Here are Ladies

J >> James Stephens >> Here are Ladies

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"It is peculiar how often opposite emotions may meet on a common plane
of expression. The extremes of love and hate strive to get equally
close to kiss or to bite the object of their regard. Work and play may
be equally strenuous and equally enthralling. Hunger and satiety unite
in a common boredom. A happy person will dance from sheer delight, and
the man in whom a pin has been secreted can only by dancing express the
exquisite sensibility of his cuticle. Whatever one does or refrains
from doing one must be tired by bed-time--it is a law--but one may be
pleasantly tired.

"I will suspect the morals of a man who cannot dance. I will look
curiously into his sugar or statecraft. I will impeach his candour or
reticence, and sneer at his method of lighting a fire unless he can
frolic when he goes out for a walk with a dog--that is the beginning of
dancing: the end of it is the beginning of a world. A young dog is a
piece of early morning disguised in an earthly fell, and the man who
can resist his contagion is a sour, dour, miserable mistake, without
bravery, without virtue, without music, with a cranky body and a
shrivelled soul, and with eyes incapable of seeing the sunlight.

"I have often thought that dogs are a very superior race of people.
They are certainly more highly organised on the affectional plane than
man. A dog will love you just for the fun of it--and that is virtue.
Pat a dog on the head and he will dance around you in an ecstasy of
good-fellowship. Let us, at least, be the equal of these sagacities.
Let us put away our false intellectual pride. Let us learn to be
unconscious. The average man trembles into a dance imagining that all
eyes are rayed upon him wonderingly or admiringly, whereas, in truth,
he will only be looked at if he dances very well or very badly. Both
of these extremities of perfection ought to be avoided. We should
exercise our very bad or very good qualities in solitude lest average
people be saddened by their disabilities in either direction. Let your
curses be as private as your prayers for both are purgative operations.
In public we must conform to the standard, in private only may we do
our best or our worst. Acting so, we will be freed from false pride
and cowardly self-consciousness. Let us be brave. Let us caress the
waists of our neighbours without fear. Let everybody's chin be our
toy. Let us pat one another on the hats as we pass in the melancholy
streets.--Thus only shall we learn to be gay and careless who for so
long have been miserable and suspicious. We will be fearless and
companionable who have been so timid and solitary. A new, a better, a
real police force will arrest people who don't dance as they travel to
and from their labour. The world will be happy at last, and
civilisation will begin to be possible."

Here, in an ecstasy of good-fellowship, the old gentleman seized his
pewter with his left hand and my glass with his right hand, and he
emptied them both before recognising his mistake. I had, however, run
out of tobacco, whereupon he became very angry, and refused to bid me
good-night.

III

The old gentleman condescended to accept the last cigar which I had,
and, having lit it with my only match, he earnestly advised me never to
smoke to excess, because this indulgence brought spots before the eyes,
deteriorated the moral character, and was, moreover, exceedingly
expensive.--On the subject of smoking and tobacco he spoke as follows--

"I have observed that people who do not smoke are usually of a sour and
unsociable disposition. All red-haired people smoke naturally, and
they almost invariably use cut-plug. Very dark-haired men smoke twist,
and their natural strength and virtue is such that in the intervals of
smoking they also chew tobacco. Fair-haired men generally smoke
cigarettes--they do this, not for the purpose of enjoyment, but purely
in imitation of their betters. However, in later life, when they
become bald, as they invariably do, they also became regenerate and
smoke pig-tail. Men with mouse-coloured hair do not smoke at all.
They collect postage stamps and sea-shells, and are usually to be found
sitting round a fire with other girls eating chocolates and seeking for
replies to such questions as, when is a door not a door? and why does a
chicken cross the road? They are miserable creatures whom I will not
further mention.

"The usage of tobacco, or some smokable substitute, is as old as
primitive man. Almost all nations of the earth are adepts in this
particular habit. It is, of course, an acquired taste, as also are
washing and tomatoes. We are born with appetites which are static and
unchangeable, but we are also born with a yearning for pleasure which
is almost as positive as an appetite and only needs cultivation to
become equally imperative. Doubtless, a traveller from some distant
planet, who knew nothing of tobacco, would be astonished at the
spectacle of a man exhaling smoke from his lips with splendid
unconcern, and our traveller's conjectures as to the origin of the
smoke and the immunity of the smoker would be highly amusing and
instructive.

