Produced by Al Haines

OVER THE FIRESIDE

WITH SILENT FRIENDS

BY RICHARD KING

WITH A "FOREWORD" BY

SIR ARTHUR PEARSON, BART., G.B.E.

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

  WITH SILENT FRIENDS
  THE SECOND BOOK OF SILENT FRIENDS
  PASSION AND POT-POURRI

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY

MCMXXI

  _Many of the following Essays
  appear by kind permission of
  the Editor of "The Tatler."_

  _Fifty per cent. of the author's
  profit on the sale of this book
  will be handed over to the
  National Library of the Blind,
  Tufton Street, Westminster, S.W._

  I DEDICATE,

  THIS LITTLE BOOK TO THOSE
  V.A.D.'S WHO, THOUGH THE
  WAR IS OVER, STILL "CARRY
  ON" AND TO THOSE OTHER
  MEN AND WOMEN WHO,
  LIVING IN FREEDOM, HAVE
  NOT FORGOTTEN THE MEN
  WHO FOUGHT OR DIED FOR IT

FOREWORD

BY SIR ARTHUR PEARSON, BART., G.B.E.

Those who buy "Over the Fireside" will purchase for themselves the real
joy of mentally absorbing the delightful thoughts which Mr. Richard
King so charmingly clothes in words.  And they will purchase, too, a
large share of an even greater pleasure--the pleasure of giving
pleasure to others--for the author tells me that he has arranged to
give half of the profits arising from the sale of this book to the
National Library for the Blind, thus enabling that beneficent
Institution to widen and extend its sphere of usefulness.

You will never, perhaps, have heard of the National Library for the
Blind, and even if it so happens that you are vaguely aware of its
existence, you will in no true degree realise all that it means to
those who are compelled to lead lives, which however full and
interesting, must inevitably be far more limited in scope than your
own.  Let me try to make you understand what reading means to the
intelligent blind man or woman.

Our lives are necessarily narrow.  Blind people, however keen their
understanding, and however clearly and sympathetically those around
them may by description make up for their lack of perception, must,
perforce, lead lives which lack the vivid actuality of the lives of
others.  To those of them who have always been blind the world, outside
the reach of their hands, is a mystery which can only be solved by
description.  And where shall they turn for more potent description
than to the pages in which those gifted with the mastery of language
have set down their impressions of the world around them?

And for people whose sight has left them after the world and much that
is in it has become familiar to them, reading must mean more than it
does to any but the most studious of those who can see.  Some are so
fortunate as to be able to enlist or command the services of an
intelligent reader, but this is not given to any but a small minority,
and even to these the ability to read at will, without the necessity of
calling in the aid of another, is a matter of real moment, helping as
it does to do away with that feeling of dependence which is the
greatest disadvantage of blindness.

All this Mr. Richard King knows nearly as well as I do, for he has been
a splendidly helpful friend to the men who were blinded in the War, and
none know better than he how greatly they have gained by learning to
read anew, making the fingers as they travel over the dotted characters
replace the eyes of which they have been despoilt.

Disaster sometimes leads to good fortune, and the disaster which befell
the blinded soldier has given to the service of the blind world
generally the affection and sympathy which Mr. Richard King so
abundantly possesses.  Your reading of this book--and if you have only
borrowed it I hope that these words may induce you to buy a copy--will
help to enable more blind folk to read than would otherwise have been
the case, and thus you will have added to the happiness of the world,
just as the perusal of "Over the Fireside" will have added to your own
happiness.

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

Draw your chair up nearer to the fireside.

It is the hour of twilight.  Soon, so very soon, another of Life's
little days will have silently crept behind us into the long dim limbo
of half-forgotten years.

We are alone--you and I.  Yet between us--unseen, but very real--are
Memories linking us to one another and to the generation who, like
ourselves, is growing old.  How still the world outside seems to have
grown!  The shadows are lengthening, minute by minute, and presently,
the garden, so brightly beautiful such a little time ago in all the
colour of its September beauty, will be lost to us in the magic mystery
of Night.  Who knows? if in the darkest shadows Angels are not
standing, and God, returning in this twilight hour, will stay with us
until the coming of the Dawn!

Inside the room the fire burns brightly, for the September evenings are
very chilly.  Its dancing flames illumine us as if pixies were shaking
their tiny lanterns in our faces.

DON'T you love the Twilight Hour, when heart seems to speak to heart,
and Time seems as if it had ceased for a moment to pursue its Deathless
course, lingering in the shadows for a while!

It is the hour when old friends meet to talk of "cabbages and kings,"
and Life and Love and all those unimportant things which happened long
ago in the Dead Yesterdays.  Or perhaps, we both sit silent for a
space.  We do not speak, yet each seems to divine the other's thought.
That is the wonder of real Friendship, even the silence speaks, telling
to those who understand the thoughts we have never dared to utter.

So we sit quietly, dreaming over the dying embers.  We make no effort,
we do not strive to "entertain."  We simply speak of Men and Matters
and how they influenced us and were woven unconsciously into the
pattern of our inner lives.

So the long hour of twilight passes--passes. . . . . .

And each hour is no less precious because there will be so many hours
"over the fireside" for both of us, now that we are growing old.

But we would not become young again, merely to grow old again.

No! NO!

Age, after all, has MEMORIES, and each Memory is as a story that is
told.

Do you know those lovely lines by John Masefield--

  _"I take the bank and gather to the fire,
    Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute
  The clock ticks to my heart.  A withered wire,
    Moves a thin ghost of music in the spinet.
  I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
    Your cornfield, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
  Ever again, nor share the battle yonder
    Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
  Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
    The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers."_

And so I hope that a few of the embers in this little book will help to
warm some unknown human heart.

And that is all I ask!

  CONTENTS

  Books and the Blind
  The Blind Man's Problem
  Dreams
  How to Help
  On Getting Away from Yourself
  Travel
  Work
  Farewells!
  The "Butters"
  Age that Dyes
  Women in Love
  Pompous Pride in Literary "Lions"
  Seaside Piers
  Visitors
  The Unimpassioned English
  Relations
  Polite Conversation
  Awful Warnings
  It's oh, to be out of England--now that Spring is here
  Bad-tempered People
  Polite Masks
  The Might-have-been
  Autumn Sowing
  What You Really Reap
  Autumn Determination
  Two Lives
  Backward and Forward
  When?
  The Futile Thought
  The London Season
  Christmas
  The New Year
  February
  Tub-thumpers
  I Wonder If . . .
  Types of Tub-thumpers
  If Age only Practised what it Preached!
  Beginnings
  Unlucky in Little Things
  Wallpapers
  Our Irritating Habits
  Away--Far Away!
  "Family Skeletons"
  The Dreariness of One Line of Conduct
  The Happy Discontent
  Book-borrowing Nearly Always Means Book-stealing
  Other People's Books
  The Road to Calvary
  Mountain Paths
  The Unholy Fear
  The Need to Remember
  Humanity
  Responsibility
  The Government of the Future
  The Question
  The Two Passions
  Our "Secret Escapes"
  My Escape and Some Others
  Over the Fireside
  Faith Reached through Bitterness and Loss
  Aristocracy and Democracy
  Duty
  Sweeping Assertions from Particular Instances
  How I came to make "History"
  The Glut of the Ornamental
  On Going "to the Dogs"
  A School for Wives
  The Neglected Art of Eating Gracefully
  Modern Clothes
  A Sense of Universal Pity
  The Few
  The Great and the Really Great
  Love "Mush"
  Wives
  Children
  One of the Minor Tragedies
  The "Glorious Dead"
  Always the Personal Note
  Clergymen
  Their Failure
  Work In the East-end
  Mysticism and the Practical Man
  Abraham Lincoln
  Reconstruction
  Education
  The Inane and Unimaginative
  Great Adventure
  Travel
  The Enthralling Out-of-Reach
  The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy
  Faith
  Spiritualism
  On Reality in People
  Life
  Dreams and Reality
  Love of God
  The Will to Faith

OVER THE FIRESIDE

_Books and the Blind_

Strange as the confession may appear coming from one who, week in, week
out, writes about books, I am not a great book-lover!  I infinitely
prefer to watch and think, think and watch, and listen.  All the same,
I would not be without books for anything in this world.  They are a
means of getting away, of forgetting, of losing oneself, the past, the
present, and the future, in the story, in the lives, and in the
thoughts of other men and women, in the thrill and excitement of
extraneous people and things.  One of the delights of winter--and in
this country winter is of such interminable length and dreariness that
we hug any delight which belongs to it alone as fervently as we hug
love to our bosoms when we have reached the winter of our lives!--is to
snuggle down into a comfy easy-chair before a big fire and, book in
hand, travel hither and thither as the author wills--hate, love,
despair, or mock as the author inveigles or moves us.  I don't think
that most of us pay half enough respectful attention to books seeing
how greatly we depend upon them for some of the quietest pleasures of
our lives.  But that is the way of human nature, isn't it?  We rarely
value anything until we lose it; we sigh most ardently for the thing
which is beyond our reach, we count our happiest days those across the
record of which we now must scrawl, "Too late!"  That is why I always
feel so infinitely sorry for the blind.  The blind can so rarely get
away from themselves, and, when they do, only with that effort which in
you and me would demand some bigger result than merely to lose
remembrance of our minor worries.  When we are in trouble, when we are
in pain, when our heart weeps silently and alone, its sorrow
unsuspected by even our nearest and dearest, we, I say, can ofttimes
deaden the sad ache of the everyday by going out into the world,
seeking change of scene, change of environment, something to divert,
for the nonce, the unhappy tenor of our lives.  But the blind, alas!
can do none of these things.  Wherever they go, to whatever change of
scene they flee for variety, the same haunting darkness follows them
unendingly.

_The Blind Man's Problem_

It is so difficult for them to get away from themselves, to seek that
change and novelty which, in our hours of dread and suspense, are our
most urgent need.  All the time, day in, day out, their perpetual
darkness thrusts them back upon themselves.  They cannot get away from
it.  Nothing--or perhaps, so very, very few things--can take them out
of themselves, allow them to lose their own unhappiness in living their
lives for something, someone outside themselves.  Their own needs,
their own loss, their own loneliness, are perpetually with them.  So
their emotions go round and round in a vicious circle, from which there
is no possible escape.  Never, never can they _give_.  They have so
little to offer but love and gratitude.  But, although gratitude is so
beautiful and so rare, it is not an emotion that we yearn to feel
always and always.  We want to give, to be thanked ourselves, to cheer,
to succour, to do some little good ourselves while yet we may.  There
is a joy in _giving_ generously, just as there is in _receiving_
generously.  Yet, there are many moments in each man's life when no
gift can numb the dull ache of the inevitable, when nothing, except
getting away--somewhere, somehow, and immediately--can stifle the
unspoken pain which comes to all of us and which in not every instance
can we so easily cast off.  Some men travel; some men go out into the
world to lose their own trouble in administering to the trouble of
other people; some find forgetfulness in work--hard, strenuous labour;
most of us--especially when our trouble be not overwhelming--find
solace in art, or music, and especially in books.  For books take one
suddenly into another world, among other men and women; and sometimes
in the problem of their lives we may find a solution of our own trials,
and be helped, encouraged, restarted on our way by them.  I thought of
these things the other day when I was asked to visit the National
Library for the Blind in Tufton Street, Westminster.  It is hidden away
in a side street, but the good work it does is spread all over the
world.  And, as I wandered round this large building and examined the
thousands of books--classic as well as quite recent works--I thought to
myself, "How the blind must appreciate this blessing!"  And from that I
began to realise once more how those who cannot see depend so greatly
on books--that means of "forgetting" which you and I pass by so
casually.  For _we_ can seek diversion in a score of ways, but _they_,
the blind, have so few, so very few means of escape.  Wherever they go,
they never find a change of scene--merely the sounds alter, that is
all.  But in books they can suddenly find a new world--a world which
_they can see_.

