The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (23 page)

A
MAN MENTIONED
casually to me this afternoon that his brother was in a hospital, having his appendix removed. This operation is now undertaken without qualm; surgeons regard it as a pastime, something to keep the hands busy, like knitting or eating salted nuts. But I can remember the day when a man whose brother was undergoing such an ordeal would have been at the hospital himself, probably accompanied by a robed choir and two or three powerful evangelists. When my brother Fairchild had his appendix out, in the early days of anæsthesia and antisepsis, it was customary to refuse water to those recently relieved of their appendices, and the poor fellow was reduced to drinking from the flower vases near his bed. When he left the hospital, he was given his appendix in a jar of alcohol, and after a few months as a mantel ornament this relic was thrown out. Dogs drank the alcohol and cats ate the appendix, and so for a night Fairchild brought joy to the animal world.

D
ESPERATE FOR
Christmas gifts I have been driven to giving subscriptions to magazines this year to many of my friends who deserve something better. The tragedy of magazines is that nobody has any time in which to read them; only those who are condemned to lonely vigils in doctors’ waiting-rooms are able to wade through those pungent comments on world affairs, those brilliant disquisitions on married happiness, those tales of adventure, for which magazine publishers pay so much. But most of us like to have a few magazines
coming to the house, if only to proclaim our intellectual status. Thus readers of the
New Yorker
and the
Atlantic
curl the lip at those whose living-room tables boast only
Life
,
Time
and the
Reader’s Digest
; and these too are given the sneer of contumely by readers of
Horizon
and
Partisan Review
; and all of the foregoing suffer embarrassment in those homes where
Country Life
,
The Tatler
and
Punch
lie beside the chairs, though I cannot quite explain why. So all week I have been tearing those hard little cards out of magazines, and accepting the Special Offer whereby I can give subscriptions at bargain rates. It is a coward’s way out, but what am I to do?

I
HAD A TOOTH
filled today. My dentist wears a tasteful white smock with a high collar; I can remember the first dentist whom I visited in my childhood, who wore a morning coat, and worked his drill with a foot pedal. His operating room was as dark as a church, and he had not been trained to stand any nonsense from children; my recollection is that he knelt on my prone form while drilling, and that every now and then he drilled a piece out of my tongue, just to learn me.… In odd corners of the world strange dentists still lurk; an Irish friend of mine told me recently of visiting a dentist on the West Coast of Ireland who had no running water, and bade his patients spit into a potted fern which was conveniently placed by the chair.… The fanciest job of dentistry I ever saw was done on a Welsh farmer; a travelling dentist pulled all his teeth in the kitchen one afternoon, and sold him a false set to be inserted at once. The total service cost just under five dollars. The man was wearing the teeth when I met him, and there was a rugged grandeur about the
lower part of his face which suggested the Sabre Tooth Tiger in the Royal Ontario Museum.

E
VERY YEAR
, about this time, I take a vacation, as a result of social pressure. I do not really like vacations; I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time. A day’s work when everything goes smoothly, or an evening when I am thoroughly happy and at ease, or an unexpected stroke of luck—these are the things which I enjoy. But when I go after the coy nymph Pleasure with a blunderbuss, determined to make her my mistress for a whole week, she vanishes into her fastnesses, and hurls ordure and makes rude noises at me whenever I approach.

M
Y HAY FEVER
continues unabated. Several people have told me that I should go to the seaside—useless advice for I have no money for gallivanting. I am toying, however, with a new invention, Marchbanks’ Maritime Mask. It will be a respirator, filled with sea water, and worn over the face and mouth like a dog muzzle; every breath the wearer takes will be filtered through the sea water, and thus he will have all the benefits of the seaside, while living inland.

As I wept, sneezed and coughed my way through my day’s work, I reflected that the world judges diseases by unjust standards. Anyone who has a migraine headache, for instance, receives the keenest sympathy, for
his ailment is heroic and—this is important—silent. But a man who has hives is a joke, though hives are desperately painful. Similarly it is heroic to suffer with one’s sinus, but a man who has catarrh, and who, in consequence, hawks, hoots, snorts, roars, gags and spits is thought to be making a great and disgusting fuss about nothing. The healthy can endure invalids only when the latter are quiet and motionless. Let them but cough or scratch, and sympathy flies out of the window.

A
N UMISTAKEABLE ODOUR
crept through Marchbanks Towers last evening and although I fought it off as long as I could, the conviction grew upon me that Chanel the skunk had hidden himself in the cellar. This created a very delicate situation. I have only seen Chanel at a distance, and he appeared to be a young, joyous, high-spirited skunk, but it is always possible to be mistaken, and I did not want to find out too late that Chanel was really of a malign and hunkerous disposition. I crept down the cellar stairs, and peeped behind the storm windows, in the coal bin and under the tubs, saying “Puss, puss, puss” in a high hypnotic voice. But Chanel did not appear, though his scent was as powerful as it had been in the upper chambers. I cannot decide which is worse: to find the skunk in one’s cellar, or to go on suspecting its presence. Perhaps, as in psycho-analysis, it is more destructive to the soul to remain in doubt about the worst. And what does one do when one finds the skunk? Carry it outside on a shovel, singing a lullaby to it? Sometimes I wish I lived in an apartment.

