Over the Fireside with Silent Friends Part 4

I often wish that we could all of us lead two lives. I don't mean I wish that we could live twice as long--though, in reality, it would come to the same thing. But I would like to live the two lives which I want to lead, and only do lead in a sort of patchwork-quilt kind of way. I would like to live a life in which I could wander gipsy-like over the face of the globe--seeing everything, doing everything, meeting everybody. I should also like to live a purely vegetable existence in some remote country village--sleeping away my life in happy domesticity, away from the crowd, free from care, tranquil, and at peace. I suppose that, even as dreams, they are only too futile--but they are very pleasant dreams nevertheless. I know that they _are_ dreams--since I am quite sure that the reality would be far less satisfactory than it seems in antic.i.p.ation.

There is "always a fly in the amber" as the saying goes, and my experience is, that the truth more nearly resembles a great big fly with a tiny speck of amber sticking somewhere to its back. For in our dream voyages we overlook the fleas, the mosquitoes, the hunt for lodgings, the struggle with languages, the hundred-and-one disturbances of the spirit which are inseparable from real voyages of any kind and bombard our inner tranquillity at every turn. In the same way, when we gaze at the peaceful landscape of some hidden-away English countryside, we yearn to live among such peacefulness, forgetting that, though life in the country may _look_ peaceful to the stranger's eye, experience teaches us that gossip and scandal and the continual agitation round and round the trivial--an agitation so great that the trivial becomes colossal--at last rob life of anything resembling _dolce far niente_ mid country lanes and in the shadow of some country church. In fact, it seems to me that the emotion which we seek--the emotion of strange wonderplaces, the emotion of utter restfulness which falls upon the soul like a benediction--do come to us from time to time, but at the most unexpected moments and in the most unlikely places. They come--and we hug them in our memory like precious thoughts. And sometimes we try to reproduce them artificially, only to discover that "never anything twice" is one of the lessons of life--and quite the last one we ever learn, even if we ever do learn it--which is doubtful.

_Backward and Forward_

Thus for the most part, things look most beautiful when we antic.i.p.ate them, or as we look back upon them in memory over the fireside. For distance lends enchantment, not only to most views, but also to memories and love. As, metaphorically, we stand on the Mount of Olives gazing down at the city of Jerusalem, thinking of all that tiny corner of the earth has meant to men and women, we forget--as we look back--the beastly little mosquito which bit us on the nose, the interruption or our companion who wondered what the stones might tell us if they could only speak. So (also metaphorically), as we set our faces towards the Holy City, filled with the antic.i.p.ation of those sublime thoughts and emotions which would surge through our souls when we eventually arrived there, we were happy in our ignorance of the fact that, when we did arrive, we felt unutterably dirty and our head ached, and the corn on our little toe felt more like a cancer than a corn! Meanwhile, the emotion of the soul, which we expected to find upon the Mount of Olives, has sometimes come to us quite unexpectedly while standing in the middle of Clapham Common in the moonlight; and that glorious spirit of adventure, which to us means "travel," we have felt riding on a motor-bike through the New Forest at nightfall when the forest seemed full of pixies and the fading sunset was red and grey and golden like the transformation scene of a pantomime.

But alas! the next day we found the forest unromantic, and Clapham Common looked indescribably common in the morning sunlight. Our mood had vanished, and although we tried to reproduce the same uplifting emotion the following evening, we couldn't--we had a headache and the gnats were about. So, although I often yearn to live _two_ lives--one full of travel and adventure, and the other peacefully over the fireside mid the peace and beauty of the country--I am quite sure that, were my wish granted, I should find both lives just the same mixture of unexpected happiness and unantic.i.p.ated disappointment which I find this one to be, yet still go smiling on. Very rarely the Time and the Place and the Mood. But when they do happen to come together--well, life is so wonderful and so beautiful that to throw in the "Loved one" too would seem like gilding the rose--a heaven worth sacrificing every stolen happiness in life for.

