Certain Personal Matters Part 5

Now that always maddens me. Why should I be expected to know the price of gloves? I'm not a commercial traveller nor a wholesale dealer, and I don't look like one. Neither am I const.i.tutionally parsimonious nor petty. I am a literary man, unworldly, and I wear long hair and a soft hat and a peculiar overcoat to indicate the same to ordinary people.

Why, I say, should I know the price of gloves? I know they are some ordinary price--elevenpence-halfpenny, or three-and-six, or seven-and-six, or something--one of those prices that everything is sold at--but further I don't go. Perhaps I say elevenpence-halfpenny at a venture.

His face lights up with quiet malice. "Don't keep them, sir," he says. I can tell by his expression that I am ridiculously low, and so being snubbed. I think of trying with three-and-six, or seven-and-six; the only other probable prices for things that I know, except a guinea and five pounds. Then I see the absurdity of the business, and my anger comes surging up.

"Look here!" I say, as bitterly as possible. "I don't come here to play at Guessing Games. Never mind your prices. I want some gloves. Get me some!"

This cows him a little, but very little. "May I ask your size, sir?" he says, a trifle more respectfully.

One would think I spent all my time remembering the size of my gloves.

However, it is no good resenting it. "It's either seven or nine," I say in a tired way.

He just begins another question, and then he catches my eye and stops and goes away to obtain some gloves, and I get a breathing s.p.a.ce. But why do they keep on with this cross-examination? If I knew exactly what I wanted--description, price, size--I should not go to a shop at all, it would save me such a lot of trouble just to send a cheque to the Stores.

The only reason why I go into a tradesman's shop is because I don't know what I want exactly, am in doubt about the name or the size, or the price, or the fas.h.i.+on, and want a specialist to help me. The only reason for having shopmen instead of automatic machines is that one requires help in buying things. When I want gloves, the shopman ought to understand his business sufficiently well to know better than I do what particular kind of gloves I ought to be wearing, and what is a fair price for them. I don't see why I should teach him what is in fas.h.i.+on and what is not. A doctor does not ask you what kind of operation you want and what price you will pay for it. But I really believe these outfitter people would let me run about London wearing white cotton gloves and a plaid comforter without lifting a finger to prevent me.

And, by the bye, that reminds me of a scandalous trick these salesmen will play you. Sometimes they have not the thing you want, and then they make you buy other things. I happen to have, through no fault of my own, a very small head, and consequently for one long summer I wore a little boy's straw hat about London with the colours of a Paddington Board School, simply because a rascal outfitter hadn't my size in a proper kind of headgear, and induced me to buy the thing by specious representations. He must have known perfectly well it was not what I ought to wear. It seems never to enter into a shopman's code of honour that he ought to do his best for his customer. Since that, however, I have noticed lots of people about who have struck me in a new light as triumphs of the salesman, masterpieces in the art of incongruity; age in the garb of youth, corpulence put off with the size called "slender men's"; unhappy, gentle, quiet men with ties like oriflammes, b.r.e.a.s.t.s like a kingfisher's, and cataclysmal trouser patterns. Even so, if the shopkeeper had his will, should we all be. Those poor withered maiden ladies, too, who fill us with a kind of horror, with their juvenile curls, their girlish crudity of colouring, their bonnets, giddy, tottering, hectic. It overcomes me with remorse to think that I myself have accused them of vanity and folly. It overcomes me with pain to hear the thoughtless laugh aloud after them, in the public ways. For they are simply short-sighted trustful people, the myopic victims of the salesman and saleswoman. The little children gibe at them, pelt even.... And somewhere in the world a draper goes unhung.

However, the gloves are bought. I select a pair haphazard, and he pretends to perceive they fit perfectly by putting them over the back of my hand. I make him a.s.sure me of the fit, and then buy the pair and proceed to take my old ones off and put the new on grimly. If they split or the fingers are too long--glovemakers have the most erratic conceptions of the human finger--I have to buy another pair.

But the trouble only begins when you have bought your thing. "Nothing more, sir?" he says. "Nothing," I say. "Braces?" he says. "No, thank you," I say. "Collars, cuffs?" He looks at mine swiftly but keenly, and with an unendurable suspicion.

He goes on, item after item. Am I in rags, that I should endure this thing? And I get sick of my everlasting "No, thank you"--the monotony shows up so glaringly against his kaleidoscope variety. I feel all the unutterable pettiness, the mean want of enterprise of my poor little purchase compared with the catholic fling he suggests. I feel angry with myself for being thus played upon, furiously angry with him. "_No, no_!"

