The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (4 page)

I
PICKED UP
a magazine this afternoon—one of those glossy eager magazines which give their impressionable readers the exciting illusion that they are really thinking—and read an article which said that it costs a family with an income of $5,000 a year the sum of $12,750 to raise a child to the age of eighteen. This seems an inflated price for most of the adults I know, many of whom would be extravagantly capitalized at $50. Still, it is a lamentable truth that a fathead or a mischief-maker eats just as much, wears out as many clothes, and takes just as much room in a bus or a train as a Socrates or a Leonardo da Vinci.

I
WAS TALKING
to a man this afternoon who said that a little girl had come to his door at lunch-time and had given him a cake of maple sugar. This astonished him, as it did me. When an adult does something for a child nobody notices, but when (probably by mistake) a child does something for an adult—that’s news.

T
HE SCHOOLS
re-opened today and troops of children in unwontedly clean clothes rushed past my gate, all agog to resume their studies. I met one little girl who was crying because she had a cold and could not begin her kindergarten class for a few days. I eavesdropped as some of the groups rushed by, and found that they were assessing the relative crabbiness of their teachers. What has come over the children of today, I wonder? In my childhood nobody liked school, and with excellent reason. What makes the modern school so attractive? Does the Minister of Education cause a powerful
love philtre to be put in the drinking fountains? Stranger things have happened.

A
S THE WEATHER
grows warmer I see more and more men going without hats. For my part, I do not feel comfortable without a hat on, and much as I detest the felt chamber-pots which are sold nowadays as suitable gentleman’s headgear, I always wear one. The people for whom I really feel sorry are the bald men who go without hats in the hope that the sun will bring out a few spears of hair on their naked noggins; it is my belief that the sun is an enemy of human hair, and that if you have a tendency to be bald, the sun will encourage it. Consider this matter scientifically. Scotsmen have hairy knees, for although they wear no knee-clouts their climate is cold, damp and sunless. But African savages do not have hairy knees, because they get too much sun on their knees for the hair to flourish. If bald men really want hair, they should wear hats filled with damp and slimy moss; this would cause hair to grow as a form of protection.

I
TOOK A LADY’S ARM
as she was stepping off a curb this afternoon, and she snatched it from me with a great show of offence. But I was raised in the Old School, and I automatically grab at any woman who is changing her level, to prevent her from tumbling down or wrenching her ankle. I cannot rid myself of a traditional belief that women are delicate creatures, though reason and observation assure me that most of them are as tough as old boots.

I
AM STAYING
in an hotel and suffer the inconvenience of being asked what I want for breakfast. I am not accustomed to answering such a question. For many years my breakfast has not varied by so much as a calory, and I consider any breakfast but my usual one a heathen abomination. In the matter of breakfast, I am out-and-out Tory. If my day is not to fall in ruins it must be founded upon a sliced orange, a dish of porridge, one slice of toast with marmalade, and three cups of weak tea. I know men of shifting and
uneasy faith who change breakfast foods as easily as they change their minds; I know women of doubtful virtue who will jump from toast to hot rolls with a light laugh and a wanton glance from beneath their sweeping eyelashes. I know inordinate men who eat meat and eggs at breakfast, and deliquescent women who break their fast with a rusk and a glass of lemon juice. But mine is the one, true, apostolic breakfast, ordained at Creation, and enduring till the twilight of Time.

A
KIND FRIEND
has sent me a Bay of Fundy lobster for Christmas, and I decided to eat it last night, as lobsters grow impatient if kept too long. I spent quite a time trying to undo its buttons and find its zipper, for a lobster is one of Nature’s most baffling packages, though a noble sight. At last I had to call for skilled assistance. The Skilled Assistant laid the lobster bare in no time, reminding me of a jest much favoured by Gaffer Marchbanks, my great-great-grandfather: “What made the lobster blush?” “It saw the salad dressing.” This was considered delightfully salacious when Gaffer was a roystering blade, and he once had his face slapped for whispering it to a Nice Girl. The incident deepened his determination to marry a girl who was not Nice, and their descendants all suffer from a taste for ribaldry which I have never been able to root out of my heart. Strive as I will, gross expressions such as “bottom,” “tum-tum” and “camisole” creep into my conversation, and I was once guilty of telling, in mixed company, about a lady organist who could change her combinations without taking her feet off the pedals. That sort of thing marks a man as a Smutty Fellow, and people avoid him lest they be dragged down to his level.… You
like smutty talk? My dear madam, why didn’t you say so before?

I
RECEIVED
a pamphlet this morning urging me to get to work on my lawn. “One can hardly do lawn work too early; grass seed loves cool weather, and so does the grass itself,” I read. Looking out of the window I saw at least two feet of snow on the ground, and more was falling; even if grass seed does love cool weather, I am not going to dig through all that snow to oblige it. Nor am I going to make my sweet pea trench this week, as the pamphlet advises; I have planted sweet peas for three successive years, and I have not had a single bloom yet; therefore I cannot see that it makes much difference when I dig my trench; September would be early enough. Indeed, I wonder whether I shall bother about my garden at all this year. I have proved over a period of years that I am incapable of growing anything. Just as there are people who cannot wear pearls without discolouring them, or a wristwatch without stopping it, I cannot enter a garden without withering it: Sam Sours Soil and Marchbanks Mars Mould. Just as women are forbidden to enter Italian vineyards for fear of blighting them, all sensible people keep me out of their gardens, and frankly, I am happy to admire them from the non-working side of the fence.