_When?_

One of the greatest--perhaps _the_ greatest--problems which parents have to face is--when to tell their children the truth about s.e.xual life; how to tell it; how little to tell--how much. And most parents, alas! are content to drift--to trust to luck! They themselves have got through fairly well; the probabilities are, then, that their children will get through fairly well too. So they, metaphorically speaking, fold their hands and listen, and, when any part of the truth breaks through the reticence of intimate conversation, they shake their heads solemnly, strive to look shocked--and often are; or else they make a joke of it--believing that their children regard the question in the same reasonable light as they do themselves. But ignorance is never reasonable, and half ignorance is even more excited. There is a "mystery" somewhere, and ignorant youth is hot after its solution. And the "mystery" is solved for them in a dozen ways--all more or less dirty and untrue. Better far be too frank, so long as your frankness isn't the frankness of coa.r.s.e levity, than not to be frank enough. The reticence of parents towards their children in this matter has turned many a young life of brilliant promise into a life-long h.e.l.l. We don't _see_ this h.e.l.l for the most part, and, because we don't see it, we fondly believe that it does not exist--or, if it does exist, that it exists so rarely as scarcely to demand more than a pa.s.sing condemnation and a sigh. We hear a great deal about the Hidden Plague. We hear of the 80,000 cases of syphilis which are registered every year in the United Kingdom. But we don't know any individual sufferer--or we _think_ we don't; and so, although we take the figure as an acknowledged fact, we nevertheless don't realise it--and in any case, it isn't a nice subject of debate, and, should the word be even mentioned in the presence of our dear, dear children, we would ask the speaker to leave the house immediately and never again return! I, too, was one of these poor fools--although I have no children to suffer from my foolishness. I knew it was a fact, but like others I didn't realise that fact--like we didn't realise the horror and filth and tragedy of war, we who never were "out there"; we who never "went over the top." But lately I have had to visit a friend in one of the largest lock hospitals in London. And one day I was obliged to walk through the waiting-room where the men are forced to sit until they are summoned to see the doctor. And truly I was appalled! There were _hundreds of them_ of all ages--from 16 to 60. They were not the serious cases, of course, and we should pa.s.s them in the street without realising that they were any but physically sound men, often of a very splendid type. But each one represented a blighted life--a future robbed of splendid promise, a present of misery and unhappiness stalking through the world like shame beneath a happy mask. I tell you, it brought the truth home to me in a way mere figures and statistics could never do. As I said before, I was appalled: I was also very angry. For I knew that ignorance was at the bottom of many of these sad tragedies--the criminal reticence of the people _who know_, too mock-modest to discuss openly a fact of life which, beyond all other facts of life, should be spoken of bluntly, honestly, therefore decently and cleanly.

_The Futile Thought_

Too many fond parents like to imagine that their children know nothing at all of s.e.xual matters--that they are clean and innocent and ignorant, and that, as long as they can be kept so, they will not run into danger and disgrace. But no parent really knows how much or how little their children know of this matter. Children have ears and imagination, and once they know anything at all--which is at any time from eight years of age, sometimes, alas! earlier--they should be told everything, not in a nasty, furtive fas.h.i.+on, glossing over the ugly part and elevating the decent side until it is out of all proportion to the truth, but quietly, with dignity, laying stress on the fact that s.e.xual morality is not a thing of religion and of G.o.d, but of self-respect, of care for the coming generation, and, especially, of that great love which one day will come into their lives. It should not be called a "sin"; at the same time it should not be laughed at and made the subject of a whispered jest.

s.e.xual laxity should be treated in the same way as dishonesty and untruthfulness--a sin against oneself, against the beauty of one's own soul, and against those who believe in us and love us and are our world.

Children should be taught to respect the dignity of their own bodies, of their own minds and soul; not by leaving them in half-ignorance, but by telling them everything, and telling them it in the right way--which is the clean and truthful way.

