By a very interesting decision of the Chair, pointing is ruled out also. If a member of the House suddenly thrusts out his arm with a long forefinger at the end of it and directs this instrument towards some other member, the Chair has decided the gesture to be out of order. It is, as another member of the Chamberlain family has said, "No class." Throwing things is absolutely barred. Nor may you now imitate the noise of animals in the chamber itself. This last is a recent decision, or rather it is an example of an old practice falling into desuetude. The last time a characteristic animal cry was heard in the House of Commons was when a very distinguished lawyer, later Lord Chief Justice of England, gave an excellent rendering of a cock-crow behind the Speaker's chair during a difference of opinion upon the matter of Home Rule—but this was more than twenty years ago.
It is a curious thing that Englishmen no longer sing during their rows. The fine song about the House of Lords which had a curse in it and was sung some months ago by two drunken men in Pall Mall to the lasting pleasure of the clubs, would come in very well at this juncture; or that other old political song now forgotten, the chorus of which is (if my memory serves me), "Bow wow wow!"
No one has seized the appetite for a row more fully than the ladies who demand the suffrage. The "disgraceful scenes" and "unwomanly conduct" which we have all heard officially denounced, were certainly odd, proceeding as they did from great groups of middle-class women as unsuited to exercises of this sort as a cow would be to following hounds, but there is no doubt that the men enjoyed it hugely. It had all the fun of a good football scrimmage about it, except when they scratched. And to their honour be it said they did not stab with those murderous long pins about which the Americans make so many jokes.
Before leaving this fascinating subject of rows, we will draw up for the warning of the reader a list of those to whom rows are abhorrent. Luckily they are few. Money-lenders dislike rows; political wire-pullers dislike rows; very tired men recovering from fevers must be put in the same category, and, finally, oddly enough, newspaper proprietors.
Why on earth this last little band—there are not a couple of dozen of them that count in the country—should have such a feature in common, Heaven only knows, but they most undoubtedly have; and they compel their unfortunate employees to write on the subject of rows most amazing and incomprehensible nonsense. There is no accounting for tastes!
IX THE PLEASANT PLACE
A gentleman of my acquaintance came to me the other day for sympathy.... But first I must describe him:—
He is a man of careful, not neat, dress: I would call it sober rather than neat. He is always clean-shaven and his scanty hair is kept short-cut. He is occupied in letters; he is, to put it bluntly, a litteratoor; none the less he is possessed of scholarship and is a minor authority upon English pottery.