_Dreams_

I can remember talking once to a blinded soldier about dreams.  I have
often wondered what kind of dreams blind people--those who have been
blind from birth, I mean--dream, what kind of scenes their vision
pictures, how their friends, and those they love, look who people this
world of sleeping fancy.  I have never had the courage to ask those
blind people whom I know, but this soldier to whom I talked, told me
that every night when he goes to bed he prays that he may
dream--because in his dreams he is not blind, in his dreams he can see,
and he is once more happy.  I could have sobbed aloud when he told me,
but to sob over the inevitable is useless--better make happier the
world which is a fact.  But I realised that this dream-sight gave him
inestimable comfort.  It gave him something to think about in the
darkness of the day.  It was a change from always thinking about the
past--the past when he could laugh and shout, run wild and enjoy
himself as other boys enjoy their lives.  And this blinded soldier used
to be reading--always reading.  I used to chaff him about it, calling
him a book-worm, urging him to go to theatres, tea-parties, long walks.
He laughed, but shook his head.  Then he told me that, although he
never used to care much for reading, books were now one of the comforts
of his life.  "When I feel blind," he said--"and we don't always feel
blind, you know, when we are in the right company among people who know
how to treat us as if we were not children, and as if we were not
deaf--I pick up a book, and, if I stick to it and concentrate, I begin
to lose remembrance and to live in the story I am reading and among the
people of the tale.  And--_it is more like seeing the world than
anything else I do!_"

_How to Help_

I must confess, his remark gave me an additional respect for those huge
volumes of books written in Braille which he always carried about with
him than I had ever felt before.  When you and I are "fed up" with life
and everybody surrounding us--and we all have these moods--we can
escape open grousing by taking a long walk, or by seeing fresh people
and fresh places, watching, thinking, and amusing ourselves in a new
fashion.  But the blind have only books--they alone are the only handy
means by which they can get away from the present and lose themselves
amid surroundings new and strange.  All the more need, then, for us to
help along the good work done by the National Library for the Blind.
It needs more helpers, and it needs more money.  Working with the
absolute minimum of staff and outside expenses, it is achieving the
maximum amount of good.  As a library, I have only to tell you that it
contains 6,600 separate works in 56,000 volumes, supplemented by 4,000
pieces of music in 8,000 volumes--a total of 64,000 items, which number
is being added to every week as books are asked for by the various
blind readers.  And in helping this great and good work, I realise now
that, to a certain extent, you are helping blind people _to see_.  For
books do take you out of yourself, don't they?  They do help you to
lose cognizance of your present surroundings, even if you be surrounded
perpetually by darkness, they do transplant you for a while into
another world--a world which you can _see_, and among men and women
whom, should the author be great enough, you seem to know as well.
Books are a blessing to all of us--but they are something more than a
blessing to the blind, they are a deliverance from their darkness.  And
we can all give them this blessing, if we will--thank Heaven, and the
women who give their lives to the work of the National Library for the
Blind!--this blessing, which is not often heard of, is a work which
will grow so soon as it is known, a work the greatness and goodness of
which are worthy of all help.

_On Getting Away from Yourself_

I always feel so sorry for the blind, because it seems to me they can
never get away from themselves by wandering in pastures new.  It is
trite to say that the glory of the golden sunsets, the glory of the
mountains and the valleys, the coming of spring, the radiance of
summer--all these things are denied them.  They are.  But their great
deprivation is that none of these things can help them to get away from
themselves, from the torments of their own souls, the haunting
dreadfulness of their own secret worries.  We, the more fortunate, not
only can fill our souls with beauty by the contemplation of beautiful
things, but, when the tale of our inner-life possesses the torments of
Hell, we can turn to them in our despair because we know that their
glory will ease our pain, will help us to forget awhile, will give us
renewed courage to go on fighting until the end.  But where all is
blackness, those inner-torments must assume gigantic proportions.
Nothing can take them away--except time and the weariness of a soul too
utterly weary to care any longer.  But time works so slowly, and the
utter weariness of the soul is often so prolonged before, as it were,
the spirit snaps and the blessed numbness of indifference settles down
upon our hearts.  People who can see have the whole of the wonder of
Nature working for them in their woe.  It is hard to feel utterly
crushed and broken before a wide expanse of mountain, moorland, or sea.
Something in their strength and vastness seems to bring renewed vigour
to our heart and soul.  It is as if God spoke words of encouragement to
you through the wonder which is His world.  But blind--one can have
none of these consolations.  All is darkness--darkness which seems to
thrust you back once more towards the terror of your own heart-break.
Sometimes I wonder that the blind do not go mad.  To them there is only
music and love to bring renewed courage to a heart weary of its own
conflict.  To get away from yourself--and not to be able to do it--oh,
that must be Hell indeed!  Verily sometimes the human need of pity is
positively terrifying.

_Travel_

We know what it would be were we never for a single instant able to get
away from the too-familiar scenes and people who, unconsciously,
because of their very familiarity, drive us back upon ourselves.  In
each life there are a series of soul crises, when the spirit has to
battle against some great pain, some great trouble, some overwhelming
disillusion--to win, or be for ever beaten.  But few, very few souls
are strong enough to win that battle unaided.  A friend may do
it--though friends to whom you would tell the secret sorrows of your
life are rare!  But a complete change of scene and environment works
wonders.  Nature, travel, work--all these things can help you in your
struggle towards indifference and the superficially normal.  But where
Nature and travel are useless, and work--well, work has to be something
all-absorbing to help us in our conflict--is the only thing left, I
wonder how men and women survive, unless, with sightlessness, some
greater strength is added to the soul, some greater numbness to the
imagination and the heart.  But this I so greatly doubt.  Truthfully,
as I said before, the need for pity seems sometimes overwhelming,
surpassing all imagining.  I am sure that I myself would assuredly have
gone mad had I not been able to lose myself a little in travel and
change of scene.  When the heart is tormented by some great pain, the
spirit seems too utterly spiritless to do anything but despair.  But
life teaches us, among other things, some of the panaceas of pain.  It
teaches us that the mind finds it difficult to realise two great
emotions at once, and that, where an emotion helps to take us out of
ourselves, by exactly the strength of that emotion, as it were, is the
other one robbed of its bitterness and its pain.  Some people seek this
soul-ease one way and some people by other means, but seek it we all
must one day or another, and it seems to me that one of the wonders of
the natural world, the sunlight and the stars, is that they are always
there, magnificent and waiting, for the weary and the sorrowing to find
some small solace in their woe.

_Work_

Work and Travel, Travel and Work--and by Work I mean some labour so
absorbing as to drug all thought; and by Travel I mean Nature, and
books, and art, and music, since these are, after all, but
dream-voyages in other men's minds--they alone are for me the panacea
of pain.  Not the cackle of the human tongue--that for ever leaves me
cold; not the sympathy which talks and reproves, or turns on the tap of
help and courage by the usual trite source--that never helps me to
forget.  But Work, and Travel, and (for me) Loneliness--these are the
three things by which I flee from haunting terrors towards numbness and
indifference.  Each one, of course, has his own weapons--these are
mine.  Years ago, when I was young and timid, I dreaded to leave the
little rut down which I wandered.  Now experience has given me the
knowledge that Life is very little after all, and that it is for the
most part worthless where there is no happiness, no forgetfulness of
pain, no inner peace.  The opinion of other people, beyond the few who
love me, leaves me cold.  The praise or approbation of the world--what
is it worth at best, while it is boring nearly always?  Each year as it
passes seems to me, not so much a mere passing of time and distance,
but a further peak attained towards some world, some inner vision,
which I but half comprehend.  Each peak is lonelier, but, as I reach it
and prepare to ascend the next, there comes into my soul a wider vision
of what life, and love, and renunciation really mean, until at last I
seem to _see_--what?  I cannot really say, but I see, as it were, the
early radiance of some Great Dawn where everything will be made clear
and, at last and at length, the soul will find comfort, and happiness,
and peace.  And the things which drag you away from this
inner-vision--they are the things which hurt, which age you before your
time, which rob you of joy and contentment.  As a syren they seem to
beckon you into the valleys where all is sunshine and liveliness, and
if you go . . . if you go, alas! it is not long before once more you
must set your face, a lonelier and a sadder man, towards the mountain
peaks.  That seems to me to be the story of--oh, so many lives!  That
seems to me to be the one big theme in a tale which superficially is
all jollity and laughter.

_Farewells!_

When Youth bids "Good-bye" to anything, it is usually to some very
_tremendous thing_--or at least, it seems to be tremendous in the eyes
of Youth.  But Age--although few people ever suspect--is always saying
Farewell, not to some tremendous thing, because Age knows alas! that
very few things are tremendous, but to little everyday pleasures which
Youth, in the full pride of its few years, smiles at complaisantly, or
ignores--for will they not repeat themselves again and again, tomorrow
perhaps, certainly next year?  But the "I Will" of Youth has become the
"I may" of Old Age.  That is why Old Age is continually saying
"Farewell" secretly in its heart.  Nobody hears it bid "Adieu" to the
things which pass; it says "Addio" under its breath so quietly that no
one ever knows: and Old Age is very, very proud.  And Youth, seeing the
smile by which Old Age so often hides its tears, imagines that Age can
have no sadness beyond the fact of growing old.  Youth is so strong, so
free, so contemptuous of all restraint, so secretly uncomprehending
face to face with the tears which are hastily wiped away.  "For, what
has Age to weep over?" it cries.  "After all, it has lived its life; it
has had its due share of existence.  How stupid--to quarrel with the
shadows when they fall!"  But Old Age hearing that cry, says nothing.
Youth would not understand it were it to speak a modicum of its
thoughts.  Besides, Old Age is fearful of ridicule; and Youth so often
mistakes that fear for envy--whereas, Old Age envies Youth so little,
so very, very little!  Would Old Age be young again?  Yes, yes, a
thousand times _Yes_!  But would Age be young again merely _to grow old
again_?  No!  A hundred thousand times No!  Old Age is too difficult a
lesson to learn ever to repeat the process.  Resignation is such a
hard-won victory that there remains no strength of will, no desire to
fight the battle all over again.  And resignation _is_ a victory--a
victory which nothing on earth can rob us.  And because it is a
victory, and because the winning of it cost us so many unseen tears, so
many pangs, so much unsuspected courage, it is for Age one of the most
precious memories of its inner-life.  No; Age envies Youth for its
innocence, its vigour and its strength; for its well-nigh unshakable
belief in itself, in the reality of happiness and of love: but Age
envies it so little--the mere fact of being young.  It knows what lies
ahead of Youth, and, in that knowledge, there can be no room for envy.
The Dawn has its beauty; so too has the Twilight.  And night comes at
length to wrap in darkness and in mystery the brightest day.

_The "Butters"_

Of all the human species--preserve, oh! preserve me from the monstrous
family of the Goats.  I don't mean the people who go off mountain
climbing, nor those old gentlemen who allow the hair round their lower
jaw to grow so long that it resembles a dirty halo which has somehow
slipped down over their noses; nor do I mean the sheepish individuals,
nor those whom, in our more vulgar moments, we crossly designate as
"Goats."  No; the people I really mean are the people who can never
utter a favourable opinion without butting a "but" into the middle of
it; people who, as it were, give you a bunch of flowers with one hand
and throw a bucket of cabbage-water over you with the other.  People,
in fact, who talk like this: "Yes, she's a very nice woman, _but_ what
a pity she's so fat!" or, "Yes, she's pretty, _but_, of course, she's
not so young as she was!"  Nothing is ever perfect in the minds of
these people, nor any person either.  For one nice thing they have to
say concerning men, women, and affairs, they have a hundred nasty
things to utter.  They are never completely satisfied by anything nor
anybody, and they cannot bear that the world should remain in ignorance
of the causes of their dissatisfaction.

It isn't that they know there is often a fly in the amber so much as
that they perceive the fly too clearly, and that amber, even at its
best, always looks to them like a piece of toffee after all.  How
anybody ever manages to live with these kind of people perpetually
about the house I do not know.  And the worst of it is there seems no
cure for the "Goats," and, unlike real Goats, nothing will ever drive
them into the wilderness for ever.  Even if you do occasionally drive
them forth, they will return to you anon to inform you that the
wilderness, to which you have never been, is a hundred times nicer than
the cultivated garden which it is your fate to inhabit.  The most
beautiful places on this earth are, according to them, just those
places which you have never visited, nor is there any likelihood of you
ever being fortunate enough to do so.  If you tell them that the most
lovely spot you have ever seen is Beaulieu in May, when the visitors
have gone, they will immediately tell you that it isn't half so lovely
as Timbuctoo--even when the visitors are there.  Should you talk to
them of charming people, they will describe to you the people they
know, people whom you really would fall violently in love with--only
there is no chance of you ever meeting them, because they have just
gone to Jamaica.  They "butt" their "but" into all your little
pleasures, and even when you really are enjoying yourself, and the
"but" would have to be a bomb to upset your equanimity, they will throw
cold water upon your ardour by gently hinting that you had better enjoy
yourself while you can, because you won't be young much longer.  Ough!
Even when one is dead, I suppose, these "Goats" will stand round you
and say: "It's very sad . . .  _But_ we all have to die some time."
And if they do, I hope I shall come back suddenly to life to butt in
with my own "but" . . .  "_But_ I hope I shan't meet YOU in Heaven."

But I suppose these "butters" enjoy themselves, even though other
people don't enjoy them.  They love to take you by the hand, as it
were, and lead you from the sunshine into the shady side of every
garden.  Not their delight is it to work the limelight.  Rather they
prefer to cast a shadow--when they can't turn out the lights
altogether.  And, strangely enough, these people are the very people
whose life is passed in the pleasantest places.  It may be that,
metaphorically speaking, they have been so long used to the Powers of
existence that they delight in treasuring the weeds.  Well, I, for one,
wish that they could live among these weeds for just so long a time as
to become quite sick of them--when, doubtless, they would return to us
only too anxious to see nothing but the simple flowers, and each simple
flower an exquisite joy in itself--although it fades!

