The Opinions of a Philosopher.
by Robert Grant.
I
My wife Josephine declares that I have become a philosopher in my old age, and perhaps she is right. Now that I am forty, and a trifle less elastic in my movements, with patches of gray about my ears which give me a more venerable appearance, I certainly have a tendency to look at the world as through a gla.s.s. Yet not altogether darkly be it said. That is, I trust I am no cynic like that fellow Diogenes who set the fashion centuries ago of turning up the nose at everything. I have a natural sunniness of disposition which would, I believe, be proof against the sardonic fumes of contemplation even though I were a real philosopher.
However, just as the mongoose of the bag-man"s story was not a real mongoose, neither am I a real philosopher.
You will remember that Diogenes, who was a real philosopher, occupied a tub as a permanent residence. He would roll in hot sand during the heat of summer, and embrace a statue of snow in winter, just to show his superiority to ordinary human conventions and how much wiser he was than the rest of the world. The real philosophers of the present day are not quite so peculiar; but they are apt to be fearfully and wonderfully superior to the weaknesses of humanity. For the most part they are to be found in the peaceful environs of a university or on some mountain top a Sabbath day"s journey from the hum of civilization, where they eschew nearly everything which the every-day mortal finds requisite to comfort and convenience, unless it be whiskey and water. I have sometimes fancied that more real philosophers than we are aware of are partial on the sly to whiskey and water. But that is neither here nor there; for, as I have already stated, I am not a real philosopher.
I have altogether too many faults to be one, and should constantly be flying in the face of my own theories. Barring the aforesaid weakness for whiskey and water, it is fair to a.s.sume that the average real philosopher lives up to his own lights and by them; whereas I, at least according to Josephine, am liable to be frightfully inconsistent. She has never forgotten my profanity on the occasion when we discovered after dinner that the soot had come down in the drawing-room and was over everything in spite of the fact that the chimney had been swept three weeks before. Now, if there is one thing which I abhor and am perpetually inveighing against as vulgar and futile, it is unbridled language. Josephine must have heard me say fifty times if she has heard me one that the man who fouls his tongue with an oath is a senseless oaf.
And yet I am bound to admit that when I discovered what had happened I swore deliberately and roundly like the veriest trooper. In order to appreciate the situation exactly I should add that it has long been a mooted point between Josephine and me whether chimneys require to be swept at all. My darling insists that the sweep shall overhaul the house annually, while I cling, with what she is pleased to call masculine fatuity, to the theory that soot, like sleeping dogs, should be let alone.
Have you ever entered a drawing-room just after a healthy, thorough fall of soot? If so, you will appreciate what is meant by its all-pervasiveness. The remotest articles of furniture are rife with infinitesimal s.m.u.t, much as they were rife with the remains of the lady in Kipling"s story after the jealous orang-outang had done with her. And yet granting that the provocation was dire, a philosopher, a real philosopher, would have acted very differently. A philosopher of the grandest type would have reasoned that what was done was done, and that there was no more use in crying over fallen soot than over spilt milk.
He would calmly have adopted prompt measures to ameliorate the situation, and after the servants were fairly at work would have taken his wife apart and pointed out to her, in well-chosen language, that here was only another instance of his superior wisdom. One of a more virulent type, but still a philosopher, might have indulged in mirth--quiet sarcastic mirth. No person of a truly philosophic cast of mind and with a rooted antipathy to d.a.m.ning would have sworn l.u.s.tily as I did.
I remember taking little Fred, my namesake and eldest son, to skate with me one winter"s afternoon on a suburban pond. He did famously for a tyro, but we both wearied at last of his everlasting strife to maintain the perpendicular, and I was conscious of a rush of joy when he became completely absorbed in watching a man who was fishing for pickerel. Have you ever fished for pickerel through a hole in the ice? If so you will recall that it is chilly and rather dispiriting work, especially if the fish are shy. They certainly were shy that afternoon, for the individual in question had angled long and bagged nothing, as I gleaned from the answers to the direct interrogatories put by my urchin during the few minutes I stood paternally by and watched the proceedings.
"Caught anything?"
"Nop."
"Had a bite?"
"Nop."
"How long you been fishing?"
"An hour."
As I glided away light-heartedly on the delicious curves of the outer edge, I reflected that he was evidently a persevering pot-hunter who would not be easily discouraged, and that I could count upon his engrossing the attention of my offspring for a considerable period.
