The Angel and the Author and others
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Jerome K. Jerome >> The Angel and the Author and others
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CHAPTER V
[If only we had not lost our Tails!]
A friend of mine thinks it a pity that we have lost our tails. He
argues it would be so helpful if, like the dog, we possessed a tail
that wagged when we were pleased, that stuck out straight when we
were feeling mad.
"Now, do come and see us again soon," says our hostess; "don't wait
to be asked. Drop in whenever you are passing."
We take her at her word. The servant who answers our knocking says
she "will see." There is a scuffling of feet, a murmur of hushed
voices, a swift opening and closing of doors. We are shown into the
drawing-room, the maid, breathless from her search, one supposes,
having discovered that her mistress IS at home. We stand upon the
hearthrug, clinging to our hat and stick as to things friendly and
sympathetic: the suggestion forcing itself upon us is that of a
visit to the dentist.
Our hostess enters wreathed in smiles. Is she really pleased to see
us, or is she saying to herself, "Drat the man! Why must he choose
the very morning I had intended to fix up the clean curtains?"
But she has to pretend to be delighted, and ask us to stay to lunch.
It would save us hours of anxiety could we look beyond her smiling
face to her tail peeping out saucily from a placket-hole. Is it
wagging, or is it standing out rigid at right angles from her skirt?
But I fear by this time we should have taught our tails polite
behaviour. We should have schooled them to wag enthusiastically the
while we were growling savagely to ourselves. Man put on insincerity
to hide his mind when he made himself a garment of fig-leaves to hide
his body.
One sometimes wonders whether he has gained so very much. A small
acquaintance of mine is being brought up on strange principles.
Whether his parents are mad or not is a matter of opinion. Their
ideas are certainly peculiar. They encourage him rather than
otherwise to tell the truth on all occasions. I am watching the
experiment with interest. If you ask him what he thinks of you, he
tells you. Some people don't ask him a second time. They say:
"What a very rude little boy you are!"
"But you insisted upon it," he explains; "I told you I'd rather not
say."
It does not comfort them in the least. Yet the result is, he is
already an influence. People who have braved the ordeal, and emerged
successfully, go about with swelled head.
[And little Boys would always tell the Truth!]
Politeness would seem to have been invented for the comfort of the
undeserving. We let fall our rain of compliments upon the unjust and
the just without distinction. Every hostess has provided us with the
most charming evening of our life. Every guest has conferred a like
blessing upon us by accepting our invitation. I remember a dear good
lady in a small south German town organizing for one winter's day a
sleighing party to the woods. A sleighing party differs from a
picnic. The people who want each other cannot go off together and
lose themselves, leaving the bores to find only each other. You are
in close company from early morn till late at night. We were to
drive twenty miles, six in a sledge, dine together in a lonely
Wirtschaft, dance and sing songs, and afterwards drive home by
moonlight. Success depends on every member of the company fitting
into his place and assisting in the general harmony. Our
chieftainess was fixing the final arrangements the evening before in
the drawing-room of the pension. One place was still to spare.
"Tompkins!"
Two voices uttered the name simultaneously; three others immediately
took up the refrain. Tompkins was our man--the cheeriest, merriest
companion imaginable. Tompkins alone could be trusted to make the
affair a success. Tompkins, who had only arrived that afternoon, was
pointed out to our chieftainess. We could hear his good-tempered
laugh from where we sat, grouped together at the other end of the
room. Our chieftainess rose, and made for him direct.
Alas! she was a short-sighted lady--we had not thought of that. She
returned in triumph, followed by a dismal-looking man I had met the
year before in the Black Forest, and had hoped never to meet again.
I drew her aside.
"Whatever you do," I said, "don't ask -- " (I forget his name. One
of these days I'll forget him altogether, and be happier. I will
call him Johnson.) "He would turn the whole thing into a funeral
before we were half-way there. I climbed a mountain with him once.
He makes you forget all your other troubles; that is the only thing
he is good for."
"But who is Johnson?" she demanded. "Why, that's Johnson," I
explained--"the thing you've brought over. Why on earth didn't you
leave it alone? Where's your woman's instinct?"