_Age that Dyes_

So many women seem to imagine that when they dip their heads in henna
twenty years suddenly slips from off them into the mess.  As a matter
of fact, they invariably pick up an additional ten years with the dye
every time.  After all, the hair, even at its dullest and greyest,
shows fewer of the painful signs of Anno Domini than almost any part of
the body.  The eyes and the hands, and, above all, the mind--these tell
the tale of the passing years far more vividly for those who pause to
read.  But then, so very many women make the mistake of imagining that
if their hair is fully-coloured and their skin fairly smooth the world
will be deceived into taking them for twenty-nine.  As a matter of
fact, the world is far too lynx-eyed ever to be taken in by any such
apparent camouflage.  On the contrary, it adds yet another ten years to
the real age, and classes the dyed one among the "poor old things" for
evermore.  No, the truth of the matter is that, to keep and preserve
the illusion of youthfulness long after youth has slipped away into the
dead years behind us, is a far more difficult and complicated matter
than merely painting the face, turning brown hair red, and being
divorced.  Perhaps one of the most rejuvenating effects is to show the
world, while trying to believe it yourself, that you don't honestly
really care tuppence about growing old.  To show that you do care, and
care horribly, is to look every second of your proper age, with the
additional effect of a dreary antiquity into the bargain.  It isn't
sufficient to be strictly economical with your smiles for fear lest
deep lines should appear on your face (deep lines will come in spite of
your imitation of a mask), or to dye your hair a kind of lifeless
golden, or to draw your waist in, dress as youthfully as your own
daughter, and generally try to skip about as giddily as your own
grandchildren.  No, if you want to seem youthful--and where is the
woman who doesn't?--you must _think_ youthfully all the time.  This
doesn't mean that you must _act_ youthfully as well.  Oh, dear me, no!
Old mutton skipping about like a super-animated young lamb--that,
indeed, gives an impression of old age which approaches to the
antiquity of a curio.  No, you must keep your intelligence alert, your
sympathies awake; you must never rust or get into a "rut"; above all,
you must keep in touch with the _aims_ of youth, without necessarily
merely imitating its _antics_--then a woman will always possess that
interest and that charm which never stales, and which will carry her
through the years with the same triumph as her youth once did, or her
beauty--if she ever possessed any.  And if _she_ must use the
artificial deceptions of chemists, which deceive nobody, let her do it
so artfully that, metaphorically speaking, she preserves the lovely
mellow atmosphere of an "old picture," not the blatant colouring of a
lodging-house daub.

But, of course, one of the hardest problems of a woman's life is to
realise just when she must acknowlege that her youthful prime is past.
Some women never seem able to solve it.  They either hang on to the
burlesque semblance of twenty-five, or else go all to pieces, and take
unto themselves "views" as violent as they are sour.  When they cannot
command the uncritical admiration of the gaping crowd, they descend
from their thrones to shy brickbats at everyone who doesn't look at
them twice.  A wise woman realises that although at forty she cannot be
the centre of attraction for her youthfulness alone, she can yet
command a circle of true friends, which, though smaller in number, is
more deeply devoted in intention.  But she will never be able to keep
even these unless her sympathies are wide, her heart full of
understanding, unless she keeps herself mentally alert and her sense of
humour perpetually bright.  Should she do so, hers will be the triumph
of real charm; and, providing that she grows older not only gracefully
but also cheerfully, not by plastering herself over with chemical
imitations of her own daughter's youth, but by shading becomingly, as
it were, the inevitable ravages of time, which nothing on earth will
ever hide; by dressing not more than five years younger than she really
is--then her attractiveness will continue until she is an old, old
woman.  And I would back her in the race for real devotion against all
the flappers who ever flapped their crêpe de chine wings to dazzle the
eyes of that cheapest of feminine prey--the elderly married man.

_Women in Love_

Have you noticed how a woman displays much more "sang froid" in love
than a man?  Her heart may be aflame, but there always seems to be a
tiny lump of ice which keeps her head cool.  Only when a woman is not
quite sure of her captor does she begin to lose her feminine
"un-dismay."  So long as she is being chased she can always remain calm
and collected, perhaps because she knows that, however hot her lover
may be in pursuit, the race began by giving her a long start, and,
being well ahead, she can listen in camouflaged amusement to the man's
protestations of her "divinity" as he "galollups" madly after her.
When you come across lovers in that state of oblivion to staring
eyes--as you do come across them so often during these beautiful warm
evenings--it is always the man who looks supremely sheepish; the woman
doesn't "turn a hair."  She simply stares at the intruder as if she
wanted him to see for himself how very attractive she is.  The man, on
the other hand, never meets the stranger's eyes.  His expression
invariably shows that he is wishing for the earth to open--which, in
parenthesis, it never does when you most want it to.  But the girl is
quite unembarrassed.  Even when it is she who is making love, a staring
and smiling crowd will not force her to desist.  She just goes on
stroking her lover's face and kissing him.  But the man looks a perfect
fool, and, I am sure, feels it.  It seems indeed, as if he would cry to
the onlookers, "Don't blame me.  It's human nature.  I shall get over
it quite soon!"  But the girl seems to say: "By all means--watch us!
This, for me, is 'Der Tag'!"  No, you can't disconcert a woman in
love--it makes her quite vain-glorious.

I wonder why love always seems such a splendid "joke" to those who are
out of it, when it was a paralysing reality while they were in it.  And
yet, as one looks back upon one's love affairs one invariably refers to
the incident as the time when "I made a fool of myself."  And yet love
is no laughing matter.  Considering that ninety-nine per cent. of our
novels and plays are about nothing else; considering that our songs and
our poetry, and the scandal we like to hear, all centre around this one
theme, we really ought to take it more seriously.  But if we see two
lovers making love to each other we laugh outright.  It is very
strange!  I suppose it is that everybody else's love affairs are
ridiculous; only our own possess the splendour of a Greek tragedy.
Perhaps we share with Nature her sense of humour, which makes love one
of the biggest practical jokes in life.  So we jeer at love in order to
hide our own "soreness," just as we laugh at the man who sits down
suddenly in Piccadilly because his foot stepped on a banana skin--we
laugh at him because it wasn't we who sat down.  Altogether love is a
conundrum, and we laugh at the answer Fate gives us because we dare not
show the world we want to cry.  Laughter is the one armour which only
the gods can pierce.  Lovers never laugh--at least, they never laugh at
love--that is why we can turn them into such glorious figures of fun.

But I always wonder why a woman of a "thousand loves" assumes a kind of
"halo," when a man of equal passion only gets called a "libertine," if
not worse things.  I suppose we think it must have been so clever of
her.  We speak of her as _inspiring_ love, though a man who inspires
the same wholesale affection isn't considered nice for young women to
know.  It is, apparently because we realise that a woman very rarely
loses her head in love.  She may have had a thousand lovers, but only
made herself look a "silly idiot" over one.  But a man looks a "silly
idiot" every time.  We know he must have uttered the usual eternal
protestations on each occasion.  But a woman only has to _listen_, and
can always hear "the tale" without losing her dignity.  She merely
begins to talk when a man comes "down to earth."  While his "soul" had
soared verbally she enjoyed him as she enjoys a "ballad concert," those
love songs which say so much and mean so very little.

_Pompous Pride in Literary "Lions"_

I always think that the author who places his own photograph as an
illustrated frontispiece to his own book must be either an exceedingly
brave man or an exceedingly misguided one.  At any rate, he runs a
terrible risk, amounting almost to certain calamity, in regard to his
literary admirers.  I have never yet known an author--and this applies
to authoresses as well--whose face, if you liked his work, was not an
acute disappointment the moment you clapped eyes upon it.  For example,
I am a devoted admirer of "Amiel's Journal", but it is years since I
have torn Amiel's photograph from the covers of his book.  I could not
bear to think that such lovely, such poetical thoughts, should issue
from a man who, in his portrait, anyway, looks like nothing so much as
a melancholy Methodist minister, the most cheerful characteristic of
whom is "Bright's disease."

In the days of my extreme youth I admired a well-known authoress--_in
public_, be it understood, as is the way of youth.  The world was given
to understand that in her seductive heroines she really drew her own
portrait.  This same world lived long in blissful ignorance that what
was stated to be a fact was only the very small portion of a
half-truth.  For years this famous lady _refused_ to have her photo
published.  She even went so far as to tell the world so in every
"interview" which journalists obtained from her--either regarding her
views on "How best to obtain an extra sugar-allowance in war-time," or
concerning "Queen Mary's noble example to English women to wear always
the same-sort-of-looking hat."  This extreme modesty piqued the
curiosity of her ten million readers enormously.  The ten million, of
which I was a member, imagined that she must be too beautiful and too
elegant to possess brains, unless she were a positive miracle.  We
pictured her as tall and graceful, with a lovely willowy figure and an
expression all sad tenderness when it wasn't all sweet smiles.

Then one fatal day the famous authoress decided--too late, I'm afraid,
by more than twenty years--to show her face to the ten million
worshippers who demanded so greatly to see it.  The irrevocable step
being taken, disillusion jumped to our eyes, as the French say, and
nearly blinded us.  Instead of the goddess we had anticipated, all we
saw was, gazing at us out of the pages of an illustrated newspaper, an
over-plump, middle-aged "party" with no figure and a fuzzy fringe, who
stood smiling in an open French window, and herself completely filling
it!  The shock to our worship was so intense that it made most of us
think several times before spending 7_s_. on her new love story, were
it ever so romantic.  And so that was the net result of _that_!

Wiser far is the other well-known authoress, who apparently had her
last photograph taken somewhere back in the early nineties, and still
sends it forth to the press as her "latest portrait study," which,
perhaps, if she be as wise as she is witty, it will for ever be.

No, I think that authors who insist upon their own photographs
appearing in their own books are either very foolish or puffed out with
pompous pride.  Nobody really wants to look at them a second time; or,
even if they do, nine times out of ten those who stay to look remain to
wish they hadn't.  I have never yet known an author's face which
compared in charm and interest with the books he writes.  Taking
literature as a professional example, it cannot truthfully be said that
beauty often follows brains.  In the case of authors, as in so many
other cases, to leave everything to the imagination is by far the
better policy in the long run.  But there is this consolation,
anyway--we are what we are, after all, and our faces are very often
libels on our "souls."

Granting this, the theory of the resurrection of the body always leaves
me inordinately cold.  As far as I, myself, am concerned, the worms can
have my body--and welcome.  May I prove extremely indigestible, that's
all!  Preferably, I want to "cease upon the midnight without pain," in
the middle of a dynamite explosion.  I want, as it were, to return to
the dust from which I came in one big bang!  And if I must have a
Christian burial, then I hope that all of me which remains for my more
or less sorrowing relatives to bury, decently and in order, will, at
most, be one--old boot!  Of course, if I do die in the middle of an
explosion, I grant that, if the resurrection of the body really be a
fact, then I shall find it extremely tiresome to hunt everywhere for my
spare parts.  It will be such a colossal bore having to worry all the
other people, also busy collecting themselves, who went up with me in
the "bang," by keeping on demanding of them the information, "Excuse
me, but have you by any chance seen anything of a big-toe nail knocking
about?"  I always feel so sorry for those Egyptian princesses whose
teeth and hair, whose jewels and old bones, proved such an irresistible
attraction to the New Zealand and Australian soldiers when they were in
camp near Cairo, that they stole out at night to rob their tombs, and
sent the plunder thus obtained "way back home to the old shack" as
souvenirs of the Great War.  It will be so perfectly aggravating for
these royal ladies to resurrect in a tomb which, in parenthesis, they
had purposely constructed to last them until the Day of Judgment--to
resurrect therein, only to discover that some of their necessary parts
are either in Auckland, or in Sydney, or in Melbourne, or, perhaps, in
all three cities.  It will be but poor consolation to learn that the
rest of them may, perhaps, be discovered among the sands of the
desert--that is to say, if they scratch about long enough looking for
them.  Personally, if I get the chance, I shall immediately go about
purloining other people's physical perfections, so that, when at last I
am ready for the next move onward, I shall consist of one part Hercules
and three-parts Owen Nares!  I shall indeed look lovely, shan't I?  In
the meanwhile, I realise that, physically speaking, I am far better
imagined than understood.  Not that I am very much worse than the
average? on the other hand, I am certainly not much better--so who
would be the happier for gazing at my photograph?  No, indeed, it
cannot be for their beauty that authors insert their own
photographs--sometimes, even, on the outside covers of their own books!
For what beauty they do possess has usually been lost somewhere on the
original negative.  If they still yearn to let themselves be _seen_, as
well as _read_, I would suggest that the frontispiece be the one page
in the book to be uncut, so that their readers, should they wish to
peep at the author's physiognomy for curiosity's sake, may--if that
curiosity prove its own punishment--leave those first pages uncut until
the book falls to pieces on the bookshelf.  For myself, I hate to read
some beautifully written thought, only to have the author's distinctly
unbeautiful face always protruding between me and my delight--like some
utterance of the commonplace in the middle of a discussion on "souls."

I suppose it is that authors--like everybody else--cannot understand
that how they look to themselves and to those who love them, and so are
used to them, they will not necessarily look to other people, who
merely want to gaze upon their photograph because they cannot look upon
their waxwork.  We all get so used to our own blemishes by seeing them
every morning when we brush our hair that we have long since ceased to
regard them seriously.  But ten to one a stranger will notice nothing
else.  That is always the way of a stranger's regard.  But, after all,
to fail to impress someone who knows you and loves you is nothing at
all; to fail, however, to impress someone who yearns to become
acquainted with you, is very often to lose a possible friend.  Better a
thousand times that an adoring reader should keep yearning to know what
her favourite author looks like than, having at last satisfied her
curiosity, she should exclaim disappointedly, "_Gosh!  To think that he
could look like that!!_"

If an author feels that indeed he must show the world what he looks
like, let him issue to the public merely a "vague impression" of
himself--a Cubist one for preference.  A Cubist portrait can look like
anything . . . but to look like anything is infinitely preferable to
looking like _nothing on this earth_, isn't it?