I say.

"These tie-holders are new." He proceeds to show me his infernal tie-holders. "They prevent the tie puckering," he says with his eye on mine. It's no good. "How much?" I say.

This whets him to further outrage. "Look here, my man!" I say at last, goaded to it, "I came here for gloves. After endless difficulties I at last induced you to let me have gloves. I have also been intimidated, by the most shameful hints and insinuations, into buying that _beastly_ tie-holder. I'm not a child that I don't know my own needs. Now _will_ you let me go? How much do you want?"

That usually checks him.

The above is a fair specimen of a shopman--a favourable rendering. There are other things they do, but I simply cannot write about them because it irritates me so to think of them. One infuriating manoeuvre is to correct your p.r.o.nunciation. Another is to make a terrible ado about your name and address--even when it is quite a well-known name.

After I have bought things at a shop I am quite unfit for social intercourse. I have to go home and fume. There was a time when Euphemia would come and discuss my purchase with a certain levity, but on one occasion....

Some day these shopmen will goad me too far. It's almost my only consolation, indeed, to think what I am going to do when I do break out.

There is a salesman somewhere in the world, he going on his way and I on mine, who will, I know, prove my last straw. It may be he will read this--amused--recking little of the mysteries of fate.... Is killing a salesman murder, like killing a human being?

THE BOOK OF CURSES

Professor Gargoyle, you must understand, has travelled to and fro in the earth, culling flowers of speech: a kind of recording angel he is, but without any sentimental tears. To be plain, he studies swearing. His collection, however, only approaches completeness in the western departments of European language. Going eastward he found such an appalling and tropical luxuriance of these ornaments as to despair at last altogether of even a representative selection. "They do not curse,"

he says, "at door-handles, and s.h.i.+rt-studs, and such other trifles as will draw down the meagre discharge of an Occidental, but when they do begin----

"I hired a promising-looking man at Calcutta, and after a month or so refused to pay his wages. He was unable to get at me with the big knife he carried, because the door was locked, so he sat on his hams outside under the verandah, from a quarter-past six in the morning until nearly ten, cursing--cursing in one steady unbroken flow--an astonis.h.i.+ng spate of blasphemy. First he cursed my family, from me along the female line back to Eve, and then, having toyed with me personally for a little while, he started off along the line of my possible posterity to my remotest great-grandchildren. Then he cursed me by this and that. My hand ached taking it down, he was so very rich. It was a perfect anthology of Bengali blasphemy--vivid, scorching, and variegated. Not two alike. And then he turned about and dealt with different parts of me. I was really very fortunate in him. Yet it was depressing to think that all this was from one man, and that there are six hundred million people in Asia."

"Naturally," said the Professor in answer to my question, "these investigations involve a certain element of danger. The first condition of curse-collecting is to be unpopular, especially in the East, where comminatory swearing alone is practised, and you have to offend a man very grievously to get him to disgorge his treasure. In this country, except among ladies in comparatively humble circ.u.mstances, anything like this fluent, explicit, detailed, and sincere cursing, aimed, missile-fas.h.i.+on, at a personal enemy, is not found. It was quite common a few centuries ago; indeed, in the Middle Ages it was part of the recognised procedure. Aggrieved parties would issue a father's curse, an orphan's curse, and so forth, much as we should take out a county court summons. And it played a large part in ecclesiastical policy too.

At one time the entire Church militant here on earth was swearing in unison, and the Latin tongue, at the Republic of Venice--a very splendid and imposing spectacle. It seems to me a pity to let these old customs die out so completely. I estimate that more than half these Gothic forms have altogether pa.s.sed out of memory. There must have been some splendid things in Erse and Gaelic too; for the Celtic mind, with its more vivid sense of colour, its quicker transitions, and deeper emotional quality, has ever over-cursed the stolid Teuton. But it is all getting forgotten.

