Here are Ladies Part 20

"I will suspect the morals of a man who cannot dance. I will look curiously into his sugar or statecraft. I will impeach his candour or reticence, and sneer at his method of lighting a fire unless he can frolic when he goes out for a walk with a dog--that is the beginning of dancing: the end of it is the beginning of a world. A young dog is a piece of early morning disguised in an earthly fell, and the man who can resist his contagion is a sour, dour, miserable mistake, without bravery, without virtue, without music, with a cranky body and a shrivelled soul, and with eyes incapable of seeing the sunlight.

"I have often thought that dogs are a very superior race of people.

They are certainly more highly organised on the affectional plane than man. A dog will love you just for the fun of it--and that is virtue.

Pat a dog on the head and he will dance around you in an ecstasy of good-fellowship. Let us, at least, be the equal of these sagacities.

Let us put away our false intellectual pride. Let us learn to be unconscious. The average man trembles into a dance imagining that all eyes are rayed upon him wonderingly or admiringly, whereas, in truth, he will only be looked at if he dances very well or very badly. Both of these extremities of perfection ought to be avoided. We should exercise our very bad or very good qualities in solitude lest average people be saddened by their disabilities in either direction. Let your curses be as private as your prayers for both are purgative operations.

In public we must conform to the standard, in private only may we do our best or our worst. Acting so, we will be freed from false pride and cowardly self-consciousness. Let us be brave. Let us caress the waists of our neighbours without fear. Let everybody's chin be our toy. Let us pat one another on the hats as we pa.s.s in the melancholy streets.--Thus only shall we learn to be gay and careless who for so long have been miserable and suspicious. We will be fearless and companionable who have been so timid and solitary. A new, a better, a real police force will arrest people who don't dance as they travel to and from their labour. The world will be happy at last, and civilisation will begin to be possible."

Here, in an ecstasy of good-fellowship, the old gentleman seized his pewter with his left hand and my gla.s.s with his right hand, and he emptied them both before recognising his mistake. I had, however, run out of tobacco, whereupon he became very angry, and refused to bid me good-night.

III

The old gentleman condescended to accept the last cigar which I had, and, having lit it with my only match, he earnestly advised me never to smoke to excess, because this indulgence brought spots before the eyes, deteriorated the moral character, and was, moreover, exceedingly expensive.--On the subject of smoking and tobacco he spoke as follows--

"I have observed that people who do not smoke are usually of a sour and unsociable disposition. All red-haired people smoke naturally, and they almost invariably use cut-plug. Very dark-haired men smoke twist, and their natural strength and virtue is such that in the intervals of smoking they also chew tobacco. Fair-haired men generally smoke cigarettes--they do this, not for the purpose of enjoyment, but purely in imitation of their betters. However, in later life, when they become bald, as they invariably do, they also became regenerate and smoke pig-tail. Men with mouse-coloured hair do not smoke at all.

They collect postage stamps and sea-sh.e.l.ls, and are usually to be found sitting round a fire with other girls eating chocolates and seeking for replies to such questions as, when is a door not a door? and why does a chicken cross the road? They are miserable creatures whom I will not further mention.

"The usage of tobacco, or some smokable subst.i.tute, is as old as primitive man. Almost all nations of the earth are adepts in this particular habit. It is, of course, an acquired taste, as also are washing and tomatoes. We are born with appet.i.tes which are static and unchangeable, but we are also born with a yearning for pleasure which is almost as positive as an appet.i.te and only needs cultivation to become equally imperative. Doubtless, a traveller from some distant planet, who knew nothing of tobacco, would be astonished at the spectacle of a man exhaling smoke from his lips with splendid unconcern, and our traveller's conjectures as to the origin of the smoke and the immunity of the smoker would be highly amusing and instructive.

"I am often surprised on reflecting that our immediate ancestors were debarred from this pleasant indulgence, and I have wondered how they made the evenings pa.s.s. The lack of tobacco and pockets in their clothes (both of which are great civilising agents) may have been responsible for the wars, harryings, kidnappings and cattle raids which, alternating with rigorous and austere religious ceremonial, formed the bulk of their pleasures. Nowadays we leave these violent entertainments to children and the semi-literate and take our pleasures more composedly. A man who can put his hands in his pockets will seldom remove them for the purpose of slaying some one whose only fault is that he was born in the County Sligo. A man with a pipe in his teeth will be too much at peace with society to endanger its existence.

