Books: Idle Ideas in 1905
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Jerome K. Jerome >> Idle Ideas in 1905
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There could have been a garden. Marguerite might have kept chickens
and a cow. That sort of girl, brought up to hard work and by no
means too well educated, is all the better for having something to
do. Later, with the gradual arrival of the family, a good, all-round
woman might have been hired in to assist. Faust, of course, would
have had his study and got to work again; that would have kept him
out of further mischief. The idea that a brainy man, his age, was
going to be happy with nothing to do all day but fool round a
petticoat was ridiculous from the beginning. Valentine--a good
fellow, Valentine, with nice ideas--would have spent his Saturdays to
Monday with them. Over a pipe and a glass of wine, he and Faust
would have discussed the local politics.
He would have danced the children on his knee, have told them tales
about the war--taught the eldest boy to shoot. Faust, with a
practical man like Valentine to help him, would probably have
invented a new gun. Valentine would have got it taken up.
Things might have come of it. Sybil, in course of time, would have
married and settled down--perhaps have taken a little house near to
them. He and Marguerite would have joked--when Mrs. Sybil was not
around--about his early infatuation. The old mother would have
toddled over from Nurnberg--not too often, just for the day.
The picture grows upon one the more one thinks of it. Why did it
never occur to them? There would have been a bit of a bother with
the Old Man. I can imagine Mephistopheles being upset about it,
thinking himself swindled. Of course, if that was the reason--if
Faust said to himself:
"I should like to marry the girl, but I won't do it; it would not be
fair to the Old Man; he has been to a lot of trouble working this
thing up; in common gratitude I cannot turn round now and behave like
a decent, sensible man; it would not be playing the game"--if this
was the way Faust looked at the matter there is nothing more to be
said. Indeed, it shows him in rather a fine light--noble, if
quixotic.
If, on the other hand, he looked at the question from the point of
view of himself and the girl, I think the thing might have been
managed. All one had to do in those days when one wanted to get rid
of the Devil was to show him a sword hilt. Faust and Marguerite
could have slipped into a church one morning, and have kept him out
of the way with a sword hilt till the ceremony was through. They
might have hired a small boy:
"You see the gentleman in red? Well, he wants us and we don't want
him. That is the only difference between us. Now, you take this
sword, and when you see him coming show him the hilt. Don't hurt
him; just show him the sword and shake your head. He will
understand."
The old gentleman's expression, when subsequently Faust presented him
to Marguerite, would have been interesting:
"Allow me, my wife. My dear, a--a friend of mine. You may remember
meeting him that night at your aunt's."
As I have said, there would have been ructions; but I do not myself
see what could have been done. There was nothing in the bond to the
effect that Faust should not marry, so far as we are told. The Old
Man had a sense of humour. My own opinion is that, after getting
over the first annoyance, he himself would have seen the joke. I can
even picture him looking in now and again on Mr. and Mrs. Faust. The
children would be hurried off to bed. There would be, for a while,
an atmosphere of constraint.
But the Old Man had a way with him. He would have told one or two
stories at which Marguerite would have blushed, at which Faust would
have grinned. I can see the old fellow occasionally joining the
homely social board. The children, awed at first, would have sat
silent, with staring eyes. But, as I have said, the Old Man had a
way with him. Why should he not have reformed? The good woman's
unconsciously exerted influence--the sweet childish prattle! One
hears of such things. Might he not have come to be known as
"Nunkie"?
Myself--I believe I have already mentioned it--I would not have
married Marguerite. She is not my ideal of a good girl. I never
liked the way she deceived her mother. And that aunt of hers! Well,
a nice girl would not have been friends with such a woman. She did
not behave at all too well to Sybil, either. It is clear to me that
she led the boy on. And what was she doing with that box of jewels,
anyhow? She was not a fool. She could not have gone every day to
that fountain, chatted with those girl friends of hers, and learnt
nothing. She must have known that people don't go leaving twenty
thousand pounds' worth of jewels about on doorsteps as part of a
round game. Her own instinct, if she had been a good girl, would
have told her to leave the thing alone.