"Great heavens!" she cried, "I thought it was Tompkins. I've invited
him, and he's accepted."
She was a stickler for politeness, and would not hear of his being
told that he had been mistaken for an agreeable man, but that the
error, most fortunately, had been discovered in time. He started a
row with the driver of the sledge, and devoted the journey outwards
to an argument on the fiscal question. He told the proprietor of the
hotel what he thought of German cooking, and insisted on having the
windows open. One of our party--a German student--sang,
"Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles,"--which led to a heated
discussion on the proper place of sentiment in literature, and a
general denunciation by Johnson of Teutonic characteristics in
general. We did not dance. Johnson said that, of course, he spoke
only for himself, but the sight of middle-aged ladies and gentlemen
catching hold of each other round the middle and jigging about like
children was to him rather a saddening spectacle, but to the young
such gambolling was natural. Let the young ones indulge themselves.
Only four of our party could claim to be under thirty with any hope
of success. They were kind enough not to impress the fact upon us.
Johnson enlivened the journey back by a searching analysis of
enjoyment: Of what did it really consist?
Yet, on wishing him "Good-night," our chieftainess thanked him for
his company in precisely the same terms she would have applied to
Tompkins, who, by unflagging good humour and tact, would have made
the day worth remembering to us all for all time.
[And everyone obtained his just Deserts!]
We pay dearly for our want of sincerity. We are denied the payment
of praise: it has ceased to have any value. People shake me warmly
by the hand and tell me that they like my books. It only bores me.
Not that I am superior to compliment--nobody is--but because I cannot
be sure that they mean it. They would say just the same had they
never read a line I had written. If I visit a house and find a book
of mine open face downwards on the window-seat, it sends no thrill of
pride through my suspicious mind. As likely as not, I tell myself,
the following is the conversation that has taken place between my
host and hostess the day before my arrival:
"Don't forget that man J-- is coming down tomorrow."
"To-morrow! I wish you would tell me of these things a little
earlier."
"I did tell you--told you last week. Your memory gets worse every
day."
"You certainly never told me, or I should have remembered it. Is he
anybody important?"
"Oh, no; writes books."
"What sort of books?--I mean, is he quite respectable?"
"Of course, or I should not have invited him. These sort of people
go everywhere nowadays. By the by, have we got any of his books
about the house?"
"I don't think so. I'll look and see. If you had let me know in
time I could have ordered one from Mudie's."
"Well, I've got to go to town; I'll make sure of it, and buy one."
"Seems a pity to waste money. Won't you be going anywhere near
Mudie's?"
"Looks more appreciative to have bought a copy. It will do for a
birthday present for someone."
On the other hand, the conversation may have been very different. My
hostess may have said:
"Oh, I AM glad he's coming. I have been longing to meet him for
years."
She may have bought my book on the day of publication, and be reading
it through for the second time. She may, by pure accident, have left
it on her favourite seat beneath the window. The knowledge that
insincerity is our universal garment has reduced all compliment to
meaningless formula. A lady one evening at a party drew me aside.
The chief guest--a famous writer--had just arrived.
"Tell me," she said, "I have so little time for reading, what has he
done?"
I was on the point of replying when an inveterate wag, who had
overheard her, interposed between us.
"'The Cloister and the Hearth,'" he told her, "and 'Adam Bede.'"
He happened to know the lady well. She has a good heart, but was
ever muddle-headed. She thanked that wag with a smile, and I heard
her later in the evening boring most evidently that literary lion
with elongated praise of the "Cloister and the Hearth" and "Adam
Bede." They were among the few books she had ever read, and talking
about them came easily to her. She told me afterwards that she had
found that literary lion a charming man, but -
"Well," she laughed, "he has got a good opinion of himself. He told
me he considered both books among the finest in the English
language."
It is as well always to make a note of the author's name. Some
people never do--more particularly playgoers. A well-known dramatic
author told me he once took a couple of colonial friends to a play of
his own. It was after a little dinner at Kettner's; they suggested
the theatre, and he thought he would give them a treat. He did not
mention to them that he was the author, and they never looked at the
programme. Their faces as the play proceeded lengthened; it did not
seem to be their school of comedy. At the end of the first act they
sprang to their feet.