_The London Season_

If only the people who repeat the words of wisdom uttered by philosophers lived as if they believed them, how much happier the world would be! It is, however, so much easier to give, or to repeat, advice, than to follow it, isn't it? Conventionality is far stronger than common sense, and a fixed habit more powerful than a revolution. Besides, most people realise that to give advice is a much more impressive ceremony than merely to receive it. And I think that the majority of people would far sooner look _impressive_ than be _wise_. The _appearance_ of a thing sometimes pleases them far more than the thing itself. Besides, to give advice is a rather pleasant proceeding, and those who habitually indulge in it seem incapable of discouragement. They will inform the "rolling stone" that if he continues his unresisting methods he will gather no moss, but the rolling stone usually continues to roll merrily onward.

They will protest to the ignorant that "to be good is to be happy," but very few of them will go out of their way to do good, if, by being "bad,"

they can s.n.a.t.c.h a personal advantage without anybody being any the wiser.

"Life would be endurable if it were not for its pleasures," they declare in the face of a pile of social invitations. Yet they still endure that treadmill of entertainments which makes up a London season, only showing their real feelings by moaning to themselves in the process. They freely acknowledge that very few of these entertainments really entertain, but to miss being seen at them would be to risk a disaster which they would not dare to take. So they go wearily smiling to amus.e.m.e.nts which don't amuse, to dances which are too crowded to dance at, to dinner parties at which they pay in boredom for the food they eat; to "at homes" which are the most "homeless" things imaginable--travelling here and there, from one entertainment to another which proves as unutterably dull as the first one. Not content with these things, they must perforce be seen at the Opera--although they _hate_ music; visit all the exhibitions of art--when Maude Goodeman is their favourite painter; talk cleverly of books which they would never read did not people talk about them, and generally follow for three long months a time-table of "enjoyment" which very few of them really enjoy. In the meanwhile, the only affairs which give them pleasure are the little impromptu ones arranged on the spur of the moment between friends.

Of course I am not speaking of the debutante. She, "sweet young thing,"

always enjoys any entertainment at which there are plenty of young men and ices. Nor, judging from observation, do I include among those who willingly go through the three months' hard labour of a London season those henna haired ladies--thickening from anno domini--who seem perfectly happy in the delusion that their juvenile antics are still deliciously girlish, and whose decollete dresses would seem to declare to the world that, though their faces may begin to show the wear and tear of life, their plump backs don't look a day over twenty-five. The one is so young that she will enjoy anything which requires the endurance of youth.

The other is of that age which is happy hugging to its bosom the adage that a woman can't possibly look a day older than champagne makes her feel.

No, the person whose life of amus.e.m.e.nt I pity is the person who accepts invitations because she daren't refuse them. If the world doesn't see her in all places where she _should be_ seen, the world always presumes her to be dead--and people would rather die in reality than live to be forgotten. But what a price they have to pay to keep their memories green.

No, as I said before, the only entertainments which people really enjoy are those at which they can be perfectly natural--natural, because they are perfectly happy. Rarely are they fixed affairs, advertised weeks beforehand. Mostly are they unpremeditated---delightful little impromptu amus.e.m.e.nts made up of people who really desire to meet each other. Large entertainments are almost invariably dull. Upon them hangs the heavy atmosphere or a hostess "paying off old debts in _one_." The only really amusing part of them is to watch the amazement on the faces of one half of the guests that the other half is there at all! That is invariably funny. In the big affairs the chef and the champagne are the real hosts of the evening. If England went "dry," I think the London season would join the dodo--people couldn't possibly endure it on ginger "pop" and cider. But champagne and a good chef could, I believe, make even a Church Congress seem jolly. They only bring an illusion of happiness--but what's the odds? A London season is but an illusion of joy after all.