I don't believe in these innocent people who do not know what they
are doing half their time. Ask any London magistrate what he thinks
of the lady who explains that she picked up the diamond brooch:-
"Not meaning, of course, your Worship, to take it. I would not do
such a thing. It just happened this way, your Worship. I was
standing as you might say here, and not seeing anyone about in the
shop I opened the case and took it out, thinking as perhaps it might
belong to someone; and then this gentleman here, as I had not noticed
before, comes up quite suddenly and says; 'You come along with me,'
he says. 'What for,' I says, 'when I don't even know you?' I says.
'For stealing,' he says. 'Well, that's a hard word to use to a
lady,' I says; 'I don't know what you mean, I'm sure.'"
And if she had put them all on, not thinking, what would a really
nice girl have done when the gentleman came up and assured her they
were hers? She would have been thirty seconds taking them off and
flinging them back into the box.
"Thank you," she would have said, "I'll trouble you to leave this
garden as quickly as you entered it and take them with you. I'm not
that sort of girl."
Marguerite clings to the jewels, and accepts the young man's arm for
a moonlight promenade. And when it does enter into her innocent head
that he and she have walked that shady garden long enough, what does
she do when she has said good-bye and shut the door? She opens the
ground-floor window and begins to sing!
Maybe I am not poetical, but I do like justice. When other girls do
these sort of things they get called names. I cannot see why this
particular girl should be held up as an ideal. She kills her mother.
According to her own account this was an accident. It is not an
original line of defence, and we are not allowed to hear the evidence
for the prosecution. She also kills her baby. You are not to blame
her for that, because at the time she was feeling poorly. I don't
see why this girl should have a special line of angels to take her up
to heaven. There must have been decent, hard-working women in
Nurnburg more entitled to the ticket.
Why is it that all these years we have been content to accept
Marguerite as a type of innocence and virtue? The explanation is, I
suppose, that Goethe wrote at a time when it was the convention to
regard all women as good. Anything in petticoats was virtuous. If
she did wrong it was always somebody else's fault. Cherchez la femme
was a later notion. In the days of Goethe it was always Cherchez
l'homme. It was the man's fault. It was the devil's fault. It was
anybody's fault you liked, but not her's.
The convention has not yet died out. I was reading the other day a
most interesting book by a brilliant American authoress. Seeing I
live far away from the lady's haunts, I venture to mention names. I
am speaking of "Patience Sparhawk," by Gertrude Atherton. I take
this book because it is typical of a large body of fiction. Miss
Sparhawk lives a troubled life: it puzzles her. She asks herself
what is wrong. Her own idea is that it is civilisation.
If it is not civilisation, then it is the American man or Nature--or
Democracy. Miss Sparhawk marries the wrong man. Later on she gets
engaged to another wrong man. In the end we are left to believe she
is about to be married to the right man. I should be better
satisfied if I could hear Miss Sparhawk talking six months after that
last marriage. But if a mistake has again been made I am confident
that, in Miss Sparhawk's opinion, the fault will not be Miss
Sparhawk's. The argument is always the same: Miss Sparhawk, being a
lady, can do no wrong.
If Miss Sparhawk cared to listen to me for five minutes, I feel I
could put her right on this point.
"It is quite true, my dear girl," I should say to her, "something is
wrong--very wrong. But it is not the American man. Never you mind
the American man: you leave him to worry out his own salvation. You
are not the girl to put him right, even where he is wrong. And it is
not civilisation. Civilisation has a deal to answer for, I admit:
don't you load it up with this additional trouble. The thing that is
wrong in this case of yours--if you will forgive my saying so--is
you. You make a fool of yourself; you marry a man who is a mere
animal because he appeals to your animal instincts. Then, like the
lady who cried out 'Alack, I've married a black,' you appeal to
heaven against the injustice of being mated with a clown. You are
not a nice girl, either in your ideas or in your behaviour. I don't
blame you for it; you did not make yourself. But when you set to
work to attract all that is lowest in man, why be so astonished at
your own success? There are plenty of shocking American men, I
agree. One meets the class even outside America. But nice American
girls will tell you that there are also nice American men. There is
an old proverb about birds of a feather. Next time you find yourself
in the company of a shocking American man, you just ask yourself how
he got there, and how it is he seems to be feeling at home. You
learn self-control. Get it out of your head that you are the centre
of the universe, and grasp the idea that a petticoat is not a halo,
and you will find civilisation not half as wrong as you thought it."
I know what Miss Sparhawk's reply would be.
"You say all this to me--to me, a lady? Great Heavens! What has
become of chivalry?"
