housekeeper that the spoons be hidden in a different place each night. If anybody accepting herself can find them in the morning, it is a slur upon her. No matter, a stick of firewood, sharpened at one end, makes an excellent substitute. Your breakfast done. Turn out the gas. Remount the stairs quietly. Open gently the front door and slip out. You will find yourself in an unknown land. A strange city groan round you in the night. The sweet, long streets lie silent in sunlight. Not a living thing is to be seen save some lean Tom that slinks from his gutter-feast as you approach. From some tree there will sound perhaps a fretful chirp, but the London sparrow is no early riser. He is but talking in his sleep. The slow tramp of unseen policeman draws near or dies away. The clatter of your own footsteps goes with you, troubling you. You find yourself trying to walk softly as one does in echoing cathedrals. A voice is everywhere about you, whispering to you, hush. Is this million-breasted city then some tender Artemis seeking to keep her babes asleep? Hush, you careless wayfarer. Do not awaken them. Walk lighter. They are so tired, these myriad children of mine, sleeping in my thousand arms. They are overworked and over-worried. So many of them are sick, so many fretful. Many of them are last so full of naughtiness. But all of them so tired. Hush! They worry me with their noise and riot when they are awake. They are so good now they are asleep. Walk lightly. Let them rest. Where the ebbing tide flows softly through worn arches to the sea, you may hear the stone-faced city talking to the restless waters. Why will you never stay with me? Why come but to go? I cannot say. I do not understand. From the deep sea I come, but only as a bird, missed from a child's hand with a cord. When she calls I must return. It is so with these children of mine. They come to me. I know not whence. I nurse them for a little while, till a hand I do not see plucks them back, and others take their place. Through the still air there passes a ripple of sound. The sleeping city stirs with the faint sigh. A distant milk-cart rattling by raises a thousand echoes. It is the vanguard of a yoked army. Soon from every street there rises the soothing cry. Me hilt, me hilt. London, like some gargantuan babe, is awake, crying for its milk. These be the white-smocked nurses hastening with its morning nourishment. The early church bells ring. You have had your milk, little London. Now come and say your prayers. Another week has just begun, baby London. God knows what will happen. Say your prayers. One by one the little creatures creep from behind the blinds into the streets. The brooding tenderness is vanished from the city's face. The fretful noises of the day have come again. Silence, her lover of the night, kisses her stone lips and steals away, and you, gentle reader, return home, garlanded with the self-sufficiency of the early riser. But it was of a certain week-day morning in the strand that I was thinking. I was standing outside Gatti's restaurant, where I had just breakfasted, listening leisurely to an argument, between an indignant lady-passenger, presumably of Irish extraction, and an omnibus conductor. For what do you want, then, to paint putney on your bus, if you don't go to putney, said the lady? We do go to putney, said the conductor. Then why did you put me out here? I didn't put you out. You got out. Sure, didn't the gentleman in the car in a tell me I was coming further away from putney every minute? Well, and so you was. Then why didn't you tell me? I was out to know you wanted to go to putney. You sings out putney, and I stops, and in you jumps. And for what do you think I called out putney, then? Because it's my name. I'll raider the bus's name. This ear is a putney. How can it be a putney, when it isn't going to putney, you gum-a-hawk? Ain't you an Irish woman? retorted the conductor. Course you are. But you aren't always going to Ireland. We're going to putney in time. Only were I going to Liverpool Street first. I are up Jim. The bus moved on, and I was about to cross the road, when a man, muttering savagely to himself, walked into me. He would have swept past me had I not, recognizing him, arrested him. It was my friend B., a busy editor of magazines and journals. It was some seconds before he appeared able to struggle out of his abstraction, and remember himself. Hello! he then said. Who would have thought of seeing you here? To judge by the way you were walking, I replied. One would imagine the strand the last place in which you expected to see any human being. Do you ever walk into a short tempered muscular man? Did I walk into you? he asked, surprised. Well, not writing, I answered, if we are to be literal. You walked on to me. If I had not stopped you, I suppose you would have walked over me. It is this confounded Christmas business, he explained. It drives me off my head. I have heard Christmas advanced as an excuse for many things, I replied. But not early in September. Oh, you know what I mean, he answered. We're in the middle of our Christmas number. I'm working day and night upon it. By the by, he added, that puts me in mind. I'm arranging a symposium, and I want you to join. Should Christmas— I interrupted him. My dear fellow, I said. I commenced my journalistic career when I was eighteen, and I have continued it at intervals ever since. I have written about Christmas from the sentimental point of view. I have analysed it from the philosophical point of view, and I have scarified it from the sarcastic standpoint. I have treated Christmas humorously for the comics, and sympathetically for the provincial weeklies. I have said all that is worth saying on the subject of Christmas, may be a trifle more. I have told the new-fashioned Christmas story. You know the sort of thing. Your heroine tries to understand herself, and, failing, runs off with the man who began as the hero. Your good woman turns out to be really bad when one comes to know her, while the villain, the only decent person in the story, dies with an enigmatic sentence on his lips that looks as if it meant something, but which you yourself will be sorry to have to explain. I have also written the old-fashioned Christmas story. You know that also. You begin with a good old-fashioned snowstorm. You have a good old-fashioned squire, and he lives in a good old-fashioned hall. You work in a good old-fashioned murder, and end up with a good old-fashioned Christmas dinner. I have gathered Christmas guests together round the crackling logs to tell ghost stories to each other on Christmas Eve, while without the wind howled, as it always does on these occasions, at its proper cue. I have sent children to heaven on Christmas Eve. It must be quite a busy time for St. Peter Christmas morning. So many good children die on Christmas Eve. It has always been a popular night with them. I have revivified dead lovers and brought them back well and jolly, just in time to sit down to the Christmas dinner. I am not ashamed of having done these things. At the time I thought them good. I once loved current wine and girls with towsly hair. One's views change as one grows older. I have discussed Christmas as a religious festival. I have arraigned it as a social incubus. If there be any joke connected with Christmas that I have not already made, I shall be glad to hear it. I have trotted out the indigestion jokes till the sight of one of them gives me indigestion myself. I have ridiculed the family gathering. I have scoffed at the Christmas present. I have made witty use of Pate of Familius and his bills. I have— Did I ever show you—I broke off to ask, as we were crossing the hay market—that little parody of mine on Poe's poem of the bells. It begins—he interrupted me in his turn— Bill's, Bill's, Bill's—he repeated. You are quite right, I admitted. I forgot I ever showed it to you. You never did, he replied. Then how do you know how it begins? I asked. I don't know for certain, he admitted, but I get on an average sixty-five a year submitted to me, and they all begin that way. I thought perhaps yours did also. I don't see how else it could begin, I retorted. He had rather annoyed me. Besides, it doesn't matter how a poem begins. It is how it goes on that is the important thing. And anyhow, I'm not going to write you anything about Christmas. Ask me to make you a new joke about a plumber. Suggest my inventing something original and not too shocking for a child to say about heaven. Propose my running you off a dog-story that can be believed by a man of average determination, and we may come to terms. But on the subject of Christmas I am taking a rest. By this