_Christmas_

Christmas comes but once a year--and the cynic cries, "Thank G.o.d!" And so, perhaps, do the very lonely. But then Christmas is not a festival for either the cynic or the desolate. The cynic is as welcome at the annual feast of turkey and plum pudding as Mr. "p.u.s.s.yfoot" would be at a "beano"; while the lonely--well, one likes to imagine that there are no lonely ones at Christmas-time; or, if there are--that somebody has asked them out, or they have toothache and so wouldn't appreciate even the society of jolly seraphims. Christmas, except to the young, is essentially a festival of "let's pretend"--let's pretend that we love everybody, that everybody loves us, that Aunt Maria isn't a prosy old bore, that Uncle John isn't a profiteer; that everybody has his or her good points and that all their bad ones are not sticking out, as they usually appear to us to be, as painfully apparent as those on the back of a porcupine should you happen to sit down upon one in a bathing costume!

And it is quite wonderful how this spirit of good will towards all men can be self-distilled, as it were! You try to feel it, and, strangely enough, you do feel it--at least, up to tea time. The public exhibition of ecstacy you give at receiving a present you don't want seems to come to you quite easily and naturally on Christmas morning. Even Aunt Maria can pretend enthusiasm quite convincingly at the gimcrack you have given her which her artistic soul loathes, the while she furtively examines its base to discover if peradventure you have forgotten to erase the price.

You yourself declare, while regarding the sixpenny pen-wiper, that it is not the gift so much as the _thought_ which pleases you, and you can declare this lie to the satisfaction, not only of yourself, but, more difficult by far, to the satisfaction of the wealthy donor who gave it to you because she couldn't think what to give you--and because, as she piously declares, "Thank G.o.d, you have everything you want!" Yes, indeed, there is something about Yuletide which makes all men benign, and the joyful hypocrisy of Christmas Eve sounds quite the genuine emotion when uttered on Christmas Day. I am bound, however, to confess that the "good will" becomes a trifle strident towards nightfall. Many things conduce to this. The children are suffering from overfeeding; Mother is sick of Aunt Maria, her husband's sister; and Father is more than fed up with the pomposity of Uncle John. There is a general and half-uttered yearning among everybody to go upstairs and lie down. The jollifications of the coming evening, when the grown-ups come into their own and the children are being sick upstairs, presume the necessity for such a retirement--a kind of regeneration of that charitable energy required for the festival "jump off." After which the digestive organs begin to realise what sweated labour means, and Father makes a speech about his pleasure at seeing so many members of the family present, and Mother weeps silently for some trouble which always revives over Christmas dinner and n.o.body has yet been able to sympathise with, because n.o.body has yet known what it is. And, because Christmas night would otherwise prove somewhat trying even to a family determined to be loving or to die in the attempt, somebody or other has invented champagne. It is quite wonderful how the dullest people seem to take unto themselves wings after the third bottle of Veuve Clicquot has been opened.

So Christmas Day is thus brought to a triumphant conclusion of good will.

And the next morning, of course, is Boxing Day--a most appropriately named event. Even if fighting isn't strictly legal, backbiting unfortunately is. Still, the wise relation seeks the frequent seclusion of his own bedroom during that mostly inglorious day of Christmas aftermath. You see, there is no knowing what sparks may fly when the digestions of a devoted family have gone on strike!

Only the children seem to be able to raise the jolly ashes of their dead selves, phoenix-like from the carcase of the devoured turkey (whose bones in the morning light of Boxing Day resemble somewhat the Cloth Hall at Ypres by the end of the war). Even they (bless 'em!) seem able to recover from the fact that the lovely toys which Uncle John gave them lie broken at their feet because Uncle John would insist upon playing with them all by himself. Children can always become philosophers in half a day. It is their special genius.

Only grown up people have forgotten how to forget. And Christmas, although the most lovable of all the festivals of the year, is also the saddest--and the most lonely, alas! There are so many "gaps"--so many empty places in the heart which the pa.s.sing of the years will never, never be able to fill. That is why Mother weeps--it is her privilege.