A Frenchman was once put on trial for murdering his father and
mother. He confessed his guilt, but begged for mercy on the plea
that he was an orphan. Chivalry was founded on the assumption that
woman was worthy to be worshipped. The modern woman's notion is that
when she does wrong she ought to be excused by chivalrous man because
she is a lady.
I like the naughty heroine; we all of us do. The early Victorian
heroine--the angel in a white frock, was a bore. We knew exactly
what she was going to do--the right thing. We did not even have to
ask ourselves, "What will she think is the right thing to do under
the circumstances?" It was always the conventional right thing. You
could have put it to a Sunday school and have got the answer every
time. The heroine with passions, instincts, emotions, is to be
welcomed. But I want her to grasp the fact that after all she is
only one of us. I should like her better if, instead of demanding:
"What is wrong in civilisation? What is the world coming to?" and so
forth, she would occasionally say to herself:
"Guess I've made a fool of myself this time. I do feel that 'shamed
of myself."
She would not lose by it. We should respect her all the more.
WHAT MRS. WILKINS THOUGHT ABOUT IT.
Last year, travelling on the Underground Railway, I met a man; he was
one of the saddest-looking men I had seen for years. I used to know
him well in the old days when we were journalists together. I asked
him, in a sympathetic tone, how things were going with him. I
expected his response would be a flood of tears, and that in the end
I should have to fork out a fiver. To my astonishment, his answer
was that things were going exceedingly well with him. I did not want
to say to him bluntly:
"Then what has happened to you to make you look like a mute at a
temperance funeral?" I said:
"And how are all at home?"
I thought that if the trouble lay there he would take the
opportunity. It brightened him somewhat, the necessity of replying
to the question. It appeared that his wife was in the best of
health.
"You remember her," he continued with a smile; "wonderful spirits,
always cheerful, nothing seems to put her out, not even--"
He ended the sentence abruptly with a sigh.
His mother-in-law, I learned from further talk with him, had died
since I had last met him, and had left them a comfortable addition to
their income. His eldest daughter was engaged to be married.
"It is entirely a love match," he explained, "and he is such a dear,
good fellow, that I should not have made any objection even had he
been poor. But, of course, as it is, I am naturally all the more
content."
His eldest boy, having won the Mottle Scholarship, was going up to
Cambridge in the Autumn. His own health, he told me, had greatly
improved; and a novel he had written in his leisure time promised to
be one of the successes of the season. Then it was that I spoke
plainly.
"If I am opening a wound too painful to be touched," I said, "tell
me. If, on the contrary, it is an ordinary sort of trouble upon
which the sympathy of a fellow worker may fall as balm, let me hear
it."
"So far as I am concerned," he replied, "I should be glad to tell
you. Speaking about it does me good, and may lead--so I am always in
hopes--to an idea. But, for your own sake, if you take my advice,
you will not press me."
"How can it affect me?" I asked, "it is nothing to do with me, is
it?"
"It need have nothing to do with you," he answered, "if you are
sensible enough to keep out of it. If I tell you: from this time
onward it will be your trouble also. Anyhow, that is what has
happened in four other separate cases. If you like to be the fifth
and complete the half dozen of us, you are welcome. But remember I
have warned you."
"What has it done to the other five?" I demanded.
"It has changed them from cheerful, companionable persons into gloomy
one-idead bores," he told me. "They think of but one thing, they
talk of but one thing, they dream of but one thing. Instead of
getting over it, as time goes on, it takes possession of them more
and more. There are men, of course, who would be unaffected by it--
who could shake it off. I warn you in particular against it,
because, in spite of all that is said, I am convinced you have a
sense of humour; and that being so, it will lay hold of you. It will
plague you night and day. You see what it has made of me! Three
months ago a lady interviewer described me as of a sunny temperament.
If you know your own business you will get out at the next station."
I wish now I had followed his advice. As it was, I allowed my
curiosity to take possession of me, and begged him to explain. And
he did so.
