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,
… somewhere east of Suez
Where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no ten commandments,
And a man can raise a thirst —
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:
… What is't I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue; never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art and nature
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite.
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:
Tis'n them as 'as munny as breaks into 'ouses an' steäls,
Them as 'as coäts to their backs an' taäkes their regular meäls.
Noä, but it's them as niver knaws wheer a meäl's to be 'ad —
Taäke my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad.
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:
But where you have met your equals,
Gun for gun and man for man,
We have noticed other sequels,
It was always you that ran.
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.