time we had reached Piccadilly Circus. I don't blame you, he said, if you are as sick of the subject as I am. So soon as these Christmas numbers are off my mind, and Christmas is over till next June at the office, I shall begin it at home. The housekeeping is gone up a pound a week already. I know what that means. The dear little woman is saving up to give me an expensive present that I don't want. I think the presents are the worst part of Christmas. Emma will give me a water-colour that she has painted herself. She always does. There would be no harm in that, if she did not expect me to hang it in the drawing-room. Have you ever seen my cousin Emma's water-colours? He asked. I think I have, I replied. There's no thinking about it, he retorted angrily. They're not the sort of water-colours you forget. He apostrifies the circus generally. Why do people do these things? he demanded. Even an amateur artist must have some sense. Can't they see what is happening? There's that thing of hers hanging in the passage. I put it in the passage because there's not much light in the passage. She's labelled it reverie. If she had called it influenza, I could have understood it. I asked her where she got the idea from, and she said she saw the sky like that one evening in Norfolk. Great heavens! Then why didn't she shut her eyes, or go home, and hide behind the bed-curtains? If I had seen a sky like that in Norfolk, I should have taken the first train back to London. I suppose the poor girl can't help seeing these things, but why paint them? I said, I suppose painting is a necessity to some natures. But why give the things to me? he pleaded. I could offer him no adequate reason. The idiotic presence that people give you, he continued. I said I'd like Tennyson's poems one year. They had worried me to know what I did want. I didn't want anything, really. That was the only thing I could think of that I wasn't dead sure I didn't want. Well, they clubbed together four of them, and gave me Tennyson in twelve volumes, illustrated with coloured photographs. They meant kindly, of course. If you suggest a tobacco pouch, they give you a blue velvet bag capable of holding about a pound, embroidered with flowers, life-size. The only way one could use it would be to put a strap to it, and wear it as a satchel. Would you believe it? I have got a velvet smoking-jacket ornamented with forget-me-nots and butterflies in coloured silk. I'm not joking. And they asked me why I never wear it. I'll bring it down to the club one of these nights, and wake the place up a bit. It needs it. We had arrived by this at the steps of the Devonshire. And I'm just as bad, he went on, when I give presents. I never give them what they want. I never hit upon anything that is of any use to anybody. If I give Jane a chinchilla-tip it, you may be certain chinchilla is the most out-of-date fur that any woman could wear. Oh, that's nicer view, she says. Now that is just the very thing I wanted. I will keep it by me till chinchilla comes in again. I give the girls watch-chains, when nobody is wearing watch-chains. When watch-chains are all the rage, I give them earrings. And they thank me, and suggest my taking them to a fancy-dress ball, that being their only chance to wear the confounded things. I waste money on white gloves with black backs, to find that white gloves with black backs stamp a woman as suburban. I believe all the shopkeepers in London save their old stock to palm it off on me at Christmas time. And why does it always take half a dozen people to serve you with a pair of gloves, I'd like to know. Only last week Jane asked me to get her some gloves for that last mansion-house affair. I was feeling amiable, and I thought I would do the thing handsomely. I hate going into a draper shop. Everybody stares at a man as if he were forcing his way into the ladies' department of a Turkish bath. One of those marionette sort of men came up to me and said it was a fine morning. Well, the devil did I want to talk about the morning to him for. I said I want it some gloves. I described them to the best of my recollection. I said I want them four buttons, but they are not to be button gloves. The buttons are in the middle, and they reach up to the elbow if you know what I mean. He bowed and said he understood exactly what I meant, which was a damn sight more than I did. I told him I wanted three-pair cream and three-pair fawn-collard, and the fawn-collard were to be Swedes. He corrected me. He said I meant Suede. I dare say he was right, but the interruption put me off, and I had to begin over again. He listened attentively until I had finished. I guess I was about five minutes standing with him there close to the door. He said, Is that all you require, sir, this morning? I said it was. Thank you, sir, he replied, of this way, please, sir. He took me into another room, and there we met a man named Jansen, to whom he briefly introduced me as a gentleman who desired gloves. Yes, sir, said Mr. Jansen, and what sort of gloves do you desire? I told him I wanted six pairs altogether, three suede, fawn-collard, and three cream-collard, kids. He said do you mean kid gloves, sir, or gloves for children? He made me angry by that. I told him I was not in the habit of using slang, nor am I when buying gloves. He said he was sorry. I explained to him about the buttons, so far as I could understand it myself, and about the length. I asked him to see to it that the buttons were sewn on firmly, and that the stitching everywhere was perfect, adding that the last gloves my wife had had of his firm had been most unsatisfactory. Jane had impressed upon me to add that. She said it would make them more careful. He listened to me enwrapped ecstasy. I might have been music. And what size, sir, he asked. I had forgotten that. Oh, sixes, I answered, unless they are very stretchy indeed, in which case they are better be five and three-quarter. Oh, and the stitching on the cream is to be black, I added. That was another thing I had forgotten. Thank you very much, said Mr. Jansen. Is there anything else that you require this morning? No, thank you, I replied, not this morning. I was beginning to like the man. He took me for quite a walk, and wherever we went everybody left off what they were doing to stare at me. I was getting tired when we reached the glove department. He marched me up to a young man who was sticking pins into himself. He said, gloves, and disappeared through a curtain. The young man left off sticking pins into himself and lent across the counter. Ladies' gloves or gentlemen's gloves, he said. Well, I was pretty mad by this time, as you can guess. It is funny when you come to think of it afterwards, but the wonder then was that I didn't punch his head. I said, are you ever busy in this shop? Does there ever come a time when you feel you would like to get your work done, instead of lingering over it and spinning it out for pure love of the thing? He did not appear to understand me. I said, I met a man at your door a quarter of an hour ago, and we talked about these gloves that I want, and I told him all my ideas on the subject. He took me to your Mr. Janssen? And Mr. Janssen and I went over the whole business again. Now Mr. Janssen leaves it with you, you who do not even know whether I want ladies or gentlemen's gloves. Before I go over this story for the third time, I want to know whether you are the man who is going to serve me, or whether you are merely a listener, because personally I am tired of the subject. Well, this was the right man at last, and I got my gloves from him. But what is the explanation? What is the idea? I was in that shop from first to last five and thirty minutes, and then a fool took me out the wrong way to show me a special line in sleeping socks. I told him I was not requiring any. He said he didn't want me to buy. He only wanted me to see them. No wonder the drapers have had to start luncheon and tea-rooms. They'll fix up small furnished flats soon where a woman can live for a week. 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. Values 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 explain. 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're going to have. Overfeed 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 Madam Tussauds 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 schoolboy. 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 cab-man coming home. I rose to go. Then you won't join that symposium, said be. 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 be. 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 seemed 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, offhand. 