"I am often surprised on reflecting that our immediate ancestors were
debarred from this pleasant indulgence, and I have wondered how they
made the evenings pass. The lack of tobacco and pockets in their
clothes (both of which are great civilising agents) may have been
responsible for the wars, harryings, kidnappings and cattle raids
which, alternating with rigorous and austere religious ceremonial,
formed the bulk of their pleasures. Nowadays we leave these violent
entertainments to children and the semi-literate and take our pleasures
more composedly. A man who can put his hands in his pockets will
seldom remove them for the purpose of slaying some one whose only fault
is that he was born in the County Sligo. A man with a pipe in his
teeth will be too much at peace with society to endanger its existence.

"If the blessings of tobacco should be extended to the remainder of the
vertebrates (as, why should it not?) I am sure that lions, elephants,
and wild boars would avail themselves of it. So, also, would
kangaroos, a beautiful and agile race living in Polynesia, or
thereabouts--they are beautiful hoppers, and collect large quantities
of this plant. In this direction they are especially well equipped,
each having a pouch in her stomach in which to carry tobacco and hops,
but wherein they now ignorantly secrete their young. Serpents would
smoke a pipe with considerable elegance, and might become more
benevolent in consequence. Frogs would smoke, but I fancy they would
expectorate too elaborately to be neighbourly. Fish, however, would
not smoke at all.--They are a cowardly and corrupt people, living in
water, which is a singular thing to do. Neither would many birds
smoke, they have neither the stamina nor the teeth, but I am certain
that crows and jackdaws would chew tobacco eagerly and with true
relish. A large proportion of the insecta are too light-minded and
frivolous to care for smoking. Beetles, however, a very reserved and
dignified race, would smoke cigars, and so would cockroaches, a rather
saturnine and cynical people; but no others.

"As for women--I am astonished they have not smoked, by mere contagion,
long ago. If they did they would certainly grow more kind-hearted and
manly, and I am sure that a deputation of ladies with pipes in their
mouths and hands in their pockets would only have to demand the
franchise from an astounded ministry to obtain it.

"Members of Parliament are, I believe, either a separate creation or a
composite of the parrot and the magpie. I have not yet discovered
their particular function in nature but have observed them with some
particularity. They wear top hats and are constantly making speeches,
both of which are easy things to do and quite pleasant minor
accomplishments.--So far as I can gather their chief use has been to
pass something called a Budget. From the fact that this Budget
contains a disgraceful imposition on tobacco I must take it that
Members of Parliament are among the lower animals who do not
smoke--they are also uninteresting in other ways."

Having said this my old friend bowed to me and departed genially with
my cigar case in his pocket. The shirt-sleeved Adonis behind the
counter wagged his head solemnly at a fly and then clouted it with a
dish-cloth.

IV

The old gentleman took an athletic pull at his liquor, and continued
his discourse. He had been discussing more to himself than to me the
merits of Professor James and Monsieur Bergson, and had inquired was I
aware of the nature of the Pragmatic Sanction. The gentleman behind
the counter remarked, that he had one on his bicycle, but that they
were no good. This statement was denounced by the Philosopher as an
unnatural and clumsy falsehood, and, anathematising the ignorance of
his interrupter, he came by slow degrees to the following discourse--

"I have but little faith in any of the methods of education with which
I am presently acquainted. The objective of every system of teaching
should be to enable the person who is being subjected to this repulsive
treatment to do something which will fit him to maintain a place in
life where he will be as little liable as possible to the changes and
vicissitudes of civilised existence.

"The cumbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can
scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of
language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed
Church and the highest order of the vertebrates.

