The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (6 page)

T
HIS IS ST. ANDREW
’
S DAY
, and although I do not belong to the Scottish Branch of the family (it spells its name Marjoribanks, which is wasteful, and therefore un-Scotch) I can never let the day pass unnoticed. My uncle Hamish Marjoribanks was an implacable Jacobite to his dying day, and at breakfast on St. Andrew’s Day he would throw great gobs of porridge at the chromo of Queen Victoria which hung on his diningroom wall, crying “There’s for ye, Hanover!” in a fierce voice. His wife, who was somewhat more reconciled to Culloden and the Act of Union, would spend the rest of the day swabbing the Royal Likeness with a dampened cloth. Uncle Hamish insisted on a grand dinner at night, and when the capercailzie was brought in and carried round the table, he would insist that we all jump up on the seats of our chairs, put one foot on the table, and drink a largish glass of neat whisky, crying something which sounded like “Slachan!” at one another; then we all threw our glasses into the fire place. After dinner Uncle Hamish would tell us how, if everyone had his rights, some obscure Bavarian
prince would be King of England and he (Uncle Hamish) would undoubtedly be a powerful figure at Court. It was all very exhausting, and cost a fortune in glass.

I
SPENT A LOT
of time this afternoon wrapping parcels, using $1.58 worth of cord, tags and stickers (none of which would stick). All of this gaudy junk will be stripped eagerly from the parcels by the recipient of my gifts, but I do not grudge the expense. In honouring the birthday of the Prince of Peace one is expected also to make substantial sacrifice to Mammon, so as not to offend his many worshippers. The paper and string which I have laid on Mammon’s altar will, I trust, provide an agreeable scent in his nostrils.

T
HE GENTLEMAN
across the table was very much interested in my assertion before dinner that I hoped to spend the Christmas Season in a Trappist monastery in Quebec and asked me when I was going there. The fact is, I am not going at all. The Trappists won’t have me. I spent a Christmas with them a few years ago and made a rather painful mistake. As everyone knows, Trappists live under a vow of silence, which I do not. I tried to keep as quiet as I could, and on Christmas Eve I consoled myself in my room in the guest-house with a bottle of rum. At midnight there was a tap on my door and the guest-master, Brother Eustachian, and his assistant, Brother Fallopian, stood outside; they showed me a typewritten notice which said “All guests are invited to join the brothers in the Oratory.” I assumed (excusably, I still think) that an Oratory
would be a place where one could talk, and when we got there I opened a discussion on the subject of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and passed out a few pamphlets. In the ensuing hullabaloo, I only escaped with my life. When I wrote for a room this year, I got an immediate reply saying that they were completely booked up. After all, I was only trying to brighten their lives, and when I recited my limerick about the young maid of Madras, I was certain that some of them laughed—faint laughter like the unwrapping of tissue paper.

F
ROM TIME TO TIME
I am bothered by the thought that I ought to take some exercise. Usually I am successful in fighting down this ugly notion, but sometimes I toy with the idea of getting one of those machines which exercise a man against his will by rolling, hauling, squeezing and folding him. What I really want is a series of searching exercises which can be done while sitting in a chair. Years ago I read that caged lions and tigers keep themselves fit by stretching and for a while I used to stretch whenever I had a spare minute, straining my halliards and squirming my binnacle to the accompaniment of alarming cracks, creaks, and pops. But it is awfully easy to stop stretching. I think I shall re-examine this theory, and perhaps evolve Marchbanks Torso Tensions for the Sedentary. Advertisements will appear of me wrapped around my office chair, with the message: “Puny? Flabby? Torpid? In Thirty Days You can be like this Masked Marvel! No Costly Equipment! No Time Required! No Effort! Tear the Seat Off your Chair and send with Five Hundred Dollars for Trial Booklet! Be Muscular the Marchbanks Way!”