And, truth to tell, so many people would like to weep too, only they dare not--they dare not. So they throw themselves into the feverish jollity which Christmas seems to demand for the sake of the children, and for the sake of the young people who, because they were so young, will never realise the aftermath of loneliness which to-day elder people know _meant war_! So they say to themselves, "Let us eat and drink and appear merry because to-morrow . . . to-morrow--who knows?--peradventure we may all meet again!" Thus the true spirit of Christmas is always as a benediction.

_The New Year_

There is something "tonic" about the New Year which there isn't about Christmas, and Birthdays certainly do not possess. After thirty, you wake up on Christmas morning, look back into the Long Ago, and sigh; after forty, you wake up on the morning of your birthday, look forward, and ofttimes despair. But New Year's Day has "buck" in it, and, when you wake up, you lay down the immediate future with those Good Intentions which somebody or other once declared paved the way to h.e.l.l, but are nevertheless a most invigorating exercise. Christmas, besides, has been seized upon by tradesmen and others in whose debt you happen to be to remind you of the fact. I suppose they hope that the Good Will of the Season will make you think kindly of their account--which, in parenthesis, perhaps it might, did not that same Good Will run you into debt in other directions. As for Birthdays--well, the person who remembers Birthdays is the person at whose head I should like to hurl the biggest and heaviest paving-stone with which, as I lie in bed on New Year's morning, I lay out my way to h.e.l.l. No, as I said before, Christmas Days and Birthdays are failures so far as festivity goes.

The former brings along with it bills and accounts rendered, and you are fed with rood which immediately overwhelms any feeling of kindliness you may happen to have in your heart, while the latter is like a settlement day with Time, and Time certainly lets you have nothing off your account. But New Year's Day, except in Scotland, where, I believe, you are expected to go out and get drunk--always an easy obligation!--brings with it nothing but another year, and possesses all the "tonic" quality of novelty, besides the promise of a much happier and luckier one than the Old Year which has just been scratched off the calendar. It is like an annual Beginning Again, and beginning again much better. Besides, New Year's Day seems to be an anniversary which belongs to you alone, as it were. On Christmas Day you are expected to do things for other people, and you do (usually just the things they don't want); while on Birthdays people do things for you (and you wish to Heaven they'd neglect their duty). But New Year's Day doesn't belong to anybody but yourself, and you prospect the future with no reference to anybody whomsoever, and, better still, with no one likely to refer to you. Oh, the New Leaves you are going to turn! The blots you are going to erase! The copy-books you are going to keep spotless! The Big Things you are going to do with what remains of your life, and the big way you are going to do them! Besides, say what you will, there comes to you on New Year's Day the very first breath of Spring. The Old Year is dead, and you kick its corpse down the limbo of the Past and Done-with the while you plan out the New.

So, looking forward in antic.i.p.ation, you feel "bucked." You aren't expected to show "good will to all men" after a previous night's debauch on turkey, plum-pudding, and sweet champagne. n.o.body comes down to breakfast on New Year's morning and weeps because "Dear Uncle John" was alive (and an unsociable old bore) "this time last year."

n.o.body adds to the day's joy by wondering if they will be "alive next New Year's Day," nor become quite "huffy" if you cheerfully remark that they very probably _will_. It doesn't invite the melancholy to become reminiscent, nor the prophet to a.s.sume the mantle of Solomon Eagle.

New Year's Day belongs to n.o.body but yourself, and what you are going to make of the 365 days which follow it. You regard the date as a kind of spiritual Spring Cleaning, and to good housewives there is all the vigorous promise of a Big Achievement even in buying a pot of paint and shaking out a duster. And, though Fate usually helps to enliven Christmas-time by arranging a big railway accident or burning a London store down, and the newspapers, in search of something to frighten us now that the war is over, by referring to Germany's "hidden army" and an unprecedentedly colossal strike in the New Year, the human spirit soars above these things on the First of January, and Hope, figuratively speaking, buys a "buzzer" and makes high holiday. Who knows if the New Year may not be your year, your _lucky_ year? And in this feeling you jump out of bed, clothe yourself in your "Gladdest Rags," collect your "Goodest" intentions, and sally forth. n.o.body wishes you anything, it's true, but you wish yourself the moon, and in wis.h.i.+ng for it you somehow feel that the New Year will give it to you.

