Front matter (continued 3)

Meanwhile, I am very well indeed, thank you. If you prick me I shall still bleed. If you tickle me I shall still laugh. And with due encouragement I shall still write.

III

I was going home late last night from one of the Tube stations when my companion pointed to a group—a man in a bowler hat, reading a paper, two women and a child—sitting on a seat on the platform. "There they are," he said. "Every night and any hour, moonlight or moonless, you'll find them sitting there." "What for?" I asked. "Oh, in case there's a raid. They are taking things in time; they are running no risks. You'll see a few at most stations." And as the train passed from station to station I noticed similar little groups on the platforms, sleeping or just staring vacantly at nothing in particular, and waiting till the lights went out and they could wait no longer.

There is no discredit in taking reasonable precautions against danger, but these good people carry apprehension to excess. We need not underrate the risks of the raids, but we need not make ourselves ridiculous about them. So far as the average individual life is concerned they are almost negligible. Assuming that the circumference of danger of an exploding bomb is 90 yards, and that the Germans drop two hundred bombs a month on London, it is, I understand, calculated that it will be thirty-four years before we have all come in the zone of danger. But the Germans do not drop two hundred bombs a month, nor twenty bombs, probably not ten bombs. Let us assume, however, that they get up to an average of twenty bombs. It will be over three hundred years before we have all come within the range of peril. I do not suggest that this reflection justifies us in going out into the streets when a raid is on. It is true I may not get my turn for three hundred years, but still there is no sense in running out to see if my turn has come. So I dive below ground as promptly as anybody. It is foolish to take risks that you need not take. But it is not less foolish to go and sit for hours every night on a Tube station platform, not because there is a raid, but because there may be a raid.

This is carrying the fear of death to extremities. I have referred to Cæsar's sane axiom on the subject, and to his refusal to take what seemed to others reasonable precautions against danger. In the end he was murdered, but in the meantime he had lived as no one whose life is one nervous apprehension of danger can possibly live. You may, of course, carry this philosophy of fearless living to excess. Smalley, in his reminiscences, tells us that when King Edward (then Prince of Wales) was staying at Homburg he said one day to Lord Hartington (the late Duke of Devonshire), "Hartington, you ought not to drink all that champagne." "No, sir, I know I ought not," said Hartington. "Then why do you do it?" "Well, sir, I have made up my mind that I would rather be ill now and then than always taking care of myself." "Oh, you think that now, but when the gout comes what do you think then?" "Sir, if you will ask me then I will tell you. I do not anticipate."

I do not commend Hartington's example for imitation any more than the example of those forlorn little groups on the Tube platforms. He was not refusing, like Cæsar, to be bullied by vague fears; he was, for the sake of a present pleasure, laying up a store of tolerably certain misery. It was not a case of fearless living, but of careless living, which is quite another thing. But at least he got a present pleasure for his recklessness, while the people who hoard up life like misers, and see the shadow of death stalking them all the time, do not live at all. They only exist. They are like Chesterfield in his later years. "I am become a vegetable," he said. "I have been dead twelve years, but I don't want any one to know about it." Those people in the Tube are quite dead, although they don't know about it. What is more, they have never been alive.

You cannot be alive unless you take life gallantly. You know that the Great Harvester is tracking you all the time, and that one day, perhaps quite suddenly, his scythe will catch you and lay you among the sheaves of the past. Every day and every hour he is remorselessly at your heels. A breath of bad air will do his work, or the prick of a pin, or a fall on the stairs, or a draught from the window. You can't take a ride in a bus, or a row in a boat, or a swim in the sea, or a bat at the wicket without offering yourself as a target for the enemy. I have myself seen a batsman receive a mortal blow from a ball driven by his companion at the wicket. Why, those people so forlornly dodging death in the Tube were not out of the danger zone. They were probably in more peril sitting there nursing their fears, lowering their vitality, and incubating death than they would have been going about their reasonable tasks in the fresh air above. You may die from the fear of death. I am not preaching Nietzche's gospel of "Live dangerously." There is no need to try to live dangerously, and no sense in going about tweaking the nose of death to show what a deuce of a fellow you are. The truth is that we cannot help living dangerously. Life is a dangerous calling, full of pitfalls. You, getting the coal in the mine by the light of your lamp, are living with death very, very close at hand. You, on the railway shunting trucks, you in the factory or the engine-shop moving in a maze of machinery, you, in the belly of the ship stoking the fire—all alike are in an adventure that may terminate at any moment. Let us accept the fact like men, and dismiss it like men, going about our tasks as though we had all eternity to live in, not foolishly challenging profitless perils, but, on the other hand, declining to be intimidated by the shadow of the scythe that dogs our steps.

IV

It is, I suppose, a common experience that our self-valuations are not fixed but fluctuating. Sometimes the estimate is extravagantly high; sometimes, but less frequently, it is too low. There are people, no doubt, whose vanity is so vast that no drafts upon it make any appreciable difference to the fund. It is as inexhaustible as the horn of Skrymir. And there are others whose humility is so established that no emotion of vain-glory ever visits them. But the generality of us go up and down according to the weather, our health, our fortune and a hundred trifles good or bad. We are like corks on the wave, sometimes borne buoyantly on the crest of the heaving sea of circumstance, then sinking into the trough of the billows. At this moment I am in the trough. I have been passing through one of those chastening experiences which reveal to us how unimportant we are to the world. When we are in health we bustle about and talk and trade and write and push and thrust and haggle and bargain and feel that we are tremendous fellows. However would the world get on without us? we say. What would become of the office? Who could put those schemes through that I have in hand? What on earth would that dear fellow Robinson do without my judgment to lean on? What would become of Jones if he no longer met me after lunch at the club for a quiet and confidential talk? How would The Star survive without...

And so we inflate ourselves with a comfortable conceit, and feel that we are really the hub of things, and that if anything goes wrong with us there will be a mournful vacuum in society. Then some day the bubble of our vanity is pricked. We are gently laid aside, deflated and humble, the world forgetting, by the world forgot. Our empire has shrunk to the dimensions of a sick-room, and there fever plays its wild dramas, turning the innocent patterns of the wall-paper into fantastic shapes, and fearsome conflicts, filling our unquiet slumbers with dreadful phantoms that, waking, we try to seize, only to fall back defeated and helpless. And then follow the days—those peaceful days—of sheer collapse, when you just lie back on the pillow and look hour by hour at the ceiling, desiring nothing and thinking of nothing, and when the doctor, feeling your stagnant pulse, says, "Yes, you have had a bad shaking."

These are the days of illumination. Outside the buses rumble by, and you know they are crowded with people going down to or returning from the great whirlpool. And you realise that the mighty world is thundering on in the old way as though it had never heard of you. Fleet Street roars by night and day in happy unconcern of you; your absence from "the Gallery" in the afternoon is unnoted by a soul; Robinson gives one thought to you, and then turns to his work as though nothing had happened; Jones misses you after lunch, but is just as happy with Brown; and The Star—well, The Star ... yes, the painful fact has to be faced.... The Star goes on its radiant path as though you had only been a fly on its wheel.

It is a humbling experience. This, then, was all your high-blown pride amounted to. You were just a bubble on the surface, a snowflake on the river—a moment there, then gone for ever. This is the foretaste of death. When that comes the waters will just close over your head as they have closed now—a comment here and there, perhaps friendly, perhaps critical, a few tears it may be, and—oblivion. It is an old story—old as humanity. You remember those verses of Dean Swift on the news of his own death, with what airy jests and indifference it was received in this and that haunt where he had played so great a part. It comes to a card party who affect to receive it in "doleful dumps."

That is the way of it. Your friend is dead: you heave a sigh and lead a heart.

Listen to that thrush outside. How he is going it! He, too, on this bright March morning sings of the world's indifference—the indifference of the joyous, living world to those who have crept to their holes. I hear in his voice the news of the coming of spring, and know that down at "the cottage" the crocuses are out in the garden and the dark beech woods are turning to brown, and the lark is springing up into the blue like a flame of song. How I have loved this pageantry of nature, these days of revelation and promise. I used to think that I was a part of them, but now I know that the pageant goes forward in sublime unconsciousness that I am no longer in the audience.

And so I lie and look at the ceiling and feel humble and disillusioned. I have discovered that the world goes on very well without me, and I am not sure that it is not worth spending a week or two in bed to learn that salutary lesson. When I return to the world I fancy I shall have lost some of my ancient swagger. I shall feel like a modest intruder upon a society that has shown it has no need for me. I may recover my feeling of importance in time, but in my secret heart I shall know that I am not the hub but only a fly on the mighty wheel of things. I can skip off and no one is any the wiser.

