The Angel and the Author and others

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The young diplomatist returned to the shore thoughtful, and later in
the day a few of us discussed the matter in a far-off, dimly-lighted
corner of the club smoking-room.

Has the pendulum swung too far the other way? Could there be truth
in our Oriental friend's terse commentary? The eternal feminine!
The Western world has been handed over to her. The stranger from
Mars or Jupiter would describe us as a hive of women, the sober-clad
male being retained apparently on condition of its doing all the hard
work and making itself generally useful. Formerly it was the man who
wore the fine clothes who went to the shows. To-day it is the woman
gorgeously clad for whom the shows are organized. The man dressed in
a serviceable and unostentatious, not to say depressing, suit of
black accompanies her for the purpose of carrying her cloak and
calling her carriage. Among the working classes life, of necessity,
remains primitive; the law of the cave is still, with slight
modification, the law of the slum. But in upper and middle-class
circles the man is now the woman's servant.

I remember being present while a mother of my acquaintance was
instilling into the mind of her little son the advantages of being
born a man. A little girl cousin was about to spend a week with him.
It was impressed upon him that if she showed a liking for any of his
toys, he was at once to give them up to her.

"But why, mamma?" he demanded, evidently surprised.

"Because, my dear, you are a little man."

Should she break them, he was not to smack her head or kick her--as
his instinct might prompt him to do. He was just to say:

"Oh, it is of no consequence at all," and to look as if he meant it.

[Doctor says she is not to be bothered.]

She was always to choose the game--to have the biggest apple. There
was much more of a similar nature. It was all because he was a
little man and she was a little woman. At the end he looked up,
puzzled:

"But don't she do anything, 'cos she's a little girl?"

It was explained to him that she didn't. By right of being born a
little girl she was exempt from all duty.

Woman nowadays is not taking any duty. She objects to housekeeping;
she calls it domestic slavery, and feels she was intended for higher
things. What higher things she does not condescend to explain. One
or two wives of my acquaintance have persuaded their husbands that
these higher things are all-important. The home has been given up.
In company with other strivers after higher things, they live now in
dismal barracks differing but little from a glorified Bloomsbury
lodging-house. But they call them "Mansions" or "Courts," and seem
proud of the address. They are not bothered with servants--with
housekeeping. The idea of the modern woman is that she is not to be
bothered with anything. I remember the words with which one of these
ladies announced her departure from her bothering home.

"Oh, well, I'm tired of trouble," she confided to another lady, "so
I've made up my mind not to have any more of it."

Artemus Ward tells us of a man who had been in prison for twenty
years. Suddenly a bright idea occurred to him; he opened the window
and got out. Here have we poor, foolish mortals been imprisoned in
this troublesome world for Lord knows how many millions of years. We
have got so used to trouble we thought there was no help for it. We
have told ourselves that "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly
upwards." We imagined the only thing to be done was to bear it
philosophically. Why did not this bright young creature come along
before--show us the way out. All we had to do was to give up the
bothering home and the bothering servants, and go into a "Mansion" or
a "Court."

It seems that you leave trouble outside--in charge of the hall-
porter, one supposes. He ties it up for you as the Commissionaire of
the Army and Navy Stores ties up your dog. If you want it again, you
ask for it as you come out. Small wonder that the "Court" and
"Mansion" are growing in popularity every day.

[That "Higher Life."]

They have nothing to do now all day long, these soaring wives of whom
I am speaking. They would scorn to sew on a shirt-button even. Are
there not other women--of an inferior breed--specially fashioned by
Providence for the doing of such slavish tasks? They have no more
bothers of any kind. They are free to lead the higher life. What I
am waiting for is a glimpse of the higher life. One of them, it is
true, has taken up the violin. Another of them is devoting her
emancipation to poker work. A third is learning skirt-dancing. Are
these the "higher things" for which women are claiming freedom from
all duty? And, if so, is there not danger that the closing of our
homes may lead to the crowding up of the world with too much higher
things?

May there not, by the time all bothers have been removed from woman's
path, be too many amateur violinists in the world, too many skirt-
dancers, too much poker work? If not, what are they? these "higher
things," for which so many women are demanding twenty-four hours a
day leisure. I want to know.