"If the blessings of tobacco should be extended to the remainder of the vertebrates (as, why should it not?) I am sure that lions, elephants, and wild boars would avail themselves of it. So, also, would kangaroos, a beautiful and agile race living in Polynesia, or thereabouts--they are beautiful hoppers, and collect large quant.i.ties of this plant. In this direction they are especially well equipped, each having a pouch in her stomach in which to carry tobacco and hops, but wherein they now ignorantly secrete their young. Serpents would smoke a pipe with considerable elegance, and might become more benevolent in consequence. Frogs would smoke, but I fancy they would expectorate too elaborately to be neighbourly. Fish, however, would not smoke at all.--They are a cowardly and corrupt people, living in water, which is a singular thing to do. Neither would many birds smoke, they have neither the stamina nor the teeth, but I am certain that crows and jackdaws would chew tobacco eagerly and with true relish. A large proportion of the insecta are too light-minded and frivolous to care for smoking. Beetles, however, a very reserved and dignified race, would smoke cigars, and so would c.o.c.kroaches, a rather saturnine and cynical people; but no others.

"As for women--I am astonished they have not smoked, by mere contagion, long ago. If they did they would certainly grow more kind-hearted and manly, and I am sure that a deputation of ladies with pipes in their mouths and hands in their pockets would only have to demand the franchise from an astounded ministry to obtain it.

"Members of Parliament are, I believe, either a separate creation or a composite of the parrot and the magpie. I have not yet discovered their particular function in nature but have observed them with some particularity. They wear top hats and are constantly making speeches, both of which are easy things to do and quite pleasant minor accomplishments.--So far as I can gather their chief use has been to pa.s.s something called a Budget. From the fact that this Budget contains a disgraceful imposition on tobacco I must take it that Members of Parliament are among the lower animals who do not smoke--they are also uninteresting in other ways."

Having said this my old friend bowed to me and departed genially with my cigar case in his pocket. The shirt-sleeved Adonis behind the counter wagged his head solemnly at a fly and then clouted it with a dish-cloth.

IV

The old gentleman took an athletic pull at his liquor, and continued his discourse. He had been discussing more to himself than to me the merits of Professor James and Monsieur Bergson, and had inquired was I aware of the nature of the Pragmatic Sanction. The gentleman behind the counter remarked, that he had one on his bicycle, but that they were no good. This statement was denounced by the Philosopher as an unnatural and clumsy falsehood, and, anathematising the ignorance of his interrupter, he came by slow degrees to the following discourse--

"I have but little faith in any of the methods of education with which I am presently acquainted. The objective of every system of teaching should be to enable the person who is being subjected to this repulsive treatment to do something which will fit him to maintain a place in life where he will be as little liable as possible to the changes and vicissitudes of civilised existence.

"The c.u.mbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed Church and the highest order of the vertebrates.

"If one walks into any school in this kingdom one is certain to meet a tall, thin, anaemic youth with a draggled moustache and a worried eye who is endeavouring to coerce a ma.s.s of indigestible, inelastic and unimportant facts into the heads of divers sleepy and disgusted children. If a small boy, on being asked where Labrador is, replies that it is the most northerly point of the Berlin Archipelago, he may be wrong in quite a variety of ways, but even if he answered correctly he would still know just as little about the matter, while if he were to give the only proper reply to so ridiculous a conundrum, he would tell his tormentor that he did not care a rap where it was, that he had not put it there, and that he would tell his mother if the man did not leave him alone. What has he got to do with Labrador, Terra del Fuego, or the Isles of Greece? Give him a fistful of facts about Donnybrook, and send him away to hunt out the truth of it, with a sandwich in his pocket and the promise of a lump of toffee when he came back with his cargo of truths--that would interest him, the toffee would make the information stick, while the verification of his facts would make his head fat and fertile.

"When we ceased to be natural creatures and put on the oppressive shrouds, wraps and disguises which we label in the villainous aggregate civilisation, we ceased to know either how to teach or how to learn.

We exchanged the freedom and s.p.a.ciousness of life for a cramped existence compounded of spectacles and bad grammar, this complicated still further by the multiplication tables, the dead languages and indigestion tabloids. During his school-days many a healthy boy had to pa.r.s.e ten square miles of dead language. Why? he does not know and he will never be told, for no one else knows any more than he. The only thing of which he is certain is, that he did not do anything to deserve it.

"Civilisation, which is responsible for all the woes of life, such as washing, shaving and buying boots, is responsible for this also.

Potatoes are more productive than Latin roots, are twice as nourishing and cannot be pa.r.s.ed. Teach a girl how to recognise an egg by the naked eye, and then teach her how to cook it. Teach a boy how to discover the kind of trees eggs grow on and what is the best kind of soil to plant them in. Teach a girl how to keep her hands from scratching, her tongue from telling lies, and her teeth from dropping out prematurely, and she will, maybe, turn out a healthy kind of mammal having a house filled with brightness and laughter. Teach a boy how to prevent another boy from mashing the head off him, teach him how to be good to his mother when she is old, teach him how to give two-pence to a beggar without imagining that he is investing his savings in Paradise at fifty per cent and a bonus; and then, having eliminated civilisation, education, clothes, tin whistles and soap this earth will not be such a bad old ball-alley for a man to smoke a pipe in.

