Books: Idle Ideas in 1905
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Jerome K. Jerome >> Idle Ideas in 1905
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And, when Science has done everything possible for women, there might
be no harm in her turning her attention to us men. Her idea at
present seems to be that we men are too beautiful, physically and
morally, to need improvement. Personally, there are one or two
points about which I should like to consult her.
WHEN IS THE BEST TIME TO BE MERRY?
There is so much I could do to improve things generally in and about
Europe, if only I had a free hand. I should not propose any great
fundamental changes. These poor people have got used to their own
ways; it would be unwise to reform them all at once. But there are
many little odds and ends that I could do for them, so many of their
mistakes I could correct for them. They do not know this. If they
only knew there was a man living in their midst willing to take them
in hand and arrange things for them, how glad they would be. But the
story is always the same. One reads it in the advertisements of the
matrimonial column:
"A lady, young, said to be good-looking"--she herself is not sure on
the point; she feels that possibly she may be prejudiced; she puts
before you merely the current gossip of the neighbourhood; people say
she is beautiful; they may be right, they may be wrong: it is not
for her to decide--"well-educated, of affectionate disposition,
possessed of means, desires to meet gentleman with a view to
matrimony."
Immediately underneath one reads of a gentleman of twenty-eight,
"tall, fair, considered agreeable." Really the modesty of the
matrimonial advertiser teaches to us ordinary mortals quite a
beautiful lesson. I know instinctively that were anybody to ask me
suddenly:
"Do you call yourself an agreeable man?" I should answer promptly:
"An agreeable man! Of course I'm an agreeable man. What silly
questions you do ask!" If he persisted in arguing the matter,
saying:
"But there are people who do not consider you an agreeable man." I
should get angry with him.
"Oh, they think that, do they?" I should say. "Well, you tell them
from me, with my compliments, that they are a set of blithering
idiots. Not agreeable! You show me the man who says I'm not
agreeable. I'll soon let him know whether I'm agreeable or not."
These young men seeking a wife are silent on the subject of their own
virtues. Such are for others to discover. The matrimonial
advertiser confines himself to a simple statement of fact: he is
considered agreeable."
He is domestically inclined, and in receipt of a good income. He is
desirous of meeting a lady of serious disposition, with view to
matrimony. If possessed of means--well, it is a trifle hardly worth
considering one way or the other. He does not insist upon it; on the
other hand he does not exclude ladies of means; the main idea is
matrimony.
It is sad to reflect upon a young lady, said to be good-looking (let
us say good-looking and be done with it: a neighbourhood does not
rise up and declare a girl good-looking if she is not good-looking,
that is only her modest way of putting it), let us say a young lady,
good-looking, well-educated, of affectionate disposition--it is
undeniably sad to reflect that such an one, matrimonially inclined,
should be compelled to have recourse to the columns of a matrimonial
journal. What are the young men in the neighbourhood thinking of?
What more do they want? Is it Venus come to life again with ten
thousand a year that they are waiting for! It makes me angry with my
own sex reading these advertisements. And when one thinks of the
girls that do get married!
But life is a mystery. The fact remains: here is the ideal wife
seeking in vain for a husband. And here, immediately underneath--I
will not say the ideal husband, he may have faults; none of us are
perfect, but as men go a decided acquisition to any domestic hearth,
an agreeable gentleman, fond of home life, none of your gad-abouts--
calls aloud to the four winds for a wife--any sort of a wife,
provided she be of a serious disposition. In his despair, he has
grown indifferent to all other considerations. "Is there in this
world," he has said to himself, "one unmarried woman, willing to
marry me, an agreeable man, in receipt of a good income." Possibly
enough this twain have passed one another in the street, have sat
side by side in the same tram-car, never guessing, each one, that the
other was the very article of which they were in want to make life
beautiful.
Mistresses in search of a servant, not so much with the idea of
getting work out of her, rather with the object of making her happy,
advertise on one page. On the opposite page, domestic treasures--
disciples of Carlyle, apparently, with a passionate love of work for
its own sake--are seeking situations, not so much with the desire of
gain as with the hope of finding openings where they may enjoy the
luxury of feeling they are leading useful lives. These philanthropic
mistresses, these toil-loving hand-maidens, have lived side by side
in the same town for years, never knowing one another.
