“Never mind,” replied Polly, with inexorable breeziness, “sit up; lock the gates; put your tongue out. If the rabble once gets into your heart, they’ll sack the place and use everything in it to your disadvantage.”
Mrs. Henry was tying her veil and thinking about something else, but Mrs. Beehive looked, somehow, as if she had eaten too much. The little bride hurriedly looked at the clock and exclaimed: “Oh how late! Paul will be back; I must fly! Thank you a thousand times for all your kindness and advice. I can’t believe all you said just now, but I expect you didn’t mean it, did you?”
She wrung our hands and disappeared. Mrs. Beehive and Mrs. Henry summoned a taxi and drove off together.
“Why were you so frank, Polly?” I asked when we were alone. “I am always pleased to back you up, but do you think it is any good?”
“Of course not,” said Polly; “I should have bitten my tongue out if it were. But, anyway, we shan’t have it on our consciences that we didn’t warn her.”
CHAPTER XII: JUST THE USUAL
If there is anything more remarkable than the way in which everything in the world is constantly changing, it is how everything goes on just as usual; just as it has gone on for centuries and centuries. That perpetual business of the toilet dates from the Fall. Sundays have always come round in due course. I expect that the family dinner-table, that uncouth institution, has been going on a long time. Domestic friction occurs in the first pages of Genesis. Who was the first monthly nurse? She probably dates pretty far back. And the only part of the show which we are definitely assured will be done away with is the only bit of it which has any real permanent interest—marrying and giving in marriage. On that showing we may have to face the endless routine of getting up, washing, eating, talking, and going to bed again with all the flavour that there is in any of it—gone! It will be worse than being in a nunnery, because there will be nothing to renounce. So long as one knows that the world, the flesh, and the devil (which are for each sex concentrated in the other) are only separated from us by our own will it is all right; but not to have them prowling about outside within reach, should we change our minds, is unthinkable. It will be just like an everlasting party of pew-openers, for they are the only people I can think of who have no sex. Another curious thing is that Creation—Nature—whatever you like to call her—manages to vary her show continually, while the lords of creation, who are supposed to be better equipped with intelligence, cannot for the life of them think of any new way of doing the same old thing. In Nature the same ideas are repeated, without appearing to be the same. Quite old-fashioned customs like sunrise and sunset, the seasons, the weather, recur as usual, but they are not often monotonous: except in exaggerated places like the Poles or the Equator, where it goes on being dark or light for too long at a time, or only rains once a year, or where the snow doesn’t know when to stop. But these exceptions are just faults. They don’t show the utter lack of resource displayed by the mass of human beings. Think what it means to pass our little span of time in a world where one may ask on any Sunday, “What is there for dinner?” and be told, “Just the usual!” And the usual is the absolutely usual; it is not like the setting of the sun, which goes on as usual, but with differences enough to make the performance always surprising. There is no difference whatever between the beef of one Sunday and that of the next; every bubble on the Yorkshire pudding is in its appointed place—even the burned side is the same—and the tart or pudding (it is immaterial which) is so identical with last Sunday’s that no thinking mind can seriously reject the doctrine of immortality.
“What fruit have you to-day, Mrs. Globe?” you may ask the greengrocer’s wife on Monday.
“Well, m’m, there’s not very much to-day, except the apples; they’re very nice; two-pence-halfpenny the pound.” And yet the shop looks full of fruit. But when you come to look at it closely, it is like the egg in “Alice in Wonderland,” which receded from every shelf to the one above it. The other fruit doesn’t actually melt away under one’s gaze, but it becomes impossible to obtain. It is either a pine-apple at seven-and-sixpence (very nice, but quite out of the question), or nice English grapes (which you can’t make into a serviceable pudding for a family), or some outlandish fruit, two-pence each (which, of course, wouldn’t do), or else the oranges, which we are rather tired of; and besides, they are going off now and are not recommended.