The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (30 page)

A
N OPPORTUNITY
presented itself to play a reed organ, or “parlour” organ this afternoon, and I seized it eagerly, for it is many years since I had a whack at such an instrument. Really it is not more than a gigantic mouth-organ, blown by foot power. And what foot power! It is popularly believed that our grandmothers were un-athletic, but no girl who operated a parlour organ lacked exercise, pumping with her feet, clawing at the
Vox Humana
and
Celeste
stops with her hands and wagging her head to keep time. But the parlour organ went out when short skirts came in. Many a young fellow of the 90’s, charmed by his girl’s command of her organ, married her, only to discover on his wedding night that she had legs like an eight-day bicycle racer—the result of furious pedalling. When skirts were raised, the jig was up.

I
HEARD LAST
evening about a physical fitness test which was used in the Air Force, called the Harvard Step Test. Here it is: step on and off an ordinary kitchen chair once every second for three minutes. If, by the end of that time you have not dropped dead, your physical condition is satisfactory, and you probably will not drop dead until tomorrow. As soon as I heard of this I was agog to try it, and lasted splendidly for about twenty seconds; then I heard a sound in my ears like the boiling of a cauldron of maple sap, and I decided to sit down and accept a cool drink and a cigarette. The only physical exercise at which I really excel is walking downstairs.

Many people complain to me that the world has become degenerate, and that we now rely on mechanical entertainments, instead of making our own fun. This is not true in one aspect of life, at least; nowadays we all make our own wrong numbers. There was a time, before the dial phone, when we relied on the operators at “Central” to get wrong numbers for us, and very good at it they were, too. But now we do it all by ourselves; somebody hoiked me out of bed at 7:10 this morning absolutely unaided.… Those “Central” girls developed wonderful voices and stupefying accents. One lifted the receiver from the hook. “Nubbaw?” said a voice. “9999,” one said. “Nyun, nyun, nyun, nyun,” said the voice, and after a few clicks one was talking to 9989, who had got out of his deathbed to answer the ring. Effete, dependent old days!

I
RECIEVED A COPY
of
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks
this morning. It looks very nice, though the price is too
high, owing to the heavy costs of production, particularly binding, these days. Nevertheless, I suppose people will insist upon buying it, thronging to the bookshops with their money clutched tightly in their little hot hands. Poor souls! How much better off they would be if they would concentrate upon that Book of Books, in which wisdom, beauty, and ineffable solace are to be found—I refer, of course, to the book which I published in 1939, and which nobody bought. It appeared between the Anschluss and the outbreak of war and these trivial distractions ruined it.

I
VISITED THE DENTIST
again today. When he had finished his work he disappeared into a little back room and I heard the sound of something gurgling from a bottle; this is a noise which always cheers me. Soon he returned with a small glass of pink liquid which he handed to me. “Try that,” he said in a conspiratorial voice. I was touched by this kindness, and I winked at him, said “Chin-chin,” and drank it at a gulp. It was mouthwash, without even an alcohol base.… I consider that the dentist abused my confidence, and I think it was a dirty trick to play on a man whose nerves were still shaky. If that dentist ever visits me in my office, I shall treat him to a glass of whisky-coloured ink.

I
AM DEEPLY
interested in a news dispatch from South Africa which tells of twin girls who suddenly became boys. I want to know more about this. Was the change the result of deep emotion generated by the Royal visit? What are the feelings of the girls with whom, until now, they mixed on terms of girlish intimacy? Is there any sign of a trend toward this sort of thing in
the Sister Dominion? Have bearded Boer farmers begun to look speculatively at their reflections in the glass, wondering how they would look in one of those saucy Voortrekker bonnets? Canada is outclassed now. All we can show is a set of Quintuplets when our King visits us, but in South Africa they are ambisextrous.

Personally I like being a man, and I can face with stoicism the possibility of becoming a woman, but I dread the intermediate period, during which I should be an It, tossed hither and thither on the turbulent seas of irreconcilable ambitions.