A
CHILD WHO
received a plastic version of a tin whistle appealed to me today for a lesson in how to play it. This was a sop to my vanity which I could not resist, for I fancy myself as a performer on all tootling instruments. But when I took the thing to demonstrate, it slobbered half a pint of spittle on my waistcoat, and
depressed me deeply. This is the trouble with all blown instruments; they drool. Brass instruments have special valves to collect this deposit, and one of the less pleasing sights in an orchestra is the frantic shakings of the trumpeters as they void their ptyalism upon the floor, and at almost any Wagner opera the conductor enters and leaves the orchestra pit in his rubbers. Nor is it nice to take over a wind instrument which someone else has been playing—particularly when one’s pupil has been hitting the humbugs hard all afternoon.

I
WENT TO
the movies last night and saw, among other things, a film about soil erosion called
The Rape of the Earth
. The word “rape” was so irresistibly humorous to two girls and their escorts in my neighbourhood that I thought they would burst; their sniggers were like the squirtings of a hose when it is first turned on. Some people are affected by some words as slot machines are affected by coins; feed in your word, and the result is invariable. Feed “Communist” into an old gent with a quarter of a million dollars, and out comes a huffy lecture; feed “Booze” into a prohibitionist, and out will come highly imaginative statistics about accidents and insanity; feed “Rape” into girls and boys and you get this bromo-seltzer fizzing.

A
LITTLE GIRL
asked me to read her a piece about clouds this evening, and I did so, although experience has taught me that reading things to children always ends up in an uncomfortable quiz, with me in the role of Marchbanks the Moron. Sure enough, she asked me where all the vapour comes from which forms the clouds. I took a leap into the dark and said that it was
caused by the warm earth meeting cold air. Was the air wet, then, she asked. Yes, I said firmly. Then why weren’t our clothes wet? They are wet, said I, feeling like a man stepping off a cliff. If the air is wet why don’t we drown? Because our lungs are made to stand it. Like fish? Yes, like fish. Are people a kind of fish? Yes.… It just shows where a little child can lead you.… And yet it would be worse to say “I don’t know.” Children never forgive their elders for their ignorance. It is obviously a grown-up’s business to know.

I
T IS MID
-J
UNE
and the ladies of my acquaintance have all put on their summer stays and hung their fleecy ones in the cupboard, but it is still far from warm. In winter I rush to the furnace-room if the temperature of my house sinks below 65, but in June I try not to notice when it drops to 58. I huddle closer into the spongey embrace of my armchair, and when I sneeze I think it must be hay fever. It is much easier to catch cold in Canada in summer than in winter, if you want my opinion.

C
HILDREN ARE
the most confirmed Tories I have ever met. Today I heard a group of them boasting among themselves about how high they could count; such improbable figures as drillions and squillions were being lightly bandied about by the bragging tots. I remember that when I was in kindergarten the same sort of blowing to the teacher used to go on morning after morning. I never joined in it, for although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that anyone who can count to ten can count
upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so. But apparently the kindergarten set of today are threshing the same old straw. Tories, that’s what children are, perpetuating the same old nonsense from generation to generation.

I
WAS AT A PARTY
last night at which the refreshments consisted solely of cheese, biscuits and beer. This seems to me to be an admirable lesson in simplicity, and the party was a great success. Not, mind you, that I dislike elaborate parties; let the footmen cluster around me with the quail on toast, the caviar and the anchovies; let sherry trifle be heaped upon crêpes suzette and liqueur cherries swim in the zabaglione. I can take parties as elaborate as they come. But many times my heart has bled for the hostess who has slaved for hours to produce four kinds of sandwiches and two kinds of cake, and who is so exhausted by her labours that she casts a gloom over her own party. Far, far better to offer something simple and good, in a spirit of revelry, than to toil to produce pretentious mediocrity. It is the spirit which makes a party, and not dainty sandwiches, cut in the form of hearts and tasting like spades.

I
CAME ACROSS
a chart in
Life
magazine yesterday which was designed to help me decide whether I am a Highbrow, a Lowbrow, an Upper Middlebrow or a Lower Middlebrow. After some pondering I think I must be a Concertina Brow, for I like such Lowbrow things as beer and parlour sculpture, and I also like such apparently Highbrow things as red wine, art, ballet and pre-Bach music. But then I am a great fellow for the theatre, which is rated as only Upper Middlebrow. I even like
front-yard sculpture, which is supposed to be Lower Middlebrow, though I also admire the fat naked female statues of Maillol, which are Upper Middlebrow. In short, my brow heaves up and down alarmingly, like a concertina, and I have a few tastes which do not fit into any of these categories, like my affection for corduroy trousers, and my fondness for bananas dipped in hot coffee. I am inclined to think that it must be very dull to have one’s brow stuck at a particular point; I am glad my brow is able to expand and contract.