The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow Part 16

Life is a thing to be lived, not spent, to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of. Is it the wisest who is always the most successful? I think not. The luckiest whist-player I ever came across was a man who was never QUITE certain what were trumps, and whose most frequent observation during the game was "I really beg your pardon," addressed to his partner; a remark which generally elicited the reply, "Oh, don't apologize. All's well that ends well."

The man I knew who made the most rapid fortune was a builder in the outskirts of Birmingham, who could not write his name, and who, for thirty years of his life, never went to bed sober. I do not say that forgetfulness of trumps should be cultivated by whist-players. I think my builder friend might have been even more successful had he learned to write his name, and had he occasionally--not overdoing it--enjoyed a sober evening. All I wish to impress is, that virtue is not the road to success--of the kind we are dealing with. We must find other reasons for being virtuous; maybe, there are some. The truth is, life is a gamble pure and simple, and the rules we lay down for success are akin to the infallible systems with which a certain cla.s.s of idiot goes armed each season to Monte Carlo. We can play the game with coolness and judgment, decide when to plunge and when to stake small; but to think that wisdom will decide it, is to imagine that we have discovered the law of chance.

Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a smile, leaving our losings with a shrug. Perhaps that is why we have been summoned to the board and the cards dealt round: that we may learn some of the virtues of the good gambler; his self-control, his courage under misfortune, his modesty under the strain of success, his firmness, his alertness, his general indifference to fate. Good lessons these, all of them. If by the game we learn some of them our time on the green earth has not been wasted. If we rise from the table having learned only fretfulness and self-pity I fear it has been.

The grim Hall Porter taps at the door: "Number Five hundred billion and twenty-eight, your boatman is waiting, sir."

So! is it time already? We pick up our counters. Of what use are they?

In the country the other side of the river they are no tender. The blood-red for gold, and the pale-green for love, to whom shall we fling them? Here is some poor beggar longing to play, let us give them to him as we pa.s.s out. Poor devil! the game will amuse him--for a while.

Keep your powder dry, and trust in Providence, is the motto of the wise.

Wet powder could never be of any possible use to you. Dry, it may be, WITH the help of Providence. We will call it Providence, it is a prettier name than Chance--perhaps also a truer.

Another mistake we make when we reason out our lives is this: we reason as though we were planning for reasonable creatures. It is a big mistake. Well-meaning ladies and gentlemen make it when they picture their ideal worlds. When marriage is reformed, and the social problem solved, when poverty and war have been abolished by acclamation, and sin and sorrow rescinded by an overwhelming parliamentary majority! Ah, then the world will be worthy of our living in it. You need not wait, ladies and gentlemen, so long as you think for that time. No social revolution is needed, no slow education of the people is necessary. It would all come about to-morrow, IF ONLY WE WERE REASONABLE CREATURES.

Imagine a world of reasonable beings! The Ten Commandments would be unnecessary: no reasoning being sins, no reasoning creature makes mistakes. There would be no rich men, for what reasonable man cares for luxury and ostentation? There would be no poor: that I should eat enough for two while my brother in the next street, as good a man as I, starves, is not reasonable. There would be no difference of opinion on any two points: there is only one reason. You, dear Reader, would find, that on all subjects you were of the same opinion as I. No novels would be written, no plays performed; the lives of reasonable creatures do not afford drama. No mad loves, no mad laughter, no scalding tears, no fierce unreasoning, brief-lived joys, no sorrows, no wild dreams--only reason, reason everywhere.

But for the present we remain unreasonable. If I eat this mayonnaise, drink this champagne, I shall suffer in my liver. Then, why do I eat it?

Julia is a charming girl, amiable, wise, and witty; also she has a share in a brewery. Then, why does John marry Ann? who is short-tempered, to say the least of it, who, he feels, will not make him so good a house-wife, who has extravagant notions, who has no little fortune.

There is something about Ann's chin that fascinates him--he could not explain to you what. On the whole, Julia is the better-looking of the two. But the more he thinks of Julia, the more he is drawn towards Ann.

So Tom marries Julia and the brewery fails, and Julia, on a holiday, contracts rheumatic fever, and is a helpless invalid for life; while Ann comes in for ten thousand pounds left to her by an Australian uncle no one had ever heard of.

I have been told of a young man, who chose his wife with excellent care. Said he to himself, very wisely, "In the selection of a wife a man cannot be too circ.u.mspect." He convinced himself that the girl was everything a helpmate should be. She had every virtue that could be expected in a woman, no faults, but such as are inseparable from a woman. Speaking practically, she was perfection. He married her, and found she was all he had thought her. Only one thing could he urge against her--that he did not like her. And that, of course, was not her fault.

How easy life would be did we know ourselves. Could we always be sure that tomorrow we should think as we do today. We fall in love during a summer holiday; she is fresh, delightful, altogether charming; the blood rushes to our head every time we think of her. Our ideal career is one of perpetual service at her feet. It seems impossible that Fate could bestow upon us any greater happiness than the privilege of cleaning her boots, and kissing the hem of her garment--if the hem be a little muddy that will please us the more. We tell her our ambition, and at that moment every word we utter is sincere. But the summer holiday pa.s.ses, and with it the holiday mood, and winter finds us wondering how we are going to get out of the difficulty into which we have landed ourselves.