I
PERCEIVE THAT
your city has no municipal arrangement for clearing the streets. As a result, when I went out for a walk this afternoon, I experienced a wide variety of footing. Before the houses of young and vigorous men, full of Civic Spirit and holiday food, the walk was clear to the cement; where less hearty citizens had their abode, there was a track about as wide as a snow shovel, and lumpy; the walks of the aged, the arthritic and the hung-over were pitiful muddles, with snow everywhere; in front of vacant lots it was necessary to break a track. Some citizens were shovelling as I passed. It is a pitiful sight, in a city renowned for learning, to see a graduate of the class of ’07 with a prolapsed abdomen and eyes dimmed by much study, trying to do a job which could be done much better by a horse or even, in these mad, rushing days, by a bulldozer.

I
worked like a dog yesterday. (Though why a dog, a notoriously lazy and useless animal, should be a symbol of industry, I do not know. It is the same with niggers. People say “I worked like a nigger,” though it is well-known that niggers, being intensely sensible and practical, never work unless they are driven to it. But enough of this—I worked desperately.) For weeks at a time I drift along, saying “Mañana, mañana” to every task that does not demand immediate attention. But mañana always comes; it arrived yesterday, and I toiled from nine in the morning until eleven at night, with brief pauses for refresment. Oh, that I were a systematic plodder! Oh, that I left my desk as clean as a hound’s tooth every night! But it is so long since the
top of my desk was clear that I have forgotten what colour it is.

I
N SPITE OF MY
deep objection to buying new clothes of any sort, I had to get a pair of shoes today. This is no weather for going barefoot. I like new things well enough once I have them; it is the buying which fills me with dread. To be confronted with oneself in a mirror, wearing one conspicuously new garment amid one’s degraded rags, is an experience for sturdier egos than mine. This is particularly my bug-bear at the tailor’s; those mirrors which show me myself in three unaccustomed aspects—horrible! I have seen men preen and primp in front of those things without a sign of embarrassment, but they fill me with confusion.… In the matter of shoes I always have to make a decision between style and fit. I admire long, narrow, pointy-toed shoes which have a worldly air about them, but Nature demands that I wear things like those leather boxes which horses wear on their hooves when pulling mowers over precious sward. My struggle between the Ideal and the Real in a shoe shop would delight the heart of a philosopher, but it invariably ruins my day.

I
WENT TO THE
Eastern Ontario Drama Festival last week, a function which, being of a cultural nature, was conducted with appropriate sedateness, as though a body were lying in the next room. Except for a few people of uncommon distinction, the gentlemen present forebore to dress; in histories of fashion, this will be known as The Century of The Sack Suit; I myself wore a dainty elephant-grey number, and a white shirt which I borrowed from my Uncle Fortunatus.

On the Friday I went to see a group of accomplished Ottawa amateurs play Noel Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
, which, as everybody knows, is about a man who has two wives—one alive and one a ghost—and enchants the audience with a spectacle of bigamy agreeably spiced with adultery. The final fit of the Festival was on Saturday night, and as some of the plays failed to grip my attention, I permitted myself to reflect on a few matters such as: (a) why amateurs in society plays never black the soles of their boots, which professionals are always careful to do; (b) why amateurs whose voices and deportment suggest a barn-raising at Pumpkin Centre choose to do plays about hoity-toity English people; (c) why plays about farm life (including the works of S. Marchbanks) invariably include a character who is crazy, or religious, or both. Perhaps the solution lies in a play by S. Marchbanks about the
bon ton
of Toronto or Ottawa—a play abounding in references to such hallmarks of high-toned society as butter knives, finger bowls, adultery and flush toilets.

T
HIS HAS BEEN
a great day for me! This morning the judges from the Horticultural Society arrived at the Towers, and made a tour of the grounds, murmuring with admiration. I was pleased by their approbation, but judge of my excitement when my name appeared in the Prize List. Let me show you my citations:

FINEST SHOW OF MIXED WEEDS
(for garden tended solely by the owner): First Prize—S. Marchbanks.
FINEST SINGLE WEED IN NATIVE STATE
: A magnificent
Amaranthus retroflexus
(Common Pigweed)—property of S. Marchbanks.
LARGEST FOLIAGE ON ANY WEED
: A stupendous
Rumex obtusifolius
(Burdock)—reared with great care by S. Marchbanks.
FINEST RARE OR SPECIMEN WEED
:
Cicuta Maculata
(Cowbane)—cherished under glass by S. Marchbanks.