"Everything is wrong. People should rise to their feet and salute when a farmer or a teacher comes into a room. No man should be allowed into Parliament who has not engaged in one or other of these professions, but because they are the two most important professions in the world their exponents are robbed and harried into slaves and fools."

Having said this with great earnestness the old gentleman absent-mindedly impounded my drink, absorbed it, and strode away wrapped in thought. The gentleman-in-waiting sympathetically asked me if I would have another one, but on learning that I had no more money he said good-night.

V

The old gentleman was in a state of most unusual content. It might have been because the sun was shining, or it might have been because he had just finished his third gla.s.s: whatever it was, the smile upon his face was of a depth and a radiance impossible to describe. He spoke for a while upon the pleasant smell of hay pa.s.sing through a city, and, remarking upon the enviable thirst of hay-makers, he swept gradually to the following weighty monologue--

"From the earliest times," said he, "drinking has been regarded not alone as a necessary lubricant, but also as a pastime, and the ingenuity of every race under the sun has been exercised in the attempt to give variety and distinction to its beverages.

"We may take it that the earliest race of men drank nothing but water, and hot water to boot, for at that era the earth must have been, if not hot, at least tepid. One can easily imagine that the contemporaries of the five-toed horse might have welcomed death as a happy release from their too sultry existence.

"I suppose man is the only brewing animal known to scientific research.

All other creatures take their food and drink neat, or in a raw state.

Of course, almost all mammals are enabled by a highly ingenious internal mechanism to brew milk, or some other lacteal subst.i.tute, but this is performed by a natural, instinctive impulse towards the preservation of their young and conserves none of the spirit of artifice and calculation so necessary to authentic brewing operations.

"Brewing was possible only when the stability of the human race was, more or less, a.s.sured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families--a father, an uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of children--wandered wherever food seemed most abundant, and fought with or eluded such other families as they chanced upon. This state of existence was too precarious and haphazard to allow of the niceties of brewing being evolved.

"But the natural tendency of families to lengthen, the gregarious instincts of the race, and the need of mutual protection and a.s.sistance ultimately welded these indiscriminate families into communities of ever-varying extent, and the movement of these huge troops and transportation of their baggage becoming more and more difficult (vehicles being unknown and horses, perhaps, treble-toed, wily and ferocious) and food, which until then had only been obtained in a fugitive state, becoming less easy of access, these communities were forced to select a settled habitation, scratch the earth for provender, settled down to the breeding of one-toed horses, and exercise the respectable virtues of thrift and industry for their preservation.

Thus, laws were formulated, tentative and unsatisfactory at first, and ever tending, as to this day, to become more complex and less satisfactory. Villages took shape, straggled into towns, widened into cities and coalesced into kingdoms and empires: and so, the civilisation of which we are partakers crawled laboriously into being, with the brewer somewhere in the centre, active, rubicund and disputatious, as he has continued to date, with a seat on the County Council which he had swindled some thirsty statesman out of, and more property than he could deal with by himself.

"It is a singular reflection that thirst has very little to do with the consumption of drink, nor is this appet.i.te subject to the vagaries of climate, for the inhabitants of the coldest regions will, it is feared, drink on equal terms with those dwelling in the sun-burnt tropics. In almost all ceremonial observances drinking has had a special place, and this diversion lends itself to an infinite number of objects--we can from the same bowl quaff health to our friends and confusion to our enemies, doubtless with equal results. Here alone men meet on equal terms. There is no religion, nationality or politics in liquor: let it be but sufficiently wet and potent and it matters not if the brew has been fermented in the tub of a Christian or the vessel of a heathen Turk.

"I understand that this latter race are forbidden, by the form of heresy which they call religion, to use liquors more potent than sherbet. Some thinkers believe that this deprivation is possibly the reason of their being Turks.--They are Turks, not from conviction, but from habit, spite, and the bile engendered by a too rigid and bigoted abstinence. In this belief, however, I do not concur, for I consider that a Turk is a Turk naturally, and without any further constraint than those imposed by the laws of geography and primogeniture.