ON CLOTHES

There is one respect in which the war has brought us a certain measure of relief. It is no longer necessary to lie awake o' nights thinking about your clothes. There are some people, of course, who like thinking about their clothes. They seem to regard themselves as perambulating shop window models on which to hang things, and if you take away that subject from their conversation they are bankrupt. When I was coming down on the bus the other afternoon I could not help overhearing snatches of a conversation which was going on between two women in the seat behind me. It was conducted with great volubility and seriousness, and it came to me in scraps like this: "No, I don't like that shade.... I saw a beautiful hat at So-and-So's at Kensington; only 25s.; it was ... Yes, she has nice taste and always looks ... No, brocaded..." And so on without a pause for the space of half an hour.

I don't offer that conversation as representative. I imagine that in the lump women are thinking less about dress to-day from the merely ornamental point of view than they ever did. If you spend twelve hours a day on a bus or a tram in a blue uniform and leggings, or driving a Carter Paterson van in a mackintosh and a sou'wester, or filling shells in a yellow overall, dress cannot occupy quite its old dominion over your thoughts. You will think more about comfort and less about finery. And that, according to Herbert Spencer, is an evidence of a higher intelligence. The more barbaric you are the more you regard dress from the point of view of ornament and the less from the point of view of utility. It is a hard saying for the West End of life. Spencer, to illustrate his point, mentions that the African attendants of Captain Speke strutted about in their goatskin mantles when the weather was fine, but when it was wet took them off, folded them up, and went about naked and shivering in the rain.

A talk like that of the two women on the bus would not be possible among men; but that does not mean that they have souls above finery. It is not good form among them to talk about dress—that is all. But that many of them think about it as seriously as women do, if less continuously, is certain. Pepys' Diary is strewn with such self-revelations as "This morning came home my fine Camlett cloak, with gold buttons, and a silk suit, which cost me much money, and I pray God to make me able to pay for it." He ought to have thought of that earlier. No one is entitled to order fine clothes and then throw the responsibility for paying for them on the Almighty. At least he might have prayed to God on the subject before approaching the tailor. The case of Goldsmith was not less conspicuous. He was as vain as a peacock, and refused to go into the Church because he loved to wear bright clothes. And his spirit is not dead among men. Who can look upon the large white spats of —— —— as he comes down the floor of the House without feeling that he is as dress-conscious as a milliner.

I am not speaking with disrespect of the well-dressed man (I do not mean the over-dressed man: he is an offence). I would be well-dressed myself if I knew how, but I have no gift that way. Like Squire Shallow, I am always in the rearward of the fashion. I find that with rare exceptions I dislike new fashions. They disturb my tranquillity. They give me a nasty jolt. I suspect that the explanation is that beneath my intellectual radicalism there lurks a temperamental conservatism, a love of sleepy hollows and quiet havens and the old grass-grown turnpikes of habit. It is no uncommon paradox. Spurgeon had it like many others. He was once rebuked by a friend for his political activity on the Liberal side. Why did he yield to this weakness? "You ought to mortify the Old Man," said his friend. "I do mortify him," said Spurgeon. "You see my Old Man is a Tory and I make him vote Liberal. That mortifies him." I am conscious of the same conflict, and in the matter of clothes the Old Man of Toryism is an easy winner.

It was so with Carlyle. He raged like a bear with a sore head against the existing political fashion of things, but in the matter of clothes he was a mere antediluvian, and when he wanted a new suit he simply wrote to the little country tailor in far-off Ecclefechan and told him to send another "as before." And so, by taking no thought about the matter, he achieved the distinction in appearance which the people who worry about clothes do not achieve. The flavour of the antique world hung about him like a fragrance, as, but yesterday, it hung about Lord Courtney who looked like a reminiscence of the world of our grandfathers walking our streets to the rebuke of a frivolous generation.

I cannot claim to exhale this fine essence of the past. I am just an ordinary camp-follower of the fashions, too perverse to march with the main army, too timid to ignore it, but just hanging on its skirts as it were, a forlorn relic of the year before last. My taste in ties, I am assured, is execrable. My clothes are lacking in style, and my boots have an unconquerable tendency to shapelessness. I put on whatever is handiest without a thought of artistic design. My pockets bulge with letters and books, and I am constantly reminded by well-meaning people that the top button of my waistcoat is unbuttoned. I am perfectly happy until I come into contact with the really well-dressed man who has arranged himself on a conscious scheme, and looks like a sartorial poem. I lunched with such a man a few days ago. I could not help envying the neat perfection of everything about him, and I know, as his eye wandered to my tie, that there was something there that made him shudder as a harsh discord in music would make me shudder. It may have been the wrong shade; it may have been awry; it may have been anything that it oughtn't to have been. I shall never know.

And it is a great joy to be able not to care. The war has lightened the cloud that hangs over those of us who simply cannot be dressy no matter how much we try. It is no longer an offence to appear a little secondhand. It is almost a virtue. You may wear your oldest clothes and look the whole world in the face and defy its judgments. You may claim that your baggy knees are a sacrifice laid on the altar of patriotism and that the hat of yester-year is another nail in the coffin of the Kaiser. A distinguished Parliamentarian, a man who has sat in Cabinets, boasted to me the other day that he had not bought a suit of clothes since the war began, and I had no difficulty in believing the statement.

That is the sort of example that makes me happy. It gives me the feeling that I am at last really in the fashion—the fashion of old and unconsidered clothes. It is a very comfortable fashion. It saves you worry and it saves you money. I hope it will continue when the war has become a memory. And if we want a literary or historical warrant for it we may go to old Montaigne. When he was a young fellow without means, he says somewhere, he decked himself out in brave apparel to show the world that he was a person of consequence; but when he came to his fortune he went in sober attire and left his estates and his châteaux to speak for him. That is the way of us unfashionable folk. We leave our estates and our châteaux to speak for us.

THE DUEL THAT FAILED

"I think," said my friend, "that the war will end when the Germans know they are beaten. No, that is not quite so banal a prophecy as it seems. Wars do not always end with the knowledge of defeat. They only end with the admission of defeat, which is quite another thing. The Civil War dragged on for a year after the South knew that they were beaten. All that bloodshed in the Wilderness was suffered in the teeth of the incontrovertible fact that it was in vain. But the man or the nation which adopts the philosophy of the bully does not fight when the certainty of victory has changed into the certainty of defeat. I have never known a bully who was not a coward when his back was to the wall. The French are at their best in the hour of defeat. There was nothing so wonderful in the story of Napoleon as that astonishing campaign of 1814, and even in 1870-1 it was the courage of France when all was lost that was the most heroic phase of the war. But the bully collapses when the stimulus of victory has deserted him.

"Let me tell you a story. In 1883, having graduated at Dublin, I went to Heidelberg—alt Heidelberg du feine. You know that jolly city, and the students who swagger along the street, their faces seamed with the scars of old sword cuts. I was one of a group of young fellows from different countries who were studying at the University, and who fraternised in a strange land.

"It was about the time when the safety bicycle was introduced in England, and one of our group, a young Polish nobleman who had a great passion for English things, got a machine sent over to him from London. If not the first, it was certainly one of the first machines of the kind that had appeared in Heidelberg. You may remember how strange it seemed even to the English public when it first came out. We had got accustomed to the old high bicycle, and the 'Safety' looked ridiculous and babyish by comparison.

"Well, in Heidelberg the appearance of the young Pole on his 'Safety' created something like a sensation. The sports of the 'Englander' were held in contempt by the students, and this absurd toy was the last straw. It was the very symbol of the childishness of a nation given over to the sport of babes.

"One day the Pole was riding out on his bicycle when he passed a couple of students, who shouted opprobrious epithets at the 'Englander' and his preposterous vehicle. The Pole turned round, flung some verbal change back at them, and rode on his way.

"That evening as he sat in his room he heard steps ascending the stairs, and there entered two students clothed in all the formality of grave business. They had brought the Pole a challenge to a duel from each of the two young fellows with whom he had exchanged words on the road. The challenges were couched in the most ruthless terms. This was to be no mere nominal satisfaction of honour. It was to be a duel without guards or any of those restrictions that are common in such affairs. The weapon was the sword, and the time-limit eight days.

"The seconds having fulfilled their errand went away, leaving the Pole in no cheerful frame of mind. He was only a very indifferent swordsman, and had never cultivated the sport of duelling. Now suddenly he was faced with the necessity of fighting a duel in which he would certainly be beaten, and might be killed, for he understood the intentions of the challengers. It was clearly not possible for him to acquire in a week such expertness with the sword as would give him a chance of victory.