So it is with these poor European peoples. They pass me in the
street. They do not guess that I am ready and willing to take them
under my care, to teach them common sense with a smattering of
intelligence--to be, as one might say, a father to them. They look
at me. There is nothing about me to tell them that I know what is
good for them better than they do themselves. In the fairy tales the
wise man wore a conical hat and a long robe with twiddly things all
round the edge. You knew he was a clever man. It avoided the
necessity of explanation. Unfortunately, the fashion has gone out.
We wise men have to wear just ordinary clothes. Nobody knows we are
wise men. Even when we tell them so, they don't believe it. This it
is that makes our task the more difficult.
One of the first things I should take in hand, were European affairs
handed over to my control, would be the rearrangement of the
Carnival. As matters are, the Carnival takes place all over Europe
in February. At Nice, in Spain, or in Italy, it may be occasionally
possible to feel you want to dance about the streets in thin costume
during February. But in more northern countries during Carnival time
I have seen only one sensible masker; he was a man who had got
himself up as a diver. It was in Antwerp. The rain was pouring down
in torrents; a cheery, boisterous John Bull sort of an east wind was
blustering through the streets at the rate of fifteen miles an hour.
Pierrots, with frozen hands, were blowing blue noses. An elderly
Cupid had borrowed an umbrella from a cafe and was waiting for a
tram. A very little devil was crying with the cold, and wiping his
eyes with the end of his own tail. Every doorway was crowded with
shivering maskers. The diver alone walked erect, the water streaming
from him.
February is not the month for open air masquerading. The "confetti,"
which has come to be nothing but coloured paper cut into small discs,
is a sodden mass. When a lump of it strikes you in the eye, your
instinct is not to laugh gaily, but to find out the man who threw it
and to hit him back. This is not the true spirit of Carnival. The
marvel is that, in spite of the almost invariably adverse weather,
these Carnivals still continue. In Belgium, where Romanism still
remains the dominant religion, Carnival maintains itself stronger
than elsewhere in Northern Europe.
At one small town, Binche, near the French border, it holds
uninterrupted sway for three days and two nights, during which time
the whole of the population, swelled by visitors from twenty miles
round, shouts, romps, eats and drinks and dances. After which the
visitors are packed like sardines into railway trains. They pin
their tickets to their coats and promptly go to sleep. At every
station the railway officials stumble up and down the trains with
lanterns. The last feeble effort of the more wakeful reveller,
before he adds himself to the heap of snoring humanity on the floor
of the railway carriage, is to change the tickets of a couple of his
unconscious companions. In this way gentlemen for the east are
dragged out by the legs at junctions, and packed into trains going
west; while southern fathers are shot out in the chill dawn at lonely
northern stations, to find themselves greeted with enthusiasm by
other people's families.
At Binche, they say--I have not counted them myself--that thirty
thousand maskers can be seen dancing at the same time. When they are
not dancing they are throwing oranges at one another. The houses
board up their windows. The restaurants take down their mirrors and
hide away the glasses. If I went masquerading at Binche I should go
as a man in armour, period Henry the Seventh.
"Doesn't it hurt," I asked a lady who had been there, "having oranges
thrown at you? Which sort do they use, speaking generally, those
fine juicy ones--Javas I think you call them--or the little hard
brand with skins like a nutmeg-grater? And if both sorts are used
indiscriminately, which do you personally prefer?"
"The smart people," she answered, "they are the same everywhere--they
must be extravagant--they use the Java orange. If it hits you in the
back I prefer the Java orange. It is more messy than the other, but
it does not leave you with that curious sensation of having been
temporarily stunned. Most people, of course, make use of the small
hard orange. If you duck in time, and so catch it on the top of your
head, it does not hurt so much as you would think. If, however, it
hits you on a tender place--well, myself, I always find that a little
sal volatile, with old cognac--half and half, you understand--is
about the best thing. But it only happens once a year," she added.
Nearly every town gives prizes for the best group of maskers. In
some cases the first prize amounts to as much as two hundred pounds.
The butchers, the bakers, the candlestick makers, join together and
compete. They arrive in wagons, each group with its band. Free
trade is encouraged. Each neighbouring town and village "dumps" its
load of picturesque merry-makers.