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 candlestick, wherefrom my brilliancy might be visible and helpful unto men, I arrived before a dingy portal in Checkers 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 a rear, 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 tended him five. The negotiations terminated with un-gentlemanly language on his part, and the Stormy Petrels scattered, never to be foregathered together again above the troubled waters of humanity. Nowadays, listening to the feeble plans of modern reformers, I cannot help but smile, remembering what was done in Checkers Street, St. Luke's, in an age where 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 abolish 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 loungers. 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 artists were in those golden days! Whence have they vanished? Ladies in blue tights and flaxen hair dance before my eyes today, 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 off 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 nowadays 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 braum, 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 die, 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 power of 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 weights. 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 cynics suggestion that it was worth enduring the miseries of Christmas to enjoy this 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 gasolier. They framed the fly-blown mirror and the taudry 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 collard 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 there 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 fracker 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 pretense 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 weights, 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 didn't 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 weights 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 farm-house 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's 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 reunions," 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 your best. 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. I'm 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. She aren't belong. 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's 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 tomorrow 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 nonplussed. 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. And 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'm 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's 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 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 downstairs. 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 upstairs woman. Shall we put it off? Well, what do you think, dear, replies the downstairs. 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. They begin by kissing the children. A woman never leaves her house without secret misgivings that she will never return to it alive. One child cannot be found. When it is found it wishes it hadn't been. It has to be washed, preparatory to being kissed. After that the dog has to be found and kissed, and final instructions given to the cook. Then they open the front door. Oh, George! calls out the first woman, turning round again. Are you there? Hello? answers a voice from the distance. Do you want me? No, dear, only to say good-bye. I'm going. Oh, good-bye. Good-bye, dear. Do you think it's going to rain? Oh, no, I should not say so. George! Yes? Have you got any money? Five minutes later they come running back. The one has forgotten her parasol, the other her purse. And speaking of purses reminds one of another essential difference between the male and female human animal. A man carries his money in his pocket. When he wants to use it, he takes it out and lays it down. This is a crude way of doing things. A woman displays more subtlety. Say she is standing in the street and wants forpence to pay for a bunch of violets she has purchased from a flower-girl. She has two parcels in one hand and a parasol in the other. With the remaining two fingers of the left hand she secures the violets. The question then arises how to pay the girl. She flutters for a few minutes, evidently not quite understanding why it is she cannot do it. The reason then occurs to her. She has only two hands, and both these are occupied. First she thinks she will put the parcels and the flowers into her right hand. Then she thinks she will put the parasol into her left. Then she looks round for a table, or even a chair. But there is not such a thing in the whole street. The difficulty is solved by her dropping the parcels and the flowers. The girl picks them up for her and holds them. This enables her to feel for her pocket with her right hand while waving her open parasol about with her left. She knocks an old gentleman's hat off into the gutter and nearly blinds the flower-girl before it occurs to her to close it. This done, she leans it up against the flower-girl's basket and sets to work in earnest with both hands. She seizes herself firmly by the back and turns the upper part of her body round till her hair is in front and her eyes behind. Still holding herself firmly with her left hand, did she let herself go goodness knows where she would spin to. With her right she prospects herself. The purse is there. She can feel it. The problem is how to get at it. The quickest way would, of course, be to take off the skirt, sit down on the curb, turn it inside out and work from the bottom of the pocket upwards. But this simple idea never seems to occur to her. There are some thirty folds at the back of the dress. Between two of these folds commences the secret passage. At last, purely by chance, she suddenly discovers it, nearly upsetting herself in the process, and the purse is brought up to the surface. The difficulty of opening it still remains. She knows it opens with a spring, but the secret of that spring she has never mastered, and she never will. Her plan is to worry it generally until it does open. Five minutes will always do it, provided she's not flustered. At last it does open. It would be incorrect to say that she opens it. It opens because it is sick of being mauled about, and as likely as not it opens at the moment when she is holding it upside down. If you happen to be near enough to look over her shoulder, you will notice that the golden silver lies loose within it. In an inner sanctuary, carefully secured with a second secret spring, she keeps her coppers, together with a postage stamp, and a draper's receipt, nine months old, for eleven-pence three farthings. I remember the indignation of an old bus conductor once. Inside we were nine women and two men. I sat next the door, and his remarks therefore he addressed to me. It was certainly taking him some time to collect the fares, but I think he would have got on better had he been less bustling. He worried them and made them nervous. Look at that, he said, drawing my attention to a poor lady opposite who was diving in the customary manner for her purse. They sit on their money, women do. Blessed if you wouldn't think they was trying to hatch it! At length the lady drew from underneath herself an exceedingly fat purse. Pussy-riding in a bumpy bus perched upon that thing, he continued. Think what a stamina they must have! He grew confidential. I've seen one woman, he said, pull out from underneath her a street door-key, a tin box of lozenges, a pencil case, a whopping big purse, a packet of hairpins, and a smelling-bottle. Why, you and me would be wretched sitting on a plain doorknob, and then women goes about like that all day. I suppose they get used to it. Drop them on an eyed-down pillow and they'd scream. The time it takes me to get tuppence out of them, why, it's heartbreaking. First they tries one side, then they tries the other, then they gets up and shakes their selves till the bus jerks them back again, and there they are a more hopeless eat than ever. If I had my way, I'd make every bus carrier female searcher as could overall them one at a time and take the money from them. Talk about the poor pick-pocket. What I say is that a man has finds his way into a woman's pocket. Well, he deserves what he gets. But it was the thought of more serious matters that lured me into reflections concerning the over-carefulness of women. It is a theory of mine, wrong possibly, indeed I have so been informed, that we pick our way through life