"In this emergency he came along to the little group of which I have spoken. We were playing cards when he entered, but stopped when we saw that something unusual had happened. He told us the story of the bicycle ride and the sequel. What was he to do? He must fight, of course, but how was he to get a dog's chance?

"Now the oldest of our group, and by far the most worldly wise, was an American. He listened to the Pole and agreed that there was no time for him to become sufficiently expert with the sword. 'But can you shoot?' he asked the Pole. Yes, he was not a bad shot. The American took up an ace from a pack of cards and held it up. 'Could you, standing where you are, hit that ace with a revolver?' 'I am not sure that I could hit it,' answered the Pole, 'but I should come very near it.' 'That's all right,' said the American. 'Now to business. These fellows have forgotten something. They're so used to fighting with the sword that they've forgotten there's such a thing as the revolver. And they're trying to bluff you into their own terms. They've forgotten, or don't choose to remember, that, as the challenged party, you have choice of weapons. Now we'll draw up an answer to this letter, accepting the challenge, claiming the choice of weapons, choosing the revolver, and putting the conditions as stiff as we can make 'em.'

"So we sat around the American and composed the reply. And I can assure you it had a very ugly look. The Pole signed it with great delight, and the American and I as seconds delivered it.

"Then we waited. One day passed without an answer—two, three, four, five, six. Still no answer. We were enjoying ourselves. On the evening of the seventh day the seconds reappeared at the Pole's rooms. They brought no acceptance of his challenge, but an impudent demand for the original conditions. The Pole came along to us with the news. 'That's all right,' said the American. 'We've got them on the run. Now to clinch the business.' And once more we sat round in great glee to draft the reply. It was as hot as we knew how to make it. It breathed death in every syllable, and it gave the Germans eight days to prepare for the end at the muzzle of the revolver.

"Again we waited, and again the days passed without a sign. Then on the eve of the eighth day the seconds once more appeared. I was present with the Pole at the time. I have never seen a more forlorn pair than those seconds made as they entered. Their principals, driven into a corner, faced with the alternative of fighting with weapons which did not assure them of victory or of accepting the humiliation of running away, had decided to run away. They would not fight on the conditions offered by the Pole, and the seconds were a spectacle of humiliation. Their apologies to us struggled with their indignation at their principals and they went away a chastened spectacle. That night we had a gay gathering with the American in the chair, and I think the incident must have got wind abroad, for thenceforward the Pole rode his Safety in peace and in triumph....

"You may think that story is a trifle. Well, it is. But I think it has some bearing on the end of the war."

ON EARLY RISING

There is no period of the year when my spirit is so much at war with the flesh as this. For the winter is over, and the woods are browning and the choristers of the fields are calling me to matins—and I do not go. Spiritually I am an early riser. I have a passion for the dawn and the dew on the grass, and the "early pipe of half-awakened birds." On the rare occasions on which I have gone out to meet the sun upon the upland lawn or on the mountain tops I have experienced an emotion that perhaps no other experience can give. I remember a morning in the Tyrol when I had climbed Kitzbulhorn to see the sun rise. I saw the darkness changing to chill grey, but no beam of sunlight came through the massed clouds that barred the east. Feeling that my night climb had been in vain, I turned round to the west, and there, by a sort of magical reflection, I saw the sunrise. A beam of light, invisible to the east, had pierced the clouds and struck the mountains in the west. It seemed to turn them to molten gold, and as it moved along the black mass it was as though a vast torch was setting the world aflame. And I remembered that fine stanza of Clough's:

And there was that other dawn which I saw, from the icy ridge of the Petersgrat, turning the snow-clad summits of the Matterhorn, the Weisshorn, and Mont Blanc to a magic realm of rose-tinted battlements.

And there are others. But they are few, for though I am spiritually a son of the morning, I am physically a sluggard. There are some people who are born with a gift for early rising. I was born with a genius for lying in bed. I can go to bed as late as anybody, and have no joy in a company that begins to yawn and grow drowsy about ten o'clock. But in the early rising handicap I am not a starter. A merciful providence has given me a task that keeps me working far into the night and makes breakfast and the newspaper in bed a matter of duty. No words can express the sense of secret satisfaction with which I wake and realise that I haven't to get up, that stern duty bids me lie a little longer, listening to the comfortable household noises down below and the cheerful songs outside, studying anew the pattern of the wall-paper and taking the problems of life "lying-down" in no craven sense.

I know there are many people who have to catch early morning buses and trams who would envy me if they knew my luck. For the ignoble family of sluggards is numerous. It includes many distinguished men. It includes saints as well as sages. That moral paragon, Dr. Arnold, was one of them; Thomson, the author of "The City of Dreadful Night," was another. Bishop Selwyn even put the duty of lying in bed on a moral plane. "I did once rise early," he said, "but I felt so vain all the morning and so sleepy all the afternoon that I determined not to do it again." He stayed in bed to mortify his pride, to make himself humble. And is not humility one of the cardinal virtues of a good Christian? I have fancied myself that people who rise early are slightly self-righteous. They can't help feeling a little scornful of us sluggards. And we know it. Humility is the badge of all our tribe. We are not proud of lying in bed. We are ashamed—and happy. The noblest sluggard of us all has stated our case for us. "No man practises so well as he writes," said Dr. Johnson. "I have all my life been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good."

Of course we pay the penalty. We do not catch the early worm. When we turn out all the bargains have gone, and we are left only with the odds and ends. From a practical point of view, we have no defence. We know that an early start is the secret of success. It used to be said of the Duke of Newcastle that he always went about as though he had got up half an hour late, and was trying all day to catch it up. And history has recorded what a grotesque failure he was in politics. When someone asked Nelson for the secret of his success he replied: "Well, you see, I always manage to be a quarter of an hour in front of the other fellow." And the recipe holds good to-day. When the inner history of the battle of the Falkland Islands is told in detail it will be found that it was the early start insisted on by the one man of military genius and vision we have produced in this war that gave us that priceless victory.

And if you have ever been on a walking tour or a cycling tour you know that early rising is the key of the business. Start early and you are master of your programme and your fate. You can linger by the way, take a dip in the mountain tarn, lie under the shadow of a great rock in the hot afternoon, and arrive at the valley inn in comfortable time for the evening meal. Start late and you are the slave of the hours. You chase them with weary feet, pass the tarn with the haste of a dispatch bearer though you are dying for a bathe, and arrive when the roast and boiled are cleared away and the merry company are doing a "traverse" around the skirting board of the billiard room. Happy reader, if you know the inn I mean—the jolly inn at Wasdale Head.

No, whether from the point of view of business or pleasure, worldly wisdom or spiritual satisfaction, there is nothing to be said in our defence. All that we can say for lying in bed is what Foote—I think it was Foote—said about the rum. "I went into a public-house," he said, "and heard one man call for some rum because he was hot, and another call for some rum because he was cold. Then I called for some rum because I liked it." We sluggards had better make the same clean breast of the business. We lie in bed because we like it. Just that. Nothing more. We like it. We claim no virtue, ask no indulgence, accept with humility the rebukes of the strenuous.

As for me, I have a licence—nay, I have more; I have a duty. It is my duty to lie in bed o' mornings until the day is well aired. For I burn the midnight oil, and the early blackbird—the first of our choir to awake—has often saluted me on my way home. Therefore I lie in bed in the morning looking at the ceiling and listening to the sounds of the busy world without a twinge of conscience. If you were listening, you would hear me laugh softly to myself as I give the pillow another shake and thank providence for having given me a job that enables me to enjoy the privileges of the sluggard without incurring the odium that he so richly deserves.

ON BEING KNOWN

I went into a tailor's in the West End the other day to order some clothes. My shadow rarely darkens a tailor's door, and this tailor's door it had never darkened before. I was surprised therefore, when, after the preliminaries of measurement were finished, the attendant, in reply to a question about a deposit, said "No deposit is necessary. The name is good enough." I confess I felt the compliment as an agreeable shock. The request for a deposit always jars on me. I know that "business is business" and that in this wilderness of London it is no dishonour to be unknown and no discredit to be formally discredited; but yet ... And here was a man I had never seen before and who had never seen me, who was prepared to execute my order without any sordid assurances of character on my side—simply on my name. Such a tribute needed some recognition. "It will save trouble," said I, "if I pay the account now." And I did so. I fancy the action was a little childish, but I couldn't help it. I really couldn't. I simply had to do something civil, and this was the only civil thing that occurred to me.

