The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (9 page)

I
SEE A STRANGE
gadget advertised—a special pair of circular scissors to remove hair from the nose and ears. Personally I regard hair in the ears as a sign of wisdom; the Chinese greatly esteem an elongated earlobe, and it seems to me that when such a lobe is allied with a splendidly hirsute ear, perfection has been reached, and should not be tampered with. As for hair in the nose, it is picturesque, and with a little practice it can be made to quiver, like the antennæ of one of the more intelligent and sensitive insects. Anything which gives interest to the gloomy, immobile pan of the average Canadian citizen should be cherished and not extirpated with circular scissors.

A
SMALL PLAY-READING
group of which I am one met last night and had a very good time with Goldsmith’s
She Stoops To Conquer
. Reading plays can be anything
from the pleasantest to the most penitential of pastimes. I was reading in Thomas Davies’
Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq.
a few days ago about one of King George the Second’s exploits in this direction. The King had reached the age of seventy-seven and had ceased to go to the theatre, but he was keen to hear Macklin’s farce
Love à la Mode
, and Macklin had some hope that he might be asked to read his play to the King—presumably acting it out with great spirit. But, as Davies tells us,
Love à la Mode
was read to his Majesty by an old Hanoverian gentleman, who spent eleven weeks in the misrepresentation of the author’s meaning; the German was totally void of humour and was, besides, not well acquainted with the English language; the King, however, expressed great satisfaction at the Irishman’s getting the better of his rivals, and gaining the young lady. I have myself been present at play readings which were not much livelier than this.

I
WAS PLAYING
some gramophone records last night, and one of them stuck in a groove, and before I could reach it, played the same passage at least ten times. I can remember the days when this happened quite often, and records with two or three such faults in them were prized. The owners would put them on again and again and howl delightedly when the repeats came. I recall one man who had a Harry Lauder record which did this at three separate points, and he never tired of it. But some of his friends did.… I visited my doctor, who has been gazing into the crystal ball and informs me that I have strabismus of the epithalamium, and must undergo treatment for it. I passed a window on the way home which contained packages of Fowl Conditioner, and the wild thought struck me that I
might cure myself with that, making a name for myself in the medical histories.

D
RIVING NEAR
a railway siding this morning I beheld a sight of grim beauty—a gondola loaded with bones on their way to a glue factory. The load was heaped high and the rib-cages, spines and skulls of horses and cattle were seen in silhouette against a winter sky. Skeletons of all kinds have a beauty of their own; to me a house half-built, or a tall building which is still in the steel-structure stage, is a more pleasing object than the same building completed. Why skeletons are considered frightening objects I have no idea; most people would be far handsomer without their flesh than with it and I think this holds true of animals, as well.… And yet I will admit that there was an air of austerity about this load for the bone-yard. It was a gigantic reminder of our mortality, and if Sir Thomas Browne had been riding in the car with me he would no doubt have favoured me with a few rolling periods on the subject. And although the bones in themselves were beautiful there was something depressing about the thought that they would end, in all probability, as ten-cent bottles of mucilage, and that vile substance which bookbinders use so freely in their trade.

A
S I SAT ON A
siding today I reflected upon the extraordinary slowness of our Canadian trains. There are, I know, fast trains in this country, but they never go anywhere that I want to go. The trains which I am forced to take dawdle through the countryside, squatting every now and then to cool their bellies in the snow,
while I yawn and try to read, a diversion which the lumpiness of the roadbed makes impossible. I was roused from a doze this afternoon by a fear that the train was on fire. There was no smoke, and I decided that someone must have left a pair of rubbers, or possibly a soiled baby, against the heating apparatus. But later I discovered that a man across the aisle had lit a pipe, at which he sucked with obvious enjoyment. There was a smoking section of the car, but he did not choose to go to it. Instead he blew his fetid exhalations everywhere, causing old ladies and expectant mothers to seek refuge between the cars, while men like myself, apparently in the best of health, turned grey in the face and wished for death to end our sufferings. I don’t mind pipes; I smoke a pipe myself; but this was such a pipe as the damned must smoke in Hell.

A
SCIENTIST WHOM
I know was telling me this evening that ants and spiders sing quite loudly for their size, that flies scream and that weevils make noises like rivetters as they bore into wheat grains, yet none of these cries is audible to us, being far above the sound level of our ears. As he explained, the notion struck me that possibly our prayers and entreaties are not audible to God’s ear. Perhaps as I walk in my garden ants and spiders send up the most terrific outcries to me for rain, or peace; maybe they think that I am being hard upon them when I do not answer their prayers, when the plain fact is that I do not hear them. Obviously they should lower their voices; and perhaps if we want to catch the ear of the Ancient of Days, we should moderate the eager shrillness with which we address Him.

I
WAS CORNERED
before dinner by that solemn man over there who took me to task for my attitude toward dogs; who are, he tells me, noble creatures. This grieves me, for the quarrel between me and the canine world was begun by the dogs themselves. I am the sort of man at whom dogs bark, rush wildly, and jump up. People who think that dogs are wonderful judges of character insist that this means that I have the soul of a burglar, or possibly a cat. If dogs think so poorly of me is it any wonder that I am distant in my attitude toward dogs? I get on well with horses, I mix freely with cows, cats are affable in my presence, and goats consider me one of themselves. Babies (also considered infallible judges of character) gurgle with fascination when I go near them. Old ladies ask me to help them across the street. But dogs dislike me. By a process of reasoning too complicated to go into here, this leads me to dislike dogs, and to regard them as idiotic and dangerous, or both. My household pet is the cat, which was man’s friend while the dog was still unable to distinguish itself from a wolf.