Accordingly, I was surprised some five minutes later to observe the fisherman (who wore no skates) shambling across the pond toward the sh.o.r.e. Glancing from him to his late station I perceived a little group of skaters gathered around my son and heir, who was dabbling with a stick in the abandoned hole. They appeared to be diverted by something and one of them, my friend Harry Bolles, who had his handkerchief up to his mouth, made a bee-line to meet me. From his lips I learned what had happened, which was this wise: The h.o.r.n.y-handed pot-hunter, having presently pulled a solitary pickerel out upon the ice and freed it from his hook, turned aside to cut another piece of bait; whereupon my hopeful picked up the fish and popped it back into its native element without so much as a syllable of commentary; and thereupon (being act three in the tragedy) he of the h.o.r.n.y hand, having realized the situation in its terrible entirety, pulled up his line, shovelled back the particles of ice into the hole and betook himself upon his shambling way without one word. Not a word, mark you. There was a real philosopher, if you like, a thorough-going, square-trotting philosopher. The only alternative was child-murder or silence, and my pot-hunter chose the simplest form of the dilemma. "I thought the fish would like it," said little Fred, when interrogated upon the subject.
And yet, despite my occasional inability to practice what I preach, Josephine is correct in her diagnosis that my cast of mind is becoming more philosophic as the years roll on. The consciousness that I am the author of four children (two strapping sons and two tall daughters), anyone of whom may const.i.tute me a grandfather before I am fifty, renders me conservative and disposed, metaphorically speaking, to draw in my horns a little. I am beginning to go to church again, for instance. You may have taken it for granted that I have been regular in my attendance at the sanctuary. Certainly I have never been a scoffer; but, on the other hand, I must confess that somehow it has come to pa.s.s since Josephine and I plighted our troth that our pew has stood empty on the Lord"s day oftener than the orthodox consider fitting. And the worst of it is I used to attend service about every other Sabbath before I became a benedict, and Josephine taught a Sunday-school cla.s.s up to within six months of our wedding ceremony. She, dear girl, has harbored ever since the belief that she continues to go to church almost every Sunday either in the morning or the afternoon, a harmless delusion which for some time I took no pains to dispel, knowing as I did that she meant to go every Sunday. Yet I knew also that pitiless, unemotional statistics would reveal an average attendance on her part of rather less than ten times in the course of each year. I was brute enough finally to call attention to a tally-sheet, covering a period of three calendar months, which I had kept for my private edification, and I was punished by seeing her sweet eyes fill with tears before she proceeded to plead to the indictment.
"You know, Fred, perfectly well that I have to stay at home with the children every other Sunday morning in order to allow Lucille to go to church."
"But how about the other mornings and all the afternoons?" I inquired, with the effrontery of a hardened sinner seizing his opportunity to take a saint to task.
Josephine blushed, partly from guilt and partly from indignation. "It rained torrents last Sunday morning, and Sunday morning fortnight--er--I was sick. I remember that I was all dressed to go one afternoon when old Mr. Philipps called and I didn"t like to leave him. Besides, I feel as though I ought to stay at home occasionally on Sunday afternoons in order to teach the children the Scriptures. The Sunday morning before that--er--I went. No, it must have been a fortnight previous, for I recollect now that I had planned to go, when you said that you hated to skate alone and declined to take the entire responsibility of the children on the pond on account of little Fred and the pickerel."
"And I said, too, I remember, that in all probability there wouldn"t be black ice again all winter."
"You did, you did," my darling cried, with tragic impetuosity, "and it is cruel of you to remind me of it."
"Moreover, it was a correct prophecy. It snowed that very night and the people who waited until Monday were nowhere."
"Oh, Fred, Fred, I"m a wicked woman. You"re the last person in the world who ought to tax me with it, but it is true. I don"t go to church as I ought. And yet I do mean to go. But if it isn"t one thing which prevents, it"s another. Lucille must have every other Sunday morning, and you seem so disappointed if I refuse to go skating or canoeing with you and the children on the fine days that I foolishly yield."
"And you the daughter of a deacon," I continued, unsparingly. Let me state by way of explanation that Josephine"s late father was for many years one of the pillars of the religious society to which he belonged.
"I know, I know. It is shameful. I--we are little better than heathens, Fred. Only think of it, four times in three months!" she added, glancing at the tell-tale sheet. "And I brought up to go regularly both morning and afternoon in addition to Sunday-school! I am a heathen; and as for you, I don"t know what to call you!" she exclaimed, with a sad, reproachful smile.
So long as Josephine was content to berate herself without including me in her anathemas, I had been ready to acquiesce in what she said, but now that she seemed disposed to drag me into the conversation I felt it inc.u.mbent upon me to reply with dignity:
"Will you please explain, my dear, why it is that, though I used to be a regular worshipper before we became man and wife, I have almost entirely ceased to attend church since that time? Who is responsible for the change, I wonder."
There is a point beyond which it is not safe to prod Josephine, and I could see from the expression of her eye that we had reached it on this occasion. She drew herself up and answered haughtily:
"I have heard you make that insinuation several times before, Fred. It is not merely silly, it is disgraceful. I keep you from church? Don"t you know," she exclaimed, with a quaver of emotion, "that your refusal to go is a source of genuine grief to me, and that I just hate to go alone?
