OTHER PEOPLE'S JOBS
I have been following with interest my friend Mr. Robert Lynd's quest of a soft job in the columns of The Daily News. I have been following it with interest, not only because I never willingly miss anything which that most witty and wise of writers pens, but also because the subject is near my heart. I say this without shame. There is nothing discreditable in desiring an agreeable occupation, light in labour and heavy in rewards. I do not pretend to have any passion for work, I know very few people who have, and I confess that I find most of those few very undesirable companions. If I were put upon oath I think I should have to admit that my impulse to work is the same humble one as Mr. Chesterton confessed to—
When I myself perceived that I
Must work or I should shortly die—
well, then he worked. And when he had driven off the shadow of death far enough to feel comfortable, no doubt he left off and did something pleasant. And so with most of us. It is only our dislike of the undertaker and all that he connotes that sucks us into the tubes in the morning and spews us out at night, and keeps us in the interval counting figures, serving out "sausage and mash," measuring yards of silk, tapping typewriters, saying "Walk this way, ma'am," trying boots on other people's feet, shouting "Full up" on buses, and "Stand clear of the gates" in lifts, and a thousand other things that make you tired to think of—things that have to be done, but are not a man's job to do.
Most of our work in this artificial civilisation of ours is like that. The shepherd who keeps sheep on the hillside and the labourer who tills the soil are living a noble life compared with the tawdry little things most of us are condemned to do in cities. We have to do them to keep the undertaker at bay, and we are not to be blamed if we go about with Mr. Lynd looking at other people's jobs and wishing we had got them. Thus he stands in front of the motor show-room, with his face glued to the window, envying the lucky salesman inside, who only has one customer in an hour to attend to, makes a pot of money out of him, and has all the rest of the day in which to smoke and gossip at the door and think about things. In the same way I never pass down Charing Cross Road without pausing in front of the book-shops and thinking what an agreeable time those fellows inside have. Why, my idea of happiness is to leave this tiresome world and go into a library and be forgotten, and here are lucky fellows who have to live in a library to earn their living.
But I daresay it is all an illusion. It is an illusion, no doubt, even in the case of postmen, for whom most of us retain a romantic and indestructible affection. They belong to the earliest of our memories, and get entangled in the clouds of glory, which, according to the poet, we trail into this world with us from afar. The clouds of glory fade, but the postman remains as a reminder that we once lived in the Golden Age. Next to the muffin-man, he seemed the most entirely enviable and likeable creature in trousers. The muffin-man, of course, had advantages. There were his muffins to begin with. And there was his bell. To have a bell of your own and to have the privilege of going down any street you liked ringing it as hard as you liked and scattering the good tidings of muffins put a man in a class by himself.
But the postman, if on a lower plane than the muffin-man, had a more continuous joy. He had not a bell of his own, but he had the run of other people's bells. He could ring any bell he liked and bang any knocker as hard as he chose without a thought of running away. And these delights he had every day and several times a day. He could go on ringing bells and knocking at doors till his arm ached. Nobody objected. On the contrary, you looked out for him, hoping that he would come and bang at your door in that breezy way of his. The longer he paused before banging, the better you liked him. It meant—it could only mean—that he had such a lot of letters for you that it took him a long time to find them all.
And, of course, the more letters there were the more joy there must be. That is the miracle with the postman. He brings bad news and good news and indifferent news, but we only remember him by his good news. Like the sun-dial, he only records the sunny hours. He is the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. He comes up the path, probably with a handful of accounts you have not paid, income tax demands, offers from kind gentlemen to lend you ten thousand pounds on your note of hand, applications for subscriptions, and other things that you would be pleased to do without. But no experience of the Barmecide feasts he is capable of offering you affects your faith in him and his good intentions. If he were to turn back in the middle of the path you would be disappointed. If he pass by your gate you are not grateful that he has not brought you ill-news. You suspect that something pleasant has unaccountably gone astray.
That is as it should be. When we have ceased to want to hear the postman's knock we may conclude that we have seen the best of the day, and that the demon of disillusion has us in thrall. It is to have given up hope that that legendary ship of our childhood will ever come home. It was that admirable vessel that made the future such an agreeable prospect. Everything would be possible when our ship came home. That it was a very rich ship and that it was on its way we did not doubt, for we had the word of most responsible people, mothers and aunts and grandmothers, on the subject. We could not understand why it tarried so long, but we did not suspect its bona fides any more than its seaworthiness. Some day—it might be any day, possibly even to-morrow—the postman would come and knock lustily at the door and bring news that the ship was in port or, at least, had been sighted from the shore.
And though we have since discovered that those responsible people were talking less literally than we thought, and that that magic ship, with its golden argosy, was a thing of the fancy, we still see the postman turn in at the gate with a mild flutter of expectation. He is himself a sort of ship, laden with merchandise from afar. In his bag there must be incredible things, and some of them may be for us. It might be assumed that men whose coming gives so much joy are themselves joyful, that they love their calling so much that they would not change with kings, but experience reveals to us the melancholy truth that postmen are as afflicted with the discontents of life as the common run of mortals.
I fancy that if that motor salesman had come to the door and opened out his mind to Mr. Lynd he would have told him that selling motors was all right, but that not selling them, which occupied about nineteen hours out of twenty, was the most sickening job under the sun, and that the thing he really yearned after was to be literary critic, like that Mr. Robert Lynd, who wrote such stunning reviews in the papers. Now that was a job. There he sat, in an arm-chair before a ripping fire, surrounded by all the latest books, with his feet on the mantel-piece and no reason to put on his boots from morning to night, reading books and smoking his hardest, and then taking the author up, as it were, between thumb and forefinger and showing the world what an ugly guy of a fellow he was. Fancy being paid to read books and lamm the writers. Fancy being paid for having your name in the paper in big type that anybody could read half a dozen yards away. Yes, that was the sort of soft job he would like. Motors ...
That is the way of things. We are all apt to think we should be happy if we were doing somebody else's work—the king's, for example. Even the nursery rhyme inculcates in us the notion that kings are happy as the day is long, yet no intelligent coal-heaver who knew the blessings of liberty and obscurity would be able to endure the boredom and routine of a calling which compels a man to live as publicly as a bee in an observation hive. I have known people even envy a bishop's gaiters, but I should be surprised to learn that there was a single bishop on the bench who did not wish he could go about in trousers again, and take up a plain hum-drum occupation in which he could be as good as he liked without announcing it about the legs. The truth probably is that all these dreams of soft jobs are vanity and that the canker and the worm can gnaw at the heart of the best of them. I offer this modest reflection to Mr. Lynd in the hope that he will not cease to write beautiful articles in order to be an incompetent motor salesman or to mix drugs in a chemist's shop. I do not think he is the sort of man who could sell anything, and I fancy he is just the sort of man who would mix the drugs more than they ought to be mixed.