One lady of my acquaintance is a Poor Law Guardian and secretary to a
labour bureau. But then she runs a house with two servants, four
children, and a husband, and appears to be so used to bothers that
she would feel herself lost without them. You can do this kind of
work apparently even when you are bothered with a home. It is the
skirt-dancing and the poker work that cannot brook rivalry. The
modern woman has begun to find children a nuisance; they interfere
with her development. The mere man, who has written his poems,
painted his pictures, composed his melodies, fashioned his
philosophies, in the midst of life's troubles and bothers, grows
nervous thinking what this new woman must be whose mind is so
tremendous that the whole world must be shut up, so to speak, sent to
do its business out of her sight and hearing, lest her attention
should be distracted.

An optimistic friend of mine tells me not to worry myself; tells me
that it is going to come out all right in the end. Woman just now,
he contends, is passing through her college period. The school life
of strict surveillance is for ever done with. She is now the young
Freshwoman. The bothering lessons are over, the bothering
schoolmaster she has said good-bye to. She has her latchkey and is
"on her own." There are still some bothering rules about being in at
twelve o'clock, and so many attendances each term at chapel. She is
indignant. This interferes with her idea that life is to be one long
orgie of self-indulgence, of pleasure. The college period will pass-
-is passing. Woman will go out into the world, take her place there,
discover that bothers were not left behind in the old schoolhouse,
will learn that life has duties, responsibilities, will take up her
burden side by side with man, will accomplish her destiny.

[Is there anything left for her to learn?]

Meanwhile, however, she is having a good time--some people think too
good a time. She wants the best of both. She demands the joys of
independence together with freedom from all work--slavery she calls
it. The servants are not to be allowed to bother her, the children
are not to be allowed to bother her, her husband is not to be allowed
to bother her. She is to be free to lead the higher life. My dear
lady, we all want to lead the higher life. I don't want to write
these articles. I want somebody else to bother about my rates and
taxes, my children's boots, while I sit in an easy-chair and dream
about the wonderful books I am going to write, if only a stupid
public would let me. Tommy Smith of Brixton feels that he was
intended for higher things. He does not want to be wasting his time
in an office from nine to six adding up figures. His proper place in
life is that of Prime Minister or Field Marshal: he feels it. Do
you think the man has no yearning for higher things? Do you think we
like the office, the shop, the factory? We ought to be writing
poetry, painting pictures, the whole world admiring us. You seem to
imagine your man goes off every morning to a sort of City picnic, has
eight hours' fun--which he calls work--and then comes home to annoy
you with chatter about dinner.

It is the old fable reversed; man said woman had nothing to do all
day but to enjoy herself. Making a potato pie! What sort of work
was that? Making a potato pie was a lark; anybody could make a
potato pie.

So the woman said, "Try it," and took the man's spade and went out
into the field, and left him at home to make that pie.

The man discovered that potato pies took a bit more making than he
had reckoned--found that running the house and looking after the
children was not quite the merry pastime he had argued. Man was a
fool.

Now it is the woman who talks without thinking. How did she like
hoeing the potato patch? Hard work, was it not, my dear lady? Made
your back ache? It came on to rain and you got wet.

I don't see that it very much matters which of you hoes the potato
patch, which of you makes the potato pie. Maybe the hoeing of the
patch demands more muscle--is more suited to the man. Maybe the
making of the pie may be more in your department. But, as I have
said, I cannot see that this matter is of importance. The patch has
to be hoed, the pie to be cooked; the one cannot do the both. Settle
it between you, and, having settled it, agree to do each your own
work free from this everlasting nagging.

I know, personally, three ladies who have exchanged the woman's work
for the man's. One was deserted by her husband, and left with two
young children. She hired a capable woman to look after the house,
and joined a ladies' orchestra as pianist at two pounds a week. She
now earns four, and works twelve hours a day. The husband of the
second fell ill. She set him to write letters and run errands, which
was light work that he could do, and started a dressmaker's business.
The third was left a widow without means. She sent her three
children to boarding-school, and opened a tea-room. I don't know how
they talked before, but I know that they do not talk now as though
earning the income was a sort of round game.