_Seaside Piers_

The only real excitement I can ever perceive about a Seaside Pier is
when the sea washes half of it away.  To me, Seaside Piers are the most
deadly things.  You pay tuppence to go on them, and you generally stay
on them until you can stay no longer because--well, because you _have_
paid tuppence.  Having walked along the dreary length of the tail-end
which joins the shore, there seems really nothing to do at the end of
your journey except to spit over the side.  Of course, there are always
those derelict kind of amusements such as putting a penny in a slot and
being sprayed with some vile scent; or putting a ha'penny in another
slot and seeing a lead ball being shot into any hole except the one in
which, had it disappeared therein, you would have got your money back.
For the rest, I am sure that half the people remain on them for the
simple reason that tuppence is tuppence in these days or any other
days.  Of course, there is generally a band which plays twice,
sometimes three times, a day; but it is not a band which ever does much
more than blast its way through a selection from "Carmen," or a
fantasia on "Faust."  Of course, if you like crowds--well, a pier is
for you another name for Paradise.  Nobody uses the tail-part except to
walk to the end, or _from_ it, on the side which is protected from the
wind.  But the end of a pier--where it swells and the band plays--is a
kind of receptacle which receives the human debouch.  There you have
the spectacle of what human beings would look like if they were put
into a bowl, like goldfish, and had nothing to do but swim round and
round.

I suppose there _is_ an amusement in such a picture--because, look at
the women who come there every morning and bring their knitting!  And
the "flappers" and the "knuts"--they seem never to tire of seeing each
other pass and re-pass for a solid hour on end!  Why do they go there?
It cannot be to see clothes, because the most you see, as a rule, is a
white skirt and blouse and a brown neck all peeling with the heat!
They must go there, then, because to go on the pier is all part and
parcel of the seaside habit--and an English seaside, anyway, is one big
bunch of habits, from the three-mile promenade of unsympathetic
asphalt, with its backing of houses in the Graeco-Surbiton style, to
the railway station at the back of the town, where antiquated "flies"
won't take anybody anywhere under half-a-crown.  It belongs, I suppose,
to that strain of fidelity which runs through the British "soul"--a
fidelity which finds expression in facing death sooner than forego
roast beef on Sunday, and will applaud an old operatic favourite until
her front teeth drop out.  It is all very laudable, but it has its
"trying" side.  One becomes rather tired of the average seaside resort,
which is built and designed rather as if the "authorities" believed
that God made Blackpool on the Seventh Day, and it was their religious
duty to erect replicas of His handiwork up and down the coast.  And
under this delusion piers, I suppose, were born.

Well, certainly they are convenient to throw yourself off the end of
them.  Happily--or unhappily, whichever way you look at it--the town
council never seem to know quite what to do with them.  Beside the
penny fair and the brass band, they only seem to be the haven of rest
for fifth-rate theatrical touring companies, who manage to pay for
their summer outing in the theatre erected at the end.  Otherwise their
importance consists chiefly in being a convenient place for the
"flapper" to "meet mother," and to carry on a violent flirtation,
without the slightest danger, with any Gay Lothario in lavender socks
who kind o' tickles them with his eyes and makes them giggle.  But for
myself, who have no mamma to meet, nor any desire to flop about with
"flappers," piers are deadly things.  Their great excitement is when
the sea washes half of them away at a moment when, apparently, five
thousand people living in boarding-houses had only just vacated them.
And sometimes even that miraculous escape seems a pity!  What do you
think?

_Visitors_

I always think that visitors are charming "interruptions."  They are
delightful when they arrive; they are equally delightful--perhaps more
so--when they go.  Only on the third day of their visit are they
tiresome, and their qualities distinctly below the par we expected.
Almost anybody can put up with almost anybody for three days.  There is
the delight of showing him over the house, bringing out all our
treasures and listening the while our visitor shows us his envy (or his
hypocrisy) by his compliments; there is the pleasure of taking him
round the garden and pointing out our own pet plants and bulbs.  Even
the servants can keep smiling through three days of extra work.  But
the second night begins to see us becoming exhausted.  We have said
everything we wanted to say.  We have taken him up to the attic and to
the farthest ends of the pig sty, we have laid down the law concerning
our own pet enthusiasms and tolerated him while he told us about his
own.  But a sense of boredom begins to creep into our hearts at the end
of the second evening, which, if there were not the pleasure of bidding
him "Good-bye" on the morrow to keep our spirits up, would end in
exasperation to be fought down and a yawn to be suppressed.  The man
who invented "long visits" ought to be made to spend them for the rest
of his life as a punishment.  There is only one thing longer--though it
sounds rather like a paradox to say so--and that is a "long day."  To
"spend a long day" with anyone sees both you and your hostess "sold up"
long before the evening.  Happily, that infliction is a country form of
entertainment, and is reserved principally for relations and family
friends who might otherwise expect us to ask them for a month.

You see, most of us are creatures possessing habits as well as a liver.
Visitors are a fearful strain on both--after forty-eight hours.  The
strain of appearing at our most hospitable and best--from the breakfast
egg in the morning to the "nightcap" at night--is one which only those
who are given a bed-sitting-room and a door with a key in it can come
through triumphantly.  Visitors usually have nothing to do, while we
have our own work--and the two can rarely mate for long.  Of course,
there are visitors who seem born with a gift for visiting; they give us
of their brightest and best for forty-eight hours and have "letters to
write" up in their bedroom during most of the subsequent days of their
sojourn.  Also there are hostesses who seem born with the "smile of
cordiality" fixed on to their mouths.  They also give of their best and
brightest for forty-eight hours and then, metaphorically, give their
guests a latch-key and a time-table of meals, and wash their hands of
them until they meet again on the door-step of "farewell."  But the
majority of visitors seem incapable of leading their own lives in any
house except their own.  They follow you about and wait for you at odd
corners, until you are either driven to committing murder or going out
to the post-office to send a telegram to yourself killing off a great
aunt and giving an early date for her funeral.  Also there are some
hostesses who cannot let their guests alone; who must always be asking
them "What are they going to do to-day," or telling them not to forget
that Lady Sploshykins is coming to tea especially to meet them!
Frantic for our entertainment, they invite all the dull people of the
neighbourhood to meals, and drag us along with them to the dull
people's houses on the exchange visit.  They are always terrified that
we are "feeling it dull," whereas the dulness really comes of our not
being allowed to stupefy in peace.

"Never outstay your welcome" is one of the social adages I would
impress upon all young people; and "Be extremely modest concerning the
length to which that welcome would be likely to extend" is an addenda
to it.  Failing any other calculation, forty-eight hours of being a
"fixture" and twelve hours of packing up are generally the safe limit.
Following that advice, you will generally enjoy the dullest visit and
will want to come again; following that advice, also, your hostess will
enjoy seeing you and hope you will.  Not to follow it is to risk losing
a friend.  Everybody hates the visitor who comes whenever he is asked
and stays far too long when he arrives.

_The Unimpassioned English_

I have just been to see the latest musical comedy.  Of course, I feel
in love with the heroine.  Could I help myself?  Even women have fallen
in love with her--so what chance has a mere male, and one at the
dangerous age at that?  But what struck me almost as much as the
youthful charm and cleverness of the new American "star" and the
invigoratingly "catchy" music, was the way in which _all the young men
on the stage put both their hands into their trouser pockets the moment
they put on evening clothes_!  They didn't do it in their glad day-rags
. . . or, at least, only one hand at a time, anyway.  But immediately
they appeared _en grande tenue_, both their hands disappeared as if by
magic!  _C'ètait bien drôle, j'vous assure!_  Perhaps . . . who knows?
. . . they were but counting their "moneys." . . .  For the chorus
ladies are certainly rather attractive, and even a svelte figure _has
been known_ to hold a big dinner!  But the fact still remains . . . if
one night some wicked dresser takes it into his evil head to stitch up
their trouser pockets, every one of the young men will have to come on
and do physical "jerks," or go outside and cut his own arms off!

But then, most Englishmen seem at a loss to know what to do with their
limbs when they are not using them for anything very special at the
moment.  Have you ever sat and watched the "niggly" things which
people--especially Englishmen--do with their hands when they don't know
what to do with them otherwise?  It is very instructive, I assure you.
I suppose our language does not lend itself to anything except being
spoken out of our mouths.  Unlike Frenchmen, we have not learnt to talk
also with our hands.  We consider it "bad form" . . . _like scratching
in public where you itch_!  Well, perhaps our decision in this respect
has added to the general fun of existence.  In life's everyday, one
doesn't notice these things, maybe.  One has become so habituated to
"Father" drumming "Colonel Bogey" on the chair-arm; or "Little Willee"
playing "shakes" with two ha'pennies and a pen-knife--that one has
ceased to pay any attention to these minor irritations.  And, when we
are among strangers, we are so busy watching that people don't put
_their_ hands into _our_ pockets, that we generally put our own hands
into them for safety. . . .  Which, perhaps, accounts for the
Englishman's habit . . . who knows?

But on the stage, this custom is an almost mesmeric one to watch.  We
certainly do see other people at a disadvantage when they are strutting
the Boards of Illusion . . . men especially.  But to a foreigner, who
is not used to seeing a man's hands disappear the moment he is asked to
stand up, the sight must come with something of a shock.  For my own
part, I think his amazement is justified.  Surely God gave a man two
hands for other needs than to pick things up with or hide them?

Personally, I always think that it is a thousand pities that men are
not expected to knit.  They grew up to be idle in the drawing-room, I
suppose, in times when every other woman was a "Sister Susie."  But the
"Sister Susie" species is nowadays almost extinct.  It requires a
German offensive to drive the modern woman towards her darning needles.

In a recent literary competition in EVE, the subject was "Bores, and
how to make the best of them."  Well, personally, I could suffer
them--if not more gladly, at least with a greater resignation--if I
were allowed to recite, "Two plain; one purl" so long as their
infliction lasted.  As it is, I am left with nothing else to do except
furtively to watch the clock, and secretly to ring up "OO Heaven" to
send down a bombing party to deliver me.

Men of the Latin races are far more wise in this respect.  If you tied
the hands of a Frenchman, or an Italian, or even a Spaniard, up behind
his back, the odds are he would be struck dumb!  But we Englishmen--we
only seem able to become eloquent when, as it were, we have voluntarily
placed our own hands into the handcuffs of our own trouser pockets.
Even Englishwomen are singularly un-self-revealing with anything except
their tongues.  You have only to watch an Englishwoman singing to
realise how extremely limited are her powers of expression.  She places
both hands over her heart to represent "Love," and opens them wide to
illustrate every other emotion.

And this self-restriction--especially when you can't hear what she is
singing about, which is not seldom--leads more quickly to the wrinkles
of perplexity than even does the problem of how to circumvent the
culinary soarings of Mrs. Beaton, and yet obtain the same results . . .
with eggs at the price they are!  If some producing genius had not
conceived the idea of ending off nearly every musical-comedy song with
a dance, and yet another genius of equally enviable parts had not
created the beauty chorus, I don't know how many a prima donna of the
lighter stage would ever be able to get through her own numbers.  For,
to dance at the end of her little ditty, and to have the chorus girls
relieve her of further action at the end of the first verse, brings as
great a relief to her as well as to the audience, as do his trouser
pockets to the young man who makes-believe to love her for ever and for
ever . . . and then some, on the stage.

And, because we have taken the well-dressed "poker" as our ideal of
masculine "good form" in society, English men and women always seem to
exude an atmosphere of "slouching" indifference to everything except
their God--and football.  It has such a very chilling effect upon
exuberant foreigners when they run up against it.  Emotionally, I am
sure we are as developed as any other nation . . . look at our poetry,
for example!  But we have so long denied the right to express it, that
we have forgotten how it should be done.

"_I shall love you on and on . . . throughout life; after death; until
the end of eternity . . . !_" declares the impassioned Englishman, the
while he carelessly shakes the dead-end off his cigarette on to
somebody else's carpet.

"_And for you, Egbert, the world will be only too well lost.  I will
willingly die with you . . . at any time most convenient to yourself,_"
answers his equally-impassioned mistress, gently replacing an errant
kiss-curl behind her left ear.

Well, I suppose it does take another Englishman to realise that these
two are preparing for a _crime passionel_.  But a simple foreigner,
more used to the violence of the "movies" in everyday life than we are,
might be excused if he merely believed them to be protesting a
preference for prawns in aspic over prawns without.

Not, however, that it really matters . . . so long as the lovers, like
Maisie, "get right there" at the finish.  For, after all, does not
passion mostly end in the same kind of old "tripe" . . . either here in
England or . . . well, let us say . . . the tropics?

_Relations_

Our Relations are a race apart.  They are not often our friends; rarer
still are they our enemies.  They are just "relations"--men and women
who treat our endeavours towards righteousness with all the outspoken
hostility of those who dislike us, whom yet we do not want to quarrel
with because then there may be nobody left except the village doctor to
bury us.