Or worse still, perhaps, the mood lasts longer than is usual. We become formally engaged. We marry--I wonder how many marriages are the result of a pa.s.sion that is burnt out before the altar-rails are reached?--and three months afterwards the little la.s.s is broken-hearted to find that we consider the lacing of her boots a bore. Her feet seem to have grown bigger. There is no excuse for us, save that we are silly children, never sure of what we are crying for, hurting one another in our play, crying very loudly when hurt ourselves.

I knew an American lady once who used to bore me with long accounts of the brutalities exercised upon her by her husband. She had inst.i.tuted divorce proceedings against him. The trial came on, and she was highly successful. We all congratulated her, and then for some months she dropped out of my life. But there came a day when we again found ourselves together. One of the problems of social life is to know what to say to one another when we meet; every man and woman's desire is to appear sympathetic and clever, and this makes conversation difficult, because, taking us all round, we are neither sympathetic nor clever--but this by the way.

Of course, I began to talk to her about her former husband. I asked her how he was getting on. She replied that she thought he was very comfortable.

"Married again?" I suggested.

"Yes," she answered.

"Serve him right," I exclaimed, "and his wife too." She was a pretty, bright-eyed little woman, my American friend, and I wished to ingratiate myself. "A woman who would marry such a man, knowing what she must have known of him, is sure to make him wretched, and we may trust him to be a curse to her."

My friend seemed inclined to defend him.

"I think he is greatly improved," she argued.

"Nonsense!" I returned, "a man never improves. Once a villain, always a villain."

"Oh, hush!" she pleaded, "you mustn't call him that."

"Why not?" I answered. "I have heard you call him a villain yourself."

"It was wrong of me," she said, flushing. "I'm afraid he was not the only one to be blamed; we were both foolish in those days, but I think we have both learned a lesson."

I remained silent, waiting for the necessary explanation.

"You had better come and see him for yourself," she added, with a little laugh; "to tell the truth, I am the woman who has married him. Tuesday is my day, Number 2, K---- Mansions," and she ran off, leaving me staring after her.

I believe an enterprising clergyman who would set up a little church in the Strand, just outside the Law Courts, might do quite a trade, re-marrying couples who had just been divorced. A friend of mine, a respondent, told me he had never loved his wife more than on two occasions--the first when she refused him, the second when she came into the witness-box to give evidence against him.

"You are curious creatures, you men," remarked a lady once to another man in my presence. "You never seem to know your own mind."

She was feeling annoyed with men generally. I do not blame her, I feel annoyed with them myself sometimes. There is one man in particular I am always feeling intensely irritated against. He says one thing, and acts another. He will talk like a saint and behave like a fool, knows what is right and does what is wrong. But we will not speak further of him. He will be all he should be one day, and then we will pack him into a nice, comfortably-lined box, and screw the lid down tight upon him, and put him away in a quiet little spot near a church I know of, lest he should get up and misbehave himself again.

The other man, who is a wise man as men go, looked at his fair critic with a smile.

"My dear madam," he replied, "you are blaming the wrong person. I confess I do not know my mind, and what little I do know of it I do not like. I did not make it, I did not select it. I am more dissatisfied with it than you can possibly be. It is a greater mystery to me than it is to you, and I have to live with it. You should pity not blame me."

There are moods in which I fall to envying those old hermits who frankly, and with courageous cowardice, shirked the problem of life.

There are days when I dream of an existence unfettered by the thousand petty strings with which our souls lie bound to Lilliputia land. I picture myself living in some Norwegian sater, high above the black waters of a rockbound fiord. No other human creature disputes with me my kingdom. I am alone with the whispering fir forests and the stars. How I live I am not quite sure. Once a month I could journey down into the villages and return laden. I should not need much. For the rest, my gun and fishing-rod would supply me. I would have with me a couple of big dogs, who would talk to me with their eyes, so full of dumb thought, and together we would wander over the uplands, seeking our dinner, after the old primitive fashion of the men who dreamt not of ten-course dinners and Savoy suppers. I would cook the food myself, and sit down to the meal with a bottle of good wine, such as starts a man's thoughts (for I am inconsistent, as I acknowledge, and that gift of civilization I would bear with me into my hermitage). Then in the evening, with pipe in mouth, beside my log-wood fire, I would sit and think, until new knowledge came to me. Strengthened by those silent voices that are drowned in the roar of Streetland, I might, perhaps, grow into something nearer to what it was intended that a man should be--might catch a glimpse, perhaps, of the meaning of life.

