The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (31 page)

I
ATTENDED A
meeting of a Strength Through Joy committee of which I am a member this afternoon, and we talked about the encouragement of hobbies. There was no mention, however, of Ill Health, which is the hobby of a lot of people I know, and a very satisfactory hobby, too. You can pursue it anywhere, with
simple materials which are to be found in every home, such as a bed, a rug, an easy-chair, or even a box of bicarbonate of soda. If you want to go in for it in a big way it is well to spend a dollar on a clinical thermometer, which you can carry in your pocket, and a watch, so that you can take your own pulse. The object of a hobby is to broaden your outlook and develop your personality, and mild invalidism will do both. Once you establish the fact that you are Poorly, you will be able to impose on your friends in a variety of delightful ways, and as a means of dominating your married partner, and subduing your children, it has no equal. It is a mistake to omit Ill Health from any list of hobbies, for it has its devotees in every class; I think it would be a good scheme to get all the Ill Health hobbyists together, and let them be Poorly at one another, and select a Champion. And instead of an annual Festival they could hold a Depresstival.

I
BOUGHT MYSELF
a small bag of dragées yesterday; life has been using me rather shabbily, and I thought I deserved a little treat. They are delicious sweetmeats, my favourites. The modern dragée is an almond coated with hard sugar, delicately flavoured with (I suspect) talcum powder; eating one always reminds me of my childhood when I was occasionally commanded to kiss ladies who tasted just like that; old ladies tasted like mauve dragées and young ladies tasted like the delicious pink and white dragées; I always gave them a little unobtrusive lick as I kissed, to test their flavour. Modern face powder affords no such delights.… The dragée has not always been an innocent indulgence. A century ago physicians concealed their most detestable purges
in those sugar shells, and poisoners have also made use of them.… Dragées are the sugar-plums about which one reads in old children’s books, and they are still more wholesome than chocolates. I sat before my fire sucking, champing and wallowing in the nostalgia which the sweets evoked.

W
HILE DRIVING
this morning near a lake I saw a large group of seagulls swooping and wheeling over its surface. Among the most graceful of birds, they have the ugliest faces; in the countenance of a seagull we observe all the bitter hatred and malignance which we usually associate with the faces of money-lenders or book censors. To my mind the inland seagull is misnamed; it ought to be called a lake gull, and as seagull is commonly pronounced seagle, I suggest that lake gulls be known as lagles. I have several ornithologist friends to whom I shall mention this, but I do not expect that they will pay any atention. Ornithologists like to give birds a Latin name, with a Latin version of their own names stuck on the end. But it is rude, untutored nature-lovers like myself who give birds their common, deeply poetic names, like the Marsh Grommet, the Wheat Teazle, and the Double-breasted Ninnyhammer, or Extra-Marital Lark.

A
CHILD WHO IS
interested in music was telling me about her favourite composers today; according to her they were all desperately poor, and never had a square meal. “Where did you pick up that notion?” I enquired; “you are wasting your pity on Chopin, who was really very well off; Beethoven had a pretty bank book, Haydn was well-heeled, Mendelssohn was born in the lap of
luxury, and made a small fortune on his own account, Handel made and lost a couple of fortunes, and even Bach was in easy circumstances, according to the standards of his day. The only poor composer of the first rank that I can think of was Schubert. Dry your tears, my poppet.” But she did not want to be comforted and was annoyed by my array of facts. Why people like to think of composers as poor I cannot say, but they do. My observation has been that most musicians were as sharp as a tack in their attitude toward money, long before the days of Petrillo.

T
HE WEEK
-
END
approaches, and I want to collapse with a book during the whole of it, seeking surcease from the cares of the world. But what book? Ah, there is the question! For when I am in this spiritually depleted condition I lack the strength to tackle a book with any substance to it, but I am too cranky to endure a foolish book. Today in a bookshop I picked up a new novel and, as is my custom, looked for a picture of the author on the back of the jacket. I judge most books by the pictures of the author. If he looks a congenial fellow, I read his book; if not, not. This accounts for the fact that I read few books by women; authoresses are, in the main, an unappetizing crew. Upon the back of this book was a picture of a fellow with large intense eyes and his hair combed forward in a fringe. Obviously, I thought, this fellow has a grievance of some sort, and his novel will fall into the great category of Gripe Novels. So I looked at some others, but found none with pictures of authors who pleased me. They all looked like Gripers, or people with a Social Conscience, or Oh-God-The-Pain-Of-It writers. I like authors to look sassy and bright, like Evelyn Waugh.

I
WATCHED A CHILD
attracting a bit of steel with a magnet this afternoon, and realized with a sudden shock that the bit of steel was a five-cent piece; I can remember when those coins were made of silver, and were much in vogue for Sunday School collection. As a child I was a regular Sabbath Day scholar, graduating from the Infant school to the Intermediate, but never rising to the Bible Class, which was taught by a lawyer whose scriptural teaching was inextricably mingled with his deeper knowledge of baseball; sometimes he would devote most of a lesson which was supposed to be about the Prodigal Son to an analysis of the Babe’s batting form. This led to a widespread belief in his class that the Prodigal passed his years of riotous living as a professional ballplayer. Sunday School teaching is one field into which the modern pedagogical approach has never penetrated. And I still think that children learn more about life and conduct when an interesting man is given the run of his tongue, and is not chained to a syllabus which dictates everything, including the opening and closing of the classroom windows.

I
WORKED LIKE
a demon in my garden this afternoon, raking, burning, digging, uprooting and whatnot with frenzied industry. Yet even as I toiled my heart was heavy, for I know by now that I am what psychiatrists call a Premature or Abortive Gardener; each year I am driven out-of-doors in April by a compulsion similar to that which makes the salmon seek the sea, and for two or three weeks I am the slave of the garden. But it is not to last; by the middle of May my rash, fierce blaze of energy has spent itself, and the garden settles
down into a state of neglect which frequently makes people think that Marchbanks Towers has not been inhabited for years.

So runs the poem. But I tickle the Earth too early, and for six months afterward she sues me for breach of promise.

“D
ON
’
T YOU THINK
Mr. X looks very distinguished?” the lady on my right asked me just now. As a matter of fact I think that X looks as though he had a clinker stuck in his grates, so I gave her an indirect reply. I never know what people mean by “distinguished” when they apply it to a man’s appearance. Often the person so described looks as though he smelt a bad drain, or had a nail in his shoe, or had been to the barber and got his hair down his neck; the alliance between distinction and an appearance of suffering appears to be unbreakable. Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million. For some reason the world has decided that an expression suggestive of pain and disgust is a mark of superior mental power, for the world assumes, quite wrongly, that to be happy is a simple thing, within the reach of any idiot.

I
WAS THINKING
about the Faust legend today, and began to wonder what I would ask for if I had sold my soul to the devil, on condition that the devil grant my wishes on earth. Faust was a painfully unimaginative fellow; he asked for youth—I would prefer a hearty middle
age. He asked for a fortune; I would prefer a purse which at all times contained an exact $1,000 in five dollar bills. He asked for that tiresome simpleton Gretchen, and what a sanctimonious mess she turned out to be! And in Marlowe’s play Faust asked for Helen of Troy, a notorious trouble-maker. In fact, as a philosopher, Faust appears to have been in the dunce class; money, women and the torments of youth—what a choice! I cannot think what the devil wanted with the soul of such a numbskull. With his opportunities I think that I should devote myself to politics, and for recreation I would demand the power to transform myself into a beautiful woman, and in that guise I would torment the reverend clergy. And after a few years I would command the devil to explode himself forever. How would he meet that situation, I wonder?