"Let's chuck this rot," suggested one.
"Let's go to the Empire," suggested the other. The well-known
dramatist followed them out. He thinks the fault must have been with
the dinner.
A young friend of mine--a man of good family--contracted a
mesalliance: that is, he married the daughter of a Canadian farmer,
a frank, amiable girl, bewitchingly pretty, with more character in
her little finger than some girls possess in their whole body. I met
him one day, some three months after his return to London.
[And only people would do Parlour Tricks who do them well!]
"Well," I asked him, "how is it shaping?"
"She is the dearest girl in the world," he answered. "She has only
got one fault; she believes what people say."
"She will get over that," I suggested.
"I hope she does," he replied; "it's awkward at present."
"I can see it leading her into difficulty," I agreed.
"She is not accomplished," he continued. He seemed to wish to talk
about it to a sympathetic listener. "She never pretended to be
accomplished. I did not marry her for her accomplishments. But now
she is beginning to think she must have been accomplished all the
time, without knowing it. She plays the piano like a schoolgirl on a
parents' visiting-day. She told them she did not play--not worth
listening to--at least, she began by telling them so. They insisted
that she did, that they had heard about her playing, and were
thirsting to enjoy it. She is good nature itself. She would stand
on her head if she thought it would give real joy to anyone. She
took it they really wanted to hear her, and so let 'em have it. They
tell her that her touch is something quite out of the common--which
is the truth, if only she could understand it--why did she never
think of taking up music as a profession? By this time she is
wondering herself that she never did. They are not satisfied with
hearing her once. They ask for more, and they get it. The other
evening I had to keep quiet on my chair while she thumped through
four pieces one after the other, including the Beethoven Sonata. We
knew it was the Beethoven Sonata. She told us before she started it
was going to be the Beethoven Sonata, otherwise, for all any of us
could have guessed, it might have been the 'Battle of Prague.' We
all sat round with wooden faces, staring at our boots. Afterwards
those of them that couldn't get near enough to her to make a fool of
her crowded round me. Wanted to know why I had never told them I had
discovered a musical prodigy. I'll lose my temper one day and pull
somebody's nose, I feel I shall. She's got a recitation; whether
intended to be serious or comic I had never been able to make up my
mind. The way she gives it confers upon it all the disadvantages of
both. It is chiefly concerned with an angel and a child. But a dog
comes into it about the middle, and from that point onward it is
impossible to tell who is talking--sometimes you think it is the
angel, and then it sounds more like the dog. The child is the
easiest to follow: it talks all the time through its nose. If I
have heard that recitation once I have heard it fifty times; and now
she is busy learning an encore.
[And all the World had Sense!]
"What hurts me most," he went on, "is having to watch her making
herself ridiculous. Yet what am I to do? If I explain things to her
she will be miserable and ashamed of herself; added to which her
frankness--perhaps her greatest charm--will be murdered. The trouble
runs through everything. She won't take my advice about her frocks.
She laughs, and repeats to me--well, the lies that other women tell a
girl who is spoiling herself by dressing absurdly; especially when
she is a pretty girl and they are anxious she should go on spoiling
herself. She bought a hat last week, one day when I was not with
her. It only wants the candles to look like a Christmas tree. They
insist on her taking it off so they may examine it more closely, with
the idea of having one built like it for themselves; and she sits by
delighted, and explains to them the secret of the thing. We get to
parties half an hour before the opening time; she is afraid of being
a minute late. They have told her that the party can't begin without
her--isn't worth calling a party till she's there. We are always the
last to go. The other people don't matter, but if she goes they will
feel the whole thing has been a failure. She is dead for want of
sleep, and they are sick and tired of us; but if I look at my watch
they talk as if their hearts were breaking, and she thinks me a brute
for wanting to leave friends so passionately attached to us.
"Why do we all play this silly game; what is the sense of it?" he
wanted to know.
I could not tell him.
CHAPTER VI
[Fire and the Foreigner.]