It is in these smaller towns that the spirit of King Carnival finds
happiest expression. Almost every third inhabitant takes part in the
fun. In Brussels and the larger towns the thing appears ridiculous.
A few hundred maskers force their way with difficulty through
thousands of dull-clad spectators, looking like a Spanish river in
the summer time, a feeble stream, dribbling through acres of muddy
bank. At Charleroi, the centre of the Belgian Black Country, the
chief feature of the Carnival is the dancing of the children. A
space is specially roped off for them.
If by chance the sun is kind enough to shine, the sight is a pretty
one. How they love the dressing up and the acting, these small
mites! One young hussy--she could hardly have been more than ten--
was gotten up as a haughty young lady. Maybe some elder sister had
served as a model. She wore a tremendous wig of flaxen hair, a hat
that I guarantee would have made its mark even at Ascot on the Cup
Day, a skirt that trailed two yards behind her, a pair of what had
once been white kid gloves, and a blue silk parasol. Dignity! I
have seen the offended barmaid, I have met the chorus girl--not by
appointment, please don't misunderstand me, merely as a spectator--up
the river on Sunday. But never have I witnessed in any human being
so much hauteur to the pound avoir-dupois as was carried through the
streets of Charleroi by that small brat. Companions of other days,
mere vulgar boys and girls, claimed acquaintance with her. She
passed them with a stare of such utter disdain that it sent them
tumbling over one another backwards. By the time they had recovered
themselves sufficiently to think of an old tin kettle lying handy in
the gutter she had turned the corner.
Two miserably clad urchins, unable to scrape together the few sous
necessary for the hire of a rag or two, had nevertheless determined
not to be altogether out of it. They had managed to borrow a couple
of white blouses--not what you would understand by a white blouse,
dear Madame, a dainty thing of frills and laces, but the coarse white
sack the street sweeper wears over his clothes. They had also
borrowed a couple of brooms. Ridiculous little objects they looked,
the tiny head of each showing above the great white shroud as gravely
they walked, the one behind the other, sweeping the mud into the
gutter. They also were of the Carnival, playing at being scavengers.
Another quaint sight I witnessed. The "serpentin" is a feature of
the Belgian Carnival. It is a strip of coloured paper, some dozen
yards long, perhaps. You fling it as you would a lassoo, entangling
the head of some passer-by. Naturally, the object most aimed at by
the Belgian youth is the Belgian maiden. And, naturally also, the
maiden who finds herself most entangled is the maiden who--to use
again the language of the matrimonial advertiser--"is considered
good-looking." The serpentin about her head is the "feather in her
cap" of the Belgian maiden on Carnival Day. Coming suddenly round
the corner I almost ran into a girl. Her back was towards me. It
was a quiet street. She had half a dozen of these serpentins.
Hurriedly, with trembling hands, she was twisting them round and
round her own head. I looked at her as I passed. She flushed
scarlet. Poor little snub-nosed pasty-faced woman! I wish she had
not seen me. I could have bought sixpenny-worth, followed her, and
tormented her with them; while she would have pretended indignation--
sought, discreetly, to escape from me.
Down South, where the blood flows quicker, King Carnival is, indeed,
a jolly old soul. In Munich he reigns for six weeks, the end coming
with a mad two days revel in the streets. During the whole of the
period, folks in ordinary, every-day costume are regarded as
curiosities; people wonder what they are up to. From the Grafin to
the Dienstmadchen, from the Herr Professor to the "Piccolo," as they
term the small artist that answers to our page boy, the business of
Munich is dancing, somewhere, somehow, in a fancy costume. Every
theatre clears away the stage, every cafe crowds its chairs and
tables into corners, the very streets are cleared for dancing.
Munich goes mad.
Munich is always a little mad. The maddest ball I ever danced at was
in Munich. I went there with a Harvard University professor. He had
been told what these balls were like. Ever seeking knowledge of all
things, he determined to take the matter up for himself and examine
it. The writer also must ever be learning. I agreed to accompany
him. We had not intended to dance. Our idea was that we could be
indulgent spectators, regarding from some coign of vantage the antics
of the foolish crowd. The professor was clad as became a professor.
Myself, I wore a simply-cut frock-coat, with trousering in French
grey. The doorkeeper explained to us that this was a costume ball;
he was sorry, but gentlemen could only be admitted in evening dress
or in masquerade.