"Indeed, your common Englishman now scarcely curses at all. A more colourless and conventional affair than what in England is called swearing one can scarcely imagine. It is just common talk, with some half-dozen orthodox bad words dropped in here and there in the most foolish and illogical manner. Fancy having orthodox unorthodox words! I remember one day getting into a third-cla.s.s smoking carriage on the Metropolitan Railway about one o'clock, and finding it full of rough working men. Everything they said was seasoned with one incredibly stupid adjective, and no doubt they thought they were very desperate characters. At last I asked them not to say that word again. One forthwith asked me 'What the ----'--I really cannot quote these puerilities--'what the idiotic _cliche_ that mattered to me?' So I looked at him quietly over my gla.s.ses, and I began. It was a revelation to these poor fellows. They sat open-mouthed, gasping. Then those that were nearest me began to edge away, and at the very next station they all bundled out of the carriage before the train stopped, as though I had some infectious disease. And the thing was just a rough imperfect rendering of some mere commonplaces, pa.s.sing the time of day as it were, with which the heathen of Aleppo used to favour the servants of the American missionary. Indeed," said Professor Gargoyle, "if it were not for women there would be nothing in England that one could speak of as swearing at all."

"I say," said I, "is not that rather rough on the ladies?"

"Not at all; they have agreed to consider certain words, for no very good reason, bad words. It is a pure convention; it has little or nothing to do with the actual meaning, because for every one of these bad words there is a paraphrase or synonym considered to be quite suitable for polite ears. Hence the feeblest creature can always produce a sensation by breaking the taboo. But women are learning how to undo this error of theirs now. The word 'd.a.m.n,' for instance, is, I hear, being admitted freely into the boudoir and feminine conversation; it is even considered a rather prudish thing to object to this word. Now, men, especially feeble men, hate doing things that women do. As a consequence, men who go about saying 'd.a.m.n' are now regarded by their fellow-men as only a shade less effeminate than those who go about saying 'nasty' and 'horrid.' The subtler s.e.x will not be long in noticing what has happened to this objectionable word. When they do they will, of course, forthwith take up all the others. It will be a little startling perhaps at first, but in the end there will be no swearing left. I have no doubt there will be those who will air their petty wit on the pioneer women, but where a martyr is wanted a woman can always be found to offer herself. She will clothe herself in cursing, like the unG.o.dly, and perish in that Nessus s.h.i.+rt, a martyr to pure language. And then this dull cad swearing--a mere unnecessary affectation of coa.r.s.eness--will disappear. And a very good job too.

"There is a pretty department of the subject which I might call grace swearing. 'Od's fish,' cried the king, when he saw the man climbing Salisbury spire; 'he shall have a patent for it--no one else shall do it.' One might call such little things Wardour Street curses. 'Od's bodkins' is a ladylike form, and 'Od's possles' a variety I met in the British Museum. Every gentleman once upon a time aspired to have his own particular grace curse, just as he liked to have his crest, and his bookplate, and his characteristic signature. It fluttered pleasantly into his conversation, as Mr. Whistler's b.u.t.terfly comes into his pictures--a signature and a delight. 'Od's b.u.t.terfly!' I have sometimes thought of a little book of grace-words and heraldic curses, printed with wide margins on the best of paper. Its covers should be of soft red leather, stamped with little gold flowers. It might be made a birthday book, or a pocket diary--'Daily Invocations.'

"Coming back to wrathy swearing, I must confess I am sorry to see it decay. It was such a thoroughly hygienic and moral practice. You see, if anything annoying happens to a man, or if any powerful emotion seizes him, his brain under the irritation begins to disengage energy at a tremendous rate. He has to use all his available force of control in keeping the energy in. Some of it will leak away into the nerves of his face and distort his features, some may set his tear-glands at work, some may travel down his vagus nerve and inhibit his heart's action so that he faints, or upset the blood-vessels in his head and give him a stroke. Or if he pens it up, without its reaching any of these vents, it may rise at last to flood-level, and you will have violent a.s.saults, the breaking of furniture, 'murther' even. For all this energy a good flamboyant, ranting swear is Nature's outlet. All primitive men and most animals swear. It is an emotional shunt. Your cat swears at you because she does not want to scratch your face. And the horse, because he cannot swear, drops dead. So you see my reason for regretting the decay of this excellent and most wholesome practice....

"However, I must be getting on. Just now I am travelling about London paying cabmen their legal fares. Sometimes one picks up a new variant, though much of it is merely stereo."

And with that, flinging a playful curse at me, he disappeared at once into the tobacco smoke from which I had engendered him. An amusing and cheerful person on the whole, though I will admit his theme was a little undesirable.