And then I went out of the shop feeling that I had come suddenly into an unexpected and pleasing inheritance. I knew now something of the emotion of Mr. Sholes, the eminent author:

I might not be able to write such delectable gup as Mr. Sholes, but I could write gup good enough to make that fellow in the shop trust me for a six-guinea suit. I did not observe that the policeman took any particular notice of me as I passed along. But—"Give me time," said I, addressing the shade of Mr. Sholes. "Give me time. I have made a start in the handicap of the famous. I am known to that excellent shopman. I may yet be known (favourably and admiringly) to the police. I may yet walk the Strand with a nimbus that will challenge Mr. Horatio Bottomley and Mr. Pemberton Billing and the illustrious great. I may yet have the agreeable consciousness that heads are turning in my direction, and that the habitual Londoner is saying to his country cousin: 'That, my dear Jane, is the eminent Mr. Alpha of the Plough who writes those articles in The Star.' ... Give me time, Mr. Sholes. Give me time."

But as I walked on and as that momentary flash of the limelight faded from me I became less confident that I wanted to live in it. I became sensible of the pleasures of obscurity. I strolled along untroubled by the curious, and enjoyed the pageant of the pavement, the display of dress, the diversity of faces, the play of light in the eyes, the incidents of the streets. I paused in front of shops and fell into a reverie before the window of the incomparable Mr. Bumpus—the window of stately books in noble bindings. I was submerged in the tide of the common life and felt the enfranchisement of the obscure. I could walk which way I pleased and no one would remark me; pause when I liked and be unobserved. But—why, here is Lord French of Ypres coming along. See how heads are turning and fingers are pointing and tongues are wagging—"That, my dear Jane..." What a nuisance this limelight must be!

And if you are really conspicuous you cannot trust yourself out of doors—unless you have the courage of John Burns, who does not care two pins who sees him or talks about him. The King, poor man, could no more walk along this pavement as I am doing, rubbing shoulders with the people and enjoying the comedy of life, than he could write to the newspapers, or address a crowd from the plinth of the Nelson Monument, or go to a booking-office and take a ticket for the Tube, or into an A.B.C. shop and ask for a cup of tea, or any of the thousand and one things that I am at liberty to do and enjoy doing without let or hindrance, comment or disturbance. He is the prisoner of publicity. He is pursued by the limelight, as the fleeing soul of the poet was pursued by the hound of heaven. He can't look in Bumpus's. He can't go on to an allotment and dig undisturbed. You cannot have limelight playing about an allotment. In fact, the more one thinks of it the more impoverished his life seems, and so in a lesser degree with all the eminent people who are pursued by the photographer, mobbed in the streets, fawned on by their friends, slandered by their enemies, exalted or defamed in the Press, and dissected in every club smoking-room and bar parlour.

But, you will say, think of the glory of having your name handed down to posterity. It is a very questionable privilege. I am not much concerned about posterity. I respect it, as Wordsworth respected it. "What has posterity done for me that I should consider it?" some one said to him, and he replied, "No, but the past has done much for you." It was a just reminder of our obligations. But it is a lean ambition to pose for posterity. I cannot thrill to the vision of the trumpeter Fame blowing my name down the corridors of time while I sleep on unheeding in

I am not warmed by the idea of a marble image standing with outstretched arm in the Abbey or sitting on a horse for ever in the streets, wet or fine, or perched up on a towering column to be a convenience to vagrant birds. If fame is often a nuisance to the living, it is only an empty echo for the dead. Spare me marble trappings, good friends, and give me the peace of forgetfulness.

By the time I had reached the end of my walk and my ruminations, I felt less cordial towards that man in the shop. I wished, on the whole, that he had asked for the deposit.

ON A MAP OF THE OBERLAND

I was rummaging among my books this morning when I came across Frey's map of the Bernese Oberland, and forthwith forgot the object of my search in the presence of this exhilarating discovery. Mr. Chesterton, I think, once described how he evoked the emotions of a holiday by calling a cab, piling it up with luggage, and driving to the station. Then, having had his sensation, he drove home again. It seemed to me rather a poor way of taking an imaginative holiday. One might as well heat an empty oven in order to imagine a feast. The true medium of the spiritual holiday is the map. That is the magic carpet that whisks you away from this sodden earth and unhappy present to sunny lands and serener days.

There are times when books offer no escape from the burden of things, when, as Mr. Biglow says

but there are no circumstances in which a map will not do the trick. I do not care whether it is a map of the known or the unknown, the visited or the unvisited, the real or the fanciful. It was the jolly map which Stevenson invented in an idle hour which became the seed of "Treasure Island." That is how a map stimulated his fancy and sent it out on a career of immortal adventure. And though you have not Stevenson's genius for describing the adventure, that is what a map will do for you if you have a spark of the boy's love of romance left in your soul. It is the "magic casement" of the poet. I have never crossed the Atlantic in the flesh, but, lord, what spiritual adventures I have had with maps in the enchanted world on the other side! I have sailed with Drake in Nombre Dios Bay, and navigated the grim straits with Magellan, and lived with the Incas of Peru and the bloody Pizarro, and gone up the broad bosom of the Amazon into fathomless forests, and sailed through the Golden Gates on golden afternoons, and stood with Cortes "silent upon a peak in Darien." I know the Shenandoah Valley far better than I know Wimbledon Common, and have fought over every inch of it by the side of Stonewall Jackson, just as I have lived in the mazes of the Wilderness with Grant and Lee.

Do not tell me I have never been to these places and a thousand others like them. I swear that I have. I have traversed them all in the kingdom of the mind, and if you will give me a map and a rainy day (like this) I will go on a holiday more entrancing than any that Mr. Cook ever planned. It is not taking tickets that makes the traveller. I have known people who have gone round the world without seeing anything, while Thoreau could stay in his back garden and entertain the universe.

But if maps of the unvisited earth have the magic of romance in them, maps of the places you have known have a fascination no less rich and deep. They, too, take you out on a holiday, but it is a holiday of memory and not of the imagination. You are back with yourself in other days and in other places and with other friends. You may tell me that this was a dreary, rainy morning, sir, and that I spent it looking out over the dismal valley and the sad cornfields with their stricken crops. Nothing of the sort. I spent it in the Bernese Oberland, with an incomparable companion. Three weeks I put in, sir, three weeks on the glaciers. See, there, on this glorious map of Frey's, is Mürren, from whence we started. In front is the mighty snow mass of the Jungfrau, the Mönch and the Eiger, shutting out the glacier solitudes whither we are bound.

There goes our track up the ravine to Obersteinberg and there is the Mütthorn hut, standing on the bit of barren rock that sticks out from the great ice-billows of the Tschingelhorn glacier. Do you remember, companion of mine, the mighty bowls of steaming tea we drank when we reached that haven of refuge? And do you remember our start from the hut at two o'clock in the morning, roped with our guide and with our lanterns lit—and the silence of our march over the snow and ice beneath the glittering stars, and the hollow boom of distant avalanches, and the breaking of the wondrous dawn over the ice-fields, and the unforgettable view as we reached the ridge of the Petersgrat and saw across the Rhone Valley the great mountain masses beyond—the Weisshorn, the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc, and the rest—touched to an unearthly beauty by the flush of the new-risen sun? And the scramble up the Tschingelhorn, and the long grind down the ice-slopes and the moraine to the seclusion of the Lotschenthal? And then the days that followed in the great ice region behind the Jungfrau; the long, silent marches over pathless snows and by yawning crevasses, the struggle up peaks in the dawn, and the nights in the huts, sometimes with other climbers who blew in across the snows from some remote adventure, sometimes alone as in that tiny hut on the Finsteraarhorn, where we paid three and a half francs for a bunch of wood to boil our kettle?

There is the Oberaar hut standing on the ledge of a dizzy precipice. Do you remember the sunset we saw from thence, when out of the general gloom of the conquering night one beam from the vanished sun caught the summit of the Dom and made it gleam like a palace in the heavens or like the towers of the radiant city that Christian saw across the dark river? And there at the end of the journey is the great glacier that leaps down, seven thousand feet, between the Schreckhorn and the Wetterhorn, to the gracious valley of Grindelwald. How innocent it looks on this map, but what a day of gathering menace was that when we got caught between the impassable crevasses, and night came on and the rain came down and ... But let the magic carpet hasten slowly here....