They are odd folk, these foreigners. There are moments of despair
when I almost give them up--feel I don't care what becomes of them--
feel as if I could let them muddle on in their own way--wash my hands
of them, so to speak, and attend exclusively to my own business: we
all have our days of feebleness. They will sit outside a cafe on a
freezing night, with an east wind blowing, and play dominoes. They
will stand outside a tramcar, rushing through the icy air at fifteen
miles an hour, and refuse to go inside, even to oblige a lady. Yet
in railway carriages, in which you could grill a bloater by the
simple process of laying it underneath the seat, they will insist on
the window being closed, light cigars to keep their noses warm, and
sit with the collars of their fur coats buttoned up around their
necks.
In their houses they keep the double windows hermetically sealed for
three or four months at a time: and the hot air quivering about the
stoves scorches your face if you venture nearer to it than a yard.
Travel can broaden the mind. It can also suggest to the Britisher
that in some respects his countrymen are nothing near so silly as
they are supposed to be. There was a time when I used to sit with my
legs stretched out before the English coal fire and listen with
respectful attention while people who I thought knew all about it
explained to me how wicked and how wasteful were our methods.
All the heat from that fire, they told me, was going up the chimney.
I did not like to answer them that notwithstanding I felt warm and
cosy. I feared it might be merely British stupidity that kept me
warm and cosy, not the fire at all. How could it be the fire? The
heat from the fire was going up the chimney. It was the glow of
ignorance that was making my toes tingle. Besides, if by sitting
close in front of the fire and looking hard at it, I did contrive, by
hypnotic suggestion, maybe, to fancy myself warm, what should I feel
like at the other end of the room?
It seemed like begging the question to reply that I had no particular
use for the other end of the room, that generally speaking there was
room enough about the fire for all the people I really cared for,
that sitting altogether round the fire seemed quite as sensible as
sulking by one's self in a corner the other end of the room, that the
fire made a cheerful and convenient focus for family and friends.
They pointed out to me how a stove, blocking up the centre of the
room, with a dingy looking fluepipe wandering round the ceiling,
would enable us to sit ranged round the walls, like patients in a
hospital waiting-room, and use up coke and potato-peelings.
Since then I have had practical experience of the scientific stove.
I want the old-fashioned, unsanitary, wasteful, illogical, open
fireplace. I want the heat to go up the chimney, instead of stopping
in the room and giving me a headache, and making everything go round.
When I come in out of the snow I want to see a fire--something that
says to me with a cheerful crackle, "Hallo, old man, cold outside,
isn't it? Come and sit down. Come quite close and warm your hands.
That's right, put your foot under him and persuade him to move a yard
or two. That's all he's been doing for the last hour, lying there
roasting himself, lazy little devil. He'll get softening of the
spine, that's what will happen to him. Put your toes on the fender.
The tea will be here in a minute."
[My British Stupidity.]
I want something that I can toast my back against, while standing
with coat tails tucked up and my hands in my pockets, explaining
things to people. I don't want a comfortless, staring, white thing,
in a corner of the room, behind the sofa--a thing that looks and
smells like a family tomb. It may be hygienic, and it may be hot,
but it does not seem to do me any good. It has its advantages: it
contains a cupboard into which you can put things to dry. You can
also forget them, and leave them there. Then people complain of a
smell of burning, and hope the house is not on fire, and you ease
their mind by explaining to them that it is probably only your boots.
Complicated internal arrangements are worked by a key. If you put on
too much fuel, and do not work this key properly, the thing explodes.
And if you do not put on any coal at all and the fire goes out
suddenly, then likewise it explodes. That is the only way it knows
of calling attention to itself. On the Continent you know when the
fire wants seeing to merely by listening:
"Sounded like the dining-room, that last explosion," somebody
remarks.
"I think not," observes another, "I distinctly felt the shock behind
me--my bedroom, I expect."
Bits of ceiling begin to fall, and you notice that the mirror over
the sideboard is slowly coming towards you.
"Why it must be this stove," you say; "curious how difficult it is to
locate sound."