[When they have tried it the other way round.]

On the Continent they have gone deliberately to work, one would
imagine, to reverse matters. Abroad woman is always where man ought
to be, and man where most ladies would prefer to meet with women.
The ladies garde-robe is superintended by a superannuated sergeant of
artillery. When I want to curl my moustache, say, I have to make
application to a superb golden-haired creature, who stands by and
watches me with an interested smile. I would be much happier waited
on by the superannuated sergeant, and my wife tells me she could very
well spare him. But it is the law of the land. I remember the first
time I travelled with my daughter on the Continent. In the morning I
was awakened by a piercing scream from her room. I struggled into my
pyjamas, and rushed to her assistance. I could not see her. I could
see nothing but a muscular-looking man in a blue blouse with a can of
hot water in one hand and a pair of boots in the other. He appeared
to be equally bewildered with myself at the sight of the empty bed.
From a cupboard in the corner came a wail of distress:

"Oh, do send that horrid man away. What's he doing in my room?"

I explained to her afterwards that the chambermaid abroad is always
an active and willing young man. The foreign girl fills in her time
bricklaying and grooming down the horses. It is a young and charming
lady who serves you when you enter the tobacconist's. She doesn't
understand tobacco, is unsympathetic; with Mr. Frederic Harrison,
regards smoking as a degrading and unclean habit; cannot see,
herself, any difference between shag and Mayblossom, seeing that they
are both the same price; thinks you fussy. The corset shop is run by
a most presentable young man in a Vandyck beard. The wife runs the
restaurant; the man does the cooking, and yet the woman has not
reached freedom from bother.

[A brutal suggestion]

It sounds brutal, but perhaps woman was not intended to live free
from all bothers. Perhaps even the higher life--the skirt-dancing
and the poker work--has its bothers. Perhaps woman was intended to
take her share of the world's work--of the world's bothers.

CHAPTER XII

[Why I hate Heroes]

When I was younger, reading the popular novel used to make me sad. I
find it vexes others also. I was talking to a bright young girl upon
the subject not so very long ago.

"I just hate the girl in the novel," she confessed. "She makes me
feel real bad. If I don't think of her I feel pleased with myself,
and good; but when I read about her--well, I'm crazy. I would not
mind her being smart, sometimes. We can all of us say the right
thing, now and then. This girl says them straight away, all the
time. She don't have to dig for them even; they come crowding out of
her. There never happens a time when she stands there feeling like a
fool and knowing that she looks it. As for her hair: 'pon my word,
there are days when I believe it is a wig. I'd like to get behind
her and give it just one pull. It curls of its own accord. She
don't seem to have any trouble with it. Look at this mop of mine.
I've been working at it for three-quarters of an hour this morning;
and now I would not laugh, not if you were to tell me the funniest
thing, you'd ever heard, for fear it would come down again. As for
her clothes, they make me tired. She don't possess a frock that does
not fit her to perfection; she doesn't have to think about them. You
would imagine she went into the garden and picked them off a tree.
She just slips it on and comes down, and then--my stars! All the
other women in the room may just as well go to bed and get a good
night's rest for all the chance they've got. It isn't that she's
beautiful. From what they tell you about her, you might fancy her a
freak. Looks don't appear to matter to her; she gets there anyhow.
I tell you she just makes me boil."

Allowing for the difference between the masculine and feminine
outlook, this is precisely how I used to feel when reading of the
hero. He was not always good; sometimes he hit the villain harder
than he had intended, and then he was sorry--when it was too late,
blamed himself severely, and subscribed towards the wreath. Like the
rest of us, he made mistakes; occasionally married the wrong girl.
But how well he did everything!--does still for the matter of that, I
believe. Take it that he condescends to play cricket! He never
scores less than a hundred--does not know how to score less than a
hundred, wonders how it could be done, supposing, for example, you
had an appointment and wanted to catch an early train. I used to
play cricket myself, but I could always stop at ten or twenty. There
have been times when I have stopped at even less.