It was still dark when Heinrich of the Looking Glass leapt up from our bed of hay in the Dolfuss hut, lit the candle and began to prepare the breakfast. Outside, the rain fell in torrents and the clouds hung thick and low over glacier and peaks. Our early start for the Gleckstein hut was thwarted. Night turned to dawn and dawn to day, and still the rain pelted down on that vast solitude of rock and ice. Then the crest of the Finstraarhorn appeared through a rent in the clouds, patches of blue broke up the grey menace of the sky, the rain ceased. Otmar and Heinrich hastily washed the iron cups and plates and swept the floor of the hut, and then, shouldering our rucksacks and closing the door of the empty hut, we scrambled down the rocks to the glacier.

It was 8.15 and the guidebooks said it was a seven hours' journey to the Gleckstein. That seemed to leave ample margin; but do not trust guide-books in a season of drought when the crevasses are open.

This wisdom, however, came later. All through the morning we made excellent progress. The sun shone, the clouds hung lightly about the peaks, the ice was in excellent condition. Heinrich, who brought up the rear, occasionally broke into song. Now, when Heinrich sings you know that all is well. When he whistles you are in a tight place. For the rest he is silent. Otmar, his brother, is less communicative. He goes on ahead silently under all conditions, skirting crevasses, testing snow-bridges to see if they will bear, occasionally pausing to consult his maps. Once only did he burst into song that day—but of that later. Otmar is an autocrat on the ice or the rocks. In the hut he will make your tea and oil your boots and help Heinrich to wash your cups and sweep the floor. But out in the open he is your master. If you ask him inconvenient questions he does not hear. If you suggest a second breakfast before it is due his silence as he pounds forward ahead humiliates you. If your pace slackens there is a rebuke in the taut insistence of the rope.

It was eleven when we halted for our cold tea and sardines (white wine for Otmar and Heinrich). The pause gave Heinrich an opportunity of taking out his pocket looking-glass and touching up his moustache ends and giving a flick to his eye-brows. Heinrich is as big and brawny as an ox, but he has the soul of a dandy.

It had been easy going on the furrowed face of the ice, but when we came to the snow slope that leads to the Lauteraar saddle our pace slackened. The snow was soft, and we sank at each step up to our shins. Otmar eased the passage up the slope by zigzagging, but it was one o'clock when we came face to face with the wall of snow, flanked by walls of rock, which form the "saddle." Otmar led my companion over the rocks; but decided that Heinrich should bring me up the snow face. Step cutting is slow work, and though Otmar, having reached the top of the saddle, threw down a second rope, which Heinrich lashed round his waist, it was two o'clock before that terrible wall was surmounted, and we could look down the great glacier that plunged seven thousand feet down into the hollow where Grindelwald lay with its red roofs and pleasant pastures, its hotels and its tourists.

We had taken nearly six hours to surmount the pass; but we seemed, nevertheless, to have the day well in hand. Four thousand feet down on a spur of the Wetterhorn we could see the slate roof of the Gleckstein hut. It seemed an easy walk over the glacier, but in these vast solitudes of ice and snow and rock, vision is deceptive. The distant seems incredibly near, for the familiar measurements of the eye are wanting.

The weather had changed again. Clouds had settled on the mighty cliffs of the Schreckhorn on our left and the Wetterhorn on our right. Mist was rolling over the pass; rain began to fall. We cut short our lunch (cold tea, cold veal, bread and jam), and began our descent, making a wide detour of the glacier to the right in the direction of the Wetterhorn. We descended a rocky precipice that cleaves the glacier, crossed an ice slope on which Otmar had to cut steps, and came in view of Grindelwald, lying like a picture postcard far down below—so immediately below that it seemed that one might fling a stone down into its midst.

At half-past three it began to dawn on me that things were not going well. Otmar had, during the past three weeks, been the most skilful of guides over most of the great glacier passes of the Oberland and up many a peak; but so far we had seen nothing like the condition of the Grindtlwaldfirn. The appalling slope of this great sea of ice makes a descent in normal times a task of difficulty. But this year the long drought had left open all the yawning crevasses with which it is seamed, and its perils were infinitely increased.

Again and again Otmar sought a way out of the maze, taking us across perilous snow bridges and cutting steps on knife-edges of ice where one looked down the glittering slope on one side, and into the merciless green-blue depths of the crevasse on the other. But wherever he turned he was baulked. Always the path led to some vast fissure which could be neither leapt nor bridged. Once we seemed to have escaped and glissaded swiftly down. Then the slope got steeper and we walked—steeper and Otmar began cutting steps in the ice—steeper and Otmar paused and looked down the leap of the glacier. We stood silent for his verdict. "It will not go." We turned on the rope without a word, and began remounting our steps.

It was half-past four. The mist was thickening, the rain falling steadily. Below, the red roofs and green pastures of Grindelwald gleamed in the sunlight of the valley. Nearer, the slate roof of the Gleckstein on its spur of rock was still visible. Two hours before it had seemed but a step to either. Now they seemed to have receded to another hemisphere.

For the first time there flashed through the mind the thought that possibly we should not reach the hut after all. A night on the glacier, or rather on the dark ridges of the Wetterhorn! A wet night, too.

The same thought was working in Otmar's mind. No word came from him, no hint that he was concerned. But the whole bearing of the man was changed. In the long hours of the morning he had led us listlessly and silently; now he was like a hound on the trail. The tug of the rope became more insistent. He made us face difficulties that he had skirted before; took us on to snow-bridges that made the mind reel; slashed steps with his ice axe with a swift haste that spoke in every stroke of the coming night. Once I failed to take a tricky snow ridge that came to a point between two crevasses, slipped back, and found myself in the crevasse, with my feet dancing upon nothing. The rope held; Otmar hauled me out without a word, and we resumed our march.

Heinrich had been unroped earlier and sent to prospect from above for a possible way out. We followed at his call, but he led us into new mazes, down into a great cavern in the glacier, where we passed over the ruined walls and buttresses of an ice cathedral, emerging on the surface of the glacier again, only to find ourselves once more checked by impassable gulfs.

It was now half-past five. We had been three and a half hours in vainly attempting to find a way down the ice. The mist had come thick upon us. The peaks were blotted out, Grindelwald was blotted out; the hut was no longer visible. Only an hour and a half of light remained, and the whole problem was still unsolved. The possibility of a night on the ice or the rocks began to approach the sphere of certainty. My strength was giving out, and I slipped again and again in the ice steps. A kind of dull resignation had taken possession of the mind. One went forward in a stupor, responsive to the tug of the rope, but indifferent to all else.

Otmar was now really concerned. He came from a valley south of the Rhone, and was unfamiliar with this pass; but he is of a great strain of Alpine guides, is proud of his achievements—he had led in the first ascent of the Zmutt ridge of the Matterhorn that year—and to be benighted on a glacier would have been a deadly blow to his pride.

He unroped himself, and dashed away in the direction of the ridge of the Wetterhorn that plunged down on our right. We watched him skimming across crevasses, pausing here and there to slash a step in the ice for foothold, balancing himself on icy ridges and vanishing into a couloir of the mountain—first depositing his rucksack on the rocks to await his return. Five minutes passed—ten. Heinrich startled the silence with an halloo—no answer. A quarter of an hour—then, from far below, a faint cry came.

"It will go," said Heinrich, "get on." We hurried across the intervening ice, and met Otmar returning like a cat up the rocks. Down that narrow slit in the mountain we descended with headlong speed. There were drops of thirty and fifty feet, slabs of rock to cross with negligible foot and hand holds, passages of loose rock where a careless move would have sent great stones thundering on the heads of those before. Once Heinrich lowered me like a bale of goods down a smooth-faced precipice of fifty feet. Once he cried: "Quick: it is dangerous," and looking up at the crest of the Wetterhorn I saw a huge block of ice poised perilously above our downward path.

The night was now upon us. We were wet to the skin. A thunderstorm of exceptional violence added to the grimness of the setting. But we were down the ridge at last. We raced across a narrow tongue of the glacier and were safe on the spur of rocks where we knew the Gleckstein hut to be. But there was no light to guide us. We scrambled breathlessly over boulders and across torrents from the Wetterhorn, each of us hardly visible to the other in the thickening mist, save when the blaze of lightning flashed the scene into sudden and spectral clearness. At last we struck a rough mountain path, and five minutes later we lifted the latch of the hut.

"What is the time, Heinrich?"

"Half-past eight."

"What would you have done, Otmar, if we had been benighted?"

Otmar did not hear. But as he got the wood and made the fire, and emptied the rucksacks of our provisions, he began to sing in a pleasant tenor voice. And Heinrich joined in with his full bass.

And presently, stripped of our wet clothes and wrapped in blankets, we sat down to a glorious meal of steaming tea—in an iron teapot as large as a pail—tongue, soup, potted chicken, and jam.

