“The book.”
“Oh! On the table.”
“Which table?”
“The one with the lamp on it.”
“I should like to know where.”
“Why—just there—on the table. There was an ‘Atlantic’ on top of it, to be sure.”
“I saw the ‘Atlantic.’ Blest if it looked as though it had anything under it! Besides, I was looking for it on top of things. You said you laid it down there just before luncheon, and I didn’t think it could have crawled in under so quick.”
“When you’re looking for a thing,” I said, “you mustn’t think, you must look. Now go ahead and read.”
If this were a single instance, or even if it were one of many illustrating a common human frailty, it would hardly be worth setting down. But the frailty under consideration has come to seem to me rather particularly masculine. Are not all the Jonathans in the world continually being sent to some sitting-room table for something, and coming back to assert, with more or less pleasantness, according to their temperament, that it is not there? The incident, then, is not isolated; it is typical of a vast group. For Jonathan, read Everyman; for the red book, read any particular thing that you want Him to bring; for the sitting-room table, read the place [pg 004] where you know it is and Everyman says it isn’t.
This, at least, is my thesis. It is not, however, unchallenged. Jonathan has challenged it when, from time to time, as occasion offered, I have lightly sketched it out for him. Sometimes he argues that my instances are really isolated cases and that their evidence is not cumulative, at others he takes refuge in a tu quoque—in itself a confession of weakness—and alludes darkly to “top shelves” and “bottom drawers.” But let us have no mysteries. These phrases, considered as arguments, have their origin in certain incidents which, that all the evidence may be in, I will here set down.