No, no, my dear lady, into this life of renunciation I would not take a companion, certainly not of the s.e.x you are thinking of, even would she care to come, which I doubt. There are times when a man is better without the woman, when a woman is better without the man. Love drags us from the depths, makes men and women of us, but if we would climb a little nearer to the stars we must say good-bye to it. We men and women do not show ourselves to each other at our best; too often, I fear, at our worst. The woman's highest ideal of man is the lover; to a man the woman is always the possible beloved. We see each other's hearts, but not each other's souls. In each other's presence we never shake ourselves free from the earth. Match-making mother Nature is always at hand to prompt us. A woman lifts us up into manhood, but there she would have us stay. "Climb up to me," she cries to the lad, walking with soiled feet in muddy ways; "be a true man that you may be worthy to walk by my side; be brave to protect me, kind and tender, and true; but climb no higher, stay here by my side." The martyr, the prophet, the leader of the world's forlorn hopes, she would wake from his dream. Her arms she would fling about his neck holding him down.

To the woman the man says, "You are my wife. Here is your America, within these walls, here is your work, your duty." True, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand, but men and women are not made in moulds, and the world's work is various. Sometimes to her sorrow, a woman's work lies beyond the home. The duty of Mary was not to Joseph.

The hero in the popular novel is the young man who says, "I love you better than my soul." Our favourite heroine in fiction is the woman who cries to her lover, "I would go down into h.e.l.l to be with you." There are men and women who cannot answer thus--the men who dream dreams, the women who see visions--impracticable people from the Bayswater point of view. But Bayswater would not be the abode of peace it is had it not been for such.

Have we not placed s.e.xual love on a pedestal higher than it deserves? It is a n.o.ble pa.s.sion, but it is not the n.o.blest. There is a wider love by the side of which it is but as the lamp illumining the cottage, to the moonlight bathing the hills and valleys. There were two women once.

This is a play I saw acted in the daylight. They had been friends from girlhood, till there came between them the usual trouble--a man. A weak, pretty creature not worth a thought from either of them; but women love the unworthy; there would be no over-population problem did they not; and this poor specimen, ill-luck had ordained they should contend for.

Their rivalry brought out all that was worst in both of them. It is a mistake to suppose love only elevates; it can debase. It was a mean struggle for what to an onlooker must have appeared a remarkably unsatisfying prize. The loser might well have left the conqueror to her poor triumph, even granting it had been gained unfairly. But the old, ugly, primeval pa.s.sions had been stirred in these women, and the wedding-bells closed only the first act.

The second is not difficult to guess. It would have ended in the Divorce Court had not the deserted wife felt that a finer revenge would be secured to her by silence.

In the third, after an interval of only eighteen months, the man died--the first piece of good fortune that seems to have occurred to him personally throughout the play. His position must have been an exceedingly anxious one from the beginning. Notwithstanding his flabbiness, one cannot but regard him with a certain amount of pity--not unmixed with amus.e.m.e.nt. Most of life's dramas can be viewed as either farce or tragedy according to the whim of the spectator. The actors invariably play them as tragedy; but then that is the essence of good farce acting.

Thus was secured the triumph of legal virtue and the punishment of irregularity, and the play might be dismissed as uninterestingly orthodox were it not for the fourth act, showing how the wronged wife came to the woman she had once wronged to ask and grant forgiveness.

Strangely as it may sound, they found their love for one another unchanged. They had been long parted: it was sweet to hold each other's hands again. Two lonely women, they agreed to live together. Those who knew them well in this later time say that their life was very beautiful, filled with graciousness and n.o.bility.

I do not say that such a story could ever be common, but it is more probable than the world might credit. Sometimes the man is better without the woman, the woman without the man.

ON THE n.o.bILITY OF OURSELVES

AN old Anglicized Frenchman, I used to meet often in my earlier journalistic days, held a theory, concerning man's future state, that has since come to afford me more food for reflection than, at the time, I should have deemed possible. He was a bright-eyed, eager little man.

One felt no Lotus land could be Paradise to him. We build our heaven of the stones of our desires: to the old, red-bearded Norseman, a foe to fight and a cup to drain; to the artistic Greek, a grove of animated statuary; to the Red Indian, his happy hunting ground; to the Turk, his harem; to the Jew, his New Jerusalem, paved with gold; to others, according to their taste, limited by the range of their imagination.

Few things had more terrors for me, when a child, than Heaven--as pictured for me by certain of the good folks round about me. I was told that if I were a good lad, kept my hair tidy, and did not tease the cat, I would probably, when I died, go to a place where all day long I would sit still and sing hymns. (Think of it! as reward to a healthy boy for being good.) There would be no breakfast and no dinner, no tea and no supper. One old lady cheered me a little with a hint that the monotony might be broken by a little manna; but the idea of everlasting manna palled upon me, and my suggestions, concerning the possibilities of sherbet or jumbles, were scouted as irreverent. There would be no school, but also there would be no cricket and no rounders. I should feel no desire, so I was a.s.sured, to do another angel's "dags" by sliding down the heavenly banisters. My only joy would be to sing.

"Shall we start singing the moment we get up in the morning?" I asked.

"There won't be any morning," was the answer. "There will be no day and no night. It will all be one long day without end."