Relations always seem to know us too little, and too well.  The good in
us is continually warped by the bad in us--which, in parenthesis, is
the only one of our secrets relatives ever seem able to keep.  To tell
the world of our faults would be like throwing mud at the family tree.
Moreover, relations always seem born with long memories.  There is no
one in this world who remembers quite so far back, nor quite so
vividly, as a mother-in-law.  And one's relations-in-law are but one's
own relations in a concentrated and more virulent form.  And yet
everybody is somebody's relation.  You consider that remark trite,
perhaps?  Well, "trite" it undoubtedly is, and yet it is extremely
difficult to realise.  The middle-aged woman whom you find so charming,
so sympathetic, so very "understanding," may send her nephews and
nieces fleeing in all directions the moment she appears among them.
The man you look upon as being an insufferable bore may still be Miss
Somebody-or-other's best beloved Uncle John.  It is so hard to explain.
It is almost as hard to explain as the charm of the man your closest
woman-friend marries.  What she can see in him you cannot for the life
of you perceive, while he, on his part, secretly wonders why the woman
he loves ever sought friendship with such a pompous, dull ass as you
are.  Love is blind, so they say.  Well, so is friendship--so are
relations--blind to everything except your faults.

Another odd thing about relations is that only very rarely can you ever
make friends with them.  At best, your intimacy amounts to nothing more
than a truce.  You are extremely lucky if it isn't open warfare.  They
know at once too little about you and too much.  They never by any
chance acknowledge that you have changed, that you are a better man
than once you were.  What you have once been, in their opinion, you
will always be--so help-them-heaven-to-hide-the-wine-cellar-key!  You
may change your friends as you "grow out" of them, or they "grow out"
of you; but your relations are for ever immutable.  The friends of your
youth you have sometimes nothing in common with later on, except
"memories"; and except for these "memories" there is little or no tie
between you.  But the "memories" of friends centre around pleasant
things, whereas the "memories" of relations seem to specialise at all
times in the disagreeable.  Moreover, relations will never acknowledge
that you have ever really _grown up_.  This is one of their most
tiresome characteristics.  To them you will always be the little boy
who forgot to write profusive thanks for the half-a-crown they gave you
when you first went to school.  You can always tell the man or woman
who live among their relatives.  They possess no individuality, no
"vision"; they are narrow, self-centred, pompous, clannish--with that
clannishness which means only complete self-satisfaction with the clan.
They take their mental and moral "cue" from the oldest generation among
them.  The younger members are, metaphorically speaking, patted on the
head and told to believe in grandpapa as they believe in God.

No, the great benefit of having relations is to come back to them.  To
visit them is like stirring up once more the memories of your lost
youth, which time and distance have rendered faint.  And to return once
more to one's youth is good for every man.  It makes him realise
himself, and the "thread" which has been running through his life
linking all the incidents together.  And, as I said before, relations
are agreeable adjuncts at your own funeral, since you may always depend
upon them saying nice things about you when it's too late for you to
hear them.  Friends will never do that.  They don't need to.  They
carry your epitaph with them written on their own hearts.  The "nice"
things have been said--they have been said to YOU.

_Polite Conversation_

A man may live to be a hundred; he may have learnt to speak twelve
different languages--all badly; he may know, in fact, everything a man
ought to know, and have done everything a man ought to have done; but
one thing he probably won't have learnt--or, if he has done so, then he
ought to be counted among the Twelve Apostles and other "wonders"--and
that is the fact that, what interests him enormously to talk about
won't necessarily be anything but a bore for other people to listen to.
Most people talk a great deal and tell you absolutely nothing you want
particularly to know.  The man or woman who can talk _impersonally_ is
as rare as a psychic phenomenon when you want to see it but won't _pay
for_ a manifestation!  Most people can talk of nothing but themselves
because nothing else really interests them.  I don't mean to say that
they boast, but, what they talk about is purely their own personal
affair--ranging from golf to grandchildren.  That is what makes dogs
the most sympathetic listeners in the world.  Could they speak, I fear
me they would only tell us about their puppies, or of their new bone,
or of the rat they worried to death the last time they scampered
through the wood.  Cats are far more egotistical, and consequently far
more human.  They can't talk, it is true; neither can they listen.  By
their manner we know exactly what interests them at the moment, and if
they appear to sympathise with us, it is only because what we want at
the moment fits in admirably with their own desires.  And so many
people are just like cats in this.  They invite us to their houses,
presumably because they desire our company, but, in reality, in order
that they may relate to us at length the incidents, big or small, which
have marked the calendar of their recent very everyday existence.

But we, on our side, are not without our means of revenge.  We invite
them back again, under protestations of friendship, and, when we have
got them, and, as it were, chained them down with the fetters of
politeness, we relate to them in our turn everything which has happened
to us and ours.  We never ask ourselves if our children, or our cook,
or our new hat, or our next summer holiday can interest anybody outside
the radius of their influence.  We demand another human being to smile
when we smile, show anger when we show anger, echo our own admiration
for our new hat, and generally retrace with us our life in retrospect
and journey with us into the problematical future.  For, as I said
before, the wisdom which realises that the incidents of our own life
need not--very probably do not, although they may be too polite to show
it--interest other people, is the rarest wisdom of all.  Most people
will never, never learn it.  And the more people love their own
affairs, the more they seek the world for listeners whom, as it were,
they may devour.  They usually have hundreds of intimates, and boast at
Christmas of having sent off a thousand cards!  As a matter of fact,
they very probably have not one real friend.  But that does not trouble
them.  They don't require friendship.  They only need, as it were, a
perpetual pair of ears into which to pour the trivialities of their
daily life.  Personally, I get so tired of listening to stories of
children I have never seen; golfing "yarns" which I have heard before;
servants--all as bad as each other; Lloyd George; new clothes;
ailments; what Aunt Emily intends to do with last year's frock, and of
little Flora's cough.  I wish it were the fashion for people to ask
their friends to _do_ something, instead of securing their society,
with nothing to do with it when they've got it, except to offer hours
for conversation with literally nothing to say on either side.  I
should like to read a book in company, it is nice to work in company; a
visit to a theatre with a congenial companion is delightful--and this,
of course, applies to concerts, lectures, picture galleries, even
shopping.  But the usual form of friendly entertainment is a deadly
thing.  Only a cook, who at the same time is an artist, can make them
possible.  For you can endure hours of little other than the personal
note in conversation with the compensation of a culinary _chef'
d'oeuvre_ in front of you.  That is why you so often hear of a
"perfectly charming woman with a simply wonderful cook."  It's the
cook, I fancy, who is the real charmer.

_Awful Warnings_

Old Age is bad enough, but a dyspeptic Old Age--that surely is fate
hitting us below the belt!  For with advancing years the love of
adventure leaves us; the "Love of a Lifetime" becomes to us of more
real consequence than our pet armchair--but the _love of a good
dinner_, that, at least, can make the everyday of an octogenarian well
worth living.  Young people little realise the awful prophecy implied
in that irritating remark--"Don't gobble!"  There is another one,
almost equally irritating to youth--"Go and change your socks!"  But,
if the truth must be told, you regret the "No" you said to Edwin when
he asked you to "fly with him"; the louis you failed to place _en
plein_ on thirty-six, which you _felt_ was coming up, infinitely less
than that you still persisted to "gobble" when you were warned not to,
and you failed to change your socks while there was yet time.  Now it
is too late, alas!  How true it is, the saying--"If Youth knew how, and
Age only could."  The trouble is that, when elderly people would warn
youth, they rarely ever give concrete examples.  They always imply some
_moral_ loss which will happen to young people if they do not follow
their elders' advice.  But youth would be far more impressed if age
drew a vivid picture of their own physical and digestive decrepitude.
But, of course, age won't do that.  Why should it?  No one likes to
think that their "every movement tells a story."

Personally, I can foresee a new profession open to those elderly people
who are the victims of their own early indiscretions.  Why should they
not tour the country as a collection of _awful warnings_!  Fancy the
joy there would be in the hearts of all those who, as it were, stand
bawling at the cross-roads that the "narrow path" is the broader one in
the long run, if they woke up and saw on the hoardings some such
announcement as this:--

  Coming!  Coming!!  Coming!!!

  FOR ONE WEEK ONLY!

  The Awful End of the Man who
  Gobbled his Food!

  Mary of the Hooked Figure; or, the Girl who Wouldn't
  Change her Wet Socks!

  A Picture of Living Vermin; or, the Man who
  Never Washed!

  The End of the Girl who Would Take the
  Wrong Turning!

  Parents, Free.  Children, One Penny.  Schools and
  Large Parties by Arrangement.

It would ease the burden of parenthood enormously.  It might even "Save
the Children."  Maybe they would thank their mother from the bottom of
their hearts because she took them to see these living examples of
youthful folly instead of lugging them to a dull lecture on hygiene.
For half the silly things we do, we do because we don't realise the
consequences.  The man who _knows everything_ would gladly give up all
his knowledge if he could turn back the hands of the clock, and,
instead of studying the origin of Arabic, learn to recognise a pair of
damp sheets when he got in between them; while a Woman of a Thousand
Love Affairs would forego the memory of nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine of
these if she could return to the early days and drink a glass of hot
water between every meal!  For, as I said before, Love leaves us and
enthusiasms die; but Old Age which can sit down to a good dinner and
thoroughly enjoy it without having to have a medical bulletin stuck up
outside its bedroom door for days afterwards, is an Old Age which no
one can call really unhappy.  To eat is, at last, about the only joy
which is left to us.  The "romantic" will shudder at my philosophy, I
know; but the "romantic" have generally such a lot to live for beside
their meals.  Old Age hasn't.  That is why elderly people who can begin
to look forward to their dinner--say at five o'clock in the
afternoon--can be said to have reached the "ripe old age" of the
Scriptures.  If they _can't_?--well, over-ripe to _rottenness_ is the
only description.

_It's oh, to be out of England--now that spring is here!_

I don't know if you, fair reader, find that in the spring your fancy
turns to thoughts of love--I know mine doesn't!  On the contrary, it
turns to thoughts of sulphur tablets and camomile tea and other sickly
or disagreeable circumventions of the "creakiness" of the human body.
For among the things I could teach Nature is that, when she made man,
she did not permit him to "flower" in the spring and start each year
with something at least resembling his pristine vigour--if he ever had
any.  But, whereas the spring gives a new glory to birds, and trees,
and plants, she only gives to us--built in the image of God--spots, a
disordered liver, and a muddy complexion.  It seems a piece of gross
mismanagement, doesn't it?  It would be so delightful if, once a year,
we were filled with extra energy; if our hair sprouted once more in the
colour with which we were born; if the old skin shed itself and a new
one came on so beautiful as to ruin the business of all the "Mrs.
Pomeroys" of this world.  But Nature seems, once having made us, to
leave us severely alone; to let us wither on our stalks, as it were,
until we drop off them and are swept away into the dustbin of the worms
and weeds.  The mind is a far kinder ally.  Oh, no; say what you will
in the praise of spring, to all those who, as it were, have commenced
the "bulge" of anno domini, it is a very trying season.  Besides--here
in England anyway--it is as uncertain as a flirt.  Sometimes it
suddenly comes upon us in the early days of March or lets mid-winter
pay us a visit in the lengthening days of May.  One never quite knows
what spring is going to do.  One never knows what kind of clothes to
wear to please it.  So often one sallies forth arrayed in winter
underwear, because the morning awoke so coldly, only to spend the rest
of the day eating ices to keep the body calm and cool.  Or, again, the
spring morning greets us with the warmth of an August day; we jump up
gaily, deck ourselves out in muslin, sally forth, take a sudden
"chill," and spend the rest of the week in bed!

One is always either too hot or too cold.  It is the season of the
unaccountable draught.  True, it often turns the fancy towards sweet
thoughts of love--but the fancy usually ends with an influenza cold
through indulging in sentimental dalliance upon the grass.  On the
whole, I always think that spring in England is nicer to sing about
than experience.  It is delightful as a season of "promise"--but, like
humanity, it often treats its promises like pie-crusts.  Still, it _is_
spring, and--although the body rarely recognises the fact except to
ruin by biliousness the romance which is surging in its heart--summer
is, as it were, knocking at the door.  And from June to mid-July--that
surely is the glory of the year!  After July, summer becomes a little
dusty at the hem.  Still, dusty, or even dirty, it makes life worth
living.  Nevertheless, I only wish that it were greedier and stole
three months away from winter.  For winter is too long, and spring is
too uncertain, and autumn too full of "Farewell."

But summer never palls.  And we have five summers to make up for,
haven't we?  For no one could really enjoy anything during the war
except the war news--when it was favourable.  But now we can--well, if
not enjoy ourselves, at least lie back, just whispering to ourselves
that, when the sun shines the world is a lovely place, and, so far as
England is concerned, there is at any rate a kind of camouflaged peace.
And so we have to be very very old if we cannot feel in our hearts a
breath of youth and spring.  After all, when the sun shines, we are, or
feel we are, of any age--or of no age whatever.  And if we cannot burst
into flower like the roses, we can at least enjoy the beauty of the
rose when it blooms--which other roses cannot do.  Thus, with a few
small mercies, life is very good when the sun shines, isn't it?