It was half past one in the morning. We had sat up late on purpose;
we had gone without our dinner; we had walked two miles. The
professor suggested pinning up the tails of his clerically-cut coat
and turning in his waistcoat. The doorkeeper feared it would not be
quite the same thing. Besides, my French grey trousers refused to
adapt themselves. The doorkeeper proposed our hiring a costume--a
little speculation of his own; gentlemen found it simpler sometimes,
especially married gentlemen, to hire a costume in this manner,
changing back into sober garments before returning home. It reduced
the volume of necessary explanation.
"Have you anything, my good man," said the professor, "anything that
would effect a complete disguise?"
The doorkeeper had the very thing--a Chinese arrangement, with
combined mask and wig. It fitted neatly over the head, and was
provided with a simple but ingenious piece of mechanism by means of
which much could be done with the pigtail. Myself the doorkeeper hid
from view under the cowl of a Carmelite monk.
"I do hope nobody recognises us," whispered my friend the professor
as we entered.
I can only hope sincerely that they did not. I do not wish to talk
about myself. That would be egotism. But the mystery of the
professor troubles me to this day. A grave, earnest gentleman, the
father of a family, I saw him with my own eyes put that ridiculous
pasteboard mask over his head. Later on--a good deal later on--I
found myself walking again with him through silent star-lit streets.
Where he had been in the interval, and who then was the strange
creature under the Chinaman's mask, will always remain to me an
unsolved problem.
DO WE LIE A-BED TOO LATE?
It was in Paris, many years ago, that I fell by chance into this
habit of early rising. My night--by reasons that I need not enter
into--had been a troubled one. Tired of the hot bed that gave no
sleep, I rose and dressed myself, crept down the creaking stairs,
experiencing the sensations of a burglar new to his profession,
unbolted the great door of the hotel, and passed out into an unknown,
silent city, bathed in a mysterious soft light. Since then, this
strange sweet city of the dawn has never ceased to call to me. It
may be in London, in Paris again, in Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, that I
have gone to sleep, but if perchance I wake before the returning tide
of human life has dimmed its glories with the mists and vapours of
the noisy day, I know that beyond my window blind the fairy city, as
I saw it first so many years ago--this city that knows no tears, no
sorrow, through which there creeps no evil thing; this city of quiet
vistas, fading into hope; this city of far-off voices whispering
peace; this city of the dawn that still is young--invites me to talk
with it awhile before the waking hours drive it before them, and with
a sigh it passes whence it came.
It is the great city's one hour of purity, of dignity. The very rag-
picker, groping with her filthy hands among the ashes, instead of an
object of contempt, moves from door to door an accusing Figure, her
thin soiled garments, her bent body, her scarred face, hideous with
the wounds of poverty, an eloquent indictment of smug Injustice,
sleeping behind its deaf shutters. Yet even into her dim brain has
sunk the peace that fills for this brief hour the city. This, too,
shall have its end, my sister! Men and women were not born to live
on the husks that fill the pails outside the rich man's door.
Courage a little while longer, you and yours. Your rheumy eyes once
were bright, your thin locks once soft and wavy, your poor bent back
once straight; and maybe, as they tell you in their gilded churches,
this bulging sack shall be lifted from your weary shoulders, your
misshapen limbs be straight again. You pass not altogether unheeded
through these empty streets. Not all the eyes of the universe are
sleeping.
The little seamstress, hurrying to her early work! A little later
she will be one of the foolish crowd, joining in the foolish
laughter, in the coarse jests of the work-room: but as yet the hot
day has not claimed her. The work-room is far beyond, the home of
mean cares and sordid struggles far behind. To her, also, in this
moment are the sweet thoughts of womanhood. She puts down her bag,
rests herself upon a seat. If all the day were dawn, this city of
the morning always with us! A neighbouring clock chimes forth the
hour. She starts up from her dream and hurries on--to the noisy
work-room.
A pair of lovers cross the park, holding each other's hands. They
will return later in the day, but there will be another expression in
their eyes, another meaning in the pressure of their hands. Now the
purity of the morning is with them.
Some fat, middle-aged clerk comes puffing into view: his ridiculous
little figure very podgy. He stops to take off his hat and mop his
bald head with his handkerchief: even to him the morning lends
romance. His fleshy face changes almost as one looks at him. One
sees again the lad with his vague hopes, his absurd ambitions.
