“For what we are about to receive,” said Mrs. Wilcox, “the Lord make us truly thankful.”
With a creak and a rustle, some five-and-thirty boarders drew in their chairs. The covers were removed, and a ripple of prosy talk began.
As usual, it started with polite enquiries as to each other’s health. In boarding-houses it generally does. No one cares a button for you or your ailments, but they ask after them all the same with exasperating regularity and take no interest in the answer.
“How is your cold, Major Jones?”
“Better, thank you, Mrs. Dumaresq—and your neuralgia?”
“Much worse; I never closed my eyes last night.”
“But you are taking something for it?”—and so on, and so on, and so on.
New comers at 37, Beaconsfield Gardens, occasionally tried to be conversational. For a time they were lively, animated, full of good stories and repartee. People listened to them in silence, and generally took offence. Conversation as a fine art was not encouraged. It was sad to notice how in a week or a fortnight the talkers talked themselves out, and subsided into the brief commonplaces of their neighbours.
The boarders, all respectable people who read the Daily Telegraph and voted Tory when they had votes, shared the profound belief of the middle-class Briton that silence shows solidity, sound judgment, and a well-balanced mind. Profound and continued silence they considered an attainment in itself. They scarcely realised, not being introspective, that two-thirds of the people who don’t speak are silent from lack of ideas.
As a matter of fact, in such a milieu, subjects for conversation of general interest were almost impossible to find. By tacit consent, politics and religion were tabooed, since the discussion of either invariably ended in a quarrel. Though the boarders read novels, they did not talk about them, and they took no great interest in literature or art. A man who was supposed to have written a book was rather cold-shouldered, for the Englishman—and in this case, as the preacher put it, man embraces woman—whatever his respect for literature in the abstract, thinks but meanly of those who produce it, if they do not happen to be celebrities. To be sure they are generally poor.