Select Conversations with an Uncle Part 4

THE GREAT CHANGE

My uncle had been hectic all day. I knew and dreaded what was coming, and said nothing that by any chance could lead up to it.

He absent-mindedly tipped the emu sixpence. Then we came to the wart hog.

"A bachelor," he said, meditatively, scratching the brute's back.

I hastily felt for a saving topic in the apprehensive darkness of my mind, and could find none.

"I expect I shall be married in October," said my uncle. Then, sighing: "The idyll of my engagement was short-lived."

It was out. Now, the day--my last idle day with my poor uncle--was a hideous wreck. All the topics he had fluttered round vanished, and, cold and awful, there loomed over us the one great topic.

"What do you _think_ of marriage, George?" said my uncle, after a pause, prodding the wart hog suddenly.

"That's your privilege," said I. "Married men don't dare to think of it. Bigamy."

"Privilege! Is it such a headlong wreck of one's ideals as they say?"

said my uncle. "Is that dreamland furniture really so unstable in use?"

"Of course," said I, "it's different from what one expects. But it seems to be worse for the other party. At least to judge from the novels they engender in their agony."

"So far as I can see," he proceeded, "what happens is very similar to a thing a scientific chap was explaining to me the other day. There are some little beasts in the sea called ascidians, and they begin life as cheerful little tadpole things, with waggling tails and big expressive eyes. They move freely about hither and thither, and often travel vast distances in an adventurous way. Then what he called metamorphosis begins. The little tadpole waggles his way to a rock and fixes himself head downward. Then he undergoes the oddest changes, becomes indeed a mere vegetative excrescence on the stone, secretes a lot of tough muck round himself, and is altogether lost to free oceanic society. He loses the cheerful tail, loses most of his brain, loses his bright expressive eye."

"The bother of it," said I, "is that very often the wandering expressive eye is not lost in the human metamorphosis."

"Putting it in another way, one might say that the kind of story that Ovid is so fond of describing, the affairs of Daphne and Io, for instance, are fables of the same thing: an interlude of sentiment and then a change into something new and domesticated, rooted, fixed, and bounded in."

"It is certainly always a settling down," said I.

"I don't like this idea of settling down, George." He shuddered. "It must be a dreadful thing to go about always with a house on your mind."

"You get used to it. And, besides, you don't go about so much."

He gave the bachelor wart hog a parting dig, and we walked slowly and silently through the zebra-house towards the elephants. "Of course we do not intend to settle down," he said presently, with a clumsy effort to render his previous remarks impersonal.

"A marriage invalidates all promises," I explained. "The law recognises this in the case of wills."

"That's a new view," he said, evidently uncomfortable about something.

"It follows from your doctrine of metamorphosis. A marries B. Then the great change begins. A gradually alters into a new fixed form, C, while B flattens and broadens out as D. It is a different couple, and they cannot reasonably be held responsible for the vagaries of A and B."

"That ought to be better understood."

"It would perhaps be as well. Before marriage Edwin vows to devote his life to Angelina, and Angelina vows she will devote her life to Edwin.

After marriage this leads to confusion if they continue to believe such promises. Marriage certainly has that odd effect on the memory. You remember Angelina's promises and forget your own, and _vice versa_."

"There is no apparition more distressing than the ghost of a dead promise," said my uncle. "Especially when it is raised in the house of your friends."

We pa.s.sed through the elephant house in silence.

"I wonder what kind of man I shall be after the change, George. It's all a toss-up," he continued, after an interval. "I have seen some men improved by it. You, for instance. You were a mere useless, indecent aspirant to genius before the thing came upon you. Now you are a respectable journalist and gracefully anxious to give satisfaction to your editor. But my own impression is that a man has to be a bit of an a.s.s before he can be improved by marriage. Most men get so mercenary, they simply work and do nothing a rational creature should. They are like the male ants that shed their wings after the nuptial flight. And their wives go round talking fas.h.i.+on articles, and calling them dear old stupids, and flirting over teacups with the unmarried men, or writing novelettes about the child-man, and living their own lives.

I've been an unmarried man and I know all about it. Every intelligent woman now seems to want to live her own life when she is not engaged in taking the child-man out into polite society, and trying to wean him from alcohol and tobacco. However, this scarcely applies to me."

"Not now," I said. And he winced.

"I wonder how it feels. Most men go into this without knowing of the change that hangs over them. But I am older. It would not be nice for a caterpillar if he knew he was going to rip up all along his back in a minute or so. Yet I could sympathise with such a caterpillar now.

Anyhow, George, I hope the change will be complete. I would not like to undergo only a partial metamorphosis, and become a queer speckled monster all spotted with bachelor habits. Yet I sometimes think I am beyond the adolescent stage, and my habits rather deeply rooted.

Hitherto, I have always d.a.m.ned a little at braces and collars and things like that. I wish I knew where one could pick up a few admissible expletives. And I loaf about London all day sometimes without any very clear idea of what I am after, telling chaps in studios how to paint, and talking to leisurely barristers, and all that kind of thing."

"_She_," I said, "will probably help you to conquer habits of that sort."

"Yes, I dare say she will," said my uncle. "I forgot that for the minute."

THE PAINS OF MARRIAGE

My uncle came to a stop outside a stationer's shop in Oxford-street.

When I saw what had caught his attention I reproached myself for my thoughtlessness.

"Come," said I, "tell me what you think of--of representative government."

"It's no good, George. You did the same thing at the cake shop. Do you think I never saw the cake shop? Since this affair was settled I think every shop I pa.s.s reminds me of it--even the gunsmith's. I never suspected before how entirely retail trade turned on marriage--except, perhaps, the second-hand book shops. The whole world seems a-marrying.

"It's queer," said he, "that a little while ago the thing that worried me to the exclusion of everything else was the idea of being married, and now it is so near it's entirely the getting married that upsets me.

I have forgotten the horrid consequences in the horror of the operation."

"It's much the same," said I, "at an execution."

"Look at those cards." He waved his hand towards a neat array of silver and white pasteboard. "'Jemima Smith,' with an arrow through the Smith, and 'Podger' written above it, and on the opposite side 'Mr and Mrs John Podger.' That is where it has me, George."

We went on past a display of electroplate with a card about presents in the window, past a window full of white flowers, past a carriage-builder's and a glove shop. "It's like death," said my uncle; "it turns up everywhere and is just the same for everybody. In that cake shop there were piles and piles of cakes, from little cakes ten inches across up to cakes of three hundredweight or so; all just the same rich, uneatable, greasy stuff, and with just the same white sugar on the top of them. I suppose every day they pack off scores. It makes one think of marrying in swarms, like the gnats. I catch myself wondering sometimes if the run of people really are separate individuals, or only a kind of replicas, without any tastes of their own. There are people who would rather not marry than marry without one of those cakes, George. To me it seems to be almost the most asinine position a couple of adults can be in, to have to buy a stone or so of that concentrated biliousness and cut it up, or procure other people to cut it up, and send it round to other adults who would almost as soon eat a.r.s.enic. And why cake--infantile cake? Why not biscuits, or cigarettes, or chocolate? It seems to me to be playing the fool with a solemn occasion."

"You see, it is the custom to have cake."

"Well, anyhow, I intend to break the custom."

"So did I, but I had it all the same."

My uncle looked at me.

"You see," said I, "when a woman says you must do this or that--must have cake at a wedding, for instance--you must do it. It is not a case for argument. It is a kind of privilege they have--the categorical imperative. You will soon learn that."