Some personalities seem to resolve themselves into a hand-shake. It is so eloquent that it leaves nothing more to be discovered about them. There is Peaker, the publisher, for example, who advances with outstretched hand and places it in yours as though it is something he wants to get rid of. It is a cold pudding of a hand, or a warm pudding of a hand, according to the weather, but, cold or warm, it is equally a pudding. What are you to do with it? It obviously doesn't belong to Peaker, or he would not be so anxious to get rid of it. You can't shake it, for it is as unresponsive as a jelly-fish, and no one can shake hands heartily with a jelly-fish. Hand-shaking must be mutual, or it is not at all. So you just hold it as long as civility demands, and then gently return it to Peaker, who goes and tries to get someone else to take it off his hands, so to speak.
And at the other extreme is that hearty fellow Stubbings, the sort of man who
Hails you "Tom" or "Jack,"
And proves by thumping on your back
How he esteems your merit.
But he does not thump you on the back. He takes your hand—if you are foolish enough to lend it to him—and crushes it into a jumble of aching bones and shakes your arm well-nigh out of its socket. That's the sort of man I am, he seems to say. Nothing half-hearted about me, sir. Yorkshire to the backbone. Jannock right through, sir. (Oh, torture!) And I'm glad to see you, sir. (Another jerk.) He restores your hand, a mangled pain, and you are careful not to trust him with it again at parting. And there is the limp and lingering hand that seems so overcharged with affection that it does not know when to go, but lies in your palm until you feel tempted to throw it out of the window. But though there are hands that make you shudder and hands that make you writhe, the ritual is worth the occasional penalty we have to pay for it. It is the happy mean between the Oriental's formal salaam and the Russian's enormous hug, and if it has less dignity than the Arab's touch with the finger-tips, which is like a benediction, it has more warmth and more of the spirit of human comradeship. We shall need a lot of medical evidence before we cease to say with the most friendly of all poets:
Then here's a hand, my trusty frien'.
And gie's a hand o' thine.
ON A FINGER-POST
At the end of the orchard, where the road that climbs up the hillside from the valley crosses the old British track that had ambled along the slopes of the hills for thousands of years, stands a finger-post. One of its hands has fallen with age, and the other two are hardly legible, though with difficulty you may see that one of them directs the wayfarer to Dunstable. I have never seen anyone consult it, and on a moonlight night it looks the most gaunt and solitary thing on earth, for ever pointing a minatory finger over the glimmering landscape, like a prophet vainly directing a naughty and unheeding world to the land of Beulah. Nobody takes any notice of it.
But it has its moments of consequence. On high-days and holidays in the summer, days such as these, happy picnickers from afar, mostly school-children out for their annual treat, come to a halt at the old finger-post on their way to the summit of the hill. The horses are unhitched from the waggonette and are left to graze while the children spread their lunch or their tea on the Icknield Way, which here resumes the character of a green-ride over which the centuries have passed without record of change. But no one ever seems to want to go to Dunstable. I do not want to go to Dunstable myself. In time I suppose the poor old finger-post will tire of telling the world to go to Dunstable and will drop its second arm in weariness and despair.
I have no desire to go to Dunstable, because I like the name so much that I do not want to spoil the emotion of pleasure it gives me by any earthly contacts. I should as soon think of going to Dunstable as of going to Ashby-de-la-Zouch. I would not destroy the poetry that hangs about that name for anything the place could give me. Ashby-de-la-Zouch belongs to the realm of dreams, where high romance is always afoot and you may see any day some splendid knight in the tournament charging down upon his foe, while the beautiful heroine drops her handkerchief to show that she can bear no more. Why should I desecrate this agreeable fancy by discovering that Ashby-de-la-Zouch is (perhaps) a grubby little place with one frowsy tea-shop and a tin tabernacle? I do not say that that is what Ashby-de-la-Zouch is like. It may be a very nice place with a boulevard and a bandstand. I shall never know. But it could not possibly be like my Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Nothing could be like my Ashby-de-la-Zouch.