Tea table Talk
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Jerome K. Jerome >> Tea table Talk
Transcribed from the 1903 Hutchinson & Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
TEA-TABLE TALK
CHAPTER I
"They are very pretty, some of them," said the Woman of the World;
"not the sort of letters I should have written myself."
"I should like to see a love-letter of yours," interrupted the Minor
Poet.
"It is very kind of you to say so," replied the Woman of the World.
"It never occurred to me that you would care for one."
"It is what I have always maintained," retorted the Minor Poet; "you
have never really understood me."
"I believe a volume of assorted love-letters would sell well," said
the Girton Girl; "written by the same hand, if you like, but to
different correspondents at different periods. To the same person
one is bound, more or less, to repeat oneself."
"Or from different lovers to the same correspondent," suggested the
Philosopher. "It would be interesting to observe the response of
various temperaments exposed to an unvaried influence. It would
throw light on the vexed question whether the qualities that adorn
our beloved are her own, or ours lent to her for the occasion.
Would the same woman be addressed as 'My Queen!' by one
correspondent, and as 'Dear Popsy Wopsy!' by another, or would she
to all her lovers be herself?"
"You might try it," I suggested to the Woman of the World,
"selecting, of course, only the more interesting."
"It would cause so much unpleasantness, don't you think?" replied
the Woman of the World. "Those I left out would never forgive me.
It is always so with people you forget to invite to a funeral--they
think it is done with deliberate intention to slight them."
"The first love-letter I ever wrote," said the Minor Poet, "was when
I was sixteen. Her name was Monica; she was the left-hand girl in
the third joint of the crocodile. I have never known a creature so
ethereally beautiful. I wrote the letter and sealed it, but I could
not make up my mind whether to slip it into her hand when we passed
them, as we usually did on Thursday afternoons, or to wait for
Sunday."
"There can be no question," murmured the Girton Girl abstractedly,
"the best time is just as one is coming out of church. There is so
much confusion; besides, one has one's Prayer-book--I beg your
pardon."
"I was saved the trouble of deciding," continued the Minor Poet.
"On Thursday her place was occupied by a fat, red-headed girl, who
replied to my look of inquiry with an idiotic laugh, and on Sunday I
searched the Hypatia House pews for her in vain. I learnt
subsequently that she had been sent home on the previous Wednesday,
suddenly. It appeared that I was not the only one. I left the
letter where I had placed it, at the bottom of my desk, and in
course of time forgot it. Years later I fell in love really. I sat
down to write her a love-letter that should imprison her as by some
subtle spell. I would weave into it the love of all the ages. When
I had finished it, I read it through and was pleased with it. Then
by an accident, as I was going to seal it, I overturned my desk, and
on to the floor fell that other love-letter I had written seven
years before, when a boy. Out of idle curiosity I tore it open; I
thought it would afford me amusement. I ended by posting it instead
of the letter I had just completed. It carried precisely the same
meaning; but it was better expressed, with greater sincerity, with
more artistic simplicity."
"After all," said the Philosopher, "what can a man do more than tell
a woman that he loves her? All the rest is mere picturesque
amplification, on a par with the 'Full and descriptive report from
our Special Correspondent,' elaborated out of a three-line telegram
of Reuter's."
"Following that argument," said the Minor Poet, "you could reduce
'Romeo and Juliet' to a two-line tragedy -
Lass and lad, loved like mad;
Silly muddle, very sad."
"To be told that you are loved," said the Girton Girl, "is only the
beginning of the theorem--its proposition, so to speak."
"Or the argument of the poem," murmured the Old Maid.
"The interest," continued the Girton Girl, "lies in proving it--why
does he love me?"
"I asked a man that once," said the Woman of the World. "He said it
was because he couldn't help it. It seemed such a foolish answer--
the sort of thing your housemaid always tells you when she breaks
your favourite teapot. And yet, I suppose it was as sensible as any
other."
"More so," commented the Philosopher. "It is the only possible
explanation."
"I wish," said the Minor Poet, "it were a question one could ask of
people without offence; I so often long to put it. Why do men marry
viragoes, pimply girls with incipient moustaches? Why do beautiful
heiresses choose thick-lipped, little men who bully them? Why are
old bachelors, generally speaking, sympathetic, kind-hearted men;
and old maids, so many of them, sweet-looking and amiable?"
