The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow Part 10

I had never heard him talk like this before. In his excitement he rose from the table, and commenced pacing the room.

"Why don't I invest my money in the two and a half per cents?" he continued. "At the very worst I should be safe for five thousand a year. What, in the name of common sense, does a man want with more? I am always saying to myself, I'll do it; why don't I?

"Well, why not?" I echoed.

"That's what I want you to tell me," he returned. "You set up for understanding human nature, it's a mystery to me. In my place, you would do as I do; you know that. If somebody left you a hundred thousand pounds to-morrow, you would start a newspaper, or build a theatre--some d.a.m.n-fool trick for getting rid of the money and giving yourself seventeen hours' anxiety a day; you know you would."

I hung my head in shame. I felt the justice of the accusation. It has always been my dream to run a newspaper and own a theatre.

"If we worked only for what we could spend," he went on, "the City might put up its shutters to-morrow morning. What I want to get at the bottom of is this instinct that drives us to work apparently for work's own sake. What is this strange thing that gets upon our back and spurs us?"

A servant entered at that moment with a cablegram from the manager of one of his Austrian mines, and he had to leave me for his study. But, walking home, I fell to pondering on his words. WHY this endless work?

Why each morning do we get up and wash and dress ourselves, to undress ourselves at night and go to bed again? Why do we work merely to earn money to buy food; and eat food so as to gain strength that we may work?

Why do we live, merely in the end to say good-bye to one another? Why do we labour to bring children into the world that they may die and be buried?

Of what use our mad striving, our pa.s.sionate desire? Will it matter to the ages whether, once upon a time, the Union Jack or the Tricolour floated over the battlements of Badajoz? Yet we poured our blood into its ditches to decide the question. Will it matter, in the days when the glacial period shall have come again, to clothe the earth with silence, whose foot first trod the Pole? Yet, generation after generation, we mile its roadway with our whitening bones. So very soon the worms come to us; does it matter whether we love, or hate? Yet the hot blood rushes through our veins, we wear out heart and brain for shadowy hopes that ever fade as we press forward.

The flower struggles up from seed-pod, draws the sweet sap from the ground, folds its petals each night, and sleeps. Then love comes to it in a strange form, and it longs to mingle its pollen with the pollen of some other flower. So it puts forth its gay blossoms, and the wandering insect bears the message from seed-pod to seed-pod. And the seasons pa.s.s, bringing with them the suns.h.i.+ne and the rain, till the flower withers, never having known the real purpose for which it lived, thinking the garden was made for it, not it for the garden. The coral insect dreams in its small soul, which is possibly its small stomach, of home and food. So it works and strives deep down in the dark waters, never knowing of the continents it is fas.h.i.+oning.

But the question still remains: for what purpose is it all? Science explains it to us. By ages of strife and effort we improve the race; from ether, through the monkey, man is born. So, through the labour of the coming ages, he will free himself still further from the brute.

Through sorrow and through struggle, by the sweat of brain and brow, he will lift himself towards the angels. He will come into his kingdom.

But why the building? Why the pa.s.sing of the countless ages? Why should he not have been born the G.o.d he is to be, imbued at birth with all the capabilities his ancestors have died acquiring? Why the Pict and Hun that _I_ may be? Why _I_, that a descendant of my own, to whom I shall seem a savage, shall come after me? Why, if the universe be ordered by a Creator to whom all things are possible, the protoplasmic cell? Why not the man that is to be? Shall all the generations be so much human waste that he may live? Am I but another layer of the soil preparing for him?

Or, if our future be in other spheres, then why the need of this planet?

Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our pa.s.sions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank.

Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, "Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us?" But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living.

ON THE CARE AND MANAGEMENT OF WOMEN

I talked to a woman once on the subject of honeymoons. I said, "Would you recommend a long honeymoon, or a Sat.u.r.day to Monday somewhere?"

A silence fell upon her. I gathered she was looking back rather than forward to her answer.

"I would advise a long honeymoon," she replied at length, "the old-fas.h.i.+oned month."

"Why," I persisted, "I thought the tendency of the age was to cut these things shorter and shorter."

"It is the tendency of the age," she answered, "to seek escape from many things it would be wiser to face. I think myself that, for good or evil, the sooner it is over--the sooner both the man and the woman know--the better."

"The sooner what is over?" I asked.

If she had a fault, this woman, about which I am not sure, it was an inclination towards enigma.

She crossed to the window and stood there, looking out.