_Bad-tempered People_

I would sooner live with an immoral man or woman than a bad-tempered
one.  An immoral person can often be a very charming companion, quite
easy to live with--if you take the various excuses for sudden absences
at their face value, and don't probe too deeply into the business; in
fact, if you are not in love with the absentee.  A bad-tempered person
in the house may have the morality of the angels--but life with him is
a daily "hell," like always living with strangers, or a mad dog, or in
a room full of those ornaments which belong, almost exclusively, to
lodging-houses everywhere.  Briefly, he is always _there_--ready to
burst into flames at any moment, ready to misunderstand everything
anybody does or says, a perpetual bugbear; and not even the emotional
repentances, which are often the only partially saving grace of
bad-tempered people, can atone for the atmosphere of disturbance which
they always inflict.  And the man or woman who loses his temper
whenever anything goes in the slightest bit wrong--well, from them may
the Lord deliver me for ever, Amen!  They carry their ill-nature about
with them all day and under all circumstances.  Sometimes they seem to
imagine that their spirit of disagreeableness is a sign of the
super-man, or of that dominating personality of which Caesar and
Napoleon are historical examples.  They frequent restaurants and harry
the already over-harried waiters.  It is such a very easy victory--the
victory over a paid servant.  But the conquerors stamp themselves for
ever and for ever among Nature's "cads" nevertheless.  Anybody who is
rude enough can give a quelling performance of "God Almighty" before
menials.  Some people delight to do so, apparently.  They possess
everything except an instinctive respect for a man and woman, however
lowly, who are earning their own living.  And the lack of it places
them among the inglorious army of the "bounders" for all time.  When
there is no "inferior" upon whom to vent the outbursts of their own
supreme egoism, they find their wives extremely useful.  In the days
when the divorce laws are "sensible," freedom will be granted for
perpetual bad temper sooner than for occasional unfaithfulness.

Of course, we all have our days when we are like nothing so much as
gunpowder looking for a match.  We can't be perfect and serene all the
time.  And if ever, as I have just hinted, we do wake up in the morning
feeling as if we could get up and quarrel with a bee because it buzzes,
a Beecham pill will probably soon put us in a regular "click" of a
humour.  ("Mr. Carter" never offered me anything; nor did Sir Thomas
Beecham.  But being fond of grand opera, I mention the pills "worth a
guinea a box" for preference.  Besides, they tell us a "Beecham at
night makes you sing with delight!"  So there!)  That is one of the
reasons why I always advocate a "silence room" in every household which
otherwise is large enough to put the biggest room aside to play
billiards in.  I would have it quite small, and decorated in restful,
neutral tints, with the finest view from the window thereof that the
house could supply.  I would also have a little window cut out of the
door, through which food could be pushed in to the sufferer without him
having to tell the domestic that it is a fine day and that he hopes her
bunion's better.  This little room would be devoted to those inmates of
the house who got up on the wrong side of the bed because both sides
were "wrong sides" that morning.  There he, or she, would stay until
the world seemed to be bright again.  And they would come forth in
their new and serener state of mind, blessing the idea with all their
hearts.  For if, as they have to do now, they had come downstairs in
the mood in which they woke up, the whole house would have known of it
to curse it, and most of its members would not be on polite speaking
terms for days afterwards.  Of course, the idea could be recommended
also for those people whose temper is always in a state of uproar.  The
only difficulty, however, would be, then--they might live in the
silence room all their lives and die there--beloved, because _unseen_.
But that is the only thing to do with an habitually disagreeable
person--_lock him up_, and, if you be wise, _take away the key of the
dungeon with you_!

_Polite Masks_

You never really know anybody--until you have either lived with them,
travelled with them, or drunk a glass of port with them quietly over
the fireside.  In almost every other instance, what you become
acquainted with is one of a variety of _masks_!  And everyone has a
fine assortment of these, haven't they?  For the most part you don them
unconsciously--or rather, you have got so used to assuming them
suddenly that you have lost all consciousness of effort.  But they are
_masks_, nevertheless--and a mask always hides the truth, doesn't it?
Not that I am one of those, however, who dislike camouflage because it
_is_ camouflage.  In fact, most of the time I thank Heaven for it--my
own and other people's!  The "assumed" is so often so much more
agreeable than the natural, and nine times out of ten all you require
of men and women is that they should at least _look_ pleasant.  You've
got to get through this life day after day somehow, and time passes
ever so much quicker for everyone if the hypocrite be a smiling
hypocrite at all times.  At every moment of the everyday--preserve me
from the _sour_-visaged saint.

After all, only love and friendship and the law demand the truth and
nothing but the truth.  Among acquaintances, among all the many
thousands you meet through life only to discuss the weather and your
own influenza symptoms--all you ask of them is that they should bring
out their smiling mask as readily as you struggle to assume your own.
Only, as I said before, in love and friendship and the courts of law is
the mask an insult, a tragic disillusion and a sham.  In every other
circumstance it is usually a blessing.  Without it society, as a social
entertainment, would become impossible.  For society is but a
collection of men and women wearing masks, each one vying with the
others to make his mask the most attractive, and, at the same time, the
most concealing.  But the worst of wearing masks is, that we become
tired at last of holding them in front of our features.  This makes the
entertainment of watching the truth peering through the camouflage one
of the most amusing among the many unpremeditated amusements of the
social world.  After all, as I said before, so long as your lover and
your friend, and the witnesses you have subpoenaed on behalf of your
own case, show you _truth_--all you ask of the others is the most
agreeable mask they can put on for the occasion.  But even lovers and
friends may deceive you, while some witnesses' idea of the truth in the
law courts hasn't that semblance of reality possessed by the Medium's
description of life in the world beyond.  That is what makes matrimony
often such a gamble with loaded dice, and holidays so often more
tedious than work.  To be in the company of one's lover for one
ecstatic hour tells one nothing of what he will be when, day after day,
one has to live with him in deadly intimacy until death doth part us
both.

Neither do you really know how much, or how little, your friend means
to you, until you have been with her on a cold railway station for
hours, when fate has done its best to make you both lose your tempers
and your luggage.  Only a very _real_ love can survive smiling through
that period when, from almost maudlin appreciation, a husband gradually
sinks into the commonplace mood of taking his soul's mate "for
granted."  Only _real_ friendship can live through the disillusionment
of irritable temper, lack of imagination, and boredom so often revealed
while travelling in the company of friends.  More than half the mutual
life of lovers and friends is spent behind masks--for masks are
sometimes necessary to keep love and friendship great and true.  But
one must, nevertheless, know _something_ of the real man and woman
_behind the mask_--even though that which lies behind it may prove
disappointing--before you can prove that your love is _real_ love, that
your friendship is _real_ friendship, that you love your lover or your
friend, not only for what they are, but also in spite of what they are
_not_.

_The Might-Have-Been_

It is rare to come across anybody with very definite ideas; it is rarer
still to meet a man and woman brave enough to put their ideas into
practice.  The hardest battle in life--and one of the longest--is the
battle to live your own life.  No one realises what fighting really
means until they stand in battle-array face to face with relations.
But most of us have to fight this battle sooner or later, and if we
fight and yet make a "hash" of the victory we gain, is it not better
so?  Relations always think they know what is best for you.  Well,
perhaps they do, if the "best" be a circumspect kind of goodness.  But
they rarely know what you _want_, and, until you have got what you
really want, even though you find it is "Dead Sea fruit" after all, the
thought always haunts the disappointed Present by visions of the
glorious Might-Have-Been.

Relatives always seem to imagine that, when you say you want to lead
your own life, it is always a "bad" life you want to lead.  They seem
to think that a girl leading her own life is a girl entertaining men
friends, until goodness knows what hour of the night, alone in her
bachelor flat, they picture a man leading his own life as a man whose
memoirs would send shudders down a really nice woman's spine.  They
never realise that there is happiness in personal freedom and
liberty--happiness which is happy merely in the independent feeling of
self-respect which this freedom and liberty gives.  They would like
boys and girls to continue to maturity the same life which they led
when they were children, subject to the same restrictions, bowing to
the same parental point of view.  No one knows of what he is capable
until he has begun the battle of life in the world of men, independent
and on his own.  Better make a "hash" of everything; better suffer and
endure and grow old in disappointment, than live in a gilded cage with
clipped wings, while kind-hearted people feed you to repletion through
the bars.

A girl or boy, who has no occupation, other than the occupation of mere
amusement, who has no Ideal; who has no interest other than the
interest of passing the time, is not only useless, but detestable as a
member of human society, while his old age is of unhappiness the most
unhappy.  For what is Old Age worth if it has no "memories"; and what
are "memories" worth if they are not memories of having lived one's
life to the full?  To me, to live one's own life is to live--or,
perhaps I ought to say, to strive to live--all those ideals which
Reflection has shown you to be good, and Nature has given you the power
to accomplish.  That to me is the fight to live your own life--the
fight to realise yourself, to live the "best" that is in you.  For a
man and woman must be able to hold up their heads high, not only face
to face with the world, but face to face with their own selves, before
they can say that Life is happy, that Life has been worth while.  The
tragic cases are those who cannot live their own lives because the
lives of other people demanded their sacrifice, a sacrifice which
cannot be withheld without loss of self-respect, of that good
fellowship with your own "soul" which some people call Conscience.

This sacrifice is generally a woman's sacrifice.  You may see the
victims of it in any church, in any town, at almost any hour of the
day.  They are grey-haired, and sad, and grim, and they hold the more
tenaciously to the promise of happiness in After Life because they have
sacrificed, or permitted to pass by, the happiness of this.  To a great
extent it is a "Victorian" sacrifice.  They are victims of that passing
Belief which was convinced that a girl of gentle birth ought to
administer to her parents, pay calls, uphold the Church, and do a
little needlework all her life, unless some man came along to marry her
and give her emancipation.  The happiness which goes with a career,
even if that career fails, is saving daughters from this parentally
imposed "atrophy."  They are learning that to live one's own life is
not necessarily to live a "bad" life, but a "fuller" life.  Thus the
young are teaching the Old People wisdom--the knowledge that youth has
its Declaration of Rights no less than Middle Age.

_Autumn Sowing_

I sometimes think the man who first said that "the road to hell is paved
with good intentions" must have said it in November.  The autumn is full
of good intentions--just as spring is full of holiday and hope, and
summer of heat and _dolce far niente_.  But, just as the first warm day
in June fills you with a physical vitality which you feel convinced that
you must live for ever, so autumn makes you realise that life is fleeting
and the mind has not yet reached its full development, nor intellectual
ambition its complete fruition.  Perhaps it is the touch of winter in the
air which braces your mind and soul and gives you the impression that,
given the long autumn evenings over the fire undisturbed, your brain will
soon be capable of tackling the removal of mountains.  If you are
unutterably silly (as so many of us are--alas!  for the world's sanity;
but thank heaven for the world's humour!) you will plan a whole
curriculum of intellectual labour for the quiet evenings over the
fireside.  Oh, the books--good books, I mean--you will read!  Oh, the
subjects you will study!  Perhaps you will learn Russian, or maybe
something strange and out-of-the-ordinary, like Arabic!  You dream of the
moment when, speaking quite casually, you will inform your friends that
you are reading the whole of the novels of Balzac; that you are studying
for the law and hope to pass your "Final" "just for the fun of the
thing"; that you are learning Persian, and intend to retranslate the
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and discover other Eastern philosophers.  In
fact, there is no end to the things you intend to do in the autumn
evenings over the fireside when your labours of the day are over.
Briefly, you are going to "cultivate your mind"; and when people talk
about "cultivating their minds," they usually regard the mind as a kind
of intellectual allotment which anyone can till--given determination, an
easy-chair near a big fire, and the long, long autumn evenings.

_What You Really Reap_

But alas! all you do . . . all you _really_ do, is . . .  Well, as I said
before, the man who first said that "the way to hell is paved with good
intentions," must have said it in the autumn, or perhaps, in the spring,
when he realised how few of the good intentions he had lived up to.
Well, maybe the most enjoyable part of going to hell is paving the way
with, as it were, your back turned to your eventual goal.  And sometimes
I rather fancy, in spite of all the moralist may say, the paving-stones
of good intent that you have laid on your way to perdition will be
counted in your favour, and the Recording Angel will place them to your
credit--which she can't do if, metaphorically speaking, you have not
paved a way anywhere, but just been content to live snugly on the little
plot upon which Fate planted you at the beginning, and you were too dully
inert either to cultivate hot-house orchids thereon or even let it become
overgrown with wild oats and roses.  And I think sometimes that on good
intentions we eventually mount to heaven.  I certainly know that the good
intentions of the early autumn make me very nearly forgive the cycle of
the seasons which robs me of summer and its joys.  And after all, there
is always this to be said for a good intention, nobody knows, yourself
least of all, if you may not one day fulfil it.  That is what makes
dreaming so exciting.  In your dreams you _have_ learnt Russian; you
_have_ read all the novels of Balzac; you _will_ be able to understand
Sir Oliver Lodge when he leaves the realms of spiritualism and talks
about the stars.  And maybe--who knows?--by the time that your dreams
have materialised into reality and spring has just arrived, you _will_ be
able to tell Lenin, if you happen to meet him, that you have "seen the
daughters of the lawyer and lost the pen of your aunt"; and you _will_
have read the books of Paul de Kock because you couldn't struggle through
Balzac; and you _will_ know the composition of the moon and the
impossibility of there being a man in it--which, after all, is a far
greater achievement than having played countless games of bridge, learnt
sixty-two steps of the tango, evolved a racing system, and arrived at
loving the Germans, isn't it?

