Many furrows

by A. G. Gardiner

OURSELVES AND OTHERS

I was playing a game of golf the other day with a man whom I had known in other affairs, but whom I had not met before on the golf links. He is one of those men, of whom I wrote some time ago, who are ridden by one idea to the exclusion of all other ideas. At the moment the thing that filled his mind was the Capital Levy, and it filled it so completely that I fancy he went round the links without ever quite realising what he was about. He would pause in the midst of addressing the ball and resume the argument from some new angle. He would make his tee and forget to put the ball on it while he threw another illuminating ray on the absorbing topic. I tried to divert his attention from the Capital Levy by remarks on the game or the beauty of the day, or anything else that was handy, as a red herring, to draw him off the scent; but it was all in vain. He stuck to his theme as precedents stick to law or barnacles to a ship's bottom.

But it was not the subject that was the chief offence to the day and the occasion. What distressed me most was his unconsciousness of the way he was blocking the course. There were a lot of people on the links, and it was clear to me that we were checking those behind us unduly. I gave him hints—slight at first and broad as day as my temper rose—that we must move more quickly. They fell on ears that did not hear. He patted his tee, and looked up to continue his argument; then his ball would roll off the tee, and he would make another little sand-castle; then a new thought would strike him, and he would stop altogether until he had disclosed it. And all the time I was sensible that curses not loud but deep were being uttered, and quite reasonably uttered, by the people behind us.

Now my friend was not an ill-mannered boor, nor even a selfish person. He was simply unconscious of other people; and although he angered me a great deal at the time, I am not holding him up to reprobation entirely. He seemed to me to have an invaluable quality in an extravagant measure. I was conscious that I envied his stolidity and power of divorcing himself from external influences even while I groaned under his intolerable calm. It was a preposterous situation. He was doing all the mischief and I was suffering all the penalty. It reminded me of the younger Pitt who drank the wine while the Clerk of the House got the headache. I was miserable at holding up the people behind, but my opponent who was holding them up was not even aware that they were there, so absorbed was he in the activities of his own mind.

Within reason, this insensibility to the outside world is a precious gift. Many of the Scotch people have it in an aggravating degree. J'y suis, j'y reste is their motto. They have what the Americans love to call "poise," an imperturbable indifference to the emotions of others that is half the secret of their success. They are masters of themselves and are clothed in a good tough skin that makes them proof against all the winds that blow. They are inferior, of course, to the Jews, whose insensibility to the feelings of others sometimes passes belief. It is the heritage no doubt of two thousand years of buffetings by a hostile world, and it enables them to exploit their superior qualities of brain to the maximum. But they are trying and often offensive, even to those of us who loathe the gospel according to Mr. Belloc.

I should be sorry to see this callosity offered as a model; but there is a virtue in it. A too sensitive skin is a heavy handicap in a rough world. There is no more sterilising thing than to be excessively conscious of other people. It is the source of most of our weaknesses and affectations, and of nearly all our insincerities of speech and action. There are some of us who are hardly ever our real selves in our contacts with others. Goldsmith "wrote like an angel but talked like poor Poll," because in the presence of company he lost the rudder of himself and was drowned by the waves of inferior but more aggressive minds. We do and say many foolish and many insincere things because the attractions and repulsions of other personalities play the dickens with our emotions. It was this consideration, I think, that led Hazlitt to rank humility as the lowest of the virtues. He meant that the sense of inferiority subordinated us to the dominion of other minds and defeated the authentic expression of ourselves.

My friend on the golf links, of course, carried insensibility to others too far. Personality should not be like a reed shaken in the wind. It should be stable and erect, standing four-square to all the winds that blow. But while it should not be worried or deflected by what it thinks others may be doing or saying or feeling, it ought not to be forgetful of the rights and conveniences of others. Nor should it forget those small graces that sweeten our intercourse with others. Take the familiar case of birthdays. It is easy to forget other people's birthdays as we grow older and have many birthdays to remember. It is easy to forget them, because we become indifferent to our own. When the light has gone off the morning hills we have no particular pleasure in reminding ourselves how the shadows are lengthening on our path. Years ago we reached a new milestone with the comfortable feeling that there were any number of milestones ahead, and that to pass another one was rather a gay experience. If anything, we did not pass them speedily enough. We could not make the laggard time keep pace with the hurry of the spirit. But when the milestones stretch far behind us and we can count those in front on the fingers of one or two hands the zest for birthdays is diminished. We may even come to regard them in the light of those "third and final" notices which announce the impatience of the tax-collector at our dilatory ways.

But though we may prefer to forget our own birthdays, we like other people to remember them. We like them to remember the day as an assurance that they remember us. We live by the affections, and our happiness depends much more than we are aware of upon the conviction that we have a place in the hearts and memories of others. If we are unfortunate enough to have outlived that place and to have become negligible laggards on the stage, the fact is mercifully concealed from us on 364 days in the year. But on the 365th day it may be blindingly revealed by a silence that stabs to the heart.

I suppose few of us have escaped the experience in some measure. Perhaps Aunt Anne comes down to breakfast on her birthday morning a little conscious of the day and hoping to receive a more cordial greeting than usual on the occasion from her nephews and nieces, whose birthdays are marked with red letters in her own calendar and celebrated by gifts on which she has spent anxious thought. And the breakfast passes without a word on the subject. If Aunt Anne is a sensible woman she makes allowance for the thoughtlessness of youth and remembers that she was once young and careless herself; but she will be an exceptional woman if she does not feel that something of the brightness has gone out of the day.

These little domestic tragedies mean more to us than we care to admit. The small attentions and civilities we bestow or forget to bestow on each other make the atmosphere in which we move. It is many years since I read Wuthering Heights, but I remember how the gloom and oppression which hang about that powerful book are created by such trifling incidents as the meeting of father and son in the morning without a word of greeting. They simply glower at each other and pass to their tasks. It is the graces of conduct that give life its flavour and make it sunny for ourselves, as well as for others. Wordsworth uses the perfect image for them when he says:

The charities that soothe and heal and bless,
Are scattered all about our feet—like flowers.

Even remembering the birthday of a friend may help to keep the garden of the mind in beauty and a reasonable regard for the amenities of the links is no bad discipline of conduct. I would not have my friend hurry his shot from a too acute sense of the people behind. Let him take his time and keep his head. But let him give others their place in the sun.