DUNSTONE'S DEAR LADY

The story of Dunstone is so slight, so trivial in its cardinal incidents, such a business of cheap feathers and bits of ribbon on the surface, that I should hesitate to tell it, were it not for its Inwardness, what one might call the symbolism of the thing. Frankly, I do not clearly see what that symbolism is, but I feel it hovering in some indefinable way whenever I recall his case. It is one of those things that make a man extend his arm and twiddle his fingers, and say, blinking, "Like _that_, you know." So do not imagine for one moment that this is a shallow story, simply because it is painted, so to speak, not in heart's blood but in table claret.

Dunstone was a strong, quiet kind of man--a man of conspicuous mediocrity, and rising rapidly, therefore, in his profession. He was immensely industrious, and a little given to melancholia in private life. He smoked rather too many cigars, and took his social occasions seriously. He dressed faultlessly, with a scrupulous elimination of style. Unlike Mr. Grant Allen's ideal man, he was not const.i.tutionally a lover; indeed, he seemed not to like the ordinary girl at all--found her either too clever or too shallow, lacking a something. I don't think _he_ knew quite what it was. Neither do I--it is a case for extended hand and twiddling fingers. Moreover, I don't think the ordinary girl took to Dunstone very much.

He suffered, I fancy, from a kind of mental greyness; he was all subtle tones; the laughter of girls jarred upon him; foolish smartness or amiable foolishness got on his nerves; he detested, with equal sincerity, bright dressing, artistic dabbling, piety, and the glow of health. And when, as his confidential friend--confidential, that is, so far as his limits allowed--I heard that he intended to marry, I was really very much surprised.

I expected something quintessential; I was surprised to find she was a visiting governess. Harringay, the artist, thought there was nothing in her, but Sackbut, the art critic, was inclined to admire her bones. For my own part, I took rather a liking to her. She was small and thin, and, to be frank, I think it was because she hardly got enough to eat--of the delicate food she needed. She was shabby, too, dressed in rusty mourning--she had recently lost her mother. But she had a sweet, low voice, a shrinking manner, rather a graceful carriage, I thought, and, though she spoke rarely, all she said was sweet and sane. She struck me as a refined woman in a blatant age. The general effect of her upon me was favourable; upon Dunstone it was tremendous. He lost a considerable proportion of his melancholia, and raved at times like a common man. He called her in particular his "Dear Lady" and his "Sweet Lady," things that I find eloquent of what he found in her. What that was I fancy I understand, and yet I cannot say it quite. One has to resort to the extended arm and fingers vibratile.

Before he married her--which he did while she was still in half-mourning--there was anxiety about her health, and I understood she needed air and exercise and strengthening food. But she recovered rapidly after her marriage, her eyes grew brighter, we saw less of Sackbut's "delicious skeleton." And then, in the strangest way, she began to change. It is none of my imagining; I have heard the change remarked upon by half a dozen independent observers. Yet you would think a girl of three-and-twenty (as she certainly was) had attained her development as a woman. I have heard her compared to a winter bud, cased in its sombre scales, until the sun shone, and the warm, moist winds began to blow. I noticed first that the delicate outline of her cheek was filling, and then came the time when she reverted to colour in her dress.

Her first essays were charitably received. Her years of struggle, her year of mourning, had no doubt dwarfed her powers in this direction; presently her natural good taste would rea.s.sert itself. But the next effort and the next were harder to explain. It was not the note of nervousness or inexperience we saw; there was an undeniable decision, and not a token of shame. The little black winter bud grew warm-coloured above, and burst suddenly into extravagant outlines and chromatic confusion. Harringay, who is a cad, first put what we were all feeling into words. "I've just seen Dunstone and his donah," he said. Clearly she was one of those rare women who cannot dress. And that was not all.

A certain buoyancy, hitherto unsuspected, crept into her manner, as the corpuscles multiplied in her veins--an archness. She talked more, and threw up a spray of playfulness. And, with a growing energy, she began to revise the exquisite aesthetic balance of Dunstone's house. She even enamelled a chair.