_Autumn Determination_

But unless your determination be something Napoleonic, you won't have
achieved very much more than this.  It has all been so invigorating and
delightful to contemplate; and the way of your decline has been so cosy
and so comfortable, and it has so often ended in a glass of hot "toddy"
and so to bed.  You had stage-managed your self-education so beautifully.
You had brought the most comfortable easy-chair right up to the fire; you
had put on your "smoking"--not that garment almost as uncomfortable as
evening-dress, but that coat which is made of velvet, or flannel, softly
lined with silk and deliciously padded: you had brought out all your
books--the "First Steps to Russian," "How to appreciate Balzac,"
"Introduction to Astronomy"--put your feet on the fender, cut the end of
your best cigar.  Everything simply invited peace and comfort and an
intellectual feast.  Then, just _one more_ glimpse at the evening
paper--and you would begin . . . oh yes! you _would begin_!  And so you
read about the threatened strike; the murder in East Ham; the leading
article, the marriage of Lady Fitzclarence-Forsooth to--well, whoever she
married, the funny remark the drunken woman made to the judge when he
fined her two-and-six for kissing a policeman; Mr. Justice Darling's
latest _mot_; the racing, the forthcoming fashions; the advertisement of
Back-Ache Pills; Mr. C.  B. Cochran's praise of his own productions, Mr.
Selfridge's praise of his own shop; the "Wants," the "Situations Vacant,"
the . . .  Then somebody woke you up to ask if you were asleep . . .
which, of course, you _weren't_ . . .  Well . . . well . . .  It is past
midnight!  So what can one do now?  What _can_ one do?  Why, go to bed,
of course.  Another autumn evening is over.  But then, there are plenty
more . . .  oh, plenty more.  "Good-night."

_Two Lives_

I often wish that we could all of us lead two lives.  I don't mean I wish
that we could live twice as long--though, in reality, it would come to
the same thing.  But I would like to live the two lives which I want to
lead, and only do lead in a sort of patchwork-quilt kind of way.  I would
like to live a life in which I could wander gipsy-like over the face of
the globe--seeing everything, doing everything, meeting everybody.  I
should also like to live a purely vegetable existence in some remote
country village--sleeping away my life in happy domesticity, away from
the crowd, free from care, tranquil, and at peace.  I suppose that, even
as dreams, they are only too futile--but they are very pleasant dreams
nevertheless.  I know that they _are_ dreams--since I am quite sure that
the reality would be far less satisfactory than it seems in anticipation.
There is "always a fly in the amber" as the saying goes, and my
experience is, that the truth more nearly resembles a great big fly with
a tiny speck of amber sticking somewhere to its back.  For in our dream
voyages we overlook the fleas, the mosquitoes, the hunt for lodgings, the
struggle with languages, the hundred-and-one disturbances of the spirit
which are inseparable from real voyages of any kind and bombard our inner
tranquillity at every turn.  In the same way, when we gaze at the
peaceful landscape of some hidden-away English countryside, we yearn to
live among such peacefulness, forgetting that, though life in the country
may _look_ peaceful to the stranger's eye, experience teaches us that
gossip and scandal and the continual agitation round and round the
trivial--an agitation so great that the trivial becomes colossal--at last
rob life of anything resembling _dolce far niente_ mid country lanes and
in the shadow of some country church.  In fact, it seems to me that the
emotion which we seek--the emotion of strange wonderplaces, the emotion
of utter restfulness which falls upon the soul like a benediction--do
come to us from time to time, but at the most unexpected moments and in
the most unlikely places.  They come--and we hug them in our memory like
precious thoughts.  And sometimes we try to reproduce them artificially,
only to discover that "never anything twice" is one of the lessons of
life--and quite the last one we ever learn, even if we ever do learn
it--which is doubtful.

_Backward and Forward_

Thus for the most part, things look most beautiful when we anticipate
them, or as we look back upon them in memory over the fireside.  For
distance lends enchantment, not only to most views, but also to memories
and love.  As, metaphorically, we stand on the Mount of Olives gazing
down at the city of Jerusalem, thinking of all that tiny corner of the
earth has meant to men and women, we forget--as we look back--the beastly
little mosquito which bit us on the nose, the interruption or our
companion who wondered what the stones might tell us if they could only
speak.  So (also metaphorically), as we set our faces towards the Holy
City, filled with the anticipation of those sublime thoughts and emotions
which would surge through our souls when we eventually arrived there, we
were happy in our ignorance of the fact that, when we did arrive, we felt
unutterably dirty and our head ached, and the corn on our little toe felt
more like a cancer than a corn!  Meanwhile, the emotion of the soul,
which we expected to find upon the Mount of Olives, has sometimes come to
us quite unexpectedly while standing in the middle of Clapham Common in
the moonlight; and that glorious spirit of adventure, which to us means
"travel," we have felt riding on a motor-bike through the New Forest at
nightfall when the forest seemed full of pixies and the fading sunset was
red and grey and golden like the transformation scene of a pantomime.
But alas! the next day we found the forest unromantic, and Clapham Common
looked indescribably common in the morning sunlight.  Our mood had
vanished, and although we tried to reproduce the same uplifting emotion
the following evening, we couldn't--we had a headache and the gnats were
about.  So, although I often yearn to live _two_ lives--one full of
travel and adventure, and the other peacefully over the fireside mid the
peace and beauty of the country--I am quite sure that, were my wish
granted, I should find both lives just the same mixture of unexpected
happiness and unanticipated disappointment which I find this one to be,
yet still go smiling on.  Very rarely the Time and the Place and the
Mood.  But when they do happen to come together--well, life is so
wonderful and so beautiful that to throw in the "Loved one" too would
seem like gilding the rose--a heaven worth sacrificing every stolen
happiness in life for.

_When?_

One of the greatest--perhaps _the_ greatest--problems which parents have
to face is--when to tell their children the truth about sexual life; how
to tell it; how little to tell--how much.  And most parents, alas! are
content to drift--to trust to luck!  They themselves have got through
fairly well; the probabilities are, then, that their children will get
through fairly well too.  So they, metaphorically speaking, fold their
hands and listen, and, when any part of the truth breaks through the
reticence of intimate conversation, they shake their heads solemnly,
strive to look shocked--and often are; or else they make a joke of
it--believing that their children regard the question in the same
reasonable light as they do themselves.  But ignorance is never
reasonable, and half ignorance is even more excited.  There is a
"mystery" somewhere, and ignorant youth is hot after its solution.  And
the "mystery" is solved for them in a dozen ways--all more or less dirty
and untrue.  Better far be too frank, so long as your frankness isn't the
frankness of coarse levity, than not to be frank enough.  The reticence
of parents towards their children in this matter has turned many a young
life of brilliant promise into a life-long hell.  We don't _see_ this
hell for the most part, and, because we don't see it, we fondly believe
that it does not exist--or, if it does exist, that it exists so rarely as
scarcely to demand more than a passing condemnation and a sigh.  We hear
a great deal about the Hidden Plague.  We hear of the 80,000 cases of
syphilis which are registered every year in the United Kingdom.  But we
don't know any individual sufferer--or we _think_ we don't; and so,
although we take the figure as an acknowledged fact, we nevertheless
don't realise it--and in any case, it isn't a nice subject of debate,
and, should the word be even mentioned in the presence of our dear, dear
children, we would ask the speaker to leave the house immediately and
never again return!  I, too, was one of these poor fools--although I have
no children to suffer from my foolishness.  I knew it was a fact, but
like others I didn't realise that fact--like we didn't realise the horror
and filth and tragedy of war, we who never were "out there"; we who never
"went over the top." But lately I have had to visit a friend in one of
the largest lock hospitals in London.  And one day I was obliged to walk
through the waiting-room where the men are forced to sit until they are
summoned to see the doctor.  And truly I was appalled!  There were
_hundreds of them_ of all ages--from 16 to 60.  They were not the serious
cases, of course, and we should pass them in the street without realising
that they were any but physically sound men, often of a very splendid
type.  But each one represented a blighted life--a future robbed of
splendid promise, a present of misery and unhappiness stalking through
the world like shame beneath a happy mask.  I tell you, it brought the
truth home to me in a way mere figures and statistics could never do.  As
I said before, I was appalled: I was also very angry.  For I knew that
ignorance was at the bottom of many of these sad tragedies--the criminal
reticence of the people _who know_, too mock-modest to discuss openly a
fact of life which, beyond all other facts of life, should be spoken of
bluntly, honestly, therefore decently and cleanly.

_The Futile Thought_

Too many fond parents like to imagine that their children know nothing at
all of sexual matters--that they are clean and innocent and ignorant, and
that, as long as they can be kept so, they will not run into danger and
disgrace.  But no parent really knows how much or how little their
children know of this matter.  Children have ears and imagination, and
once they know anything at all--which is at any time from eight years of
age, sometimes, alas! earlier--they should be told everything, not in a
nasty, furtive fashion, glossing over the ugly part and elevating the
decent side until it is out of all proportion to the truth, but quietly,
with dignity, laying stress on the fact that sexual morality is not a
thing of religion and of God, but of self-respect, of care for the coming
generation, and, especially, of that great love which one day will come
into their lives.  It should not be called a "sin"; at the same time it
should not be laughed at and made the subject of a whispered jest.
Sexual laxity should be treated in the same way as dishonesty and
untruthfulness--a sin against oneself, against the beauty of one's own
soul, and against those who believe in us and love us and are our world.
Children should be taught to respect the dignity of their own bodies, of
their own minds and soul; not by leaving them in half-ignorance, but by
telling them everything, and telling them it in the right way--which is
the clean and truthful way.

_The London Season_

If only the people who repeat the words of wisdom uttered by philosophers
lived as if they believed them, how much happier the world would be!  It
is, however, so much easier to give, or to repeat, advice, than to follow
it, isn't it?  Conventionality is far stronger than common sense, and a
fixed habit more powerful than a revolution.  Besides, most people
realise that to give advice is a much more impressive ceremony than
merely to receive it.  And I think that the majority of people would far
sooner look _impressive_ than be _wise_.  The _appearance_ of a thing
sometimes pleases them far more than the thing itself.  Besides, to give
advice is a rather pleasant proceeding, and those who habitually indulge
in it seem incapable of discouragement.  They will inform the "rolling
stone" that if he continues his unresisting methods he will gather no
moss, but the rolling stone usually continues to roll merrily onward.
They will protest to the ignorant that "to be good is to be happy," but
very few of them will go out of their way to do good, if, by being "bad,"
they can snatch a personal advantage without anybody being any the wiser.
"Life would be endurable if it were not for its pleasures," they declare
in the face of a pile of social invitations.  Yet they still endure that
treadmill of entertainments which makes up a London season, only showing
their real feelings by moaning to themselves in the process.  They freely
acknowledge that very few of these entertainments really entertain, but
to miss being seen at them would be to risk a disaster which they would
not dare to take.  So they go wearily smiling to amusements which don't
amuse, to dances which are too crowded to dance at, to dinner parties at
which they pay in boredom for the food they eat; to "at homes" which are
the most "homeless" things imaginable--travelling here and there, from
one entertainment to another which proves as unutterably dull as the
first one.  Not content with these things, they must perforce be seen at
the Opera--although they _hate_ music; visit all the exhibitions of
art--when Maude Goodeman is their favourite painter; talk cleverly of
books which they would never read did not people talk about them, and
generally follow for three long months a time-table of "enjoyment" which
very few of them really enjoy.  In the meanwhile, the only affairs which
give them pleasure are the little impromptu ones arranged on the spur of
the moment between friends.

Of course I am not speaking of the débutante.  She, "sweet young thing,"
always enjoys any entertainment at which there are plenty of young men
and ices.  Nor, judging from observation, do I include among those who
willingly go through the three months' hard labour of a London season
those henna haired ladies--thickening from anno domini--who seem
perfectly happy in the delusion that their juvenile antics are still
deliciously girlish, and whose décolleté dresses would seem to declare to
the world that, though their faces may begin to show the wear and tear of
life, their plump backs don't look a day over twenty-five.  The one is so
young that she will enjoy anything which requires the endurance of youth.
The other is of that age which is happy hugging to its bosom the adage
that a woman can't possibly look a day older than champagne makes her
feel.

No, the person whose life of amusement I pity is the person who accepts
invitations because she daren't refuse them.  If the world doesn't see
her in all places where she _should be_ seen, the world always presumes
her to be dead--and people would rather die in reality than live to be
forgotten.  But what a price they have to pay to keep their memories
green.

