The Perfect Gentleman Part 2

THE LIER IN BED

If I had to get on with but one article of furniture, I think I would choose a bed. One could if necessary sit, eat, read, and write in the bed. In past time it has been a social centre: the hostess received in it, the guests sat on benches, and the most distinguished visitor sat on the foot of the bed. It combines the uses of all the other articles in the '$198 de luxe special 4-room outfit' that I have seen advertised for the benefit of any newly married couple with twenty dollars of their own for the first payment. Very few houses, if any, nowadays are without furniture that n.o.body uses, chairs that n.o.body ever sits on, books that n.o.body ever reads, ornaments that n.o.body ever wants, pictures that n.o.body ever looks at; an acc.u.mulation of unessential objects that does credit chiefly to the activity of manufacturers and merchants catering to our modern l.u.s.t for unnecessary expenditure. Not so many centuries ago one or two books made quite a respectable library; dining-room tables were real banqueting boards laid on trestles and taken away after the banquet; one bench might well serve several Perfect Gentlemen to sit upon; and a chair of his own was the baron's privilege. Today the $198 de luxe special 4-room outfit would feel naked and ashamed without its '1 Pedestal' and '1 Piece of Statuary.' Yet what on earth does a happy couple, bravely starting life with twenty dollars, want of a pedestal and a piece of statuary? And I notice also that the outfit--'a complete home,' says the description--makes no provision for a kitchen; but perhaps they are no longer de luxe.

It is impossible, at this time, to recover with complete certainty the antiquity of the bed. We may presume that the Neanderthal man had a wife (as wives were then understood) and maintained a kind of housekeeping that may have gone no further than pawing some leaves together to sleep on; but this probably was a late development. Earlier we may imagine the wind blowing the autumn leaves together and a Neanderthal man lying down by chance on the pile. He found it pleasant, and, for a few thousand years, went out of his way to find piles of leaves to lie down on, until one day he hit upon the bright idea of piling the leaves together himself. Then for the first time a man had a bed. His sleep was localized; his pile of leaves, brought together by his own sedulous hands, became property. Monogamy was encouraged, and the idea of home came into being. Personally I have no doubt whatever that the man who made the first bed was so charmed with it that the practice of lying in bed in the morning began immediately; and it is probably a conservative statement that the later Pliocene era saw the custom well developed.

One wonders what the Neanderthal man would have thought of a de luxe 4-room outfit, or complete home, for $198.

Even to-day, however, there are many fortunate persons who are never awakened by an alarm-clock--that watchman's rattle, as it were, of Policeman Day. The invention is comparatively recent. Without trying to uncover the ident.i.ty of the inventor, and thus adding one more to the Who's Who of Pernicious Persons, we may a.s.sume that it belongs naturally to the age of small and cheap clocks which dawned only in the nineteenth century. Some desire for it existed earlier. The learned Mrs.

Carter, said Dr. Johnson, 'at a time when she was eager in study, did not awake as early as she wished, and she therefore had a contrivance that, at a certain hour, her chamber light should burn a string to which a heavy weight was suspended, which then fell with a sudden strong noise; this roused her from her sleep, and then she had no difficulty in getting up.'

This device, we judge, was peculiar to Mrs. Carter, than whom a less eager student would have congratulated herself that the sudden strong noise was over, and gone sweetly to sleep again. The venerable Bishop Ken, who believed that a man 'should take no more sleep than he can take at once,' had no need of it. He got up, we are told, at one or two o'clock in the morning 'and sometimes earlier,' and played the lute before putting on his clothes.

To me the interesting thing about these historic figures is that they got up with such elastic promptness, the one to study and the other to play the lute. The Bishop seems a shade the more eager; but there are details that Mrs. Carter would naturally have refrained from mentioning to Dr. Johnson, even at the br.i.m.m.i.n.g moment when he had just accepted her contribution to the _Rambler_. For most of us--or alarm-clocks would not be made to ring continuously until the hara.s.sed bed-warmer gets up and stops the racket--this getting out of bed is no such easy matter; and perhaps it will be the same when Gabriel's trumpet is the alarm-clock. We are more like Boswell, honest sleeper, and have 'thought of a pulley to raise me gradually'; and then have thought again and realized that even a pulley 'would give me pain, as it would counteract my internal disposition.' Let the world go hang; our internal disposition is to stay in bed: we cling tenaciously to non-existence--or rather, to that third state of consciousness when we are in the world but not of it.