"That was a narrow escape from a night on the mountains," I said.

"It is a very foolish glacier," said Heinrich.

Otmar said nothing.

Five hours later Otmar woke us from our bed of hay.

"It is fine," he said. "The Wetterhorn will go."

*****

As I look up it is still raining and the sad sheaves still stand in the sodden fields. But I have been a journey. I have had three weeks in the Oberland—three weeks of summer days with a world at peace, the world that seems like a dream we once had, so remote has it become and so incredible. I roll up my magic carpet and bless the man who invented maps for the solace of men.

ON A TALK IN A BUS

I jumped on to a bus in Fleet Street the other evening and took a seat against the door. Opposite me sat a young woman in a conductor's dress, who carried on a lively conversation with the woman conductor in charge of the bus. There were the usual criticisms of the habits and wickedness of passengers, and then the conductor inside asked the other at the door how "Flo" was getting on at the job and whether she was "sticking it out."

"Pretty girl, ain't she?" she said.

"Well, I can't see where the pretty comes in," replied the other.

"Have you seen her when she has her hat off? She's pretty then."

"Can't see what difference that would make."

"She's got nice eyes."

"Never see anything particular about her eyes."

"Well, she's a nice kid, anyway."

"Yes, she's a nice kid all right, but I can't see the pretty about her—not a little bit. Pretty!" She tossed her head and looked indignant, almost hurt, as though she had received some secret personal affront.

I do not think she had. It was more probable that on a subject about which she felt deeply she had suffered a painful shock. She liked "Flo," thought her "a nice kid," but mere personal affection could not be permitted to compromise the stern truth about a sacred subject like "prettiness."

The little incident interested me because it illustrated one of the great differences between the sexes. You have only to try to turn that conversation into masculine terms to see how wide that difference is. Tom and Bill might have a hundred things to say about Jack. They might agree that he was a liar or an honest chap, that he drank too much or didn't drink enough, that he was mean or generous; but there is one thing it would never occur to them to discuss. It would never occur to them to discuss his looks, to talk about his eyes, to consider whether he was more beautiful with or without his hat. They might say that he looked merry or miserable, sulky or pleasant, but that would have reference to Jack's character and moral aptitudes and not to any æsthetic consideration.

But this conversation about "Flo" was entirely æsthetic. The question of her moral traits only came in as a means of dodging the main issue. The main issue was whether she was pretty, and it was evidently a very important issue indeed.

It is this interest of women in their own sex as works of art that distinguishes them from men. Men have no interest in their own sex in that sense. Sit on a bus and see what interests the male passenger. It is not his fellow males. He does not sit and study their clothes, and make mental notes on their claims to beauty. If he is interested in his fellow passengers at all it is the other sex that appeals to him. His own sex has no pictorial attraction for him. But a woman is interested in women and women only. It is their clothes that her eye wanders over with mild envy or disapproval. You almost hear her mind recording the price of that muff, those furs, the hat and the boots. At the end of her survey you feel that she knows what everything cost, what are the wearer's ambitions, social status, place of residence—in fact, all about her. And she is equally concerned about her physical qualities. She will watch a pretty face with open admiration, and pay it the same sort of tribute that she would pay to a beautiful picture or any other work of art. "What a pretty woman!" "What lovely hair that girl has!"

This is not a peculiarity of our own people alone. Not long ago I went with two French officers over a great munitions factory near Paris. We were accompanied by a clever little woman who was secretary to the head of one of the departments, and who acted as guide. We went through great shops where thousands of women were working, and as we passed along I noticed that every eye fell on the little woman. I became so interested in this human fact that I forgot to give my attention to the machinery. And to be honest I am always ready to turn away from machinery, which to me is much less interesting than human nature. I think I can say with truth that not one woman in all those thousands failed to scan our guide or bothered to give one glance at the officers. Yet they were fine fellows and obviously important persons, while the guide was commonplace in appearance and quite plainly dressed.

There are of course women who dress and comport themselves with an eye to male admiration as well as female envy and appreciation. They are the women of the bold eye, which is not the same thing as the brave eye. But taking women in the lump, it is their own sex they are interested in. They devote enormous attention to dress, but they do so for each other's enjoyment. They have a passion for personal beauty, but it is the personal beauty of their own sex that appeals to them. No doubt there is a sexual motive underlying this fact. It is the motive expressed in "'My face is my fortune, sir,' she said." The desire to be pretty is ultimately the desire to be matrimonially fortunate. Bill's success in life has no relation to his looks. He may be as ugly as sin, but if he has strong arms, a good digestion, and a sound mind he will do as well as another. Some of the plainest men in England have sat on the Woolsack. Plain women, it is true, have come to eminence. Catherine Sedley, the mistress of James II., is a case in point. She herself was puzzled to explain her influence over that sour fanatic-libertine, for, as she said, "I have no beauty and he has not the faculty to appreciate my intelligence." But the exceptions prove the rule. Prettiness is the woman's commodity. It is the badge of her servitude. And behind that little conversation in the bus about "Flo's" claims to prettiness was a very practical, though unformed, consideration of her prospects in life.

What will be the effect of the war upon "Flo" and her kind? She has found that she has an independent, non-sexual importance to society, that she has a career which has nothing to do with prettiness, that she can win her bread with her mental and physical faculties as easily as a man. She has tasted freedom and discovered herself. The discovery will give her a new independence of outlook, a more self-confident view of her place in society, a greater respect for the hard practical things of life. She will still desire to be pretty and to have the admiration of her sex, but the desire will have a sounder foundation than in the past It will no longer be her career. It will be her ornament. It will decorate the fact that she can run a bus as well as a man.

ON VIRTUES THAT DON'T COUNT

I often think that when we go down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat we shall all be greatly astonished at the credit and debit items we shall find against our names in the ledger of our life. We shall discover that many of the virtues which we thought would give us a thumping credit balance have not been recorded at all, and that some of our failings have by the magic of celestial book-keeping been entered on the credit side. The fact is that our virtues are often no virtues at all. They may even only be vices, seen in reverse.

Take Smithson Spinks—everyone knows the Smithson Spinks type. What a reputation for generosity the fellow has! What a grandeur of giving he exhales! How noble his scorn for mean fellows! How royal the flash of his hand to his pocket if you are getting up a testimonial to this man, or a fund for that object, or want a loan yourself! No one hesitates to ask Smithson Spinks for anything. He likes to be asked. He would be hurt if he were not asked. And yet if you track Smithson Spinks's generosity to its source you find that it is only pride turned inside out. The true motive of his giving is not love of his fellows, but love of himself and the vanity of a mind that wants the admiration and envy of others. You see the reverse of the shield at home, where the real Smithson Spinks is discovered as a stingy fellow, who grumbles when the boys want new boots and who leaves his wife to struggle perpetually with a load of debt and an empty purse, while he plays the part of the large-hearted gentleman abroad. He believes in his own fiction, but when he looks in the ledger he will have a painful shock. He will turn to the credit side, expecting to find GENEROSITY written in large and golden letters, and he will probably find instead VANITY in plain black on the debit side.

And I—let us say that I flatter myself on being a truthful person. But am I? What will the ledger say? I have a dreadful suspicion that it may put my truthfulness down to the compulsion of a tremulous nerve. I may—who knows?—only be truthful because I haven't courage enough for dissimulation. It may not be a positive moral virtue at all, but only the moral reflection of a timorous spirit. It needs great courage to tell a lie which you have got to face out. I could no more do it than I could dance on the point of a needle.

Consider the courage of that monumental liar Arthur Orton—the sheer unflinching audacity with which he challenged the truth, facing Tichborne's own mother with his impudent tale of being her son, facing judges and juries, going into witness-boxes with his web of outrageous inventions, keeping a stiff lip before the devastating rain of exposure. A ruffian, of course, a thick-skinned ruffian, but what courage!

Now there may be a potential Arthur Orton in me, but he has never had a chance. I have no gift of dissimulation. If I tried it I should flounder like a boy on his first pair of skates. I could not bluff a rabbit. No one would believe me if I told him a lie. My eye would return a verdict of guilty against me on the spot, and my tongue would refuse its office. And therein is the worm that eats at my self-respect. May not my obedience to the ten commandments be only due to my fear of the eleventh commandment—that cynical rescript which runs, "Thou shalt not be found out"? I hope it is not so, but I must prepare myself for the revelations of the ledger in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. For they will be as candid about me and you as about Smithson Spinks.