"Was there not a custom," she said, still gazing down into the wet, glistening street, "among one of the ancient peoples, I forget which, ordaining that when a man and woman, loving one another, or thinking that they loved, had been joined together, they should go down upon their wedding night to the temple? And into the dark recesses of the temple, through many winding pa.s.sages, the priest led them until they came to the great chamber where dwelt the voice of their G.o.d. There the priest left them, clanging-to the ma.s.sive door behind him, and there, alone in silence, they made their sacrifice; and in the night the Voice spoke to them, showing them their future life--whether they had chosen well; whether their love would live or die. And in the morning the priest returned and led them back into the day; and they dwelt among their fellows. But no one was permitted to question them, nor they to answer should any do so. Well, do you know, our nineteenth-century honeymoon at Brighton, Switzerland, or Ramsgate, as the choice or necessity may be, always seems to me merely another form of that night spent alone in the temple before the altar of that forgotten G.o.d. Our young men and women marry, and we kiss them and congratulate them; and, standing on the doorstep, throw rice and old slippers, and shout good wishes after them; and he waves his gloved hand to us, and she flutters her little handkerchief from the carriage window; and we watch their smiling faces and hear their laughter until the corner hides them from our view. Then we go about our own business, and a short time pa.s.ses by; and one day we meet them again, and their faces have grown older and graver; and I always wonder what the Voice has told them during that little while that they have been absent from our sight. But of course it would not do to ask them. Nor would they answer truly if we did."

My friend laughed, and, leaving the window, took her place beside the tea-things, and other callers dropping in, we fell to talk of pictures, plays, and people.

But I felt it would be unwise to act on her sole advice, much as I have always valued her opinion.

A woman takes life too seriously. It is a serious affair to most of us, the Lord knows. That is why it is well not to take it more seriously than need be.

Little Jack and little Jill fall down the hill, hurting their little knees, and their little noses, spilling the hard-earned water. We are very philosophical.

"Oh, don't cry!" we tell them, "that is babyish. Little boys and little girls must learn to bear pain. Up you get, fill the pail again, and try once more."

Little Jack and little Jill rub their dirty knuckles into their little eyes, looking ruefully at their b.l.o.o.d.y little knees, and trot back with the pail. We laugh at them, but not ill-naturedly.

"Poor little souls," we say; "how they did hullabaloo. One might have thought they were half-killed. And it was only a broken crown, after all. What a fuss children make!" We bear with much stoicism the fall of little Jack and little Jill.

But when WE--grown-up Jack with moustache turning grey; grown-up Jill with the first faint "crow's feet" showing--when WE tumble down the hill, and OUR pail is spilt. Ye Heavens! what a tragedy has happened.

Put out the stars, turn off the sun, suspend the laws of nature. Mr.

Jack and Mrs. Jill, coming down the hill--what they were doing on the hill we will not inquire--have slipped over a stone, placed there surely by the evil powers of the universe. Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill have b.u.mped their silly heads. Mr. Jack and Mrs. Jill have hurt their little hearts, and stand marvelling that the world can go about its business in the face of such disaster.

Don't take the matter quite so seriously, Jack and Jill. You have spilled your happiness, you must toil up the hill again and refill the pail. Carry it more carefully next time. What were you doing? Playing some fool's trick, I'll be bound.

A laugh and a sigh, a kiss and good-bye, is our life. Is it worth so much fretting? It is a merry life on the whole. Courage, comrade. A campaign cannot be all drum and fife and stirrup-cup. The marching and the fighting must come into it somewhere. There are pleasant bivouacs among the vineyards, merry nights around the camp fires. White hands wave a welcome to us; bright eyes dim at our going. Would you run from the battle-music? What have you to complain of? Forward: the medal to some, the surgeon's knife to others; to all of us, sooner or later, six feet of mother earth. What are you afraid of? Courage, comrade.

There is a mean between basking through life with the smiling contentment of the alligator, and s.h.i.+vering through it with the aggressive sensibility of the Lama determined to die at every cross word. To bear it as a man we must also feel it as a man. My philosophic friend, seek not to comfort a brother standing by the coffin of his child with the cheery suggestion that it will be all the same a hundred years hence, because, for one thing, the observation is not true: the man is changed for all eternity--possibly for the better, but don't add that. A soldier with a bullet in his neck is never quite the man he was.

But he can laugh and he can talk, drink his wine and ride his horse.

Now and again, towards evening, when the weather is trying, the sickness will come upon him. You will find him on a couch in a dark corner.

"Hallo! old fellow, anything up?"

"Oh, just a twinge, the old wound, you know. I will be better in a little while."