There are those, no doubt, who will say that they have something better to do than waste their time wondering why they like to stay in bed, which they don't. They are persons who have never been bored by the monotony of dressing or have tried to vary it, sometimes beginning at one end, sometimes at the other, but always defeated by the hard fact that a man cannot b.u.t.ton his collar until he has put on his shirt. If they condescend so far, they will say, with some truth, that it is a question of weather, and any fool knows that it is not pleasant to get out of a warm bed into a cold bedroom. The matter has been considered from that angle. 'I have been warm all night,' wrote Leigh Hunt, 'and find myself in a state perfectly suited to a warm-blooded animal. To get out of this state into the cold, besides the inharmonious and uncritical abruptness of the transition, is so unnatural to such a creature that the poets, refining upon the tortures of the d.a.m.ned, make one of their greatest agonies consist in being suddenly transported from heat to cold--from fire to ice. They are "haled" out of their "beds," says Milton, by "harpy-footed furies"--fellows who come to call them.'

But no man, say I, or woman either, ever lay in bed and devised logical reasons for staying there--unless for the purposes of an essay, in which case the rec.u.mbent essayist, snuggle as he may, is mentally up and dressed. He is really awake. He has tied his necktie. He is a busy bee--and I can no more imagine a busy bee lying in bed than I can imagine lying in bed with one. He is no longer in the nice balance between sense and oblivion that is too serenely and irresponsibly comfortable to be consciously a.n.a.lyzed; and in which, so long as he can stay there without getting wider awake, nothing else matters.

Lying in bed being a half-way house between sleeping and waking, and the mind then equally indifferent to logic and exact realism, the lier in bed can and does create his own dreams: it is an inexpensive and gentlemanly pleasure. If his bent is that way, he becomes Big Man Me: Fortunatus's purse jingles in his pocket; the slave jumps when he rubs the lamp; he excels in all manly sports. If you ask with what authority I can thus postulate the home-made dreams of any lier in bed but myself, the answer is easy. It is common knowledge that the half-awake minds of men thus employ themselves, and the fashion of their employment may be reasonably deduced from observation of individuals. The _ego_ even of a modest man will be somewhat rampant; the _ego_ of a conceited one would, barring its capability for infinite expansion, swell up and bust. But this riot of egoism has as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying in Bed as a movie play has to the fine art of the drama. The true artist may take fair advantage of his nice state of unreason to defy time and s.p.a.ce, but he will respect essential verities. He will treat his _ego_ like the child it is; and, taking example from a careful mother, tie a rope to it when he lets it out to play. Thus he will capture a kind of immortality; and his lying in bed, a transitory state itself, will contradict the transitory character of life outside of it. Companions he has known and loved will come from whatever remote places to share these moments, for the Fine Art of Lying in Bed consists largely in cultivating that inward eye with which Wordsworth saw the daffodils.

Whether this can be done on the wooden pillow of the j.a.panese I have no way of knowing; but I suspect there were some admirable liers in bed among the Roman patricians who were grossly accused of effeminacy because they slept on feathers.

The north of China, where bedding is laid in winter on raised platforms gently heated by little furnaces underneath, must have produced some highly cultivated liers in bed. The proverbial shortness of the German bed (which perhaps explains the German _Kultur_) may have tended to discourage the art and at the same time unconsciously stimulated a hatred of England, where the beds are proverbially generous. One can at least hope, however, that all beds are alike in this matter, provided the occupant is a proper lier, who can say fairly,--

My bed has legs To run away From Here and Now And Everyday.

It trots me off From slumber deep To the Dear Land Of Half-Asleep.

TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE

'Take me away,' said Thomas Carlyle, when silence settled for a moment over a dinner-table where one of the diners had been monologuing to the extreme limit of boredom, 'for G.o.d's sake take me away and put me in a room by myself and give me a pipe of tobacco!'

Little as we may otherwise resemble Carlyle, many of us have felt this emotion; and some realize (although the painful suspicion comes from a mind too a.n.a.lytical for its own comfort) that we may have occasioned it.

The nice consideration for the happiness of others which marks a gentleman may even make him particularly susceptible to this haunting apprehension. Carlyle defined the feeling when he said, 'To sit still and be pumped into is never an exhilarating process.' But pumping is different. How often have I myself, my adieus seemingly done, my hat in my hand and my feet on the threshold, taken a fresh grip, hat or no hat, on the pump-handle, and set good-natured, Christian folk distressedly wondering if I would never stop! And how often have I afterward recalled something strained and morbidly intent in their expressions, a gla.s.siness of the staring eye and a starchiness in the smiling lip, that has made me suffer under my bed-cover and swear that next time I would depart like a sky-rocket!

Truly it seems surprising, in a fortunate century when the correspondence school offers so many inexpensive educational advantages for deficient adults, that one never sees an advertis.e.m.e.nt--

STOP BEING A BORE!

If you _bore people_ you can't be loved.

_Don't you want to be loved?_ Don't YOU?

Then sign and mail this coupon _at once_.

Let Dynamo Doit teach you through his famous mail course, _How not to be a Bore_.