You can never be absolutely sure of a man's moral nature until you have shipped him, figuratively,

until in fact you have got him away from his defences, liberated him from the conventions and respectabilities that encompass him with minatory fingers and vigilant eyes, and left him to the uncontrolled governance of himself. Then it will be found whether the virtues are diamonds or paste—whether they spring out of the ten commandments or out of the eleventh. The lord Angelo in Measure for Measure passed for a strict and saintly person—and I have no doubt believed himself to be a strict and saintly person—so long as he was under control, but when the Duke's back was turned the libertine appeared. And note that subtle touch of Shakespeare's. Angelo was not an ordinary libertine. He passed for a saint because he could not be tempted by vice, but only by virtue. Hear him communing with himself when Isabella has gone:

His saintliness revolted from vice, but his love of virtue opened the floodgates of viciousness. What a paradox is man! I think I have known more than one lord Angelo whose virtue rested on nothing better than a fastidious taste, or an absence of appetite.

That is certainly the case with many people who have the quality of sobriety. Abraham Lincoln, himself a total abstainer, once got into great trouble for saying so. He was addressing a temperance meeting at a Presbyterian church, and said: "In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims (to drink) have been spared more from the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have fallen." It seemed a reasonable thing to say, but it shocked the stern teetotalers present. "It's a shame," said one, "that he should be permitted to abuse us so in the house of the Lord." They did not like to feel that they were not more virtuous than men who drank and even got drunk. They expected to have a large credit entry for not tippling. Like Malvolio, they mixed up virtue with "cakes and ale." If you indulged in them you were vicious, and if you abstained from them you were virtuous. It was a beautifully simple moral code, but virtue is not so easily catalogued. It is not a negative thing, but a positive thing. It is not measured by its antipathies but by its sympathies. Its manifestations are many, but its root is one, and its names are "truth and justice," which even the Prayer Book puts before "religion and piety."

And to return to the Lincoln formula, if you have no taste for tippling what virtue is there in not tippling? The virtue is often with the tippler. I knew a man who died of drink, and whose life, nevertheless, had been an heroic struggle with his enemy. He was always falling, but he never ceased fighting. And it is the fighting, I think, he will find recorded in the ledger—greatly to his surprise, for he had the most modest opinion of his merits and a deep sense of his moral infirmity.

It is no more virtuous for some men not to get drunk than it is for a Rothschild not to put his hand in his neighbour's pocket in order to steal half-a-crown. He doesn't need a half-crown, and there is no virtue in not stealing what you don't want. That was what was wrong with the "Northern Farmer's" philosophy that those who had money were the best:

It was a creed of virtue which looked at the fact and not at the temptation. He will have found a much more complex system of book-keeping where he has gone. I imagine him standing painfully puzzled at the sort of accounts which he will find made up in the "valley of decision."

ON HATE AND THE SOLDIER

"And when are you going back to fight those vermin again?" asked the man in the corner.

"D'ye mean ole Fritz?" said the soldier.

"I mean those Huns," said the other.

"Oh, there's nothing wrong with ole Fritz," replied the soldier. "He can't help hisself. He's shoved out there in the mud to fight same as we are, and he does the job same as we do. But he'd jolly well like to chuck the business and go home. Course he would. Stands to reason. Anybody would."

It was a disappointing reply to the man in the corner, who obviously felt that the other was wanting in the first essential of a soldier—a personal hatred of the individual enemy. This man clearly did not hate the enemy. Yet if anyone was entitled to hate him he had abundant reason. He had been out since August, 1914, had been wounded four times, buried by shell explosion three times, and gassed twice. It was two years since he had been home on leave, and now he was on his way to see his people in the West of England. He talked about his experiences with the calm dispassionateness of one describing commonplace things, quite uncomplainingly, very sensibly, and without the least trace of egotism. He'd been in a horrible spot lately, "reg'lar death-trap," at G——. "Nobody can hold it," he said. "We take it when we like, and Fritz, he takes it when he likes. That's all there is about it." It was noticeable that he always spoke of the enemy as "Fritz," and always without any appearance of personal animus.

I do not record the incident as unusual. I record it as usual. No one who has had much intercourse with soldiers at the front, whether rank or file, will dispute this. In any circumstances, it is hard to nurse a passion at white heat over a term of years, and it is impossible to do so when you see the ugly business of war at close quarters. You have to be comfortably at home to really enjoy the luxury of hate. I have heard more bitter things from the lips of clergymen and seen more bitter things from the pen of so-called comic journalists than I have heard from the lips of soldiers, and in that admirable collection of utterances of hate in Germany, made by Mr. William Archer, it will be found that the barbaric things generally come from the pulpits or the studies of be-spectacled professors.

The soldier is too near the foul business, sees all the misery and suffering too close, to be consumed with hate. If he could envy the other fellow he would stand a better chance of hating him. But he sees that Fritz is in no better plight than himself. He is living in the mud among the rats too, and is just as helpless an atom in the machine of war as himself. He sees his body, torn and disgusting, cumbering the battlefield, or hanging limp and horrible on the barbed wire in No Man's Land. It is Fritz's turn to-day; it may be his own to-morrow. And the baser feeling gives place to a general compassion. The chord of a common humanity is struck, and if he does not actually love his enemy he ceases to hate him.

But the man in the corner of the carriage need have no fear that this means that the soldier opposite is a less valuable fighting man in consequence. The idea that you must grind your teeth all the time is an infantile delusion. I should have much more confidence in that quiet, sane, undemonstrative soldier in the face of the enemy than I should have in the people who kill the enemy with their mouth, and prove their patriotism by the violence of their language. I have known many brave men who have given their lives heroically in this war, but I cannot recall one—not one—who stained his heroism with vulgar hate.

The gospel of hate as the instrument of victory, indeed, is not the soldier's gospel at all. There have been few greater soldiers in history than General Lee, and probably no more saintly man. He fought literally to the last ditch, but he never ceased to repudiate the doctrine of hate. When the minister in the course of a sermon had expressed himself bitterly about the enemy, Lee said to him: "Doctor, there is a good old Book which says, 'Love your enemies.' Do you think that your remarks this evening were quite in the spirit of that teaching?" And when one of his generals exclaimed of the enemy, "I wish these people were all dead," Lee answered, "How can you say so? Now, I wish they were all at home attending to their business and leaving us to do the same." And Lee stated his attitude generally when he said: "I have fought against the people of the North because I believed they were seeking to wrest from the South dearest rights. But I have never cherished bitter or vindictive feelings and have never seen the day when I did not pray for them."

There was a striking illustration of the contrast between the soldier's and the civilian's attitude towards the enemy the other day. In the current issue of Punch I saw a poem by Sir Owen Seaman (the author of that heroic line, "I hate all Huns"), addressed to the "Huns," in which he said:

In the newspapers that same morning (5th March, 1918) there appeared a report from Sir Douglas Haig, in the course of which he said:

Many of the hits upon our Tanks at Flesquières were obtained by a German artillery officer who, remaining alone at his battery, served a field gun single-handed until killed at his gun. The great bravery of this officer aroused the admiration of all ranks.

The same chivalrous spirit breathes through the letters of Captain Ball, V.C., published in the memoir of the brilliant airman. He was little more than a boy when he was killed after an almost unparalleled career of victory in the air. He fought with a terrible skill, but he had no more personal animus for his opponent than he would have had for the bowler whom it was his business to hit to the boundary. In one of his letters to his father he said:

You ask me to let the devils have it when I fight. Yes, I always let them have all I can, but really I don't think them devils. I only scrap because it is my duty, but I do not think anything bad about the Huns. He is just a good chap with very little guts, trying to do his best. Nothing makes me feel more rotten than to see them go down, but you see it is either them or me, so I must do my best to make it a case of them.

And the gay, healthy temper in which he played his part is revealed in another letter, in which he describes a fight that ended in mutual laughter:

We kept on firing until we had used up all our ammunition. There was nothing more to be done after that, so we both burst out laughing. We couldn't help it—it was so ridiculous. We flew side by side laughing at each other for a few seconds, and then we waved adieu to each other and went off. He was a real sport was that Hun.

That is a pleasant picture to carry in the mind, the two high-spirited boys sent out to kill each other, faithfully trying to do their duty, failing, and then riding through the air side by side with merry laughter at their mutual discomfiture and gay adieus at parting.

And at the risk of hurting the feelings of the man in the corner I shall recall a letter which shows that even among the enemy of to-day, even among that worst of all military types, the German officer, there are those whom the miseries and horrors of war touch to something nobler than hate. The letter appeared in the Cologne Gazette early in the war, and was as follows:

Perhaps you will be so good as to assist by the publication of these lines in freeing our troops from an evil which they feel very strongly. I have on many occasions, when distributing among the men the postal packets, observed among them postcards on which the defeated French, English and Russians were derided in a tasteless fashion.