with too much care. We are forever looking down upon the ground. Maybe we do avoid a stumble or two over a stone or a briar, but also we miss the blue of the sky, the glory of the hills. These books that good men write telling us that what they call success in life depends on our flinging aside our youth and wasting our manhood in order that we may have the means, when we are eighty, of spending a rollicking old age, annoy me. We save all our lives to invest in a South Sea bubble, and in skimping and scheming we have grown mean and narrow and hard. We will put off the gathering of the roses till to-morrow. Today it shall be all work, all bargain driving, all plotting. Lo, when to-morrow comes, the roses are blown, nor do we care for roses, idle things of small marketable value, cabbages are more to our fancy by the time to-morrow comes. Life is a thing to be lived, not spent, to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing. It is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of. Is it the wisest, who is always the most successful? I think not. The luckiest wist-player I ever came across was a man who was never quite certain what were Trump's, and whose most frequent observation during the game was, I really beg your pardon, addressed to his partner, a remark which generally elicited the reply, oh, don't apologize, all's well that ends well. The man I knew who made the most rapid fortune was a builder in the outskirts of Birmingham, who could not write his name, and who for thirty years of his life never went to bed sober. I do not say that forgetfulness of Trump should be cultivated by wist-players. I think my builder friend might have been even more successful had he learned to write his name, and had he occasionally, not overdoing it, enjoyed a sober evening. All I wish to impress is that virtue is not the road to success of the kind we are dealing with. We must find other reasons for being virtuous. Maybe there are some. The truth is, life is a gamble, pure and simple, and the rules we lay down for success are akin to the infallible systems with which a certain class of idiot goes armed each season to Monte Carlo. We can play the game with coolness and judgment, decide when to plunge and when to stake small, but to think that wisdom will decide it is to imagine that we have discovered the law of chance. Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a smile, leaving our losings with a shrug. Perhaps that is why we have been summoned to the board and the cards dealt round, that we may learn some of the virtues of the good gambler, his self-control, his courage under misfortune, his modesty under the strain of success, his firmness, his alertness, his general indifference to fate. Good lessons these, all of them. If by the game we learn some of them, our time on the green earth has not been wasted. If we rise from the table having learned only fretfulness and self-pity, I fear it has been. The grim hall-porter taps at the door. Number five hundred billion and twenty-eight, your boatman is waiting, sir. So, is it time already? We pick up our counters. Of what use are they? In the country the other side of the river they are no tender. The blood red for gold, and the pale green for love. To whom shall we fling them? Here is some poor beggar longing to play. Let us give them to him as we pass out. Poor devil, the game will amuse him for a while. Keep your powder dry and trust in Providence, is the motto of the wise. Wet powder could never be of any possible use to you. Dry it may be, with the help of Providence. We will call it Providence. It is a prettier name than chance, perhaps also a truer. Another mistake we make when we reason out our lives is this. We reason as though we were planning for reasonable creatures. It is a big mistake. Well-meaning ladies and gentlemen make it when they picture their ideal worlds. When marriage is reformed and the social problem solved, when poverty and war have been abolished by acclamation, and sin and sorrow rescinded by an overwhelming parliamentary majority, ah, then the world will be worthy of our living in it. You need not wait, ladies and gentlemen, so long as you think for that time. No social revolution is needed. No slow education of the people is necessary. It would all come about tomorrow if only we were reasonable creatures. Imagine a world of reasonable beings. The Ten Commandments would be unnecessary. No reasoning being sins. No reasoning creature makes mistakes. There would be no rich men, for what reasonable man cares for luxury and ostentation? There would be no poor. That I should eat enough for two while my brother in the next street, as good a man as I, starves, is not reasonable. There would be no difference of opinion on any two points. There is only one reason. You, dear reader, would find that on all subjects you were of the same opinion as I. No novels will be written. No plays performed. The lives of reasonable creatures do not afford drama. No mad loves. No mad laughter. No scalding tears. No fierce, unreasoning, brief lived joys. No sorrows. No wild dreams. Only reason. Reason everywhere. But for the present we remain unreasonable. If I eat this mayonnaise, drink this champagne, I shall suffer in my liver. Then why do I eat it? Julia is a charming girl, amiable, wise, and witty. Also she has a share in a brewery. Then why does John Mary Anne, who is short-tempered to say the least of it, who he feels will not make him so good a housewife, who has extravagant notions, who has no little fortune? There is something about Anne's chin that fascinates him. He could not explain to you what. On the whole Julia is the better looking of the two. But the more he thinks of Julia, the more he is drawn towards Anne. So Tom marries Julia, and the brewery fails. And Julia, on a holiday, contracts rheumatic fever, and is a helpless invalid for life. While Anne comes in for ten thousand pounds, left to her by an Australian uncle no one had ever heard of. I have been told of a young man who chose his wife with excellent care. Said he to himself very wisely. In the selection of a wife a man cannot be too circumspect. He convinced himself that the girl was everything a helpmate should be. She had every virtue that could be expected in a woman. No faults, but such as a inseparable from a woman. Speaking practically, she was perfection. He married her, and found she was all he had thought her. Only one thing could he urge against her. That he did not like her. And that, of course, was not her fault. How easy life would be did we know ourselves. Could we always be sure that tomorrow we should think as we do today? We fall in love during a summer holiday. She is fresh, delightful, altogether charming. The blood rushes to our head every time we think of her. Our ideal career is one of perpetual service at her feet. It seems impossible that fate could bestow upon us any greater happiness than the privilege of cleaning her boots and kissing the hem of her garment. If the hem be a little muddy, that will please us the more. We tell her our ambition, and at that moment every word we utter is sincere. But the summer holiday passes, and with it the holiday mood. And winter finds us wondering how we are going to get out of the difficulty into which we have landed ourselves. Or, worse still, perhaps, the mood lasts longer than is usual. We become formally engaged. We marry. I wonder how many marriages are the result of a passion that is burnt out before the altar rails are reached. And three months afterwards the little lass is broken-hearted to find that we consider the lacing of her boots a bore. Her feet seem to have grown bigger. There is no excuse for us. Save that we are silly children. Never sure of what we are crying for. Hurting one another in our play. Crying very loudly when hurt ourselves. I knew an American lady once, who used to bore me with long accounts of the brutalities exercised upon her by her husband. She had instituted divorce proceedings against him. The trial came on, and she was highly successful. We all congratulated her, and then for some months she dropped out of my life. But there came a day when we again found ourselves together. One of the problems of social life is to know what to say to one another when we meet. Every man and woman's desire is to appear sympathetic and clever. And this makes conversation difficult because, taking us all round, we are neither sympathetic nor clever. But this, by the way. Of course I began to talk to her about her former husband. I asked her how he was getting on. She replied that she thought he was very comfortable. Married again, I suggested. Yes, she answered. Serve