You snatch up the children and hurry out of the room. After a while,
when things have settled down, you venture to look in again. Maybe
it was only a mild explosion. A ten-pound note and a couple of
plumbers in the house for a week will put things right again. They
tell me they are economical, these German stoves, but you have got to
understand them. I think I have learnt the trick of them at last:
and I don't suppose, all told, it has cost me more than fifty pounds.
And now I am trying to teach the rest of the family. What I complain
about the family is that they do not seem anxious to learn.
"You do it," they say, pressing the coal scoop into my hand: "it
makes us nervous."
It is a pretty, patriarchal idea: I stand between the trusting,
admiring family and these explosive stoves that are the terror of
their lives. They gather round me in a group and watch me, the
capable, all-knowing Head who fears no foreign stove. But there are
days when I get tired of going round making up fires.
Nor is it sufficient to understand only one particular stove. The
practical foreigner prides himself upon having various stoves,
adapted to various work. Hitherto I have been speaking only of the
stove supposed to be best suited to reception rooms and bedrooms.
The hall is provided with another sort of stove altogether: an iron
stove this, that turns up its nose at coke and potato-peelings. If
you give it anything else but the best coal it explodes. It is like
living surrounded by peppery old colonels, trying to pass a peaceful
winter among these passionate stoves. There is a stove in the
kitchen to be used only for roasting: this one will not look at
anything else but wood. Give it a bit of coal, meaning to be kind,
and before you are out of the room it has exploded.
Then there is a trick stove specially popular in Belgium. It has a
little door at the top and another little door at the bottom, and
looks like a pepper-caster. Whether it is happy or not depends upon
those two little doors. There are times when it feels it wants the
bottom door shut and the top door open, or vice versa, or both open
at the same time, or both shut--it is a fussy little stove.
Ordinary intelligence does not help you much with this stove. You
want to be bred in the country. It is a question of instinct: you
have to have Belgian blood in your veins to get on comfortably with
it. On the whole, it is a mild little stove, this Belgian pet. It
does not often explode: it only gets angry, and throws its cover
into the air, and flings hot coals about the room. It lives,
generally speaking, inside an iron cupboard with two doors. When you
want it, you open these doors, and pull it out into the room. It
works on a swivel. And when you don't want it you try to push it
back again, and then the whole thing tumbles over, and the girl
throws her hands up to Heaven and says, "Mon Dieu!" and screams for
the cook and the femme journee, and they all three say "Mon Dieu!"
and fall upon it with buckets of water. By the time everything has
been extinguished you have made up your mind to substitute for it
just the ordinary explosive stove to which you are accustomed.
[I am considered Cold and Mad.]
In your own house you can, of course, open the windows, and thus
defeat the foreign stove. The rest of the street thinks you mad, but
then the Englishman is considered by all foreigners to be always mad.
It is his privilege to be mad. The street thinks no worse of you
than it did before, and you can breathe in comfort. But in the
railway carriage they don't allow you to be mad. In Europe, unless
you are prepared to draw at sight upon the other passengers, throw
the conductor out of the window, and take the train in by yourself,
it is useless arguing the question of fresh air. The rule abroad is
that if any one man objects to the window being open, the window
remains closed. He does not quarrel with you: he rings the bell,
and points out to the conductor that the temperature of the carriage
has sunk to little more than ninety degrees, Fahrenheit. He thinks a
window must be open.
The conductor is generally an old soldier: he understands being
shot, he understands being thrown out of window, but not the laws of
sanitation. If, as I have explained, you shoot him, or throw him out
on the permanent way, that convinces him. He leaves you to discuss
the matter with the second conductor, who, by your action, has now,
of course, become the first conductor. As there are generally half a
dozen of these conductors scattered about the train, the process of
educating them becomes monotonous. You generally end by submitting
to the law.
Unless you happen to be an American woman. Never did my heart go out
more gladly to America as a nation than one spring day travelling
from Berne to Vevey. We had been sitting for an hour in an
atmosphere that would have rendered a Dante disinclined to notice
things. Dante, after ten minutes in that atmosphere, would have lost
all interest in the show. He would not have asked questions. He
would have whispered to Virgil:
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