"I think," said the Old Maid, "that perhaps--" But there she
stopped.
"Pray go on," said the Philosopher. "I shall be so interested to
have your views."
"It was nothing, really," said the Old Maid; "I have forgotten."
"If only one could obtain truthful answers," the Minor Poet, "what a
flood of light they might let fall on the hidden half of life!"
"It seems to me," said the Philosopher, "that, if anything, Love is
being exposed to too much light. The subject is becoming
vulgarised. Every year a thousand problem plays and novels, poems
and essays, tear the curtain from Love's Temple, drag it naked into
the market-place for grinning crowds to gape at. In a million short
stories, would-be comic, would-be serious, it is handled more or
less coarsely, more or less unintelligently, gushed over, gibed and
jeered at. Not a shred of self-respect is left to it. It is made
the central figure of every farce, danced and sung round in every
music-hall, yelled at by gallery, guffawed at by stalls. It is the
stock-in-trade of every comic journal. Could any god, even a Mumbo
Jumbo, so treated, hold its place among its votaries? Every term of
endearment has become a catchword, every caress mocks us from the
hoardings. Every tender speech we make recalls to us even while we
are uttering it a hundred parodies. Every possible situation has
been spoilt for us in advance by the American humorist."
"I have sat out a good many parodies of 'Hamlet,'" said the Minor
Poet, "but the play still interests me. I remember a walking tour I
once took in Bavaria. In some places the waysides are lined with
crucifixes that are either comic or repulsive. There is a firm that
turns them out by machinery. Yet, to the peasants who pass by, the
Christ is still beautiful. You can belittle only what is already
contemptible."
"Patriotism is a great virtue," replied the Philosopher: "the
Jingoes have made it ridiculous."
"On the contrary," said the Minor Poet, "they have taught us to
distinguish between the true and the false. So it is with love.
The more it is cheapened, ridiculed, employed for market purposes,
the less the inclination to affect it--to be in love with love, as
Heine admitted he was, for its own sake."
"Is the necessity to love born in us," said the Girton Girl, "or do
we practise to acquire it because it is the fashion--make up our
mind to love, as boys learn to smoke, because every other fellow
does it, and we do not like to be peculiar?"
"The majority of men and women," said the Minor Poet, "are incapable
of love. With most it is a mere animal passion, with others a mild
affection."
"We talk about love," said the Philosopher, "as though it were a
known quantity. After all, to say that a man loves is like saying
that he paints or plays the violin; it conveys no meaning until we
have witnessed his performance. Yet to hear the subject discussed,
one might imagine the love of a Dante or a society Johnny, of a
Cleopatra or a Georges Sand, to be precisely the same thing."
"It was always poor Susan's trouble," said the Woman of the World;
"she could never be persuaded that Jim really loved her. It was
very sad, because I am sure he was devoted to her, in his way. But
he could not do the sort of things she wanted him to do; she was so
romantic. He did try. He used to go to all the poetical plays and
study them. But he hadn't the knack of it and he was naturally
clumsy. He would rush into the room and fling himself on his knees
before her, never noticing the dog, so that, instead of pouring out
his heart as he had intended, he would have to start off with, 'So
awfully sorry! Hope I haven't hurt the little beast?' Which was
enough to put anybody out."
"Young girls are so foolish," said the Old Maid; "they run after
what glitters, and do not see the gold until it is too late. At
first they are all eyes and no heart."
"I knew a girl," I said, "or, rather, a young married woman, who was
cured of folly by the homoeopathic method. Her great trouble was
that her husband had ceased to be her lover."
"It seems to me so sad," said the Old Maid. "Sometimes it is the
woman's fault, sometimes the man's; more often both. The little
courtesies, the fond words, the tender nothings that mean so much to
those that love--it would cost so little not to forget them, and
they would make life so much more beautiful."
"There is a line of common sense running through all things," I
replied; "the secret of life consists in not diverging far from it
on either side. He had been the most devoted wooer, never happy out
of her eyes; but before they had been married a year she found to
her astonishment that he could be content even away from her skirts,
that he actually took pains to render himself agreeable to other
women. He would spend whole afternoons at his club, slip out for a
walk occasionally by himself, shut himself up now and again in his
study. It went so far that one day he expressed a distinct desire
to leave her for a week and go a-fishing with some other men. She
never complained--at least, not to him."
