The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (2 page)

I
WAS IN TORONTO
yesterday on business, and woke at 8
A.M.
to the sound of the radio in the next room playing Strauss waltzes. Radios in hotel bedrooms are an abomination of desolation, and people who want to listen to waltzes before they have cleaned their teeth are, in my opinion, perverted.… I almost swooned at lunch when I saw a man at a table some distance away who had been killed, I thought, in the war. It was not possible to rush to him at once and say “Are you a ghost, or merely an Amazing Resemblance?” and so I was kept on pins and needles for an hour. But at last I buttonholed him, and it was indeed my friend. When I told him that I had thought him dead, mourned his loss, and filed him away in my memory, he laughed uproariously. Nothing amuses people under fifty so much as being told that you thought they were dead; after fifty the joke gradually loses its side-splitting character until, in the seventies, it is received with sour
looks. Having established my friend’s corporeality we exchanged news, but I could not shake off my doubt at once, and for half an hour or so I expected him to come out with some interesting revelation about the Life Beyond.

T
HE COMING OF
summer has encouraged ants to invade my house, and this morning the bathtub was full of them. I drowned the lot, more in sorrow than in anger, and as they disappeared down the plug-hole, I reflected that I had probably started a Flood legend in the ant world, which in time will be recorded in ant Scripture.

I
SAT DOWN
today to rootle through a pile of mail which has accumulated during the week and which I have not opened, owing to its uninteresting appearance. I take my time about opening letters which look as though they contained unpleasant news, or information which I do not want. I discovered in the heap a copy of a magazine called
The Celt
, published in Britain and devoted to what the publishers presume to be the interests of fanatical Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen, Manxmen, Cornishmen and Bretons; large chunks of it are printed in Erse, Gaelic, Welsh and Breton by fellows called Dmurphaidh and Na Dhoaileach, who used to be plain Murphy and Dooley before the Celtic bug bit them. All of these Celts seemed to be uncommonly vexed with the English, and did not hesitate to say that if the English could be got out of the way everything would be dheaochd (jake) with the world. Being possessed of a considerable degree of traditional Celtic wisdom myself, I soon committed
The Celt
to the flames.

This seems to be my week to receive peculiar periodicals. Another paper called
The Jacobite
arrived from New Zealand, of all places; it was devoted entirely to that most lost of all lost causes. It boasted that a letter written by Mary, Queen of Scots, had recently sold for £1200, whereas one from Elizabeth had sold for a measly £500—an obvious victory for the Stuart cause. It spoke admiringly of Louis XVI as the man who had given the Americans their independence—an interpretation of history which was new to me. I once knew a Jacobite, and he wasted a great deal of time scheming to dethrone the late King George V, in order to supplant him with an obscure Bavarian prince called Ruprecht, who had no desire at all to press his claim to the throne of Britain, though he was the nearest thing to a Stuart to be found in the modern world.

I
AM BEGINNING
to be a little bit touchy about the fact that I have never been up in an airplane. Not so long ago I was among the majority in that respect; now I appear to be one of a timid minority, classed with people who think tomatoes poisonous, or who refuse to use the telephone during thunderstorms. Everybody seems to fly everywhere. The real reason why I do not fly is that I am a coward, and have not even been on a Ferris Wheel for twenty years. But I am getting sick of inventing lies about how I prefer train travel, or motoring, and some day I may be forced into a plane by my fear of losing face.

Y
ESTERDAY
I finished the series of treatments which have occupied my time during the past month. “You’ve
been a good patient, Mr. Marchbanks,” said the nurse as I climbed off the gridiron; “we’ve put 124,000,000 velocipedes through you and you haven’t batted an eyelash.” (She may have said something else, but I think it was velocipedes; these measurements of electricity are very confusing.) I said nothing. When one is praised by nurses it is best not to be too enthusiastic. They may like you so much that they insist on further treatments. I silently cursed the Atomic Frier, into which I have been slid like a roasting fowl for a month, and escaped to the cubby-hole where my clothes had been left. As always in doctors’ dressing rooms, the mirror in this place was hung to suit the needs of women rather than men, and gave me a fine view of my navel. I was on my knees, tying my tie, when the nurse came in again. She thought I was praying, and bent her head reverently. While she was thus occupied I escaped into the blessed light of day, and bought a pound of candied peanuts and ate them all at once, to celebrate my liberty.

I set out for my place of business today and met two men. “Hello, I never expected to see you again,” said one of them. “Nope, heard you were a goner,” said the other. “Ridiculous,” said I, haughtily. “Well, you can’t blame us,” said the first man; “it was all over town that when you came back it would be in a box.” “Pooh, pooh,” said I, being unable to think of anything which properly expressed my feelings. “What was wrong with you, anyway?” asked the second man, screwing up his eyes as though he thought that he could produce X-ray vision in himself by that means, and look right into my inside. “Well, if you wish to know,” said I with dignity, “I had a slight case of cradlecap, and I have been taking treatment for it.” They went their way, muttering discontentedly. I reached
my office and was greeted there with great friendliness, but during the morning a man stuck his head in at the door and said, “Well, well, wonders will never cease. I heard you were on your last legs.” I threw a heavy paper-weight at him, but he ducked.