No, as I said before, the only entertainments which people really enjoy
are those at which they can be perfectly natural--natural, because they
are perfectly happy.  Rarely are they fixed affairs, advertised weeks
beforehand.  Mostly are they unpremeditated---delightful little impromptu
amusements made up of people who really desire to meet each other.  Large
entertainments are almost invariably dull.  Upon them hangs the heavy
atmosphere or a hostess "paying off old debts in _one_."  The only really
amusing part of them is to watch the amazement on the faces of one half
of the guests that the other half is there at all!  That is invariably
funny.  In the big affairs the chef and the champagne are the real hosts
of the evening.  If England went "dry," I think the London season would
join the dodo--people couldn't possibly endure it on ginger "pop" and
cider.  But champagne and a good chef could, I believe, make even a
Church Congress seem jolly.  They only bring an illusion of
happiness--but what's the odds?  A London season is but an illusion of
joy after all.

_Christmas_

Christmas comes but once a year--and the cynic cries, "Thank God!"  And
so, perhaps, do the very lonely.  But then Christmas is not a festival
for either the cynic or the desolate.  The cynic is as welcome at the
annual feast of turkey and plum pudding as Mr. "Pussyfoot" would be at a
"beano"; while the lonely--well, one likes to imagine that there are no
lonely ones at Christmas-time; or, if there are--that somebody has asked
them out, or they have toothache and so wouldn't appreciate even the
society of jolly seraphims.  Christmas, except to the young, is
essentially a festival of "let's pretend"--let's pretend that we love
everybody, that everybody loves us, that Aunt Maria isn't a prosy old
bore, that Uncle John isn't a profiteer; that everybody has his or her
good points and that all their bad ones are not sticking out, as they
usually appear to us to be, as painfully apparent as those on the back of
a porcupine should you happen to sit down upon one in a bathing costume!
And it is quite wonderful how this spirit of good will towards all men
can be self-distilled, as it were!  You try to feel it, and, strangely
enough, you do feel it--at least, up to tea time.  The public exhibition
of ecstacy you give at receiving a present you don't want seems to come
to you quite easily and naturally on Christmas morning.  Even Aunt Maria
can pretend enthusiasm quite convincingly at the gimcrack you have given
her which her artistic soul loathes, the while she furtively examines its
base to discover if peradventure you have forgotten to erase the price.
You yourself declare, while regarding the sixpenny pen-wiper, that it is
not the gift so much as the _thought_ which pleases you, and you can
declare this lie to the satisfaction, not only of yourself, but, more
difficult by far, to the satisfaction of the wealthy donor who gave it to
you because she couldn't think what to give you--and because, as she
piously declares, "Thank God, you have everything you want!"  Yes,
indeed, there is something about Yuletide which makes all men benign, and
the joyful hypocrisy of Christmas Eve sounds quite the genuine emotion
when uttered on Christmas Day.  I am bound, however, to confess that the
"good will" becomes a trifle strident towards nightfall.  Many things
conduce to this.  The children are suffering from overfeeding; Mother is
sick of Aunt Maria, her husband's sister; and Father is more than fed up
with the pomposity of Uncle John.  There is a general and half-uttered
yearning among everybody to go upstairs and lie down.  The jollifications
of the coming evening, when the grown-ups come into their own and the
children are being sick upstairs, presume the necessity for such a
retirement--a kind of regeneration of that charitable energy required for
the festival "jump off."  After which the digestive organs begin to
realise what sweated labour means, and Father makes a speech about his
pleasure at seeing so many members of the family present, and Mother
weeps silently for some trouble which always revives over Christmas
dinner and nobody has yet been able to sympathise with, because nobody
has yet known what it is.  And, because Christmas night would otherwise
prove somewhat trying even to a family determined to be loving or to die
in the attempt, somebody or other has invented champagne.  It is quite
wonderful how the dullest people seem to take unto themselves wings after
the third bottle of Veuve Clicquot has been opened.

So Christmas Day is thus brought to a triumphant conclusion of good will.
And the next morning, of course, is Boxing Day--a most appropriately
named event.  Even if fighting isn't strictly legal, backbiting
unfortunately is.  Still, the wise relation seeks the frequent seclusion
of his own bedroom during that mostly inglorious day of Christmas
aftermath.  You see, there is no knowing what sparks may fly when the
digestions of a devoted family have gone on strike!

Only the children seem to be able to raise the jolly ashes of their dead
selves, phoenix-like from the carcase of the devoured turkey (whose bones
in the morning light of Boxing Day resemble somewhat the Cloth Hall at
Ypres by the end of the war).  Even they (bless 'em!) seem able to
recover from the fact that the lovely toys which Uncle John gave them lie
broken at their feet because Uncle John would insist upon playing with
them all by himself.  Children can always become philosophers in half a
day.  It is their special genius.

Only grown up people have forgotten how to forget.  And Christmas,
although the most lovable of all the festivals of the year, is also the
saddest--and the most lonely, alas!  There are so many "gaps"--so many
empty places in the heart which the passing of the years will never,
never be able to fill.  That is why Mother weeps--it is her privilege.
And, truth to tell, so many people would like to weep too, only they dare
not--they dare not.  So they throw themselves into the feverish jollity
which Christmas seems to demand for the sake of the children, and for the
sake of the young people who, because they were so young, will never
realise the aftermath of loneliness which to-day elder people know _meant
war_!  So they say to themselves, "Let us eat and drink and appear merry
because to-morrow . . . to-morrow--who knows?--peradventure we may all
meet again!"  Thus the true spirit of Christmas is always as a
benediction.

_The New Year_

There is something "tonic" about the New Year which there isn't about
Christmas, and Birthdays certainly do not possess.  After thirty, you
wake up on Christmas morning, look back into the Long Ago, and sigh;
after forty, you wake up on the morning of your birthday, look forward,
and ofttimes despair.  But New Year's Day has "buck" in it, and, when
you wake up, you lay down the immediate future with those Good
Intentions which somebody or other once declared paved the way to Hell,
but are nevertheless a most invigorating exercise.  Christmas, besides,
has been seized upon by tradesmen and others in whose debt you happen
to be to remind you of the fact.  I suppose they hope that the Good
Will of the Season will make you think kindly of their account--which,
in parenthesis, perhaps it might, did not that same Good Will run you
into debt in other directions.  As for Birthdays--well, the person who
remembers Birthdays is the person at whose head I should like to hurl
the biggest and heaviest paving-stone with which, as I lie in bed on
New Year's morning, I lay out my way to Hell.  No, as I said before,
Christmas Days and Birthdays are failures so far as festivity goes.
The former brings along with it bills and accounts rendered, and you
are fed with rood which immediately overwhelms any feeling of
kindliness you may happen to have in your heart, while the latter is
like a settlement day with Time, and Time certainly lets you have
nothing off your account.  But New Year's Day, except in Scotland,
where, I believe, you are expected to go out and get drunk--always an
easy obligation!--brings with it nothing but another year, and
possesses all the "tonic" quality of novelty, besides the promise of a
much happier and luckier one than the Old Year which has just been
scratched off the calendar.  It is like an annual Beginning Again, and
beginning again much better.  Besides, New Year's Day seems to be an
anniversary which belongs to you alone, as it were.  On Christmas Day
you are expected to do things for other people, and you do (usually
just the things they don't want); while on Birthdays people do things
for you (and you wish to Heaven they'd neglect their duty).  But New
Year's Day doesn't belong to anybody but yourself, and you prospect the
future with no reference to anybody whomsoever, and, better still, with
no one likely to refer to you.  Oh, the New Leaves you are going to
turn!  The blots you are going to erase!  The copy-books you are going
to keep spotless!  The Big Things you are going to do with what remains
of your life, and the big way you are going to do them!  Besides, say
what you will, there comes to you on New Year's Day the very first
breath of Spring.  The Old Year is dead, and you kick its corpse down
the limbo of the Past and Done-with the while you plan out the New.
So, looking forward in anticipation, you feel "bucked."  You aren't
expected to show "good will to all men" after a previous night's
debauch on turkey, plum-pudding, and sweet champagne.  Nobody comes
down to breakfast on New Year's morning and weeps because "Dear Uncle
John" was alive (and an unsociable old bore) "this time last year."
Nobody adds to the day's joy by wondering if they will be "alive next
New Year's Day," nor become quite "huffy" if you cheerfully remark that
they very probably _will_.  It doesn't invite the melancholy to become
reminiscent, nor the prophet to assume the mantle of Solomon Eagle.
New Year's Day belongs to nobody but yourself, and what you are going
to make of the 365 days which follow it.  You regard the date as a kind
of spiritual Spring Cleaning, and to good housewives there is all the
vigorous promise of a Big Achievement even in buying a pot of paint and
shaking out a duster.  And, though Fate usually helps to enliven
Christmas-time by arranging a big railway accident or burning a London
store down, and the newspapers, in search of something to frighten us
now that the war is over, by referring to Germany's "hidden army" and
an unprecedentedly colossal strike in the New Year, the human spirit
soars above these things on the First of January, and Hope,
figuratively speaking, buys a "buzzer" and makes high holiday.  Who
knows if the New Year may not be your year, your _lucky_ year?  And in
this feeling you jump out of bed, clothe yourself in your "Gladdest
Rags," collect your "Goodest" intentions, and sally forth.  Nobody
wishes you anything, it's true, but you wish yourself the moon, and in
wishing for it you somehow feel that the New Year will give it to you.

_February_

February is the month when, cold-red are the noses--and so (oh help!)
are the "toes-es."  No one ever sings about February: scarcely anyone
speaks about It.  It is indeed unspeakable.  Its only benefit is that,
once every four years, it keeps people younger a day longer.  If you're
thirty-nine, you're thirty-nine for an extra twenty-four hours, and at
that period of life you're glad of any small mercy.  It is the month
when the new-rich depart to sun themselves in their new-found sun, and
the new-poor, and others who are quite used to poverty, swear at them
in secret.  Oh, yes, indeed!  If the Clerk of the Weather has a left
ear it must surely at this moment be as 'ot as 'ell!  Nobody likes
February--it is the step-child of the months.

One simply lives through it as one lives through a necessary duty.
It's a month--and that's all.  Thank Heaven! somebody once made it the
shortest!  By the end of January most people have had more than enough
of the English Winter even if the English Winter thinks we can ever
have enough of it, and comes back saying "Hello!" to us right into
Summer, and starts ringing us up, as it were, to tell us it's coming
back again as early as October.  Just as if we didn't know--just as if
we ever wanted to know!  The English Summer is far more modest.
Usually it's gone before we have, so to speak, washed our hands, tidied
our hair, and dressed ourselves up to meet it.  But Winter in England
not only comes before it is wanted, but outstays its welcome by weeks.
And of all the months it brings with it, February, though the shortest,
seems to linger longest.  March may be colder, but the first day of
Spring is marked on its calendar; and we wait for it like we wait for a
lover--a lover in whose embrace we may not yet be, but who is, as it
were, downstairs washing his hands, he has arrived, he is here--and so
we can endure the suspense of waiting for him with a grin.  April may
fill the dykes fuller than February, whose skies are supposed to weep
all day long, but generally only succeed in dribbling, but April
belongs to Spring--even though our face and hands and feet are still in
Mid-Winter.

February always reminds me of the suburbs--appalling but you've got to
go through them to get to London.  Were I a rich man, I would follow
Spring round the World.  In that way I should be able to smile through
life like those people who, in snapshots from the Riviera, seem
composed principally of wide grins and thin legs, and whose joie de
vivre is usually published in English illustrated journals in seasons
when the English weather makes you feel that Life is just a Big Damn in
a mackintosh.  To follow Spring round the world would be like following
a mistress whose charms never palled, whose welcome was never too warm
to be sultry, whose friendship was never too cold to freeze further
promise of intimacy.  What a delightful chase! and what a
sweet-tempered man I should be!  For, say what you will, the weather
has a lot to do with that spotless robe of white which is supposed to
envelop saints.  If you can't be pure and good and generous and
altogether delightful in the Spring, you might as well write yourself
off for evermore among the ignoble army of the eternally disgruntled.
And if you _can_ be all these things in weather that is typically
English and typically February, then a hat would surely hide your halo.

And this is about all the good that February does, so far as I can see.
True, once in four years it also allows old maids to propose.  But the
three years when they had to wait to be asked have usually taken all
their courage out of them.  Besides, the married people and others who
are otherwise hooked and secure have turned even that benefit into a
joke--and no woman likes to place all her heart-yearnings at the mercy
of a laugh.  So that, what Leap-Year once allowed, people have turned
into a jeer.  But then, that is all part and parcel of February.
Somebody once tried their best to make it as attractive as possible,
even if it could only be so once every four years.  But everybody else
has since done their best to rob it of its one little bit of anaemic
joy.  Perhaps we ought not to blame them!  Nobody ought to be blamed in
February.  It is a month which brings out the very worst in everybody.

_Tub-thumpers_

I often wonder what born tub-thumpers are like in their own homes.
Perhaps they are as meek and mild as watered buttermilk.  Thinking it
over, I think they must be.  No self-respecting woman could be
tub-thumped at daily without eyeing furtively the nearest meat-carver.
For the genius of a tub-thumper is that he is usually born deaf.  I
don't mean to say that he cannot hear, but he only hears what is
convenient for his own arguments to hear, and the more an explanation
is convincing the more he tries to shout it down, deafening himself as
well as the poor fool who is struggling to make his meaning clear.
Each one of us, I suppose, has to "let off steam" some time somewhere,