"That is where she was foolish," said the Girton Girl. "Silence in
such cases is a mistake. The other party does not know what is the
matter with you, and you yourself--your temper bottled up within--
become more disagreeable every day."
"She confided her trouble to a friend," I explained.
"I so dislike people who do that," said the Woman of the World.
"Emily never would speak to George; she would come and complain
about him to me, as if I were responsible for him: I wasn't even
his mother. When she had finished, George would come along, and I
had to listen to the whole thing over again from his point of view.
I got so tired of it at last that I determined to stop it."
"How did you succeed?" asked the Old Maid, who appeared to be
interested in the recipe.
"I knew George was coming one afternoon," explained the Woman of the
World, "so I persuaded Emily to wait in the conservatory. She
thought I was going to give him good advice; instead of that I
sympathised with him and encouraged him to speak his mind freely,
which he did. It made her so mad that she came out and told him
what she thought of him. I left them at it. They were both of them
the better for it; and so was I."
"In my case," I said, "it came about differently. Her friend
explained to him just what was happening. She pointed out to him
how his neglect and indifference were slowly alienating his wife's
affections from him. He argued the subject.
"'But a lover and a husband are not the same,' he contended; 'the
situation is entirely different. You run after somebody you want to
overtake; but when you have caught him up, you settle down quietly
and walk beside him; you don't continue shouting and waving your
handkerchief after you have gained him.'
"Their mutual friend presented the problem differently."
"'You must hold what you have won,' she said, 'or it will slip away
from you. By a certain course of conduct and behaviour you gained a
sweet girl's regard; show yourself other than you were, how can you
expect her to think the same of you?'
"'You mean,' he inquired, 'that I should talk and act as her husband
exactly as I did when her lover?'
"'Precisely,' said the friend 'why not?'
"'It seems to me a mistake,' he grumbled.
"'Try it and see,' said the friend.
"'All right,' he said, 'I will.' And he went straight home and set
to work."
"Was it too late," asked the Old Maid, "or did they come together
again?"
"For the next mouth," I answered, "they were together twenty-four
hours of the day. And then it was the wife who suggested, like the
poet in Gilbert's Patience, the delight with which she would welcome
an occasional afternoon off."
"He hung about her while she was dressing in the morning. Just as
she had got her hair fixed he would kiss it passionately and it
would come down again. All meal-time he would hold her hand under
the table and insist on feeding her with a fork. Before marriage he
had behaved once or twice in this sort of way at picnics; and after
marriage, when at breakfast-time he had sat at the other end of the
table reading the paper or his letters, she had reminded him of it
reproachfully. The entire day he never left her side. She could
never read a book; instead, he would read to her aloud, generally
Browning' poems or translations from Goethe. Reading aloud was not
an accomplishment of his, but in their courting days she had
expressed herself pleased at his attempts, and of this he took care,
in his turn, to remind her. It was his idea that if the game were
played at all, she should take a hand also. If he was to blither,
it was only fair that she should bleat back. As he explained, for
the future they would both be lovers all their life long; and no
logical argument in reply could she think of. If she tried to write
a letter, he would snatch away the paper her dear hands were
pressing and fall to kissing it--and, of course, smearing it. When
he wasn't giving her pins and needles by sitting on her feet he was
balancing himself on the arm of her chair and occasionally falling
over on top of her. If she went shopping, he went with her and made
himself ridiculous at the dressmaker's. In society he took no
notice of anybody but of her, and was hurt if she spoke to anybody
but to him. Not that it was often, during that month, that they did
see any society; most invitations he refused for them both,
reminding her how once upon a time she had regarded an evening alone
with him as an entertainment superior to all others. He called her
ridiculous names, talked to her in baby language; while a dozen
times a day it became necessary for her to take down her back hair
and do it up afresh. At the end of a month, as I have said, it was
she who suggested a slight cessation of affection."
"Had I been in her place," said the Girton Girl, "it would have been
a separation I should have suggested. I should have hated him for
the rest of my life."
"For merely trying to agree with you?" I said.
"For showing me I was a fool for ever having wanted his affection,"
replied the Girton Girl.