For a year or so I was in the East. When I returned Mrs. Dunstone amazed me. In some odd way she had grown, she had positively grown. She was taller, broader, brighter--infinitely brighter. She wore a diamond brooch in the afternoon. The "delicious skeleton" had vanished in plumpness. She moved with emphasis. Her eye--which glittered--met mine bravely, and she talked as one who would be heard. In the old days you saw nothing but a rare timid glance from under the pretty lids. She talked now of this and that, of people of "good family," and the difficulty of getting a suitable governess for her little boy. She said she objected to meeting people "one would not care to invite to one's house." She swamped me with tea and ruled the conversation, so that Dunstone and I, who were once old friends, talked civil twaddle for the s.p.a.ce of one hour--theatres, concerts, and a.s.semblies chiefly--and then parted again. The furniture had all been altered--there were two "cosy nooks" in the room after the recipe in the _Born Lady_. It was plain to me, it is plain to everyone, I find, that Mrs. Dunstone is, in the sun of prosperity, rapidly developing an extremely florid vulgarity. And afterwards I discovered that she had forgotten her music, and evidently enjoyed her meals. Yet I for one can witness that five years ago there was _that_ about her--I can only extend my arm with quivering digits.

But it was something very sweet and dainty, something that made her white and thoughtful, and marked her off from the rest of womankind. I sometimes fancy it may have been anaemia in part, but it was certainly poverty and mourning in the main.

You may think that this is a story of disillusionment. When I first heard the story, I thought so too. But, so far as Dunstone goes, that is not the case. It is rare that I see him now, but the other day we smoked two cigars apiece together. And in a moment of confidence he spoke of her. He said how anxious he felt for her health, called her his "Dainty Little Lady," and spoke of the coa.r.s.eness of other women. I am afraid this is not a very eventful story, and yet there is _that_----That very convenient gesture, an arm protruded and flickering fingers, conveys my meaning best. Perhaps you will understand.

EUPHEMIA'S NEW ENTERTAINMENT

Euphemia has great ideas of putting people at their ease, a thousand little devices for thawing the very stiffest among them with a home-like glow. Far be it from me to sing her praises, but I must admit that at times she is extremely successful in this--at times almost too successful. That tea-cake business, for instance. No doubt it's a genial expedient to make your guests toast his own tea-cake: down he must go upon his knees upon your hearthrug, and his poses will melt away like the dews of the morning before the rising sun. Nevertheless, when it comes to roasting a gallant veteran like Major Augustus, deliberately roasting him, in spite of the facts that he has served his country n.o.bly through thirty irksome years of peace, and that he admires Euphemia with a delicate fervour--roasting him, I say, alive, as if he were a Strasburg goose, or suddenly affixing a delicate young genius to the hither end of a toasting-fork while he is in the midst of a really very subtle and tender conversation, the limits of social warmth seem to be approaching dangerously near. However, this scarcely concerns Euphemia's new entertainment.

This new entertainment is modelling in clay. Euphemia tells me it is to be quite the common thing this winter. It is intended especially for the evening, after a little dinner. As the reader is aware, the evening after a little dinner is apt to pall. A certain placid contentment creeps over people. I don't know in what organ originality resides; but it's a curious thing, and one I must leave to the consideration of psychologists, that people's output of original remarks appears to be obstructed in some way after these gastronomic exercises. Then a little dinner always confirms my theory of the absurdity of polygonal conversation. Music and songs, too, have their drawbacks, especially gay songs; they invariably evoke a vaporous melancholy. Card-playing Euphemia objects to because her uncle, the dean, is prominent in connection with some ridiculous a.s.sociation for the suppression of gambling; and in what are called "games" no rational creature esteeming himself an immortal soul would partic.i.p.ate. In this difficulty it was that Euphemia--decided, I fancy, by the possession of certain really very becoming ap.r.o.ns--took up this business of clay-modelling.

You have a lump of greyish clay and a saucer of water and certain small tools of wood (for which I cannot discover the slightest use in the world) given you, and Euphemia puts on a very winning bib. Then, moistening the clay until it acquires sufficient plasticity, and incidentally splas.h.i.+ng your cuffs and coat-sleeves with an agreeably light tinted mud, you set to work. At first people are a little disgusted at the apparent dirtiness of the employment, and also perhaps rather diffident. The eldest lady says weakly deprecatory things, and the feeblest male is jocular after his wont. But it is remarkable how soon the charm of this delightful occupation seizes hold of you. For really the sensations of moulding this plastic matter into shape are wonderfully and quite unaccountably pleasing. It is ever so much easier than drawing things--"anyone can do it," as the advertis.e.m.e.nt people say--and the work is so much more substantial in its effects. Technical questions arise. In moulding a head, do you take a lump and fine it down, or do you dab on the features after the main k.n.o.b of it is shaped?