The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (27 page)

A
BEAUTIFUL NEW
dogproof garbage box was installed on the back stoop at Marchbanks Towers today. For several years all the jolly doggies of the neighbourhood have looked upon my back stoop as a rendezvous where they can drop in for a snack, a chat, a fight or to enquire after some dog of easy virtue with whom they can pitch a bit of woo; dogs create their own form of bebop, and discuss big deals involving dozens of bones on my back porch, and I make no secret of the fact that I am sick of it. Therefore I have caused to be constructed a large and durable chest, heavily ribbed and studded with brass screws, in which I shall keep my garbage pails in future, and the dogs can find some new Kasbah in which to carry on their raffish social life.… For a time I used to lie in wait in my kitchen until the dogs gathered for the evening, and then (choosing my time very precisely) I would rush out among them, striking to right and left with a broom, and uttering loud and terrifying cries, like a Japanese warrior going into battle. Then I would pick up the garbage and go inside, congratulating myself on a good job well done. But I found that the dogs looked upon me merely as the floorshow, or comedy act, of their evening’s entertainment.… Well, they’ll laugh on the other side of their muzzles when they see my new box.

A
LL YESTERDAY
’
S
papers informed me that this would be International Shut-Ins Day, and when I awoke I found
that rain was descending in large greasy blobs about the size of marbles. This meant that I was a shut-in myself until this evening, for though I enjoy a walk in the rain a recent misadventure with my umbrella put such an amusement out of the question. Personally I do not greatly mind being a shut-in. I have often longed to have my sphere of activity sharply limited. Whenever I see an advertisement telling me that it is now possible for me to get to Britain in eight hours, or that the wonders of South America are within my easy reach, I recoil; when a speaker begins his remarks by saying that the world is shrinking, I shrink too. I shall end my days, beyond a doubt, as a happily cantankerous old shut-in, reading, eating and sleeping in one small room, with doors and windows sealed, and a hole in the ceiling for the entry and removal of necessities. At last my corpse will be dragged up through the hole, and only my memories will be left.

I
T LOOKED LIKE
rain this afternoon, and I gave it every chance to do so. But nothing happened, so I girded up my loins and cut my grass, after which the heavens opened and the rains fell. The malignancy of Nature in these matters is past belief. If I am not to enjoy the beauty of my lawn when I have cut it, why should I bother with it? I often think that I should abandon the futile struggle and allow Nature to reclaim the pleasure grounds of Marchbanks Towers. Let the velvet lawns grow rank; let briars and thistles choke the Lovers’ Walk; let scum accumulate on the lily pond; let the grape arbour and the Temple of Diana fall into ruin. Let the place assume the aspect of Tobacco Road, and I shall sit happily on the decaying verandah, spitting tobacco juice at the passers-by.

T
HERE SEEM
to be a good many advertisements for Irish goods about these days, and most of them give the impression that everything in Ireland is made by peculiar fellows in bobtailed coats, who wear bog beards and smoke clay pipes. If memory serves me aright the word “shantycraft” was used in one such billboard that I saw. It is a lucky thing that my great-uncle Brian Boru Marchbanks never lived to see those things. He was a proud man, and any suggestion that Irishmen kept pigs under their beds or habitually went about with holes in the seats of their pants (for the airiness of it) used to put him into a state of passionate resentment. It was his opinion that Irishmen were just the same as other people, and frequently in the street he would call loudly upon anyone who was with him to point out just one respect—only one—in which he could be singled out from the crowd as an Irishman. Often his protestations of ordinariness would draw quite a crowd, which he would offer to fight, man by man, until he was dragged away by his wellwishers.

T
HE LADY
on my right has just asked me if I remember the novels of Sir Hall Caine. I replied that with Hall Caine, as with Sir Walter Scott, I had never been able to read one of his books through. All of Caine’s characters lived in an atmosphere of agony and molasses, which was intolerable to my ribald mind. The lady then confessed to me that she, too, had no admiration for Caine, but thought that I might recall in which of his novels it was that the heroine dried her baby’s diapers by wrapping them around her own body, next to the skin. I could not recall the source of this
astounding instance of motherlove but said that any heroine of Hall Caine’s was quite welcome to get rheumatism, so far as I am concerned. It was a little surprising, however, to hear that Caine ever acknowledged the existence of anything so closely related to the baser functions as a diaper.… You’ve never heard of Hall Caine!
Sancta simplicitas!

T
HE LADY ON MY
left tells me that she wants a job in my Institute for the Re-Gruntlement of Disgruntled Persons. As qualifications she tells me that she is a bad cook and a terrible dancer; the latter circumstance she attributes to a Methodist upbringing, which still causes her to drag one leg. She says that she gets devilish ideas easily, and advances some very original notions for treating disgruntled persons with Epsom Salt. She seems to be the ideal appointee for the post of Matron. I have already put the Business Management of the institution into the hands of a man who was unfrocked by the Income Tax division of the Department of National Revenue for extortion above and beyond the call of duty.

T
HIS
,
YOU WILL
be interested to hear, is my natal day, which finds me in good health and spirits, though a little inconvenienced with hay fever. I have been receiving congratulations and wishes that I might live for a thousand years with becoming modesty. At noon I attended a small testimonial luncheon given by the Marchbanks Humanist Party, which I ruined by getting hiccups. My hiccup is the equal of another man’s shriek, and when I begin a spell of hiccups I am likely to continue for an hour. Once, several years ago, I had
to leave a dinner party because of hiccups, and walk a long distance to my lodgings, screeching loudly every few seconds. Policemen glared at me, dogs followed me, and old women wearing W.C.T.U. ribbons sneered at me, and pitied me in angry voices. But I was soberer than most judges, and an unhappy victim of circumstances. Life can be very cruel.