"If one walks into any school in this kingdom one is certain to meet a
tall, thin, anaemic youth with a draggled moustache and a worried eye
who is endeavouring to coerce a mass of indigestible, inelastic and
unimportant facts into the heads of divers sleepy and disgusted
children. If a small boy, on being asked where Labrador is, replies
that it is the most northerly point of the Berlin Archipelago, he may
be wrong in quite a variety of ways, but even if he answered correctly
he would still know just as little about the matter, while if he were
to give the only proper reply to so ridiculous a conundrum, he would
tell his tormentor that he did not care a rap where it was, that he had
not put it there, and that he would tell his mother if the man did not
leave him alone. What has he got to do with Labrador, Terra del Fuego,
or the Isles of Greece? Give him a fistful of facts about Donnybrook,
and send him away to hunt out the truth of it, with a sandwich in his
pocket and the promise of a lump of toffee when he came back with his
cargo of truths--that would interest him, the toffee would make the
information stick, while the verification of his facts would make his
head fat and fertile.

"When we ceased to be natural creatures and put on the oppressive
shrouds, wraps and disguises which we label in the villainous aggregate
civilisation, we ceased to know either how to teach or how to learn.
We exchanged the freedom and spaciousness of life for a cramped
existence compounded of spectacles and bad grammar, this complicated
still further by the multiplication tables, the dead languages and
indigestion tabloids. During his school-days many a healthy boy had to
parse ten square miles of dead language. Why? he does not know and he
will never be told, for no one else knows any more than he. The only
thing of which he is certain is, that he did not do anything to deserve
it.

"Civilisation, which is responsible for all the woes of life, such as
washing, shaving and buying boots, is responsible for this also.
Potatoes are more productive than Latin roots, are twice as nourishing
and cannot be parsed. Teach a girl how to recognise an egg by the
naked eye, and then teach her how to cook it. Teach a boy how to
discover the kind of trees eggs grow on and what is the best kind of
soil to plant them in. Teach a girl how to keep her hands from
scratching, her tongue from telling lies, and her teeth from dropping
out prematurely, and she will, maybe, turn out a healthy kind of mammal
having a house filled with brightness and laughter. Teach a boy how to
prevent another boy from mashing the head off him, teach him how to be
good to his mother when she is old, teach him how to give two-pence to
a beggar without imagining that he is investing his savings in Paradise
at fifty per cent and a bonus; and then, having eliminated
civilisation, education, clothes, tin whistles and soap this earth will
not be such a bad old ball-alley for a man to smoke a pipe in.

"Everything is wrong. People should rise to their feet and salute when
a farmer or a teacher comes into a room. No man should be allowed into
Parliament who has not engaged in one or other of these professions,
but because they are the two most important professions in the world
their exponents are robbed and harried into slaves and fools."

Having said this with great earnestness the old gentleman
absent-mindedly impounded my drink, absorbed it, and strode away
wrapped in thought. The gentleman-in-waiting sympathetically asked me
if I would have another one, but on learning that I had no more money
he said good-night.

V

The old gentleman was in a state of most unusual content. It might
have been because the sun was shining, or it might have been because he
had just finished his third glass: whatever it was, the smile upon his
face was of a depth and a radiance impossible to describe. He spoke
for a while upon the pleasant smell of hay passing through a city, and,
remarking upon the enviable thirst of hay-makers, he swept gradually to
the following weighty monologue--

"From the earliest times," said he, "drinking has been regarded not
alone as a necessary lubricant, but also as a pastime, and the
ingenuity of every race under the sun has been exercised in the attempt
to give variety and distinction to its beverages.

"We may take it that the earliest race of men drank nothing but water,
and hot water to boot, for at that era the earth must have been, if not
hot, at least tepid. One can easily imagine that the contemporaries of
the five-toed horse might have welcomed death as a happy release from
their too sultry existence.

"I suppose man is the only brewing animal known to scientific research.
All other creatures take their food and drink neat, or in a raw state.
Of course, almost all mammals are enabled by a highly ingenious
internal mechanism to brew milk, or some other lacteal substitute, but
this is performed by a natural, instinctive impulse towards the
preservation of their young and conserves none of the spirit of
artifice and calculation so necessary to authentic brewing operations.

"Brewing was possible only when the stability of the human race was,
more or less, assured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a
state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet
aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families--a father, an
uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of
children--wandered wherever food seemed most abundant, and fought with
or eluded such other families as they chanced upon. This state of
existence was too precarious and haphazard to allow of the niceties of
brewing being evolved.