"You can generally," said the Philosopher, "make people ridiculous
by taking them at their word."
"Especially women," murmured the Minor Poet.
"I wonder," said the Philosopher, "is there really so much
difference between men and women as we think? What there is, may it
not be the result of Civilisation rather than of Nature, of training
rather than of instinct?"
"Deny the contest between male and female, and you deprive life of
half its poetry," urged the Minor Poet.
"Poetry," returned the Philosopher, "was made for man, not man for
poetry. I am inclined to think that the contest you speak of is
somewhat in the nature of a 'put-up job' on the part of you poets.
In the same way newspapers will always advocate war; it gives them
something to write about, and is not altogether unconnected with
sales. To test Nature's original intentions, it is always safe to
study our cousins the animals. There we see no sign of this
fundamental variation; the difference is merely one of degree."
"I quite agree with you," said the Girton Girl. "Man, acquiring
cunning, saw the advantage of using his one superiority, brute
strength, to make woman his slave. In all other respects she is
undoubtedly his superior."
"In a woman's argument," I observed, "equality of the sexes
invariably does mean the superiority of woman."
"That is very curious," added the Philosopher. "As you say, a woman
never can be logical."
"Are all men logical?" demanded the Girton Girl.
"As a class," replied the Minor Poet, "yes."
CHAPTER II
"What woman suffers from," said the Philosopher, "is over-praise.
It has turned her head."
"You admit, then, that she has a head?" demanded the Girton Girl.
"It has always been a theory of mine," returned the Philosopher,
"that by Nature she was intended to possess one. It is her admirers
who have always represented her as brainless."
"Why is it that the brainy girl invariably has straight hair?" asked
the Woman of the World.
"Because she doesn't curl it," explained the Girton Girl. She spoke
somewhat snappishly, it seemed to me.
"I never thought of that," murmured the Woman of the World.
"It is to be noted in connection with the argument," I ventured to
remark, "that we hear but little concerning the wives of
intellectual men. When we do, as in the case of the Carlyles, it is
to wish we did not."
"When I was younger even than I am now," said the Minor Poet, "I
thought a good deal of marriage--very young men do. My wife, I told
myself, must be a woman of mind. Yet, curiously, of all the women I
have ever loved, no single one has been remarkable for intellect--
present company, as usual, of course excepted."
"Why is it," sighed the Philosopher, "that in the most serious
business of our life, marriage, serious considerations count for
next to nothing? A dimpled chin can, and often does, secure for a
girl the best of husbands; while virtue and understanding combined
cannot be relied upon to obtain her even one of the worst."
"I think the explanation is," replied the Minor Poet, "that as
regards, let us say, the most natural business of our life,
marriage, our natural instincts alone are brought into play.
Marriage--clothe the naked fact in what flowers of rhetoric we will-
-has to do with the purely animal part of our being. The man is
drawn towards it by his primeval desires; the woman by her inborn
craving towards motherhood."
The thin, white hands of the Old Maid fluttered, troubled, where
they lay upon her lap. "Why should we seek to explain away all the
beautiful things of life?" she said. She spoke with a heat unusual
to her. "The blushing lad, so timid, so devotional, worshipping as
at the shrine of some mystic saint; the young girl moving spell-
bound among dreams! They think of nothing but of one another."
"Tracing a mountain stream to its sombre source need not mar its
music for us as it murmurs through the valley," expounded the
Philosopher. "The hidden law of our being feeds each leaf of our
life as sap runs through the tree. The transient blossom, the
ripened fruit, is but its changing outward form."
"I hate going to the roots of things," said the Woman of the World.
"Poor, dear papa was so fond of doing that. He would explain to us
the genesis of oysters just when we were enjoying them. Poor mamma
could never bring herself to touch them after that. While in the
middle of dessert he would stop to argue with my Uncle Paul whether
pig's blood or bullock's was the best for grape vines. I remember
the year before Emily came out her favourite pony died; I have never
known her so cut up about anything before or since. She asked papa
if he would mind her having the poor creature buried in the garden.
Her idea was that she would visit now and then its grave and weep
awhile. Papa was awfully nice about it and stroked her hair.