"It was just about Christmas time," he said. "We were discussing the
Drury Lane Pantomime--some three or four of us--in the smoking room
of the Devonshire Club, and young Gold said he thought it would prove
a mistake, the introduction of a subject like the Fiscal question
into the story of Humpty Dumpty. The two things, so far as he could
see, had nothing to do with one another. He added that he
entertained a real regard for Mr. Dan Leno, whom he had once met on a
steamboat, but that there were other topics upon which he would
prefer to seek that gentleman's guidance. Nettleship, on the other
hand, declared that he had no sympathy with the argument that artists
should never intrude upon public affairs. The actor was a fellow
citizen with the rest of us. He said that, whether one agreed with
their conclusions or not, one must admit that the nation owed a debt
of gratitude to Mrs. Brown Potter and to Miss Olga Nethersole for
giving to it the benefit of their convictions. He had talked to both
ladies in private on the subject and was convinced they knew as much
about it as did most people.
"Burnside, who was one of the party, contended that if sides were to
be taken, a pantomime should surely advocate the Free-Food Cause,
seeing it was a form of entertainment supposed to appeal primarily to
the tastes of the Little Englander. Then I came into the discussion.
"'The Fiscal question,' I said, 'is on everybody's tongue. Such
being the case, it is fit and proper it should be referred to in our
annual pantomime, which has come to be regarded as a review of the
year's doings. But it should not have been dealt with from the
political standpoint. The proper attitude to have assumed towards it
was that of innocent raillery, free from all trace of partisanship.'
"Old Johnson had strolled up and was standing behind us.
"'The very thing I have been trying to get hold of for weeks,' he
said--'a bright, amusing resume of the whole problem that should give
offence to neither side. You know our paper,' he continued; 'we
steer clear of politics, but, at the same time, try to be up-to-date;
it is not always easy. The treatment of the subject, on the lines
you suggest, is just what we require. I do wish you would write me
something.'
"He is a good old sort, Johnson; it seemed an easy thing. I said I
would. Since that time I have been thinking how to do it. As a
matter of fact, I have not thought of much else. Maybe you can
suggest something."
I was feeling in a good working mood the next morning.
"Pilson," said I to myself, "shall have the benefit of this. He does
not need anything boisterously funny. A few playfully witty remarks
on the subject will be the ideal."
I lit a pipe and sat down to think. At half-past twelve, having to
write some letters before going out to lunch, I dismissed the Fiscal
question from my mind.
But not for long. It worried me all the afternoon. I thought,
maybe, something would come to me in the evening. I wasted all that
evening, and I wasted all the following morning. Everything has its
amusing side, I told myself. One turns out comic stories about
funerals, about weddings. Hardly a misfortune that can happen to
mankind but has produced its comic literature. An American friend of
mine once took a contract from the Editor of an Insurance Journal to
write four humorous stories; one was to deal with an earthquake, the
second with a cyclone, the third with a flood, and the fourth with a
thunderstorm. And more amusing stories I have never read. What is
the matter with the Fiscal question?
I myself have written lightly on Bime-metallism. Home Rule we used
to be merry over in the eighties. I remember one delightful evening
at the Codgers' Hall. It would have been more delightful still, but
for a raw-boned Irishman, who rose towards eleven o'clock and
requested to be informed if any other speaker was wishful to make any
more jokes on the subject of Ould Ireland; because, if so, the raw-
boned gentleman was prepared to save time by waiting and dealing with
them altogether. But if not, then--so the raw-boned gentleman
announced--his intention was to go for the last speaker and the last
speaker but two at once and without further warning.
No other humourist rising, the raw-boned gentleman proceeded to make
good his threat, with the result that the fun degenerated somewhat.
Even on the Boer War we used to whisper jokes to one another in quiet
places. In this Fiscal question there must be fun. Where is it?
For days I thought of little else. My laundress--as we call them in
the Temple--noticed my trouble.
"Mrs. Wilkins," I confessed, "I am trying to think of something
innocently amusing to say on the Fiscal question."
"I've 'eard about it," she said, "but I don't 'ave much time to read
the papers. They want to make us pay more for our food, don't they?"
"For some of it," I explained. "But, then, we shall pay less for
other things, so that really we shan't be paying more at all."
"There don't seem much in it, either way," was Mrs. Wilkins' opinion.
"Just so," I agreed, "that is the advantage of the system. It will
cost nobody anything, and will result in everybody being better off."
"The pity is," said Mrs. Wilkins "that pity nobody ever thought of it
before."
"The whole trouble hitherto," I explained, "has been the foreigner."
"Ah," said Mrs. Wilkins, "I never 'eard much good of 'em, though they
do say the Almighty 'as a use for almost everything."