It is the same with everything he puts his hand to. Either he does
not care for boating at all, or, as a matter of course, he pulls
stroke in the University Boat-race; and then takes the train on to
Henley and wins the Diamond Sculls so easily that it hardly seems
worth while for the other fellow to have started. Were I living in
Novel-land, and had I entered for the Diamond Sculls, I should put it
to my opponent before the word was given to us to go.

"One minute!" I should have called out to him. "Are you the hero of
this novel, or, like myself, only one of the minor characters?
Because, if you are the hero you go on; don't you wait for me. I
shall just pull as far as the boathouse and get myself a cup of tea."

[Because it always seems to be his Day.]

There is no sense of happy medium about the hero of the popular
novel. He cannot get astride a horse without its going off and
winning a steeplechase against the favourite. The crowd in Novel-
land appears to have no power of observation. It worries itself
about the odds, discusses records, reads the nonsense published by
the sporting papers. Were I to find myself on a racecourse in Novel-
land I should not trouble about the unessential; I should go up to
the bookie who looked as if he had the most money, and should say to
him:

"Don't shout so loud; you are making yourself hoarse. Just listen to
me. Who's the hero of this novel? Oh, that's he, is it? The heavy-
looking man on the little brown horse that keeps coughing and is
suffering apparently from bone spavin? Well, what are the odds
against his winning by ten lengths? A thousand to one! Very well!
Have you got a bag?--Good. Here's twenty-seven pounds in gold and
eighteen shillings in silver. Coat and waistcoat, say another ten
shillings. Shirt and trousers--it's all right, I've got my pyjamas
on underneath--say seven and six. Boots--we won't quarrel--make it
five bob. That's twenty-nine pounds and sixpence, isn't it? In
addition here's a mortgage on the family estate, which I've had made
out in blank, an I O U for fourteen pounds which has been owing to me
now for some time, and this bundle of securities which, strictly
speaking, belong to my Aunt Jane. You keep that little lot till
after the race, and we will call it in round figures, five hundred
pounds."

That single afternoon would thus bring me in five hundred thousand
pounds--provided the bookie did not blow his brains out.

Backers in Novel-land do not seem to me to know their way about. If
the hero of the popular novel swims at all, it is not like an
ordinary human being that he does it. You never meet him in a
swimming-bath; he never pays ninepence, like the rest of us, for a
machine. He goes out at uncanny hours, generally accompanied by a
lady friend, with whom the while swimming he talks poetry and cracks
jokes. Some of us, when we try to talk in the sea, fill ourselves up
with salt water. This chap lies on his back and carols, and the wild
waves, seeing him, go round the other way. At billiards he can give
the average sharper forty in a hundred. He does not really want to
play; he does it to teach these bad men a lesson. He has not handled
a cue for years. He picked up the game when a young man in
Australia, and it seems to have lingered with him.

He does not have to get up early and worry dumb-bells in his
nightshirt; he just lies on a sofa in an elegant attitude and muscle
comes to him. If his horse declines to jump a hedge, he slips down
off the animal's back and throws the poor thing over; it saves
argument. If he gets cross and puts his shoulder to the massive
oaken door, we know there is going to be work next morning for the
carpenter. Maybe he is a party belonging to the Middle Ages. Then
when he reluctantly challenges the crack fencer of Europe to a duel,
our instinct is to call out and warn his opponent.

"You silly fool," one feels one wants to say; "why, it is the hero of
the novel! You take a friend's advice while you are still alive, and
get out of it anyway--anyhow. Apologize--hire a horse and cart, do
something. You're not going to fight a duel, you're going to commit
suicide."

If the hero is a modern young man, and has not got a father, or has
only something not worth calling a father, then he comes across a
library--anybody's library does for him. He passes Sir Walter Scott
and the "Arabian Nights," and makes a bee-line for Plato; it seems to
be an instinct with him. By help of a dictionary he worries it out
in the original Greek. This gives him a passion for Greek.

When he has romped through the Greek classics he plays about among
the Latins. He spends most of his spare time in that library, and
forgets to go to tea.

[Because he always "gets there," without any trouble.]