The impression made by these postcards on our men is highly noteworthy. Scarcely anybody is pleased with these postcards; on the contrary, everyone expresses his displeasure.

This is natural when one considers the position. We know how victories are won. We also know by what tremendous sacrifices they are obtained. We see with our own eyes the unspeakable misery of the battlefield. We rejoice over our victories, but our joy is damped by the recollection of the sad pictures which we observe almost daily.

And our enemies have in an overwhelming majority of cases truly not deserved to be derided in such a way. Had they not fought so bravely we should not have had to register such losses.

Insipid, therefore, as these postcards are in themselves, their effect here, on the battlefields, in the presence of our dead and wounded, is only calculated to cause disgust. Such postcards are as much out of place on the battlefield as a clown is at a funeral. Perhaps these lines may prove instrumental in decreasing the number of such postcards sent to our troops.

I do not suppose they did. I have no doubt the fire-eaters at home went on fire-eating under the impression that that was what the men at the front wanted to keep up their fighting spirit. But it is not. There is plenty of hate in the trenches, but it is directed, not against the victims of war, but against the institution of war. That is the one ray of hope that shines over the dismal landscape of Europe to-day.

ON TAKING THE CALL

Jane came home from the theatre last night overflowing with an indignation that even the beauty of a ride on the top of a bus in the air of these divine summer nights had not cooled. It was not dissatisfaction with the play or the performance that made her boil with volcanic wrath. It was the vanity of the insufferable actor-manager, who would insist on "taking the call" all the time and every time. There were some quite nice people in the play, it seemed, but the more the audience called for them the more the preposterous "old-clo'" man of the stage came smirking before the curtain, rubbing his fat hands and creasing his fat cheeks. "It was disgusting," said Jane. "The creature had been gibbering in the lime-light all night, and the audience were trying to level things up a bit by giving the interesting people a show, and this greedy cormorant snatched every crumb for himself. I hate him. He is a Hun."

The outburst reminded me of a story I once heard about another actor-manager. At the end of the play he went on the stage and found his company bending down in a circle and gazing intently at something on the floor. "What are you looking at?" he asked. "Oh," they chanted in chorus, "we're looking at a spot we've never seen before. It's the centre of the stage."

There are, of course, people who carry the centre of the stage with them. It does not matter where they go or what they play: they dominate the scene. "Where O'Flaherty sits is the head of the table," and where Coquelin stood was the centre of the stage. He needed no placard to remind you that he was someone in particular. You would no more have thought of turning the limelight on to him than you would have thought of turning it on to the moon at midnight or the sun at midday. He just appeared and everyone else became accessory to that commanding presence: he spoke and all other voices seemed like the chirping of sparrows.

And so in other spheres. Take the case of Mr. Asquith, for example, in relation to the House of Commons. It does not matter where he sits. He may go to the darkest corner under the gallery, but the centre of the stage will go with him. When he had sat down after delivering his first speech in opposition, one of the ablest observers in Parliament turned to me and said: "The Prime Minister has crossed the floor of the House." And that exactly expressed the feeling created by that authoritative manner, that masculine voice, that air of high detachment from the mere squalor and tricks of the Parliamentary game. He never seemed greater to the House than in the moment when he had fallen—never more its intellectual master, its most authentic voice, its wisest and most disinterested counsellor.

It is not these men, the Coquelins and the Asquiths, who come sprinting before the curtain after drenching themselves in the limelight on the stage. They hate the limelight and they are indifferent to the applause. The gentry who cultivate the art of "taking the call" are quite another breed. You know the type, both on the stage and off. Take that eminent actor, Bluffington Phelps. He shambles about the stage, his words gurgle in his throat, his eyes roll like a bull's under torture; if he is not throwing agonised glances at the man with the limelight he is straining to catch the voice of the prompter at the flies. But when it comes to "taking the call" there is not his superior on the stage. He monopolises the applause as he monopolises the limelight; and by these artifices he has persuaded the public that he is an actor. It is a glorious joke—

It is true, as Lincoln said, that you can fool some of the people all the time. Mr. Bluffington Phelps knows that it is true. He knows that there is a large part of the public, possibly the majority of the public, which is born to be fooled, which will believe anything because it hasn't the faculty of judging anything but the size of the crowd and which will always follow the ass with the longest ears and the loudest bray.

It is the same off the stage. The art of politics is the art of "taking the call." Harley knew the trick perfectly. Where anything was to be got, it was said of him, he always knew how to wriggle himself in; when any misfortune threatened he knew how to wriggle himself out. He took the cheers and passed the kicks on to his colleagues. His chivalrous spirit is not dead. It is familiar in every country, but most of all in democratic countries. We all know the type of politician who has the true genius for the limelight. If the newspapers forget him for five minutes he is miserable. "What has happened to the publicity department? Has the fellow in charge of the limelight gone to sleep? Wake him up. Don't let the public forget me. If there's nothing else to tell 'em, tell 'em that my hat is two sizes larger than it was a year ago. Tell 'em about my famous smile. Tell 'em about my dear old grandmother to whom I owe my inimitable piety. Tell 'em I'm at my desk at seven o'clock every morning and never leave it until half-past seven the next morning. Tell 'em anything you like—only tell 'em."

If things go right, and there is applause in the house, he skips in front of the curtain to take the call. "Thank you, gentlemen—and ladies. Thank you. Yes, alone I did it. Nobody else in the company had a hand in it—nor a finger. No, not a finger." If anything goes wrong and the audience hiss, does he shirk the ordeal? Not at all. He comes before the curtain with indignant sorrow. "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I agree with you. Most scandalous failure. It was all Jones's doing, and Smith's, and Robinson's. I went down on my bended knees to them, but they wouldn't listen to me—wouldn't listen. And now you see what's happened. Hear the anguish in my voice. Look at the tears in my broken-hearted eyes. Oh, the pity of it, ladies and gentlemen—the pity of it. And I tried so hard—I really did. But they wouldn't listen—they wouldn't l-l-listen." (Breaks down in sobs.)

I recall a legend that seems apposite. A certain politician of antiquity—let us all call him Eurysthenes—hit on a happy idea for making himself famous. He bought a lot of parrots and taught them to shriek "Great is Eurysthenes!" Then he turned them all out into the woods, and there they sat and squawked "Great is Eurysthenes!" And the Athenians, astonished at such unanimity, took up the refrain and cried, "Great is Eurysthenes." And Eurysthenes, who was waiting in the flies, so to speak, took the call and was famous ever after.

A DITHYRAMB ON A DOG

Chum, roped securely to the cherry tree, is barking at the universe in general and at the cows in the paddock beyond the orchard in particular. Occasionally he pauses to snap at passing bees, of which the orchard is full on this bright May morning; but he soon tires of this diversion and resumes his loud-voiced demand to share in the good things that are going. For the sun is high, the cuckoo is shouting over the valley, and the woods are calling him to unknown adventures. They shall not call in vain. Work shall be suspended and this morning shall be dedicated to his service. For this is the day of deliverance. The word is spoken and the shadow of the sword is lifted. The battle for his biscuit is won.

He does not know what a narrow shave he has had. He does not know that for weeks past he has been under sentence of death as an encumbrance, a luxury that this savage world of men could no longer afford; that having taken away his bones we were about to take away his biscuits and leave his cheerful companionship a memory of the dream world we lived in before the Great Killing began. All this he does not know. That is one of the numerous advantages of being a dog. He knows nothing of the infamies of men or of the incertitudes of life. He does not look before and after and pine for what is not. He has no yesterday and no to-morrow—only the happy or the unhappy present. He does not, as Whitman says, "lie awake at night thinking of his soul," or lamenting his past or worrying about his future. His bereavements do not disturb him and he doesn't care twopence about his career. He has no debts and hungers for no honours. He would rather have a bone than a baronetcy. He does not turn over old albums, with their pictured records of forgotten holidays and happy scenes and yearn for the "tender grace of a day that is dead," or wonder whether he will keep his job and what will become of his "poor old family," as Stevenson used to say, if he doesn't, or speculate whether the war will end this year, next year, some time, or never. He doesn't even know there is a war. Think of it! He doesn't know there is a war. O happy dog! Give him a bone, a biscuit, a good word, and a scamper in the woods, and his cup of joy is full. Would that my needs were as few and as easily satisfied.