W
HEN I AWOKE
this morning there was a smell of
burning in the air, and for a moment I wondered if the northern bush fires had crept up during the night, in the hope of engulfing me and my neighbours. While dressing I wondered what I would do in such an emergency: would I form a firebreak by chopping down the puny hedge of Marchbanks Towers, order my dependents to go and stand waist-deep in the nearest lake, and take up a menacing position on the lawn with a soda syphon; or would I phone the fire department, shrieking, “Save me! Save me!”? Like all men whose work consists of dreaming, word-spinning and prophesying, I like to torture myself with these problems; nothing so entrances a man of words as to imagine himself in a situation in which words are powerless. It is this which keeps him humble. Men of action, I notice, are rarely humble, even in situations where action of any kind is a great mistake, and masterly inaction is called for.

I
SAT ON MY
verandah last evening, reading Winston Churchill’s new book, which I do very slowly, because I seem to hear that wonderful phlegmy voice declaiming every word. How many people, I wonder, hear voices as they read? I always do. I read American books with an American accent, and English books with an English accent, and Canadian books in the voice of a friend of mine who speaks the best Canadian I have heard. People have told me that I would be able to read much faster if I gave up this indulgence, and clutched groups of words and whole paragraphs with my greedy eyes, but I pay no attention to them. My method is the one I like, and it is an infallible touchstone for judging a writer’s style. The man who writes only for the eye generally writes badly; the man who writes to be heard
will write with some eloquence, some regard for the music of words, and will reach nearer to his reader’s heart and mind. Of course, fools and clods will write like fools and clods, whatever means they use.… No, madam, I do not read the works of foreign writers in broken English.

I
REFRESHED MYSELF
today by reading a few chapters of
Peck’s Bad Boy
, a book which delighted my childhood. I wonder if children read it now. Re-reading with the eye of bawdy eld supplanting that of dewy innocence, I was astonished to discover what a suggestive work it is. George W. Peck, who wrote it, was a Milwaukee journalist, and he became so popular as a funny-man that he was elected mayor of that city, the first and last time in history that any city ever elected a consciously funny man to be its chief magistrate. He scaled even dizzier heights, however, and was Governor of Wisconsin before he died. Let this be a lesson to our Canadian politicians; wit and politics are not mutually exclusive.

T
HE MEDICAL
profession had some fun with me this afternoon. They extracted blood from me at various strategic points, and did strange things with such of my by-products as they could obtain. They took pictures of my insides, and put me in a machine which rendered me transparent. They gouged and banged me to see if I would scream, but I remembered that I had once been a Wolf Cub, and kept a stiff upper lip (though why I should have done this when my underlip was trembling like a blanc-mange in an earthquake I cannot say). But the final injustice came when they decided
to weigh me. I craftily left off my coat, hoping thereby to gain a slight advantage, but the doctor who had just used the fluoroscope to see through me saw through me again and ordered me sternly to put it on. This I did, and consequently the weight of two books which I had in my pocket, as well as $2.35 in silver, was entered on the charge-sheet against me. This is the kind of unfairness which drives men to rash acts. However, it will be easy for me to make a good impression next time I visit my doctor, for I shall simply leave my books and money at home, and he will think that I am losing weight.

N
O THANK YOU
, I will not have a cigarette.… No, no, I do not mind if you smoke, Madam, but I shall wait until later and have a pipe when we go into the drawing-room.… Yes, I know I am old-fashioned but I do not approve of people who smoke pipes at the table. The other day, by the way, a lady asked me how often I removed the dotterel from my pipe. “I have never had a dotterel in my pipe,” I replied merrily, and went on to explain to her that a dotterel is a foolish bird, and that she meant to say dottle. She did not seem to think this very funny and was cross with me because she was in the wrong and I had corrected her. Sometimes I think it is better to let people wallow in their ignorance; to Know Better is a sure way to offend. I well recall when I was about eight years old correcting a schoolteacher who called the Cambrian Hills “the Caymbrian Hills.” I was right and she was wrong, but I was not smart enough in those days to know that the errors of Authority should be pointed out and enjoyed on the sly, and not in public. She hated me for the rest of the year that I was in her class.
… Yes, indeed, Madam, it is a fatal mistake to attempt to further the education of a professional educator.

I
HAD AN OPPORTUNITY
to spend an hour looking at the collection of silver and goldsmith’s work which has been presented to Hart House by Lord Lee of Fareham. In a world where so many things are made quickly and cheaply and in great quantities it is balm to the soul to see so many things which are unique, and which have obviously cost thousands of hours of the most patient and skillful workmanship. I was particularly struck by a seventeenth-century figure of Diana riding a stag, a golden toy with clockwork in its base which is made to run about a dinner table on invisible wheels. Furthermore, it is so designed that as it approaches the table’s edge it turns back again toward the centre—a trick which modern toymakers have only just begun to work into children’s toys. I lingered also over three beautiful illuminated books. No doubt our modern system of printing books by the hundred thousand on thin sheets of squeezed tree is very good for popular education, but it is ugly to the eye and the fingers. These books were to be caressed and wondered at, as well as read.