T
HIS MORNING
I had a brief chat with a gum-chewer, whose technique, I was interested to observe, was very poor. She chomped vigorously, with much wasteful jaw-movement and audible squelching. If I had had the time, I would have given her a lesson. The experienced chewer wastes no motion; he keeps his teeth together, merely nudging his quid from time to time with a single molar; he does not seek to produce the maximum of saliva, but is content with enough to keep his palate gently afloat; he does not work at his gum—
rather let us say that he cherishes it; his technique is that of the cow, rather than the cement-mixer.

A
LITTLE GIRL
was showing me some of her piano exercises today. They were simple things with fanciful names, and she seemed to like them. When I was a child piano lessons involved an intimate acquaintance with the exercises of a fiend named Carl Czerny, all of which were intended to be performed at incredible speed. The pupil of those days began with a variety of Czerny, and soon passed on to thick books called
The School of Velocity
,
The School of Finger Dexterity
and so forth until he approached a work of blood-chilling difficulty called
The Virtuoso Pianist
. I never scaled this awful eminence (I broke down and was flung aside in
Finger Dexterity
) but I heard other students playing it, and such swoops, crashes and wrist-paralyzing convulsions of sound were never heard. The object of learning all this, I was told, was so that if, in later life, one broke down in the performance of a concerto, one could always fill in with a few spasms of Czerny; the musically ignorant in the audience would never notice the difference, and the musically élite would understand that the pianist was perfectly capable of playing anything.

T
HERE
’
LL ALWAYS BE
an England while there is a U.S.A. I looked through a quantity of American magazines this afternoon and was amazed by the number of shaving creams, foods, leather goods and types of booze which are advertised with pictures of Windsor Castle, London clubs, Scotsmen in native dress and similar phenomena, suggestive of Ye Merrie Olde Englande.
The more fiercely the socialists hack at Englysshe Tradition the more avidly do their American cousins embrace it, fake it, and attach it to their consumer goods. In Britain the stately homes are turned into hostels for Labour Youth Cycling Clubs, and the velvet lawns of noble lords are ripped up by miners pretending to search for coal; meanwhile in Akron, Ohio, Antonio Spigoni shaves himself with a soap which he thinks gives him an Old Etonian appearance, and in South Bend, Indiana, Mrs. Brunnhilde Klotz stuffs her friends with Olde Nell Gwynne Tea Biscuits (made in St. Louis, Mo.). A mad world, my masters, and one half of it doesn’t know how the other half lives!

I
WAS BROUGHT UP
to believe that it was dangerous, if not downright suicidal, to eat onions. From time to time, just out of perversity, I would eat a few in a restaurant, and they always gave me pains, but they were so delicious that I could not resist them. Now, after deep thought, I have decided to conquer onions, and so yesterday I bought a very small bottle of pickled onions, and consumed two of them at lunch. I felt no ill effects during the afternoon, and so I ate two more with my evening meal. I still live, and unless I drop dead I shall continue this homeopathic approach to onions, increasing the dose each day until I am able to pick up a big, red Spanish onion and eat it like an apple.… The chief objection to onions, of course, is that they make one smell like an onion oneself. The breath of an onion-eater is a powerful weapon of offence. I am told that a glass of milk kills the smell of onions on the breath, but this must be a well-guarded secret or a lie, for I never see any onion-eaters drinking
milk, and their blow-torch breaths can be felt at forty feet.

T
HE PAPERS ARE
full of news this morning about a gravedigger who killed a girl for love. Indeed, for several weeks I have been reading about murderers and suicides who are all described as “love-crazed.” I wonder how many love-crazed people there really are? As I walk through the streets, what portion of the people I meet are in this distressing and dangerous condition? Quite a few, it appears. But from my newspaper reading I can make a few deductions about them. Most love-crazed people appear to live in boarding-houses, and a majority of them earn less than $2,000 a year. They are not extensively educated, as a usual thing, and none of them toil under the burden of a mighty intellect. But they are great lovers, and very handy with knives, pistols and blunt instruments. Very few of them have steady jobs, and not many of them belong to the skilled trades. They do not eat regularly. (It is a curious fact that most of them have been grabbing a snack—a hamburger and a soft drink or something of that kind—within three hours before they commit murder.) Their physical health is good, but they tend to be puny above the eyebrows. They are under 35. They need a good hobby and a larger circle of female acquaintance.

I
WAS TALKING TO
a man before dinner who had recently returned from England, and was full of information about the harm which he thought the socialist government had done there. For one thing, he said, the dog-boxes have disappeared from English trains. This rattled me, I confess. Not long ago there used to be
special holes between the carriages of English trains, in which dogs rode; they were happy in there, and they passed their journey in sleeping and trying to look out of a small window which other dogs had licked and blown their noses upon. But such dog-boxes are no more and dogs ride in the carriages with the people, whether Labour supporters or not. This man said that he had ridden fifty miles in a carriage with a dog as big as a calf, which stood on his feet, stuck its nose into his pockets, and beat noisily upon his newspaper with its tail.… This suggests to me that the Labour Government depends heavily upon the dog-lover vote, a very powerful political group in England where dogs are regarded as semi-sacred, along with such totems as crumpets, Brussels sprouts and umbrellas. “The voice of the people is the voice of Dog,” say these zealots.