I
TALKED TO
a man this morning who is financially interested in Ontario wines. I asked him why they were no better than they are, and he replied by telling me of the extreme care and cleanliness shown in manufacturing them. “But that’s just the trouble,” I said: “you make wine as though it were a disinfectant. In the wineries of France they concentrate on flavour, and not on cleanliness, and as a result they produce great wines; wine must be made by vintners, not by analytical chemists. Wine and cheese are two things which cannot be made under laboratory conditions if they are to be good. It is better for the connoisseur not to poke his nose into the cheese factory or the winery. Cleanliness is the bugbear of this continent, and too much is sacrificed to it.” He goggled a bit, and then said that he didn’t know anything about it; he was a rye drinker himself. Oh, for a glass of real wine from grapes pressed by the feet of joyous, pleasure-loving Ontario farmers.

M
Y BROTHER
Fairchild has been having rather a difficult time with magic. Hoping to ingratiate himself with
his children, he bought them some magic tricks, with which he thought that they might mystify their little friends. Having made this false step, he was soon involved in the appalling task of teaching the children to perform the tricks. Teaching a child to do even the simplest sleight-of-hand is like teaching a hippopotamus to embroider pillow-slips. The result of the whole mad scheme was tears, bad temper, and frustration for Fairchild.… I sympathize with him. Once, in the bleak past, I cherished a desire to be a magician; I would have been quite content if I could have achieved the modest skill of say, Dante or Blackstone. I laboured before a mirror with coins, cards, eggs, handkerchiefs and billiard balls for weeks, my arms aching until one bitter day when I came to my senses and admitted that nothing short of psycho-analysis and blood transfusions could make a conjurer of me. For the same reasons that I cannot carpenter shelves, fix leaky taps, or tend a furnace, I was unable to pluck fifty quarters out of the air, or pull a rabbit out of a hat.

I
ARGUED TODAY
with the most illogical opponent I have met in a long time. For my part, I can argue quite logically when it suits me, having been trained to it at my school, where there were a number of clever young English masters who supervised our boyish wrangles. “That’s an
argumentum ad hominem
, Marchbanks,” they would cry, when I was buttering up my opponent before giving him a verbal K.O. Or they would shriek, “
Tu quoque!
” when I sought to unnerve my rival by shouting “The same to you, with knobs on!” at him, hoping to make him lose his temper. They were also very critical of something called “an undistributed middle” which I apparently made use of when
I was being particularly foxy. Under their tutelage I learned the useful art of logic, which permits me to hold my opponent very closely to the rules, while pulling a dialectical fast one on him whenever I can. But when I argue with someone who scorns logic, and even reason, I have to depend on my talent for abuse if I hope to win.

A
T CHRISTMAS
someone gave me some Russian cigarettes, wrapped in black paper and with elegant gold tips. From time to time I smoke one, enjoying a deep sense of sin as I do so. Thus it is to have been brought up in a household of Continuing Presbyterians; when others wallow happily in the fleshpots I gather up the skirts of my immortal soul and dabble my feet timidly over the brink.…I shovelled a lot of heavy snow this afternoon, which caused a great lethargy to come upon me. But I revived myself with a glass of sherry, which made me so hungry that I ate a huge tea, after which I could do nothing but loll by the fire and yawn until it was time to come here. Physical activity of any kind is my downfall; in order to keep my brain working and my productiveness at its height, I should be carried everywhere in a chair, like a Chinese mandarin.