him right, I exclaimed, and his wife, too. She was a pretty bright-eyed little woman, my American friend, and I wished to ingratiate myself. A woman who would marry such a man, knowing what she must have known of him, is sure to make him wretched, and we may trust him to be a curse to her. My friend seemed inclined to defend him. I think he is greatly improved, she argued. Nonsense, I returned. A man never improves. Once a villain, always a villain. Oh, hush! she pleaded. You mustn't call him that. Why not? I answered. I've heard you call him a villain yourself. It was wrong of me, she said, flushing. I'm afraid he was not the only one to be blamed. We were both foolish in those days. But I think we have both learned a lesson. I remained silent, waiting for the necessary explanation. You had better come and see him for yourself, she added, with a little laugh. To tell the truth, I am the woman who has married him. Tuesday is my day. Number two, Kay Mansions. And she ran off, leaving me staring after her. I believe an enterprising clergyman who would set up a little church in the strand, just outside the law courts, might do quite a trade remarrying couples who had just been divorced. A friend of mine, a respondent, told me he had never loved his wife more than on two occasions. The first, when she refused him. The second, when she came into the witness box to give evidence against him. You are curious creatures, you men, remarked a lady once to another man in my presence. You never seem to know your own mind. She was feeling annoyed with men, generally. I do not blame her. I feel annoyed with them myself sometimes. There is one man in particular I am always feeling intensely irritated against. He says one thing and acts another. He will talk like a saint and behave like a fool. Knows what is right and does what is wrong. But we will not speak further of him. He will be all he should be one day, and then we will pack him into a nice, comfortably lined box, and screw the lid down tight upon him, and put him away in a quiet little spot near a church I know of, lest he should get up and misbehave himself again. The other man, who is a wise man as men go, looked at his fair critic with a smile. My dear madam, he replied, you are blaming the wrong person. I confess I do not know my mind, and what little I do know of it I do not like. I did not make it. I did not select it. I am more dissatisfied with it than you can possibly be. It is a greater mystery to me than it is to you, and I have to live with it. You should pity, not blame me. There are moods in which I fall to envying those old hermits, who frankly and with outrageous cowardice, shirked the problem of life. There are days when I dream of an existence unfettered by the thousand petty strings with which our souls lie bound to Liliputia land. I picture myself living in some Norwegian sata, high above the black waters of a rock-bound fjord. No other human creature disputes with me, my kingdom. I am alone with the whispering fur forests, and the stars. How I live, I am not quite sure. Once a month I could journey down into the villages and return laden. I should not need much. For the rest my gun and fishing-rod would supply me. I would have with me a couple of big dogs, who would talk to me with their eyes, so full of dumb thought. And together we would wander over the uplands seeking our dinner, after the old primitive fashion of the men who dreamt not of ten-course dinners and savoy suppers. I would cook the food myself, and sit down to the meal with a bottle of good wine, such as starts a man's thoughts. For I am inconsistent, as I acknowledge, and that gift of civilization I would bear with me into my hermitage. Then in the evening, with pipe in mouth, beside my logwood fire, I would sit and think, until new knowledge came to me. Strengthened by those silent voices that are drowned in the roar of street-land, I might perhaps grow into something nearer to what it was intended that a man should be. Might catch a glimpse, perhaps, of the meaning of life. No, no, my dear lady. Into this life of renunciation I would not take a companion. Certainly not of the sex you were thinking of, even would she care to come, which I doubt. There are times when a man is better without the woman, when a woman is better without the man. Love drags us from the depths, makes men and women of us. But if we would climb a little nearer to the stars, we must say goodbye to it. We men and women do not show ourselves to each other at our best. Too often I fear at our worst. The woman's highest ideal of man is the lover. To a man the woman is always the possible beloved. We see each other's hearts, but not each other's souls. In each other's presence we never shake ourselves free from the earth. Matchmaking mother-nature is always at hand to prompt us. A woman lifts us up into manhood, but there she would have us stay. Climb up to me, she cries to the lad, walking with soiled feet in muddy ways. Be a true man that you may be worthy to walk by my side. Be brave to protect me, kind and tender and true. But climb no higher, stay here by my side. The martyr, the prophet, the leader of the world's fallen hopes, she would wake from his dream. Her arms she would fling about his neck, holding him down. To the woman, the man says, you are my wife. Here is your America, within these walls. Here is your work, your duty. True, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand. But men and women are not made in moulds, and the world's work is various. Sometimes, to her sorrow, a woman's work lies beyond the home. The duty of Mary was not to Joseph. The hero in the popular novel is the young man who says, I love you better than my soul. Our favourite heroine in fiction is the woman who cries to her lover, I would go down into hell to be with you. There are men and women who cannot answer thus. The men who dream dreams. The women who see visions. Impracticable people from the Bayswater point of view. But Bayswater would not be the abode of peace it is had it not been for such. Have we not placed sexual love on a pedestal higher than it deserves? It is a noble passion, but it is not the noblest. There is a wider love by the side of which it is but as the lamp illumining the cottage, to the moonlight bathing the hills and valleys. There were two women once. This is a play I saw acted in the daylight. They had been friends from girlhood till there came between them the usual trouble. A man. A weak, pretty creature, not worth a thought from either of them, but women loved the unworthy. There would be no over-population problem, did they not? And this poor specimen, ill luck had ordained they should contend for. Their rivalry brought out all that was worst in both of them. It is a mistake to suppose love only elevates. It can debase. It was a mean struggle for what to an onlooker must have appeared a remarkably unsatisfying prize. The loser might well have left the conqueror to her poor triumph, even granting it had been gained unfairly. But the old, ugly, primeval passions had been stirred in these women, and the wedding bells closed only the first act. The second is not difficult to guess. It would have ended in the divorce court had not the deserted wife felt that a finer revenge would be secured to her by silence. In the third, after an interval of only eighteen months, the man died. The first piece of good fortune that seems to have occurred to him personally throughout the play. His position must have been an exceedingly anxious one from the beginning. Notwithstanding his flabbinous, one cannot but regard him with a certain amount of pity, not unmixed with amusement. Most of life's dramas can be viewed as either farce or tragedy, according to the whim of the spectator. The actors invariably play them as tragedy, but then that is the essence of good farce acting. Thus was secured the triumph of legal virtue and the punishment of irregularity. And the play might be dismissed as uninterestingly orthodox. Were it not for the fourth act? Showing how the wronged wife came to the woman she had once wronged, to ask and grant forgiveness. Strangely, as it may sound, they found their love for one another unchanged. They had been long-parted. It was sweet to hold each other's hands again. Two lonely women, they agreed to live together. Those who knew them well in this later time say that their life was very beautiful, filled with graciousness and nobility. I do not say that such a story could ever be common, but it is more probable than the world might credit. Sometimes the man is better without the woman, the woman without the man. End of chapter 8 Chapter 9 Of Second