_February_

February is the month when, cold-red are the noses--and so (oh help!) are the "toes-es." No one ever sings about February: scarcely anyone speaks about It. It is indeed unspeakable. Its only benefit is that, once every four years, it keeps people younger a day longer. If you're thirty-nine, you're thirty-nine for an extra twenty-four hours, and at that period of life you're glad of any small mercy. It is the month when the new-rich depart to sun themselves in their new-found sun, and the new-poor, and others who are quite used to poverty, swear at them in secret. Oh, yes, indeed! If the Clerk of the Weather has a left ear it must surely at this moment be as 'ot as 'ell! n.o.body likes February--it is the step-child of the months.

One simply lives through it as one lives through a necessary duty.

It's a month--and that's all. Thank Heaven! somebody once made it the shortest! By the end of January most people have had more than enough of the English Winter even if the English Winter thinks we can ever have enough of it, and comes back saying "h.e.l.lo!" to us right into Summer, and starts ringing us up, as it were, to tell us it's coming back again as early as October. Just as if we didn't know--just as if we ever wanted to know! The English Summer is far more modest.

Usually it's gone before we have, so to speak, washed our hands, tidied our hair, and dressed ourselves up to meet it. But Winter in England not only comes before it is wanted, but outstays its welcome by weeks.

And of all the months it brings with it, February, though the shortest, seems to linger longest. March may be colder, but the first day of Spring is marked on its calendar; and we wait for it like we wait for a lover--a lover in whose embrace we may not yet be, but who is, as it were, downstairs was.h.i.+ng his hands, he has arrived, he is here--and so we can endure the suspense of waiting for him with a grin. April may fill the d.y.k.es fuller than February, whose skies are supposed to weep all day long, but generally only succeed in dribbling, but April belongs to Spring--even though our face and hands and feet are still in Mid-Winter.

February always reminds me of the suburbs--appalling but you've got to go through them to get to London. Were I a rich man, I would follow Spring round the World. In that way I should be able to smile through life like those people who, in snapshots from the Riviera, seem composed princ.i.p.ally of wide grins and thin legs, and whose joie de vivre is usually published in English ill.u.s.trated journals in seasons when the English weather makes you feel that Life is just a Big d.a.m.n in a mackintosh. To follow Spring round the world would be like following a mistress whose charms never palled, whose welcome was never too warm to be sultry, whose friends.h.i.+p was never too cold to freeze further promise of intimacy. What a delightful chase! and what a sweet-tempered man I should be! For, say what you will, the weather has a lot to do with that spotless robe of white which is supposed to envelop saints. If you can't be pure and good and generous and altogether delightful in the Spring, you might as well write yourself off for evermore among the ign.o.ble army of the eternally disgruntled.

And if you _can_ be all these things in weather that is typically English and typically February, then a hat would surely hide your halo.

And this is about all the good that February does, so far as I can see.

True, once in four years it also allows old maids to propose. But the three years when they had to wait to be asked have usually taken all their courage out of them. Besides, the married people and others who are otherwise hooked and secure have turned even that benefit into a joke--and no woman likes to place all her heart-yearnings at the mercy of a laugh. So that, what Leap-Year once allowed, people have turned into a jeer. But then, that is all part and parcel of February.

Somebody once tried their best to make it as attractive as possible, even if it could only be so once every four years. But everybody else has since done their best to rob it of its one little bit of anaemic joy. Perhaps we ought not to blame them! n.o.body ought to be blamed in February. It is a month which brings out the very worst in everybody.

_Tub-thumpers_

I often wonder what born tub-thumpers are like in their own homes.

Perhaps they are as meek and mild as watered b.u.t.termilk. Thinking it over, I think they must be. No self-respecting woman could be tub-thumped at daily without eyeing furtively the nearest meat-carver.