"These foreigners," I continued, "these Germans and Americans, they
dump things on us, you know."
"What's that?" demanded Mrs. Wilkins.
"What's dump? Well, it's dumping, you know. You take things, and
you dump them down."
"But what things? 'Ow do they do it?" asked Mrs. Wilkins.
"Why, all sorts of things: pig iron, bacon, door-mats--everything.
They bring them over here--in ships, you understand--and then, if you
please, just dump them down upon our shores."
"You don't mean surely to tell me that they just throw them out and
leave them there?" queried Mrs. Wilkins.
"Of course not," I replied; "when I say they dump these things upon
our shores, that is a figure of speech. What I mean is they sell
them to us."
"But why do we buy them if we don't want them?" asked Mrs. Wilkins;
"we're not bound to buy them, are we?"
"It is their artfulness," I explained, "these Germans and Americans,
and the others; they are all just as bad as one another--they insist
on selling us these things at less price than they cost to make."
"It seems a bit silly of them, don't it?" thought Mrs. Wilkins. "I
suppose being foreigners, poor things, they ain't naturally got much
sense."
"It does seem silly of them, if you look at it that way," I admitted,
"but what we have got to consider is, the injury it is doing us."
"Don't see 'ow it can do us much 'arm," argued Mrs. Wilkins; "seems a
bit of luck so far as we are concerned. There's a few more things
they'd be welcome to dump round my way."
"I don't seem to be putting this thing quite in the right light to
you, Mrs. Wilkins," I confessed. "It is a long argument, and you
might not be able to follow it; but you must take it as a fact now
generally admitted that the cheaper you buy things the sooner your
money goes. By allowing the foreigner to sell us all these things at
about half the cost price, he is getting richer every day, and we are
getting poorer. Unless we, as a country, insist on paying at least
twenty per cent. more for everything we want, it is calculated that
in a very few years England won't have a penny left."
"Sounds a bit topsy turvy," suggested Mrs. Wilkins.
"It may sound so," I answered, "but I fear there can be no doubt of
it. The Board of Trade Returns would seem to prove it conclusively."
"Well, God be praised, we've found it out in time," ejaculated Mrs.
Wilkins piously.
"It is a matter of congratulation," I agreed; "the difficulty is that
a good many other people say that far from being ruined, we are doing
very well indeed, and are growing richer every year."
"But 'ow can they say that," argued Mrs. Wilkins, "when, as you tell
me, those Trade Returns prove just the opposite?"
"Well, they say the same, Mrs. Wilkins, that the Board of Trade
Returns prove just the opposite."
"Well, they can't both be right," said Mrs. Wilkins.
"You would be surprised, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "how many things can
be proved from Board of Trade Returns!"
But I have not yet thought of that article for Pilson.
SHALL WE BE RUINED BY CHINESE CHEAP LABOUR?
"What is all this talk I 'ear about the Chinese?" said Mrs. Wilkins
to me the other morning. We generally indulge in a little chat while
Mrs. Wilkins is laying the breakfast-table. Letters and newspapers
do not arrive in my part of the Temple much before nine. From half-
past eight to nine I am rather glad of Mrs. Wilkins. "They 'ave been
up to some of their tricks again, 'aven't they?"
"The foreigner, Mrs. Wilkins," I replied, "whether he be Chinee or
any other he, is always up to tricks. Was not England specially
prepared by an all-wise Providence to frustrate these knavish tricks?
Which of such particular tricks may you be referring to at the
moment, Mrs. Wilkins?"
"Well, 'e's comin' over 'ere--isn't he, sir? to take the work out of
our mouths, as it were."
"Well, not exactly over here, to England, Mrs. Wilkins," I explained.
"He has been introduced into Africa to work in the mines there."
"It's a funny thing," said Mrs. Wilkins, "but to 'ear the way some of
them talk in our block, you might run away with the notion--that is,
if you didn't know 'em--that work was their only joy. I said to one
of 'em, the other evening--a man as calls 'isself a brass finisher,
though, Lord knows, the only brass 'e ever finishes is what 'is poor
wife earns and isn't quick enough to 'ide away from 'im--well,
whatever 'appens, I says, it will be clever of 'em if they take away
much work from you. It made them all laugh, that did," added Mrs.
Wilkins, with a touch of pardonable pride.
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