The explanation, I fancy, must be that people who sign and mail coupons _at once_ do not know when they are bored; that the word 'boredom,' so hopelessly heavy with sad significance to many of us, is nevertheless but caviar to the general and no bait at all for an enterprising correspondence school.

A swift survey of literature, from the Old Testament down, yields some striking discoveries. To take an example, Job does not appear to have regarded Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as bores. And there is Bartlett's _Familiar Quotations_, out of which one can familiarly quote nothing about boredom earlier than Lord Byron. The subject has apparently never been studied, and the broad division into Bores Positive and Bores Negative is so recent that I have but this minute made it myself.

The Bore Positive pumps; the Bore Negative compels pumping. Unlike Carlyle, he regards being pumped into as an exhilarating process, and so, like the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad's tired shoulders, he sits tight and says nothing; the difference being that, whereas the Old Man kept Sinbad walking, the Bore Negative keeps his victim talking. Charlie Wax--who lives down town in the shop-window and is always so well-dressed--would be a fine Bore Negative if one were left alone with him under compulsion to keep up a conversation.

Boredom, in fact, is an acquired distaste--a by-product of the printing-press and steam-engine, which between them have made and kept mankind busier than Solomon in all his wisdom could have imagined. Our arboreal ancestor could neither bore nor be bored. We see him--with the mind's eye--up there in his tree, poor stupid, his think-tank (if the reader will forgive me a word which he or she may not have _quite_ accepted) practically empty; nothing but a few primal, inarticulate thinks at the bottom. It will be a million years or so yet before his progeny will say a long farewell to the old home in the tree; and even then they will lack words with which to do the occasion justice.

Language, in short, must be invented before anybody can be bored with it. And I do not believe, although I find it stated in a ten-volume Science-History of the Universe, that 'language is an internal necessity, begotten of a l.u.s.tful longing to express, through the plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his ability to interpret Nature.' An internal necessity, yes--except in the case of the Bore Negative, who prefers to listen; but quite as likely begotten of man's anything but secret sense of his ability to interpret himself.

Speech grew slowly; and mankind, now a speaking animal, had centuries--nay, epochs--in which to become habituated to the longwindedness that Job accepted as a matter of course in Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. So that even to-day many, like Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, bore and are bored without really knowing it.

In the last a.n.a.lysis a bore bores because he keeps us from something more interesting than himself. He becomes a menace to happiness in proportion as the span of life is shortened by an increasing number of things to do and places to go between crib and coffin. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, full of an unusual personal experience that the leisurely reader finds most horridly entertaining, bored the Wedding Guest because at that moment the Wedding Guest wanted to get to the wedding, and was probably restrained from violence only by the subconscious thought that it is not good form to appear at such functions with a missing b.u.t.ton. But the Mariner was too engrossed in his own tale to notice this lack of interest; and so invariably is the Bore Positive: everything escapes him except his listener.

But no matter how well we know when we are bored, none of us can be certain that he does not sometimes bore--not even Tammas. The one certainty is that _I may bore_, and that on the very occasion when I have felt myself as entertaining as a three-ring circus, I may in effect have been as gay and chatty as a like number of tombstones. There are persons, for that matter, who are bored by circuses and delighted by tombstones. My mistake may have been to put all my conversational eggs in one basket--which, indeed, is a very good way to bore people.

Dynamo Doit, teaching his cla.s.s of industrious correspondents, would probably write them, with a picture of himself shaking his fist to emphasize his point: 'Do not try to exhaust your subject. You will only exhaust your audience. Never talk for more than three minutes on any topic. Wear a wrist-watch _and keep your eye on it_. If at the end of _three minutes_ you cannot change the subject, tell one of the following anecdotes.' And I am quite sure also that Professor Doit would write to his cla.s.s: 'Whatever topic you discuss, _discuss it originally_. Be apt.

Be bright. Be pertinent. Be _yourself_. Remember always that it is not so much what you say as the _way you say it_ that will charm your listener. Think clearly. Ill.u.s.trate and drive home your meaning with illuminating figures--the sort of thing that your hearer will remember and pa.s.s on to others as "another of So-and-so's _bon-mots_." Here you will find that reading the "Wit and Humor" column in newspapers and magazines is a great help. And speak plainly. Remember that unless you are _heard_ you cannot expect to _interest_. On this point, dear student, I can do no better than repeat Lord Chesterfield's advice to his son: "Read what Cicero and Quintilian say of enunciation."'