I
CHATTED THIS
evening to a man who is in the calendar business and who tells me that one mighty industry recently distributed several hundreds of thousands of calendars in which April was credited with 31 days. This is probably the result of a secret coup by the calendar reformers. I do not personally favour calendar reform as I am a friend to inconvenience and inconsistency, believing that the illogicality of our present calendar serves as a useful reminder of the capriciousness of fate and the mutability of all things. The calendar reformers just want to be cosy. A pox on cosiness!

I
BECAME INVOLVED
in an argument about modern painting, a subject upon which I am spectacularly ill-informed; however, many of my friends can become heated, and even violent on the subject and I enjoy their wrangles. In a modest way, I am an artist myself, and I have some sympathy with the Abstractionists, although I have gone beyond them in my own approach to art. I am a Lumpist. Two or three decades ago it was quite fashionable to be a Cubist, and to draw everything in cubes; then there was a revolt by the Vorticists who drew everything in whirls; we now have the Abstractionists who paint everything in a very abstracted manner. But my own small works (done on my
telephone pad) are composed of carefully shaded, strangely-shaped lumps, with traces of Cubism, Vorticism and Abstraction in them for those who possess the seeing eye. As a Lumpist, I stand alone.

I
RECEIVED AN
undergraduate magazine this morning, containing the kind of poetry which boys and girls write between eighteen and twenty-one, full of words like “harlot,” “stench,” “whore” and the like. The young have a passion for strong meaty words, and like to write disillusioned verses with jagged edges about the deceit and bitterness of life. I idly turned my hand to versifying, and produced this nice bit of undergraduate poetry, which I offer free to any university magazine:

I> have not lost the youthful, zestful university touch with a bit of verse.

O
N MY WAY HERE
tonight I found that an icy crust had formed on all the snow, about an eighth of an inch in thickness, and as I trod it broke into large flat chunks,
like dinner plates. I smashed a few of these, experimentally, and found it an admirable release from tension. I began to pretend that the chunks of ice were valuable pieces of china, and this was even more fun. “Here goes a Spode dinner plate!” I cried, and smashed it to smithereens. Then—“Bang goes a half dozen Crown Derby demi tasses!”—and bang they went. Next—“Here’s for those ruddy soup cups I’ve always hated!”—and an armful of them dispersed into atoms. It was glorious. I was a bull in a china shop—an embittered, vindictive bull, revenging itself for a thousand annoyances and injuries. I suppose that, by the time I had finished, I had destroyed about an acre of ice or $50,000 worth of china, and I felt fine. If people had more cheap releases of this kind, there would be fewer deaths from heart failure.

T
HE PAPERS TELL
me that an admirer of Deanna Durbin’s has paid $60 for a lock of Beethoven’s hair to give her, to be added to her collection of musical relics. I hope he sniffed it before paying. It is well-known that Beethoven, who was a nasty man in many ways and possessed of a thoroughly Germanic sense of humour, was pestered all his life by women who wanted his hair, and on more than one occasion he cut a swatch off a goat and sent it to a fan, who presumably wore it in a locket, or sewed it into her corsets next to her heart. I doubt if the smell of goat would wear off, even after 150 years.

I
TRAVELLED BY
train yesterday, and observed a remarkable change in my character, which would undoubtedly be of the deepest interest to psychologists, if I chose
to make it public. There was a queue for the dining car, and as I stood in the narrow corridor, beside the axe, hammer, saw and crowbar which railways display in a little glass showcase (doubtless for sale to tourists) I imagined, and mentally ate, several meals, wondering meanwhile how the gluttons in the diner could take so long. It was sheer malignance, I decided. But when at last I was shown to a table I forgot all this, chose my meal with a gourmet’s care, and then ate it as much like a gourmet as its decidedly poor quality permitted, forgetting all about the needy wretches in the corridor. But when I passed them on my way out their fiery and indignant eyes burned through my waistcoat, giving me heartburn.

T
HE DIFFERENCES
between Montreal and Toronto are basic and significant. In Montreal I see dozens of men wearing wigs, and almost as many who obviously wear corsets. In the Queen City of the Trillium Province wigs are a great rarity, and prolapsed abdomens are commonplace. The shiny dome, the swaying paunch—these are marks of respectability in Toronto, and are carefully cultivated; a special wax is used by Toronto barbers for polishing those heads, and the tailors cut the trousers in such a way as to throw the bay window
into prominence. They seem to say, “I am a plain, blunt fellow and I scorn subterfuge; the flesh may be weak, but the spirit is of brass.” In Montreal, on the contrary, fanciful wigs are worn by old men, and cruel stays are endured by them, as a tribute to the charm of youth and beauty. Your Montreal man, at thirty or so, cries to the Fleeting Moment in the words of Faust, “Ah, stay, thou art so fair!” and then he buys anything he can get which will keep up a pretence—however scarecrow-like—of youth. It is the old conflict of Hebraism and Hellenism, and upon the whole I plump for Hellenism, even when it means wigs and circingles.