"But the natural tendency of families to lengthen, the gregarious
instincts of the race, and the need of mutual protection and assistance
ultimately welded these indiscriminate families into communities of
ever-varying extent, and the movement of these huge troops and
transportation of their baggage becoming more and more difficult
(vehicles being unknown and horses, perhaps, treble-toed, wily and
ferocious) and food, which until then had only been obtained in a
fugitive state, becoming less easy of access, these communities were
forced to select a settled habitation, scratch the earth for provender,
settled down to the breeding of one-toed horses, and exercise the
respectable virtues of thrift and industry for their preservation.
Thus, laws were formulated, tentative and unsatisfactory at first, and
ever tending, as to this day, to become more complex and less
satisfactory. Villages took shape, straggled into towns, widened into
cities and coalesced into kingdoms and empires: and so, the
civilisation of which we are partakers crawled laboriously into being,
with the brewer somewhere in the centre, active, rubicund and
disputatious, as he has continued to date, with a seat on the County
Council which he had swindled some thirsty statesman out of, and more
property than he could deal with by himself.

"It is a singular reflection that thirst has very little to do with the
consumption of drink, nor is this appetite subject to the vagaries of
climate, for the inhabitants of the coldest regions will, it is feared,
drink on equal terms with those dwelling in the sun-burnt tropics. In
almost all ceremonial observances drinking has had a special place, and
this diversion lends itself to an infinite number of objects--we can
from the same bowl quaff health to our friends and confusion to our
enemies, doubtless with equal results. Here alone men meet on equal
terms. There is no religion, nationality or politics in liquor: let it
be but sufficiently wet and potent and it matters not if the brew has
been fermented in the tub of a Christian or the vessel of a heathen
Turk.

"I understand that this latter race are forbidden, by the form of
heresy which they call religion, to use liquors more potent than
sherbet. Some thinkers believe that this deprivation is possibly the
reason of their being Turks.--They are Turks, not from conviction, but
from habit, spite, and the bile engendered by a too rigid and bigoted
abstinence. In this belief, however, I do not concur, for I consider
that a Turk is a Turk naturally, and without any further constraint
than those imposed by the laws of geography and primogeniture.

"Meanwhile it is interesting to speculate on the future of an abstinent
nation whose politics have the misfortune to be guided by a Peerage
instead of a Beerage, and whose national destiny is irrationally
divorced from the interests of 'The Trade.' Any departure from the
established customs of humanity must be criticised unsparingly, and, if
necessary, destructively. To overthrow the customs of antiquity must
entail its own punishment and that punishment may be an awe-inspiring
and chastening Success. Therefore, this happy whisky-governed land of
ours should never forsake its liquor or it may be forced by opportunity
and work to become great. The foundations of our civilisation are
steeped in beer--let no sacrilegious hand seek to interfere with it,
for, even if the foundations were rotten, the interests of the Trade
must not be disturbed, the grave and learned members of our Corporation
might be horribly reduced to working for their living, and our
unfortunate City might have the extraordinary misfortune to scramble
out of debt in the absence of its statesmen."

The old gentleman, with a bright smile, said that "he did not mind if
he did," and he "did" with such gusto that I had to call a cab.

VI

The old gentleman came in hurriedly and called for that to which he was
accustomed. He fumbled in one pocket after another, and after going over
all his pockets several times he remarked to me "I have forgotten my
purse." His air was so friendly and confiding that it more than repaid
me for the small sum which I had to advance. He sat down close beside
me, and, after touching on the difficulty of being understood in a
tavern, he drew genially to these remarks--

"Language may be described as a medium for recording one's sensations.
It is gesture translated into sound. It is noise with a meaning. Music
cannot at all compare with it, for music is no more than the scientific
distribution of noise, and it does not impart any meaning to the
disintegrated and harried tumults. Language may be divided into several
heads, which, again, may be subdivided almost indefinitely.--The primary
heads are, language, talk, and speech. Speech is the particular form of
noise which is made by Members of Parliament. Language is the symbols
whereby one lady in a back street makes audible her impressions of the
lady who lives on the same floor--it is often extremely sinewy. Talk may
be described as the crime of people who make one tired.