Thoughts of an Adult Fellow This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. An old English-sized Frenchman, I used to meet often in my earlier journalistic days, held a theory concerning man's future state, that has since come to afford me more food for reflection than, at the time, I should have deemed possible. He was a bright-eyed, agor-little man. One felt no lotus-land could be paradise to him. We build our heaven of the stones of our desires. To the old red-bearded Norseman, a foe to fight and the cup to drape. To the artiste Greek, a grove of animated staturey. To the red-engine, his happy hunting ground. To the Turk, his harem. To the Jew, his new Jerusalem. Paved with gold. To others, according to their taste, limited by the range of their imagination. Few things had more terrors for me when a child than heaven, as pictured for me by certain of the good folks round about me. I was told that if I were a good lad, kept my hair tidy, and did not tease the cat, I would probably, when I died, go to a place where all the long I would sit still and sing hymns. Think of it, as reward to a healthy boy for being good. There would be no breakfast and no dinner, no tea and no supper. One old lady cheered me a little with a hint, that the monotony might be broken by a little manna. But the idea of everlasting manna paled upon me, and my suggestions concerning the possibilities of sherbet or jambles were scouted as irreverent. There would be no skull, but also there would be no cricket and no rounders. I should feel no desire, so I was assured, to do another angel's text by sliding down the heavenly banisters. My only joy would be to sing. Shall we start singing the moment we get up in the morning? I asked. There won't be any morning, was the answer. There will be no day and no night. It will all be one long day without end. And shall we always be singing? I persisted. Yes, you will be so happy, you will always want to sing. Shouldn't I ever get tired? No, you will never get tired, and you will never get sleepy or hungry or thirsty. And does it go on like that forever? Yes, forever and ever. Will it go on for a million years? Yes, a million years, and then another million years, and then another million years after that. There will never be an end to it. I can remember to this day the agony of those nights, when I would lie awake, thinking of this endless heaven, from which there seemed to be no possible escape. For the other place was equally eternal, or I might have been tempted to seek refuge there. We groan of folk, our brains dulled by the slowly-accured habit of not thinking, do wrong to torture children with these awful teams. Eternity, heaven, hell, are meaningless words to us. We repeat them as we gavel our prayers, telling our smug, self-satisfied selves that we are miserable seniors. But to the child, the intelligent stranger in the land, seeking to know their fearful realities. If you doubt me, reader, stand by yourself, beneath the stars, one night, and solve this thought, eternity. Your next address shall be the county lunatic asylum. My actively inclined French friend held cheerier views than are common of man's life beyond the grave. His belief was that we were destined to constant change, to everlasting work. We were to pass through the older planets to labor in the greater suns. But for such advanced career, a more capable being was needed. No one of us was sufficient, he argued, to be granted a future existence all to himself. His idea was that two or three or four of us, according to our intrinsic value, would be combined to make a new and more important individuality, fitted for a higher existence. Man, he pointed out, was already a collection of the beasts. You and I, he would say, tapping forth to my chest and then his own. We have them all here. The ape, the tiger, the pig, the motherly hand, the game cock, the good ant. We are all rolled into one. So the man of the future, he will be made up of many men, the courage of one, the wisdom of another, the kindness of a third. Take a city man, he would continue, say the Lord Mayor, add to him a poet, say Swinburne, mix them with a religious enthusiast, say General Butte. There, you will have the man fit for the higher life. Garibaldi and Bismarck, he held, should make a very fine mixture, correcting one another, if needful, extract of Ipsum might be added as seasoning. He thought that the Irish politicians would mix admirably with scotch-divines. That oxport dons would go well with Lady Noblists. He was convinced that Count Altstoy, if you gait the journeys, we call them measures in those days. Together with a humorist, he was kind enough to suggest myself, he would produce something very choice. Queen Elizabeth, he fancied, was probably being reserved to go, let us hope in the long-distant future, with Oide. It sounds a whimsical theory, said down here in my words, not he is. But the old fellow was so much in earnest, that few of us ever thought to laugh as it talked. Indeed, there were moments on starry nights, as walking home from the office, we would pause on Waterloo Bridge, to enjoy the witchery of the long line of the embankment lines, when I could almost believe, as I listened to him, in the not impossibility of his dreams. Even as regards this world, it would often be a game, one thinks, and no loss, if some half-dozen of us were all together or boiled down, or whatever the process necessary might be, and something made out of us in that way. Have not you, my fair reader, sometimes taught to yourself, what a delightful husband Tommy's, plus Harry Dad, plus Dick the Other, would make. Tommy's always so cheerful and good tempered, yet you feel that, in the serious moments of life, he would be lacking. A delightful hubby, when you felt merry, yes, but you would not go to him for comfort and strength in your troubles. Now would you? Now, in your hour of sorrow, how good it would be to have near you, grave, honest Harry. He is a good sort, Harry. Perhaps, after all, he is the best of the three, solid, staunch, and true. What a pity, he is just a trifle commonplace and unambitious. Your friends, not knowing his twirling hidden qualities, would hardly envy you. And the husband, that no other girl envies you, well, that would hardly be satisfactory, owed it. Dick, on the other hand, is clever and brilliant. He will make his way. There will come a day you are convinced, when a woman will be proud to bear his name. If only he were not so self-centered, if only he were more sympathetic. But the combination of the three, or rather of the best qualities of the three, Tom's good temper, Harry's tender strength, Dick's brilliant masterfulness, that is the man who would be worthy of you. The woman, David Copperfield wanted, was Agnes Andura rolled into one. He had to take them one after the other, which was not so nice. And did you really love Agnes, Mr. Dickens, or merely feel he ought to? Forgive me, but I am doubtful concerning that second marriage of Copperfields. Come, strictly between ourselves, Mr. Dickens, was not David, good human soul, now and again a wee bit bored by the immaculate Agnes. She made him an excellent wife, I am sure. She never ordered oysters by the barrel, unopened. It did, on any day, have been safe to ask Traddle's hope to dinner. In fact, Sophie and the whole Rose Garden might have accompanied him. Agnes would have been equal to the occasion. The dinner would have been perfectly cooked and served, and Agnes' sweet smile would have pervaded the meal. But after the dinner, when David and Traddle set smoking alone, while from the drawing-room, drifted down the notes of high-class elevator music, played by the saintly Agnes, did the never, glancing covertly towards the empty chair between them, see the laughing-carl-framed face of a very foolish little omen, one of those foolish little omen that the wise men sang God for making, and wish, in spite of all, that it were flesh and blood, not shadow. O you foolish wise folk, who would remodel human nature? Can't you see how great is the work given unto childish hands? Thank you that in well-ordered housekeeping and high-class conversation wise the whole making of a man. Foolish Dora, fashioned by clever old magician nature, who knows that weakness and helplessness are a talisman calling for strength and tenderness in man. Trouble yourself not unduly about those oysters nor the under-done mutton little omen. Good plain cooks at twenty pounds a year will see to these things for us, and now and then, when a windfall comes our way, we will dine together at a moderate-priced restaurant, where these things are managed even better. Your work, dear, is