There is a statue of Aphrodite in one of the smaller Paris parks.
Twice in the same week, without particularly meaning it, I found
myself early in the morning standing in front of this statue gazing
listlessly at it, as one does when in dreamy mood; and on both
occasions, turning to go, I encountered the same man, also gazing at
it with, apparently, listless eyes. He was an uninteresting looking
man--possibly he thought the same of me. From his dress he might
have been a well-to-do tradesman, a minor Government official,
doctor, or lawyer. Quite ten years later I paid my third visit to
the same statue at about the same hour. This time he was there
before me. I was hidden from him by some bushes. He glanced round
but did not see me; and then he did a curious thing. Placing his
hands on the top of the pedestal, which may have been some seven feet
in height, he drew himself up, and kissed very gently, almost
reverentially, the foot of the statue, begrimed though it was with
the city's dirt. Had he been some long-haired student of the Latin
Quarter one would not have been so astonished. But he was such a
very commonplace, quite respectable looking man. Afterwards he drew
a pipe from his pocket, carefully filled and lighted it, took his
umbrella from the seat where it had been lying, and walked away.
Had it been their meeting-place long ago? Had he been wont to tell
her, gazing at her with lover's eyes, how like she was to the statue?
The French sculptor has not to consider Mrs. Grundy. Maybe, the
lady, raising her eyes, had been confused; perhaps for a moment
angry--some little milliner or governess, one supposes. In France
the jeune fille of good family does not meet her lover unattended.
What had happened? Or was it but the vagrant fancy of a middle-aged
bourgeois seeking in imagination the romance that reality so rarely
gives us, weaving his love dream round his changeless statue?
In one of Ibsen's bitter comedies the lovers agree to part while they
are still young, never to see each other in the flesh again. Into
the future each will bear away the image of the other, godlike,
radiant with the glory of youth and love; each will cherish the
memory of a loved one who shall be beautiful always. That their
parting may not appear such wild nonsense as at first it strikes us,
Ibsen shows us other lovers who have married in the orthodox fashion.
She was all that a mistress should be. They speak of her as they
first knew her fifteen years ago, when every man was at her feet. He
then was a young student, burning with fine ideals, with enthusiasm
for all the humanities.
They enter.
What did you expect? Fifteen years have passed--fifteen years of
struggle with the grim realities. He is fat and bald. Eleven
children have to be provided for. High ideals will not even pay the
bootmaker. To exist you have to fight for mean ends with mean
weapons. And the sweet girl heroine! Now the worried mother of
eleven brats! One rings down the curtain amid Satanic laughter.
That is why, for one reason among so many, I love this mystic morning
light. It has a strange power of revealing the beauty that is hidden
from us by the coarser beams of the full day. These worn men and
women, grown so foolish looking, so unromantic; these artisans and
petty clerks plodding to their monotonous day's work; these dull-eyed
women of the people on their way to market to haggle over sous, to
argue and contend over paltry handfuls of food. In this magic
morning light the disguising body becomes transparent. They have
grown beautiful, not ugly, with the years of toil and hardship; these
lives, lived so patiently, are consecrated to the service of the
world. Joy, hope, pleasure--they have done with all such, life for
them is over. Yet they labour, ceaselessly, uncomplainingly. It is
for the children.
One morning, near Brussels, I encountered a cart of faggots, drawn by
a hound so lean that stroking him might have hurt a dainty hand. I
was shocked--angry, till I noticed his fellow beast of burden pushing
the cart from behind. Such a scarecrow of an old woman! There was
little to choose between them. I walked with them a little way. She
lived near Waterloo. All day she gathered wood in the great forest,
and starting at three o'clock each morning, the two lean creatures
between them dragged the cart nine miles to Brussels, returning when
they had sold their load. With luck she might reckon on a couple of
francs. I asked her if she could not find something else to do.
Yes, it was possible, but for the little one, her grandchild. Folks
will not employ old women burdened with grandchildren.
You fair, dainty ladies, who would never know it was morning if
somebody did not enter to pull up the blind and tell you so! You do
well not to venture out in this magic morning light. You would look
so plain--almost ugly, by the side of these beautiful women.
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