But perhaps, after all, enunciation is no more important than renunciation; and the first virtue that we who do not wish to be bores must practise is abstemiousness of self. I know it is hard, but I do not mean total abstinence. A man who tried to converse without his _I's_ would make but a blind stagger at it. This short and handsome word (as Colonel Roosevelt might have said) is not to be utterly discarded without danger of such a silence as would transform the experimenter into a Bore Negative of the most negative description. Practically deprived of speech, he would become like a Charlie Wax endowed with locomotion and provided with letters of introduction. But one can at least curb the p.r.o.noun, and, with shrewd covert glances at his wrist-watch, confine the personally conducted tour into and about Myself within reasonable limits. Let him say bravely in the beginning, 'I will not talk about Myself for more than thirty minutes by my wrist-watch'; then reduce it to twenty-five; then to twenty--and so on to the irreducible minimum; and he will be surprised to feel how his popularity increases with leaps and bounds at each reduction--provided, of course, that he finds anything else to talk about.

Your Complete Bore, however, is incapable of this treatment, for he does not know that he is a bore. It is only the Occasional Bore, a sensitive, well-meaning fellow who would not harm anybody, whose head lies sleepless on a pillow hot with his blushes while he goes over and over so apt and tripping a dialogue that it would withhold Gabriel from blowing his trumpet. So it seems to him in his bed; but alas, these dialogues are never of any practical use. They comfort, but they do not cure. For no person ever talks to us as we talk to ourselves. The better way is to decide firmly (1) to get a wrist-watch, and (2) to get to sleep.

There is, however, one infallible rule for not being a bore,--or at any rate for not being much of a bore,--and that is, never to make a call, or talk to one person, or to several at once, for more than fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes is not really a very long time, although it may seem so. But to apply this rule successfully one must become adept in the Fine Art of Going Away. Resting your left hand negligently on your right knee, so that the wrist protrudes with an effect of careless grace from the cuff, you have glanced at your watch and observed that the fifteen minutes are up. You get up yourself. Others get up--or, if there is but one other, she. So far, so good. But now that everybody is up, new subjects of conversation, as if catching this rising infection, come up also. You are in a position in which, except by rather too oratorical or dramatic a gesture, you cannot look at your watch; more than that, if you bore a person sitting down and wondering when you are going to get up, you bore far worse a person standing up and wondering when you will go away. That you have in effect started to go away--and not gone away--and yet must go away some time--and may go away at any minute: this consciousness, to a person standing first on one tired foot and then on the other, rapidly becomes almost, but never quite, unendurable.

Reason totters, but remains on the throne. One can almost lay down a law: _Two persons who do not part with kisses should part with haste._

The way to do is to go like the sky-rocket--up and out.

But the fifteen-minute call followed by the flying exit is at best only a niggling and unsatisfactory solution; it is next door to always staying at home. Then certainly you would never be a bore (except to the family); but neither by any possibility could you ever be that most desirable factor in life, the Not-Bore. The Hermit is a slacker. Better far to come out of your cave, mingle, bore as little as may be--and thank Heaven that here and there you meet one whom you somehow feel reasonably certain that you do not bore.

WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR

Of the several places in which a man waits to have something done to him, no other is so restful as the establishment of his tailor. His doctor and his dentist do their best with inviting chairs and a pile of magazines on the table: one gets an impression that both of them were once liberal subscribers to the current periodicals, but stopped a year or two ago and have never bought a magazine since. But these, in their official capacity, are painful gentlemen; and a long procession of preceding patients have imparted to the atmosphere of their waiting-rooms a heavy sense of impending misery.

The tailor is different. 'There was peace,' wrote Meredith, 'in Mr.

Goren's shop. Badgered ministers, bankrupt merchants, diplomatists with a headache,--any of our modern grandees under difficulties,--might have envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided: and he was an enviable man. He loved his craft, he believed he had not succeeded the millions of antecedent tailors in vain.'

And so it is, I dare say, in varying degree with all tailors; or at any rate should be, for tailor and customer meet on the pleasantest imaginable plane of congenial interest. A person whose chief desire in life at the moment is to be becomingly dressed comes to one whose chief ambition in life at the moment is to becomingly dress him. No hideous and insistent apprehension preys on the mind of the waiting customer; for the tailor's worst tool is a tape-measure, and his worst discovery may be that the customer is growing fat. One waits, indeed, without serious apprehension, at the barber's; but here the company is mixed and the knowledge inescapable that it will look on with idle interest while he cuts your hair or covers your honest face with lather. Only the harmless necessary a.s.sistant will see you measured, and he, by long practise, has acquired an air of remoteness and indifference that makes him next thing to invisible. So complete indeed is this tactful abstraction that one might imagine him a man newly fallen in love.

I have seen it stated, though I cannot remember just where, that the Old Testament makes no mention of the tailor; the Book, however, shows plainly that Solomon was not only a sage but also a best-dresser, and it stands to reason that his wives did not make his clothes. One wife might have done it, but not three hundred. A tailor came at intervals to the palace, and then went back to where, somewhere in the business section of the ancient city, there was doubtless a tablet with a cuneiform inscription:--

I am he that makes the Glory of Solomon: yea, and Maker of the Upper and the Nether Glory.