Don"t you know that I should like nothing better than to go with you every Sunday, and that I am ready to go to any church you will select?"
"Yes," I answered, doggedly, "I am well aware that you would prefer to have me become anything rather than remain--er--a steadfast worshipper of nature."
Josephine made a little gesture of impatience such as my well-born apotheosis of nature is apt to evoke. For a few moments she looked as though she were going to cry; then, with an almost pa.s.sionate outburst, she exclaimed:
"You will promise me, Fred, won"t you, that when the children are old enough to understand what it means not to go to church you will go too?"
Now, it may be that my response at the time to this pathetic appeal was not altogether satisfactory to my darling; but she has forgotten her fears and her tears to-day in the happy consciousness that as surely as the bells begin to ring on Sunday morning I begin to brush my silk hat with the feverish impatience of an abandoned church-goer. Punctuality, which has always seemed to Josephine a pitiful sort of virtue, ranks in my category of human conduct almost on a par with brotherly love, and I am apt to make myself and her pretty miserable on each returning Sabbath by my endeavors to get the family out of the house and into our pew on time. It is only by bearing strictly in mind what day it is that I am able to keep my lips from speaking guile when little Fred remembers at the last moment that he has forgotten his pocket-handkerchief or Josephine"s glove bursts open in the process of being hastily rammed on and I am compelled to wait while she sends upstairs for a fresh pair.
You should see how her nostrils swell with pride as we sweep by my old pal, Nicholas Long, and his wife, who are manifestly not going to church.
I can discern on Nick"s face, as we pa.s.s, an expression which is half sardonic, half pitiful. Evidently he has not forgotten my quondam oft-repeated vow that no child of mine should be taught the orthodox fairy tales in unlearning which I had spent some of the best years of my life. And now I am a recreant, and he who aided and abetted me in my a.s.severations of independence remains faithful. Yes, but Nick, poor fellow, has no children. His grin seems to say, "See what you are missing, poor old patriarch; Dorothy and I are off for a ten-mile tramp in the country."
Yet, despite his apparent jubilation of spirit, I detect a longing expression in Dorothy"s eyes and I notice that she steals a second glance over her tailor-made shoulder at little Winona, our youngest, who is an uncommonly pretty child, if I do say it.
"There go a light-hearted, honest couple with the courage of their convictions," I remark to Josephine, tentatively. "Before the sermon has begun they will be on the river and they will come home delightfully tired just in time for dinner."
"Light-hearted? I believe, Fred, that they are both perfectly miserable," she exclaimed, with a sweeping glance of pride at her progeny. "I was thinking just before you spoke how much I pitied that woman."
I can remember as if it were yesterday Nick Long telling me with bubbling ecstasy, shortly after he was engaged, that his lady-love had a clear, a.n.a.lytical mind, almost like a man"s. "No nonsense about her," he said.
"She sees things just as they are." I rather got the impression at the time that he intended thereby to insinuate gently but plainly that he was a far luckier dog than I who had married a woman with a mind conspicuously feminine. I should like very much to know whether, if Dorothy were to be blessed with children after all, Nick would have to go to church.
Not only have I lost moral courage in the matter of some of my deepest convictions, but I notice also with consternation that my physical bravery is ebbing away as my years increase. I have drawn the line, for example, squarely and tautly on burglars. One night not very long since I was awakened by noise and, after listening, I came to the conclusion that it proceeded from housebreakers. I slipped out of bed stealthily and put my ear to the bolted chamber door in order to confirm my conviction. My movements aroused Josephine, who sat up in bed and asked hoa.r.s.ely what the matter was. I put my finger on my lips quite irrelevantly, for it was pitch dark.
"Fred, are there burglars in the house?" she gasped.
"Sh! Yes."
"What are you doing, Fred? Oh, you mus"n"t go down and expose yourself on any account." She was evidently very much agitated. "Promise me that you will not."
Having ascertained that the door was secure I walked across the room and turned on the electric light. Josephine was sitting bolt upright, quivering with excitement. Her eyes followed my every movement, as, having slipped on my trousers and a pair of boots, I began to look around me, tramping st.u.r.dily.
"Fred, they"ll hear you if you make such a noise," said my wife, in an agonized whisper.
"I fervently trust so," I retorted. "That"s why I"m doing it."
As I spoke my eye lit at last on something adapted to my purpose. I had been trying to avoid the destruction of a wash basin, and I seized with grateful eagerness the pair of Indian clubs which offered themselves and, lifting them to the level of my brow, let them fall clamorously on the floor. The welkin rang, so to speak, and I sank with nervous exhaustion into an arm-chair.