That is the sort of boy he is. How I used to hate him! If he has a
proper sort of father, then he goes to college. He does no work:
there is no need for him to work: everything seems to come to him.
That was another grievance of mine against him. I always had to work
a good deal, and very little came of it. He fools around doing
things that other men would be sent down for; but in his case the
professors love him for it all the more. He is the sort of man who
can't do wrong. A fortnight before the examination he ties a wet
towel round his head. That is all we hear about it. It seems to be
the towel that does it. Maybe, if the towel is not quite up to its
work, he will help things on by drinking gallons of strong tea. The
tea and the towel combined are irresistible: the result is always
the senior wranglership.

I used to believe in that wet towel and that strong tea. Lord! the
things I used to believe when I was young. They would make an
Encyclopaedia of Useless Knowledge. I wonder if the author of the
popular novel has ever tried working with a wet towel round his or
her head: I have. It is difficult enough to move a yard, balancing
a dry towel. A heathen Turk may have it in his blood to do so: the
ordinary Christian has not got the trick of it. To carry about a wet
towel twisted round one's head needs a trained acrobat. Every few
minutes the wretched thing works loose. In darkness and in misery,
you struggle to get your head out of a clammy towel that clings to
you almost with passion. Brain power is wasted in inventing names
for that towel--names expressive of your feelings with regard to it.
Further time is taken up before the glass, fixing the thing afresh.

You return to your books in the wrong temper, the water trickles down
your nose, runs in rivulets down your back. Until you have finally
flung the towel out of the window and rubbed yourself dry, work is
impossible. The strong tea always gave me indigestion, and made me
sleepy. Until I had got over the effects of the tea, attempts at
study were useless.

[Because he's so damned clever.]

But the thing that still irritates me most against the hero of the
popular novel is the ease with which he learns a modern foreign
language. Were he a German waiter, a Swiss barber, or a Polish
photographer, I would not envy him; these people do not have to learn
a language. My idea is that they boil down a dictionary, and take
two table-spoonsful each night before going to bed. By the time the
bottle is finished they have the language well into their system.
But he is not. He is just an ordinary Anglo-Saxon, and I don't
believe in him. I walk about for years with dictionaries in my
pocket. Weird-looking ladies and gentlemen gesticulate and rave at
me for months. I hide myself in lonely places, repeating idioms to
myself out loud, in the hope that by this means they will come
readily to me if ever I want them, which I never do. And, after all
this, I don't seem to know very much. This irritating ass, who has
never left his native suburb, suddenly makes up his mind to travel on
the Continent. I find him in the next chapter engaged in complicated
psychological argument with French or German savants. It appears--
the author had forgotten to mention it before--that one summer a
French, or German, or Italian refugee, as the case may happen to be,
came to live in the hero's street: thus it is that the hero is able
to talk fluently in the native language of that unhappy refugee.

I remember a melodrama visiting a country town where I was staying.
The heroine and child were sleeping peacefully in the customary
attic. For some reason not quite clear to me, the villain had set
fire to the house. He had been complaining through the three
preceding acts of the heroine's coldness; maybe it was with some idea
of warming her. Escape by way of the staircase was impossible. Each
time the poor girl opened the door a flame came in and nearly burned
her hair off. It seemed to have been waiting for her.

"Thank God!" said the lady, hastily wrapping the child in a sheet,
"that I was brought up a wire walker."

Without a moment's hesitation she opened the attic window and took
the nearest telegraph wire to the opposite side of the street.

In the same way, apparently, the hero of the popular novel, finding
himself stranded in a foreign land, suddenly recollects that once
upon a time he met a refugee, and at once begins to talk. I have met
refugees myself. The only thing they have ever taught me is not to
leave my brandy flask about.

[And, finally, because I don't believe he's true.]

I don't believe in these heroes and heroines that cannot keep quiet
in a foreign language they have taught themselves in an old-world
library. My fixed idea is that they muddle along like the rest of
us, surprised that so few people understand them, begging everyone
they meet not to talk so quickly. These brilliant conversations with
foreign philosophers! These passionate interviews with foreign
countesses! They fancy they have had them.

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