LOVE'S MINOR FRICTIONS
Minor friction is the kind that produces the most showy results with the smallest outlay. You can stir up more electricity in a cat by stroking her fur the wrong way than you can by dropping her into the well. You can ruffle the dearest member of your family more by asking him twice if he is sure that he locked the back door than his political opponents could stir him with a libel. We have direct access to the state of mind of the people with whom we share household life and love. Therefore, in most homes, no matter how congenial, a certain amount of minor friction is inevitable.
Four typical causes of minor friction are questions of tempo, the brotherly reform measure, supervised telephone conversations, and tenure of parental control. These are standard group-irritants that sometimes vex the sweetest natures.
The matter of tempo, broadly considered, covers the whole process of adjustment between people of hasty and deliberate moods. It involves alertness of spiritual response, alacrity in taking hints and filling orders, timely appreciations, considerate delays, and all the other delicate retards and accelerations that are necessary if hearts are to beat as one. But it also includes such homely questions as the time for setting out for places, the time consumed in getting ready to set out, and the swiftness of our progress thither. When a man who is tardy is unequally yoked with a wife who is prompt, their family moves from point to point with an irregularity of rhythm that lends suspense to the mildest occasions.
A certain architect and his wife Sue are a case in point. Sue is always on time. If she is going to drive at four, she has her children ready at half-past three, and she stations them in the front hall, with muscles flexed, at ten minutes to four, so that the whole group may emerge from the door like food shot from guns, and meet the incoming automobile accurately at the curb. Nobody ever stops his engine for Sue. Her husband is correspondingly late. Just after they were married, the choir at their church gambled quietly on the chances—whether she would get him to church on time, or whether he would make her late. The first Sunday they came five minutes early, the second ten minutes late, and every Sunday after that, Sue came early, Prescott came late, and the choir put their money into the contribution-box. In fact, a family of this kind can solve its problem most neatly by running on independent schedules, except when they are to ride in the same automobile or on the same train. Then, there is likely to be a breeze.
But the great test of such a family's grasp of the time-element comes when they have a guest who must catch a given car, due to pass the white post at the corner at a quarter to the hour. The visit is drawing to a close, with five minutes to spare before car-time. Those members of the family who like to wait until the last moment, and take their chances of boarding the running-board on the run, continue a lively conversation with the guest. But the prompt ones, with furtive eye straying to the clock, begin to sit forward uneasily in their chairs, their faces drawn, pulse feverish, pondering the question whether it is better to let a guest miss a car or seem to hurry him away. The situation is all the harder for the prompt contingent, because usually they have behind them a criminal record of occasions when they have urged guests to the curb in plenty of time and the car turned out to be late. The runners and jumpers of the family had said it would be late, and it was late. These memories restrain speech until the latest possible moment. Then the guest is whisked out to the white post with the words, “If you could stay, we'd be delighted, but if you really have to make your train—” Every punctual person knows the look of patronage with which the leisured classes of his family listen to this old speech of his. They find something nervous and petty about his prancing and pawing, quite inferior to their large oblivion. As Tagore would say, “They are not too poor to be late.”
The matter of tempo involves also the sense of the fortunate moment, and the timing of deeds to accord with moods. In almost every group there is one member who is set at a slightly different velocity from the others, with a momentum not easily checked. When the rest of the household settles down to pleasant conversation, this member thinks of something pressing that must be done at once.
The mother of three college boys is being slowly trained out of this habit. Her sons say that she ought to have been a fire-chief, so brisk is she when in her typical hook-and-ladder mood. Whenever her family sits talking in the evening, she has flitting memories of things that she must run and do. One night, when she had suddenly rushed out to see if the maid had remembered to put out the milk tickets, one of the boys was dispatched with a warrant for her arrest. He traced her to the door of the side porch, and peered out at her in the darkness. “What's little pussy-foot doing now?” he inquired affectionately. “Can she see better in the dark? Come along back.” But her blood was up. She thought of several other duties still waiting, and went at once to the kitchen and filled the dipper. With this she returned to the room where sat the waiting conversationalists, and systematically watered the fern. It was like wearing orange to a Sinn Fein rally. At the chorus of reproach she only laughed, the scornful laugh of the villain on the stage. Six determined hands seized her at once. The boys explained that, when they wanted to talk to her, it was no time to water ferns. As habitual breaker-up of public meetings, she was going to be reformed.