T
HERE WAS A
time when I took a modest pride in my handwriting; of late years it has degenerated into a scrawl. This probably means that my moral stature is increasing, for I have observed that beautiful writers are usually uncommonly wicked men. One of the most exquisite writers who ever lived was Casanova, and everybody knows that he was a fellow you wouldn’t trust even with your old Aunt Bessie; another impeccable
master of the cursive hand was Poggio, who used it chiefly to write down dirty stories about the clergy. Of late years I have grown so moral that I am becoming dull company for myself, and it is my invariable habit to remove my hat to all wearers of back-to-front collars. Result: I can hardly read my own notes. Canadians on the whole must be remorselessly moral fellows, for they are shocking scrawlers.

I
ATTENDED A
committee meeting this afternoon to decide certain matters bearing upon the public weal, and tried to look serious for three hours and a half. As I am incapable of concentrating on any single theme for more than an hour at a time, this was a strain on my histrionic powers. My imagination wandered; I thought about what I would do if I had a lot of money, what I would do if I were wrecked on a desert island with Joan Fontaine, and what I would do if I were a wood-carver of the genius of Grinling Gibbons. I drew funny faces on the paper which had been given to me for the purpose of making serious notes. I wondered what would happen if an evil fairy were to sneak into the room through the keyhole and strike us all stark naked. I wondered if I would be able to eat a woolly old Life Saver which I found in my pocket with my car keys, without being rebuked by the Chair. It is useless to put me on committees: I have an incorrigibly frivolous and vacillating mind.

I
WENT TO SEE
Donald Wolfit in Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
last evening, and liked it much better than I liked
Lear
last week; the company seemed more suited to the satirical work. This play is all about avarice, and was
a delightful change from most modern plays which are all about love. But avarice, as a vice, seems to have gone out of fashion. Nobody is miserly in the grand manner nowadays. Of course, following the trend of the times, the State has taken over avarice, and for genuine grasping, grinding, scrunching, scraping meanness and extortion it surpasses immeasurably all miserliness based on individual whim. In fact, I think it would pay the Income Tax Payers’ Association to engage Mr. Wolfit and his company to stage a special performance of
Volpone
and give free seats to the Government, the deputy ministers, and the heads of all bureaux and boards at Ottawa as a lesson in avarice punished.… The genius of Jonson never fails to astonish and refresh me. What a torrent of golden words! And what a magnificent detestation of cant and folly.

W
HILE ON THE
train today I sat near a man who was wearing a particularly fine example of a $5 wig. Like many other things, the excellence of wigs increases directly with their cost, and $5 procures the absolute minimum of deception and aesthetic satisfaction. This fellow had bought a somewhat larger wig than he really needed, perhaps in the hope that his head would grow, and in consequence it shifted a little every time the train lurched. Sometimes it dropped down over his eyes, and I was treated to the spectacle of a growing gap between art and nature at the back: at other times the thing jerked backward, giving him a high forehead, like pictures of Shakespeare; when it tilted over one eye he had quite a rakish appearance. His hair alone entitled him to challenge Lon Chaney’s right to the name of “The Man With A Thousand Faces.” I should judge that he had owned this wig for many years, for it had
grown a trifle mangy, and he had tried to rejuvenate it by smearing it with brilliantine. The result was rather as though he had decorated his pate with a piece of cotton waste which someone had used for cleaning an engine.

I
WENT TO SEE
John Gielgud’s production of
The Importance of Being Earnest.
I have never understood why some people call this an “artificial comedy”; true, it does not sprawl, and it wastes no words in foolishly reproducing the emptiness of everyday speech, but it is no more “artificial” than the music of Mozart is “artificial”… . It has been a long time since Canada saw comedy acting as perfect as this.… It is a wonderful thing to watch the audience at a performance of this quality; every time they laugh they seem to roll forward a little in their seats, and the cumulative effect of this movement is as though the whole theatre had given a tiny hop toward the stage. And what a wonderful thing it is to see an Ontario audience laugh! Those stony, disapproving, thin-lipped faces, eloquent of our bitter winters, our bitter politics, and our bitter religion, melt into unaccustomed merriment, and a sense of relief is felt all through the theatre, as though the straps and laces of a tight corset had been momentarily loosened.