At last I have found a branch of gardening in which I excel! From now on my course is clear, and the Marchbanks Weed Sanctuary begins tonight.

I
BOUGHT A NEW RADIO
licence today, although I don’t suppose I use my radio more than 20 times a year, having full use of my vision, and being able to read advertisements for coffee, stomach medicine, and soap in the newspapers at my leisure. I grudged the $2.50, and I hope that the C.B.C. will not regard it as my personal endorsation of their artistic policy. Then I went to see a radio broadcast put on the air, and yearned mightily to get my hands on a Hammond organ which was being played. It has been a lifelong ambition of mine to lie at full length on the pedal-board of an organ, with the power full on, just to see what kind of apocalyptic roar the thing would emit.

R
IDDLES AND CONUNDRUMS
are making a surprising return to popularity to my great grief, for I detest them. I suppose they follow naturally from the craze for quizzes of all sorts. I have never guessed the answer to a riddle in my life; when confronted with one, I simply sit in mute embarrassment until the questioner stops urging me “not to give up” and springs his silly surprise. Conundrums are even more agonizing for a conundrum involves an excruciating pun of some sort. From the mists of antiquity I recall several Literary Conundrums. Sample: “What did the illiterate man say to his son when he wished him to eat vigorously?” Answer: “Chaucer (Chaw, sir.”) There was also the
Musical Conundrum. Sample: “What musical cry of acclaim did the lady give when she desired her maid to bring her stockings?” Answer: “Hosanna! (Hose, Anna.)” And here is a triple-threat conundrum: “A man, woman and a child went for a walk and each fractured a knee; where did they go to for new ones?” Answer: “The man went to Africa where the Negroes; the woman went to Ireland where the Sheeneys are; the child went to the butcher’s for a kidney.” (D’yuh catch on? “Knee grows,” “she knees” and “kid knee”—a killer, ain’t it?) Paromonasia on this reckless scale appals me.

I
WATCHED A MAN
giving his trotting-horse a workout this afternoon. It was a noble animal with a great deal of what appeared to be adhesive tape on its legs, and when it moved it had the high-stepping, galvanized action of an usher at a society wedding. I was particularly entranced by the way it rolled its eyes. It has been my observation that the spirit of a man or an animal may be judged from this characteristic alone; a wildly rolling eye is invariably the accompaniment of a proud and daring spirit. Most of us, of course, have eyes like green grapes which have been partly squashed, floating in pools of mutton gravy, and we are incapable of moving them to right or left.… When the horse trotted its trainer allowed one of his feet to dangle nonchalantly from the side of the sulky; somehow this mannerism seemed to embody the whole devil-may-care attitude of the trotting fraternity. I watched until I was chilled, and then trotted home, trying to roll my eyes.

T
HE ONWARD MARCH
of statistical research sometimes
provokes me to incredulous protest. For instance, I see in the paper today a statement attributed to a “hair stylist” (which is what hairdressers now call themselves) that “Upswept hair-dos reduce woman’s sex appeal 60 per cent.” How does he know? Frankly, I think that he is wrong. Indeed, I once knew a fellow who found upswept hair-dos so provocative that he used to roam about at parties, nibbling the napes of the necks of any women whose hair was so arranged. It was the little curly wisps at the bottom of the hair-do, he explained, which drove him to this: they reminded him of hearts of celery. Sometimes the women were flattered; sometimes they screamed; sometimes their escorts offered to punch him on the nose. I gave up his acquaintance, considering his conduct embarrassingly eccentric, yet I suppose he did no more than yield to an impulse which afflicts all men at some time or other, but which they shove down into the reeking cesspit of the Unconscious.