to teach us gentleness and kindness. Lay your curls here, child. It is from such a zeal that we learn wisdom. Foolish wise folks near at you, Foolish wise folk could pull up the useless lilies, the needless roses, from the garden, would plant in their places only serviceable holes on cabbage. But the gardener knowing better plants the silly short-lived flowers, Foolish wise folk, asking for what purpose. As for Agnes Mr. Deacons, do you know what she always makes me think of? You will not mind my saying. The omen one reads about. Frankly, I don't believe in her. I do not refer to Agnes in particular, but the omen of whom she is a type. The faultless omen we read of. We men have many faults, but thank God they have one redeeming virtue. They are none of them faultless. But the heroine of fiction, oh, a terrible dragon of virtue is she. May heaven preserve us, poor man, undeserving though we be, from a life with the heroine of fiction. She is all soul and heart and intellect. It's never a bit of human nature to cancel off our by. Her beauty, it appels one. It is so painfully indescribable. Whence comes she? Why there goes she? Why do we never meet her like? Of women I know a goodish feel. I am the look among them for her prototype, but I find it not. They are charming, dear beautiful, all these women that I know. It would not be right for me to tell you ladies, the esteem and veneration with which I regard you all. You yourselves, blushing, would be the first to check my order. But yet, dear ladies, seen even through my eyes, you come not near the ladies that I read about. You are not if I may be permitted an expressive algorithm in the same street with them. Your beauty I can look upon, and retain my reason, for whatever value that may be to me. Your conversation, I admit, is clever and brilliant in the extreme. Your knowledge, vast and various. Your culture, quite Bostonian, yet you do not. I hardly know how to express it. You do not shine with the sixteen full-moon power of the heroine of fiction. You do not, and I thank you for it, impress me with the idea that you are the only woman on art. You, even you, possess tempers of your own. I am inclined to think you take an interest in your clothes. I would not be sure, even, that you do not mingle a little of your own hair, you know what I mean, with the hair of your head. There is, in your temperament, a vein of vanity, a suggestion of selfishness, a spice of laziness. I have known you a trifle unreasonable, a little inconsiderate, slightly ejecting. Unlike the heroine of fiction, you have a certain number of human appetites and instincts. A few human follies, perhaps a human fault, or shall we say two. In short, dear ladies, you also, even as a man, are the children of Adam and Eve. Tell me, if you know, where I may meet with this supernatural sister of yours, this woman that one reads about. She never keeps anyone waiting while she does her back hair. She is never indignant with everybody else in the house because she cannot find her own birds. She never scolds the servants. She is never cross with the children. She never slams the door. She is never jealous of her younger sister. She never lingers at the gate with any cousin but the right one. Dear me, where do they keep them? These women that one reads about. I suppose, where they keep the pretty girl of art. You have seen her, have you not, reader? The pretty girl in the picture. She leaps the six-bed gate with a year and a half to spare, turning round in her saddle for a while to make some smiling remark to the comic man behind, who of course is standing on his head in the ditch. She floats gracefully off the pay on stormy mornings. Her baneous, generally of Chiffon and Old Pointless, has not lost a curve. The older ladies, bedding round her, look wet. Their dress clings damply to their limbs. But the pretty girl of art dives and never a curl of her hair is disarranged. The pretty girl of art stands lightly on tip-tail and volleys a tennis ball six feet above her head. The pretty girl of art keeps the head of the pond straight against the stiff current and the strong wind. She never gets the water off her sleeve and down her back and all over the cushions. Her pole never sticks in the mud with the steam launched ten years off and the man looking the other way. The pretty girl of art skates in high-heeled French shoes at an angle of 45 to the surface of the eyes, both hands in her mouth. She never sits down plump with her feet a year apart and says ow. The pretty girl of art drives tandem down pickley during the hide-up decision at 18 miles an hour. It never occurs to her leader that the time has now arrived for him to turn round and get into the cart. The pretty girl of art rides her bicycle through the town on market day carrying a basket of eggs and smiling right and left. She never throws away both her handles and runs into a cow. The pretty girl of art goes trout fishing in openwork stockings under a blazing sun with a bunch of new beast-bangled primroses in her hair and every time she gracefully flicks her rod she hauls out a salmon. She never ties herself up to a tree or hooks the duck. She never comes home soaked and desegreable to tell you that she caught six but put them all back again because they were merely two or three pounders and not ward the trouble of carrying. The pretty girl of art plays croquet with one hand and looks as if she enjoyed the game. She never tries to accidentally kick her ball into position when nobody is noticing or stands it out that she is through a hoop that she knows she isn't. She is a good all-round sportswoman is the pretty girl in the picture. The only thing I have to say against her is that she makes one dissatisfied with the girl out of the picture. The girl who mistakes a punt for a tea totem so that you'll end feeling as if you had had a day in the Bay of Biscay and who every now and again stands you with the thick end of the pole. The girl who does not skate with her hands in her mouth but who, throwing them up to heaven says I am going and who goes taking care that you go with her. The girl who, as you brush her down and try to comfort her explains to you indignantly that the horse took the corner too sharply and never noticed the milestone. The girl whose hair or sea water does not improve. There can be no doubt about it that there is where they keep the good woman of fiction where they keep the pretty girl of art. Does it not occur to you mausoleum archers that you are sadly disturbing us? These women that are a combination of Venus, St. Cecilia and Elizabeth Frye you paint them for us in your glowing pages. It is not kind of you knowing as you must tell women we have to put up with. Would we not be happier we men and women were we to idealize one another less? My dear young lady you have nothing whatever to complain to fate about, I assure you. Unclaps those pretty hands of yours and come away from the darkening window. Jack is as good as a fellow as you deserve. Don't yearn so much. Sir Galahad, my dear Sir Galahad writes and fights in the land that lies beyond the sunset. Far enough away from this noisy little art where you and I spend much of our time tittle-tattling, flirting, wearing fine clothes and going to shows. And besides you must remember Sir Galahad was a bachelor as an idealist he was wise. Your Jack is by no means a bad sort of night as nights go nowadays in this unideal world. Here is much solid honesty about him and he does not pose. He is not exceptional I grant you but my dear have we ever tried the exceptional man. Yes he is very nice in drying room and it is interesting to read about him in the society papers. You will find most of his good qualities there. Take my advice. Don't look into him too closely. You be content with Jack and thank heaven he is no worse. We are not saints. We man none of us and our beautiful thoughts. I fear we write in poetry not action. The white knight, my dear young lady, with his pure soul, his heroic heart, his life's devotion to a noble endeavour does not leave down here to any great extent. They have tried it one or two of them and the world, you and I. The world is made up of you and I have generally starved and hooted them. There are not many of them left now. Do you think you would care to be the wife of one supposing one were to be found for you? Would you care to live with him in two furnished rooms in Clarenwell? Die with him on a chair bedstead. A sanctuary hand still put up a statue to him and you may be honoured as the wife who shared with him his sufferings. Do you think you are woman enough for that? If not, thank your stars you have secured for your own