"It is my opinion that people talk too much. I think the world would be
a healthier and better place if it were more silent. On every day that
passes there is registered over all the earth a vast amount of language
which, so far as I can see, has not the slightest bearing on anything
anywhere.

"I have been told of a race living in Central Africa, or elsewhere, who
by an inherent culture were enabled to dispense with speech. They
whistled, and by practice had attained so copious and flexible a
vocabulary that they could whistle good-morning and good-night, or
how-do-you-do with equal facility and distinction. This, while it is a
step in the right direction, is not a sufficiently long step. To live
among these people might appear very like living in a cageful of canaries
or parrots. Parrots are a very superior race who usually travel with
sailors. They have a whistle which can be guided or deflected into
various by-ways. I once knew a parrot who was employed by a sailor-man
to curse for him when his own speech was suspended by liquor. He could
also whistle ballads and polkas, and had attained an astonishing
proficiency in these arts; for, by long practice, he could dovetail
curses and whistles in a most energetic and, indeed, astonishing manner.
It would often project two whistles and a curse, sometimes two curses and
a whistle, while all the time keeping faithfully to the tune of 'The
Sailor's Grave' or another. It was a highly cultivated and erudite
person. As it advanced in learning it took naturally to chewing tobacco,
but, being a person of strongly experimental habits, it tried one day to
curse and whistle and chew tobacco at the one moment, with the
unfortunate result that a piece of honeydew got jammed between a whistle
and a curse, and the poor thing perished miserably of strangulation.

"It is indeed singular that while every race of mankind is competent to
speak, none of the other races, such as cats, cows, caterpillars, and
crabs, have shown the slightest interest in the making of this ordered
noise. This is the more strange when we reflect that almost all animals
are provided with a throat and a mouth which are capable of making a
noise certainly equal in volume and intelligibility to the sounds made by
a German or a Spaniard.

"Long ago men lived in trees and had elongated backbones which they were
able to twitch. There were no shops, theatres, or churches in those
times, and, consequently, no necessity for a specialized and meticulous
prosody. Man barked at his fellow-man when he wanted something, and if
his request was not understood he bit his fellow-man and was quit of him.
When they forsook the trees and became ground-walkers they came into
contact with a variety of theretofore unknown objects, the necessity for
naming which so exercised their tongues that gradually their bark took on
a different quality and became susceptible of more complicated sounds.
Then, with the dawning of the Pastoral Age, food in a gregarious
community became a matter of more especial importance. When a man barked
at his wife for a cocoanut and she handed him a baby or a bowl of soup or
an evening paper it became necessary, in order to minimise her
alternatives, that he should elaborate his bark to meet this and an
hundred other circumstances. I do not know at what period of history man
was able to call his wife names with the certainty of reprisal. It was
possible quite early, because I have often heard a dog bark in a
dissatisfied and important manner at another dog and be perfectly
comprehended.

"A difficulty would certainly arise as to the selection of a word when
forty or fifty men might at the same time label any article with as many
different names, and, it is reasonable to suppose, that they would be
reluctant to adopt any other expression but that of their own creation.
In such a crux the strongest man of the community would be likely to
clout the others to an admission that his terminology was standard.

"Thus, by slow accretions, the various languages crept into currency, and
the youth of innumerable schoolboys has been embittered by having to
learn to spell.

"Grasshoppers are a fine, sturdy race of people. A great many of them
live on the Hill of Howth, where I have often spent hours hearkening to
their charming conversation. They do not speak with the same machinery
that we use--they convey their ideas to each other by rubbing their
hind-legs together, whereupon noises are produced of exceeding variety
and interest. As a method of speech this is simply delightful, and I
wish we could be trained to converse in so majestical a manner. Perhaps
we shall live to see the day when the journals will chronicle that Mr.
Redmond had rubbed his legs together for three hours at the Treasury
Bench and was removed frothing at the feet, but after a little rest he
was enabled to return and make more noise than ever."

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