'Certainly, my dear,' he said, 'we will have him laid to rest in the
new strawberry bed.' Just then old Pardoe, the head gardener, came
up to us and touched his hat. 'Well, I was just going to inquire of
Miss Emily,' he said, 'if she wouldn't rather have the poor thing
buried under one of the nectarine-trees. They ain't been doing very
well of late.' He said it was a pretty spot, and that he would put
up a sort of stone. Poor Emily didn't seem to care much where the
animal was buried by that time, so we left them arguing the
question. I forget how it was settled; but I know we neither of us
ate either strawberries or nectarines for the next two years."
"There is a time for everything," agreed the Philosopher. "With the
lover, penning poetry to the wondrous red and white upon his
mistress' cheek, we do not discuss the subject of pigment in the
blood, its cause and probable duration. Nevertheless, the subject
is interesting."
"We men and women," continued the Minor Poet, "we are Nature's
favourites, her hope, for whom she has made sacrifice, putting aside
so many of her own convictions, telling herself she is old-
fashioned. She has let us go from her to the strange school where
they laugh at all her notions. We have learnt new, strange ideas
that bewilder the good dame. Yet, returning home it is curious to
notice how little, in the few essential things of life, we differ
from her other children, who have never wandered from her side. Our
vocabulary has been extended and elaborated, yet face to face with
the realities of existence it is unavailing. Clasping the living,
standing beside the dead, our language still is but a cry. Our
wants have grown more complicated; the ten-course banquet, with all
that it involves, has substituted itself for the handful of fruits
and nuts gathered without labour; the stalled ox and a world of
trouble for the dinner of herbs and leisure therewith. Are we so
far removed thereby above our little brother, who, having swallowed
his simple, succulent worm, mounts a neighbouring twig and with easy
digestion carols thanks to God? The square brick box about which we
move, hampered at every step by wooden lumber, decked with many rags
and strips of coloured paper, cumbered with odds and ends of melted
flint and moulded clay, has replaced the cheap, convenient cave. We
clothe ourselves in the skins of other animals instead of allowing
our own to develop into a natural protection. We hang about us bits
of stone and metal, but underneath it all we are little two-legged
animals, struggling with the rest to live and breed. Beneath each
hedgerow in the springtime we can read our own romances in the
making--the first faint stirring of the blood, the roving eye, the
sudden marvellous discovery of the indispensable She, the wooing,
the denial, hope, coquetry, despair, contention, rivalry, hate,
jealousy, love, bitterness, victory, and death. Our comedies, our
tragedies, are being played upon each blade of grass. In fur and
feather we run epitomised."
"I know," said the Woman of the World; "I have heard it all so
often. It is nonsense; I can prove it to you."
"That is easy," observed the Philosopher. "The Sermon on the Mount
itself has been proved nonsense--among others, by a bishop.
Nonsense is the reverse side of the pattern--the tangled ends of the
thread that Wisdom weaves."
"There was a Miss Askew at the College," said the Girton Girl. "She
agreed with every one. With Marx she was a Socialist, with Carlyle
a believer in benevolent despotism, with Spinoza a materialist, with
Newman a fanatic. I had a long talk with her before she left, and
tried to understand her; she was an interesting girl. 'I think,'
she said, 'I could choose among them if only they would answer one
another. But they don't. They won't listen to one another. They
only repeat their own case.'"
"There never is an answer," explained the Philosopher. "The kernel
of every sincere opinion is truth. This life contains only the
questions--the solutions to be published in a future issue."
"She was a curious sort of young woman," smiled the Girton Girl; "we
used to laugh at her."
"I can quite believe it," commented the Philosopher.
"It is so like shopping," said the Old Maid.
"Like shopping!" exclaimed the Girton Girl.
The Old Maid blushed. "I was merely thinking," she said. "It
sounds foolish. The idea occurred to me."
"You were thinking of the difficulty of choosing?" I suggested.
"Yes," answered the Old Maid. "They will show you so many different
things, one is quite unable--at least, I know it is so in my own
case. I get quite angry with myself. It seems so weak-minded, but
I cannot help it. This very dress I have on now--"
"It is very charming," said the Woman of the World, "in itself. I
have been admiring it. Though I confess I think you look even
better in dark colours."
"You are quite right," replied the Old Maid; "myself, I hate it.
But you know how it is. I seemed to have been all the morning in
the shop. I felt so tired. If only--"