explosiveness one of us unexceptional man who knows no better than to admire you. You are not exceptional. And in us ordinary man there is some good. It wants finding that is all. We are not so commonplace as you think us. Even your Jack found of his dinner. His conversation forecornered by the sporting press. Yes, I agree he is not interesting as he sits snoring in the easy chair. But believe it or not there are the makings of a great hero in Jack. If fate would be kinder to him and shake him out of his ease. Dr. Jekyll contained beneath his ample waistcoat not two eagles but three. Not only hide but another. A greater than Jekyll. A man as near to the angels as a hide was to the demons. These well fed city men, these gaty Johnny's, these plough boys, apothecaries, thieves. What in each one lies hidden the hero? Did fate, the sculptor, choose to use his chisel? That little drab we have noticed now and then, our way taking us often past the end of the court, there was nothing by which to distinguish her. She was not overclean, could use coarse language on occasion. Just a spawn of the streets, take care less the cloak of our child should brush her. One morning the district coroner, not generally speaking a poet himself, but an adept at discovering poetry buried under unlikely rubbish heaps, tells us more about her. She earned six ceilings a week, and upon it supported a bedridden mother and three younger children. She was housewife, nurse, mother, breadwinner, rolled into one. Yes, dear our heroines out of fiction. So, Lutishtam has won the Victoria Cross, test out under a storm of bullets and rescued the riddle flag. Who'd have thought it of Lutishtam? The village alehouse, one always deemed the goal of his endeavours. Chance comes to Tom, and we find him out. To Harry, the fates were less kind. It never too well was Harry. Drank, knocked his wife about, they say. Bury him, we are well rid of him. He was good for nothing. Are we sure? Let us acknowledge you, your seniors. We know, those of us who dare to examine ourselves, that we are capable of every meanness, of every wrong under the sun. It is by the accident of circumstance, aided by the helpful watchfulness of the policemen, that our possibilities of crime are known, only to ourselves. But, having acknowledged our evil, let us also acknowledge, that we are capable of greatness. The martyrs, who faced death and torture unflinchingly for conscious sake, were men and women like ourselves. They had the wrong side. Before the small trials of daily life, they no doubt fell as we fall. By no means were they the pick of humanity. Tips many of them had been, and murderers, evil leavers, and evil doers. But the nobility was there also, lying dormant, and there they came. Among them must have been men, who had cheated their neighbors over the counter, men who had been cruel to their wives and children, selfish, scandal-mongering women. In easier times, their virtue might never have been known to any, but their maker. In every age and in every period, when and where fate has called upon men and women to play the man, human nature has not been found wanting. They were a poor lot, those French aristocrats, that the terror seized, cowardly, selfish, greedy, had been their lives. Yet, there must have been good, even in them. One the little things that in their little lives, they had thought so great were swept away from them. One they found themselves face to face with their realities. Then, even they played the man. Poor Shuffling, Charles the First, crossed it over with weakness and folly, deep down in him, at last we find a great gentleman. I like to hear stories of the littleness of great man. I like to think that Shakespeare was fond of his glass. I even cling to the tale of that disgustful final orgy with friend Ben Johnson. Possibly the story may not be true, but I hope it was. I like to hear stories of the great gentleman, but I like to think of him as poacher, as Willis never do well, denounced by the local grammar schoolmaster, preached it by the local JP of the period. I like to reflect that Cromwell had a wart on his nose, that thought makes me more contented with my own features. I like to think that he put sweets up on the chairs to see finely dressed ladies spoil their frocks, to tell myself that he roared with laughter at the silly chest, like any eastern airy with his bank holiday squared of dirty water. I like to read that Carlisle Chewbacca met his wife and occasionally made himself highly reclusive over small annoyances, that would have been smiled at by a man of well-balanced mind. I think of the 50 fullest things a week I do and say to myself, I too am a literary man. I like to think that even Judas had his moments of nobility. He is good hours when he would willingly have laid down his life for his master. Perhaps even to him there came, before the journey's end, the memory of a voice saying, Thy scenes be forgiven thee. There must have been good even in Judas. Virtualized like the golden quartz, there is not very much of it, and much pains has to be spent on the extracting of it. But nature seems to think it watered her while to fashion these huge useless stones, if in them she may hide away her precious metals. Perhaps also in human nature, she cares little for the mass of dross, provided that, by crushing and cleansing, she can extract from it a little gold, sufficient to repay her for the labor of the world. We wonder why she troubles to make this stone. Why cannot the gold lie in nuggets on the surface? But her methods are secrets to us. Perchance there is a reason for the courts. Perchance there is a reason for the evil and folly, through which run, unseen to the careless eye, the tiny veins of virtue. Eye, the stone predominates, but the gold is there. We claim to have it valued, the evil that there is in man no tongue can tell. We are vile, among the vile, a little evil people. But we are great, pile up the bricks of our scenes till the tower knocks at heaven's gate, calling for vengeance. Yet we are great, with a greatness and a virtue that the untempted angels may not reach to. To return his job to human race, it is one long record of cruelty, of falsehood, of oppression. Think you the world would be spinning round the sun until this day, if that written record were all. Sodom, God who'd have spared had there been found tenrightiest man within its walls. The world is saved by its just man. History sees them not. She is but the newspaper, a report of accidents. Judge your life by that. The new shall believe that the true temple of him is the divorce court, that man are of two classes only, the tiff and the policeman, that all noble thought is but the politician's catchword. History sees only the destroying conflagrations. She takes no thought of the sweet firesides. History notes the wrong, but the patient's suffering, the heroic endeavor, that slowly and silently, as the soft processes of nature, recloding with vardeer the patient-wasted land, obliterate the wrong, she has no eyes for. In the days of cruelty and oppression, not altogether yet of the past, one fears must have lived a gentle-hearted man and woman, healing with their help and sympathy, the owns that else the world had died of. After the tiff, riding with the jingle of sword and spar, comes, mounted on his ass, the good Samaritan. The pyramid of world's evil, God help us. It rises high, shutting out almost the sun. But the record of man's good deeds, it lies written in the laughter of the children, in the light of lover's eyes, in the dreams of the young man, it shall not be forgotten. The fires of persecution served as torches to show heaven the heroism that was in man. From the soil of tyranny sprang self-sacrifice and daring for the ride. Cruelty, what is it but the vile manure, making the ground ready for the flowers of tenderness and pity? Hate and anger shriek to one another across the ages, but the voices of love and comfort are nonetheless existent that the speake in whispers leaps to ear. We have done wrong, O ye witnessing happens, but we have done good. We claim justice. We have laid down our lives for our friends. Greater love had no man than this. We have fought for the right. We have died for the truth, as the truth seemed to us. We have done noble deeds. We have lived noble lives. We have comforted the sorrowful. We have suckered the weak, failing, falling, making in our blindness many a false death. Yet we have striven. For the sake of the army of just man and true, for the sake of the myriads of patient loving women, for the sake of the pitiful and helpful, for the sake of the good that lies hidden within us. Spare us, O Lord.