But the reform measure, a group-irritant second to none, is generally uphill business in the home. Welfare work among equals is sometimes imperative, but seldom popular. Any programme of social improvement implies agitation and a powerful leverage of public opinion not wholly tranquillizing to the person to be reformed.
There is one family that has worked for years upon the case of one of its members who reads aloud out of season. When this brother William finds a noble bit of literature, he is fired to share it with his relatives, regardless of time and circumstances. He comes eagerly out of his study, book in hand, when his public is trying on a dress. Or he begins to read without warning, when all the other people in the room are reading something else. Arguments and penalties never had the slightest effect, until one of the company hit upon a device that proves a defensive measure in emergencies.
Brother William started suddenly to read aloud from a campaign speech. His youngest sister was absorbed in that passage in “Edwin Drood” called “A Night With Durdles,” where Jasper and Durdles are climbing the cathedral spire. In self-defence she also began to read in a clear tone as follows: “Anon, they turn into narrower and steeper staircases, and the night air begins to blow upon them, and the chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened rook precedes the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the beating down of dust and straws upon their heads.”
The idea spread like wildfire. All the others opened their books and magazines and joined her in reading aloud from the page where they had been interrupted. It was a deafening medley of incongruous material—a very telling demonstration of the distance from which their minds had jumped when recalled to the campaign speech. Brother William was able to distinguish in the uproar such fragments as these: “Just at that moment I discovered four Spad machines far below the enemy planes”; “‘Thankyou thankyou,’ cried Mr. Salteena—”; “Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus, a most dear wood-rat”; and “‘It is natural,’ Gavin said slowly, ‘that you, sir, should wonder why I am here with this woman at such an hour.’”
This method did not work a permanent cure, because nothing ever cures the reader-aloud. His impulse is generosity—a mainspring of character, not a passing whim. But at a crisis, his audience can read aloud in concert.
The reform measure is more hopeful when directed, not at a rooted trait, but at a surface phase or custom. Even here success is not without its battles. My sister Barbara and I were once bent upon teaching our younger brother Geoffrey to rise when ladies entered the room. Geoffrey, then at the brigand age, looked at this custom as the mannerism of an effete civilization. He rose, indeed, for guests, but not as to the manner born. One day he came home and reported that the lady next door had introduced him to an aunt of hers who had just arrived on a visit. “And,” said he, with speculative eye upon his sisters, “I didn't get up to be introduced.”
The effect was all that heart could wish. Tongues flew. Geoffrey listened with mournful dignity, offering no excuse. He waited until our sisterly vocabulary was exhausted.
“Why didn't you ask me where I was when she introduced me?” he asked at length. “I was crawling along the ridgepole of her garage catching her cat for her, and I couldn't get up.”
But we were not easily diverted from our attempts to foster in him the manly graces. We even went so far as to invite Geoffrey to afternoon tea-parties with our friends. But a Tea-Lion, he said, was one thing that he was not. On such occasions he would be found sitting on the kitchen table dourly eating up the olives and refusing to come in. We were too young in those days to know that you cannot hurry a certain phase. But now, when we meet our brother at receptions, we smile at our former despair. Reformers often find their hardest tasks taken out of their hands by time.
Few brothers and sisters, however, are willing to trust to time to work its wonders. There is a sense of fraternal responsibility that goads us to do what we can for each other in a small way. The friction that ensues constitutes an experience of human values that the hermit in his cell can never know. Whenever people of decided views feel personally responsible for each other's acts, a type of social unrest begins to brew that sometimes leads to progress and sometimes leads to riots.