Shut the door of the dark room quietly. I should not stay even to sympathize with him if I were you. The men will be coming to screw the coffin down soon. I think he would like to be alone with it till then.

Let us leave him. He will come back to the club later on in the season.

For a while we may have to give him another ten points or so, but he will soon get back his old form. Now and again, when he meets the other fellows' boys shouting on the towing-path; when Brown rushes up the drive, paper in hand, to tell him how that young scapegrace Jim has won his Cross; when he is congratulating Jones's eldest on having pa.s.sed with honours, the old wound may give him a nasty twinge. But the pain will pa.s.s away. He will laugh at our stories and tell us his own; eat his dinner, play his rubber. It is only a wound.

Tommy can never be ours, Jenny does not love us. We cannot afford claret, so we will have to drink beer. Well, what would you have us do?

Yes, let us curse Fate by all means--some one to curse is always useful.

Let us cry and wring our hands--for how long? The dinner-bell will ring soon, and the Smiths are coming. We shall have to talk about the opera and the picture-galleries. Quick, where is the eau-de-Cologne? where are the curling-tongs? Or would you we committed suicide? Is it worth while?

Only a few more years--perhaps to-morrow, by aid of a piece of orange peel or a broken chimney-pot--and Fate will save us all that trouble.

Or shall we, as sulky children, mope day after day? We are a broken-hearted little Jack--little Jill. We will never smile again; we will pine away and die, and be buried in the spring. The world is sad, and life so cruel, and heaven so cold. Oh dear! oh dear! we have hurt ourselves.

We whimper and whine at every pain. In old strong days men faced real dangers, real troubles every hour; they had no time to cry. Death and disaster stood ever at the door. Men were contemptuous of them. Now in each snug protected villa we set to work to make wounds out of scratches. Every head-ache becomes an agony, every heart-ache a tragedy.

It took a murdered father, a drowned sweetheart, a dishonoured mother, a ghost, and a slaughtered Prime Minister to produce the emotions in Hamlet that a modern minor poet obtains from a chorus girl's frown, or a temporary slump on the Stock Exchange. Like Mrs. Gummidge, we feel it more. The lighter and easier life gets the more seriously we go out to meet it. The boatmen of Ulysses faced the thunder and the suns.h.i.+ne alike with frolic welcome. We modern sailors have grown more sensitive.

The suns.h.i.+ne scorches us, the rain chills us. We meet both with loud self-pity.

Thinking these thoughts, I sought a second friend--a man whose breezy common-sense has often helped me, and him likewise I questioned on this subject of honeymoons.

"My dear boy," he replied; "take my advice, if ever you get married, arrange it so that the honeymoon shall only last a week, and let it be a bustling week into the bargain. Take a Cook's circular tour. Get married on the Sat.u.r.day morning, cut the breakfast and all that foolishness, and catch the eleven-ten from Charing Cross to Paris. Take her up the Eiffel Tower on Sunday. Lunch at Fontainebleau. Dine at the Maison Doree, and show her the Moulin Rouge in the evening. Take the night train for Lucerne. Devote Monday and Tuesday to doing Switzerland, and get into Rome by Thursday morning, taking the Italian lakes en route. On Friday cross to Ma.r.s.eilles, and from there push along to Monte Carlo. Let her have a flutter at the tables. Start early Sat.u.r.day morning for Spain, cross the Pyrenees on mules, and rest at Bordeaux on Sunday. Get back to Paris on Monday (Monday is always a good day for the opera), and on Tuesday evening you will be at home, and glad to get there. Don't give her time to criticize you until she has got used to you. No man will bear unprotected exposure to a young girl's eyes. The honeymoon is the matrimonial microscope. Wobble it. Confuse it with many objects. Cloud it with other interests. Don't sit still to be examined. Besides, remember that a man always appears at his best when active, and a woman at her worst. Bustle her, my dear boy, bustle her: I don't care who she may be. Give her plenty of luggage to look after; make her catch trains.

Let her see the average husband sprawling comfortably over the railway cus.h.i.+ons, while his wife has to sit bolt upright in the corner left to her. Let her hear how other men swear. Let her smell other men's tobacco. Hurry up, and get her accustomed quickly to the sight of mankind. Then she will be less surprised and shocked as she grows to know you. One of the best fellows I ever knew spoilt his married life beyond repair by a long quiet honeymoon. They went off for a month to a lonely cottage in some heaven-forsaken spot, where never a soul came near them, and never a thing happened but morning, afternoon, and night.