One of my temperance friends called on me today. “Do you think it is going to be permanent?” he asked, in the voice which doctors use when enquiring after one’s elimination. “Will what be permanent?” I countered. “The Gold Cure,” he whispered. “I have not been taking the Gold Cure,” I said, coldly. “That’s what they all say,” he replied; “but I heard from someone who knows a man who knows an intimate friend of yours that you had a nasty scare with pink elephants—teeny-weeny pink elephants about the size of cocktail sausages—which you saw crawling all over your counterpane. And this man said that they took you to Toronto in a strait-jacket, and drained your crank-case, and packed you in dry ice for a week, and then put you in a furnace and evaporated all the beverage alcohol out of you.” “You have been misinformed,” said I. “Well, that’s what they’re saying, anyway,” he said, “and you’ll never persuade them otherwise.” “I shall not even try,” said I, pushing the secret button which opened a trapdoor at his feet, and dejected him smartly into a pickle-barrel in the cellar.

“Well, well, so you beat the Grim Reaper after all!” shrieked another acquaintance on the street, seizing my hand and trying to break it off. “You are mistaken; I am a ghost; whoo!” said I, choking back my rage. “Always kidding!” said the creature, lurching on his way. I learned also that in my absence three people had applied for my job, thinking that I would never lift pen or strike typewriter again.

My experiences of the past week convince me that
the world is full of Intuitive Diagnosticians and Vicarious Undertakers. Every third person I meet seems to know what ails me, and a good many of them have buried me so deep that they take it as a personal affront that I am still walking about. I have made up my mind to outlive all of these vultures, just for spite, and every year I shall defile their graves in some new and outrageous way on Father’s Day. My family history is full of instances of Marchbankses who wouldn’t lie down; they all outlived their physicians by several decades, and in one or two instances their cantankerousness was so powerful that they did not die at all, but were removed from this earth in heavenly chariots. I have every intention of following their example.… No madam, I have not got anything infectious.

O
N MY WAY
here this evening I saw a girl sitting on the stoop of a house, with a sign hanging over her head saying “Live Bait.” They didn’t catch me with that bait, though. Not pretty enough.

I
HAVE BEEN
a lifelong reader in bed, and as I grow busier I find that bed is the only place in which I read at all. But I am now so torpid that I am never able to read more than a page of print before I drop off to sleep. At this rate it takes me several months to finish a modern novel, and more than a year to wade through a Victorian novel. What is more, I have to re-read whatever I read while semi-conscious, and valuable time is lost. If this tendency increases the time will soon be at hand when I never read anything. Would that be a good thing? There are times when I think that the reading I have done in the past has had no
effect except to cloud my mind and make me indecisive. However, when I look at the determined non-readers among my acquaintance, I feel that there may be something in reading, after all.

I
WENT TO
a Fashion Show last evening to see what women would be wearing next season. I myself wore an outfit which I expect that many men will favour during the coming year. It was a dark, three-piece ensemble with a plunging neckline which reveals, when I lean forward, the pencil-and-pen accessories with which the dainty waistcoat is embellished. Informality is the keynote of the costume, accentuated by the extra fullness at the knees and the high gloss on the bosom of the trousers. With this I wore wool socks, with inserts of contrasting yarns, and conservative shoes of scuffed calf. For outdoor wear I put a topcoat over this ensemble, which presents a pleasing contrast of napped and napless cloth in the same colour, and complete the effect with a hat in the classic Canadian, or
pot de chambre
style. This is what is called a Basic Costume, suitable for office wear and, by the addition of a clean shirt and handkerchief, suitable also for dinners, dancing, and social engagements.

O
FTEN, AS I
have conned the pages of a newspaper, I have wondered who those people are who show such engaging frankness about their innermost secrets. There are their photographs, their names and addresses and all the lurid details of the years which they spent in martyrdom to gas, bloating, sour stomach, pains in the back and spots before the eyes, before they discovered the amazing patent medicine which cured them. But
the question still remains: Who knows them? They must be real, but are they anybody’s neighbours? … Yes, yes, I realize that it is not a nice thing to mention while eating Scotch broth.

W
HEN THE HISTORY
of western civilization as evinced in Eastern Ontario is written, a long footnote will have to be devoted to the curious place which the garbage pail holds in our folk habits. A traveller from Mars, dropping suddenly upon this part of the Earth, might assume that we loved these vessels, and were proud of them. Every garbage-day the pails line the streets like sentinels—mute evidence of the amount of food we eat and the quantity of rubbish which we throw away; every night, after the collection, they lie scattered in the snow, and at dusk they look like the bodies of soldiers, fallen in battle and frozen in death. Indeed, Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow must have looked rather like one of these Ontario streets.

I
RECEIVED A LETTER
from the U.S. this morning, bearing a stamp with the heads of three women who had been prominent in the fight for Women’s Rights engraved on it. As I lay in bed I reflected upon the uncompromising plainness of all three. Does an enthusiasm for Women’s Rights kill beauty, or are none but plain women interested in the acquisition of Rights? Surely the engraver could have done something for these worthy but wooden-visaged females? An Italian coin which I had palmed off on me on Monday makes even poor Victor Emmanuel look regal—a staggering feat of artistic mendacity. But these crusaders in the cause of Women’s Rights make the familiar picture of
Laura Secord look like something spicy from
La Vie Parisienne
.

I
SEE BY THE PAPER
that a Toronto burlesque house offers a striking novelty—a dance of chorus girls who are shackled together in pretty imitation of a chain-gang. If I am not mistaken the first appearance of this delicious new idea was in
The Beggar’s Opera
in 1728, which includes a Hornpipe of Prisoners in Chains. Inch by inch Toronto is creeping up on modernity.