"Meanwhile it is interesting to speculate on the future of an abstinent nation whose politics have the misfortune to be guided by a Peerage instead of a Beerage, and whose national destiny is irrationally divorced from the interests of 'The Trade.' Any departure from the established customs of humanity must be criticised unsparingly, and, if necessary, destructively. To overthrow the customs of antiquity must entail its own punishment and that punishment may be an awe-inspiring and chastening Success. Therefore, this happy whisky-governed land of ours should never forsake its liquor or it may be forced by opportunity and work to become great. The foundations of our civilisation are steeped in beer--let no sacrilegious hand seek to interfere with it, for, even if the foundations were rotten, the interests of the Trade must not be disturbed, the grave and learned members of our Corporation might be horribly reduced to working for their living, and our unfortunate City might have the extraordinary misfortune to scramble out of debt in the absence of its statesmen."

The old gentleman, with a bright smile, said that "he did not mind if he did," and he "did" with such gusto that I had to call a cab.

VI

The old gentleman came in hurriedly and called for that to which he was accustomed. He fumbled in one pocket after another, and after going over all his pockets several times he remarked to me "I have forgotten my purse." His air was so friendly and confiding that it more than repaid me for the small sum which I had to advance. He sat down close beside me, and, after touching on the difficulty of being understood in a tavern, he drew genially to these remarks--

"Language may be described as a medium for recording one's sensations.

It is gesture translated into sound. It is noise with a meaning. Music cannot at all compare with it, for music is no more than the scientific distribution of noise, and it does not impart any meaning to the disintegrated and harried tumults. Language may be divided into several heads, which, again, may be subdivided almost indefinitely.--The primary heads are, language, talk, and speech. Speech is the particular form of noise which is made by Members of Parliament. Language is the symbols whereby one lady in a back street makes audible her impressions of the lady who lives on the same floor--it is often extremely sinewy. Talk may be described as the crime of people who make one tired.

"It is my opinion that people talk too much. I think the world would be a healthier and better place if it were more silent. On every day that pa.s.ses there is registered over all the earth a vast amount of language which, so far as I can see, has not the slightest bearing on anything anywhere.

"I have been told of a race living in Central Africa, or elsewhere, who by an inherent culture were enabled to dispense with speech. They whistled, and by practice had attained so copious and flexible a vocabulary that they could whistle good-morning and good-night, or how-do-you-do with equal facility and distinction. This, while it is a step in the right direction, is not a sufficiently long step. To live among these people might appear very like living in a cageful of canaries or parrots. Parrots are a very superior race who usually travel with sailors. They have a whistle which can be guided or deflected into various by-ways. I once knew a parrot who was employed by a sailor-man to curse for him when his own speech was suspended by liquor. He could also whistle ballads and polkas, and had attained an astonishing proficiency in these arts; for, by long practice, he could dovetail curses and whistles in a most energetic and, indeed, astonishing manner.

It would often project two whistles and a curse, sometimes two curses and a whistle, while all the time keeping faithfully to the tune of 'The Sailor's Grave' or another. It was a highly cultivated and erudite person. As it advanced in learning it took naturally to chewing tobacco, but, being a person of strongly experimental habits, it tried one day to curse and whistle and chew tobacco at the one moment, with the unfortunate result that a piece of honeydew got jammed between a whistle and a curse, and the poor thing perished miserably of strangulation.

"It is indeed singular that while every race of mankind is competent to speak, none of the other races, such as cats, cows, caterpillars, and crabs, have shown the slightest interest in the making of this ordered noise. This is the more strange when we reflect that almost all animals are provided with a throat and a mouth which are capable of making a noise certainly equal in volume and intelligibility to the sounds made by a German or a Spaniard.

"Long ago men lived in trees and had elongated backbones which they were able to twitch. There were no shops, theatres, or churches in those times, and, consequently, no necessity for a specialized and meticulous prosody. Man barked at his fellow-man when he wanted something, and if his request was not understood he bit his fellow-man and was quit of him.

When they forsook the trees and became ground-walkers they came into contact with a variety of theretofore unknown objects, the necessity for naming which so exercised their tongues that gradually their bark took on a different quality and became susceptible of more complicated sounds.

Then, with the dawning of the Pastoral Age, food in a gregarious community became a matter of more especial importance. When a man barked at his wife for a cocoanut and she handed him a baby or a bowl of soup or an evening paper it became necessary, in order to minimise her alternatives, that he should elaborate his bark to meet this and an hundred other circ.u.mstances. I do not know at what period of history man was able to call his wife names with the certainty of reprisal. It was possible quite early, because I have often heard a dog bark in a dissatisfied and important manner at another dog and be perfectly comprehended.

"A difficulty would certainly arise as to the selection of a word when forty or fifty men might at the same time label any article with as many different names, and, it is reasonable to suppose, that they would be reluctant to adopt any other expression but that of their own creation.

In such a crux the strongest man of the community would be likely to clout the others to an admission that his terminology was standard.