There are some days when I believe all the food in the shops is made of painted cardboard like a doll’s-house dinner-party, because, although there appears to be an endless variety, there is, in fact, nothing that can be bought and eaten by ordinary people. If you examine each item separately, this will become evident. All the things in the windows are frauds, for the reasons described in Mrs. Globe’s shop, and therefore there is nothing for it but to have just the usual; to return up the street again to the butcher. We always “fall back” on his bloated, striped perpetuity.
“What about a nice fowl?” asks some bright spirit, and, indeed, that is true; what about it? except that, even supposing you can afford to spend three-and-sixpence on a quarter-of-an-hour’s amusement for four persons, there is not really any difference between this fowl and the last we had, so we may as well fall back on the butcher, who gives more for the same price. The fish-monger has all sorts of delightful traveller’s samples in the way of foreign birds hanging over the front of his shop, but, if you look into them, they are all plain fowls at heart; and when you get the two-and-sixpenny ones home and undress them, really it would come cheaper and be just as satisfactory to pot a sparrow out of the bathroom window with a catapult. By the way, I wonder that is not done oftener. It would be a change from the neck of mutton, and until they become “just the usual” sparrows, and find their way to the poulterers, we shall not be told that they are very scarce and not in season.
Perhaps the reason why many of us behave so much as usual is that, although there are many varieties of conduct available, we have got into a nervous habit of eliminating most of them from our list of what is possible, just as we reject many eatables which the shops would provide. But in either case it is not actually necessary to fall back on the apples or the butcher or the nice thing to say. There is plenty of variety to be had if people would stop falling back on the “old favourites” either in food or conversation. The dullest permanent officials and ladies in the world have thoughts about what is going on, if they would only allow themselves to think them: thoughts as peculiar to themselves, as different from their neighbours’, as are the curves made by two lambs jumping in the air. But they won’t tell us what these thoughts are. They push them away, saying to themselves, “No, that would never do,” and so they fall back on the apples. That is to say, they dish up the same old remarks in the same old way, until those of us who feel boredom begin to scream and cry and throw the food about. It is dreadful. I have seen people sitting round a table deliberately, wantonly refusing us the thoughts which the good God put into their heads in order that that they might share them with us. Some funny fellow on reading this will discover that it would be capital sport if we all said what we thought. He will picture insults flying like bullets, and all decency at an end. But no one is suggesting that the usual topics of conversation should be changed unless with the consent of all present. All we require is that when the scenery of Dorsetshire or the marriage of one’s son or the book which every one is reading is under discussion, the company should not limit their conversation to what it is “always as nice as anything” to say; that they should not give us “just the usual,” but try some of the other things in the shop, in season and out of season, as we have been taught. The price, of course, may be a little higher; but though some will call us vulgar if we do not fall back on the apples, others will call us dull if we do, so what does it matter? No one, however careful, can be a perfect lady to the whole world. So when Mrs. Beehive asks us what we feel about the scenery of Dorsetshire, let us be as open with her as we should be with our doctor if he suddenly lost his temper, thumped his fist on the table, and, looking us straight between the eyes, thundered, “Damn it all, madam, what have you had for breakfast?” We should tell the truth at once then, without stopping to think whether we had not better leave out the fifth cup of tea. It is just the fifth cup of tea that may be the significant note in an otherwise commonplace breakfast. It is sickeningly dull hearing you tell us, not what you noticed about the scenery of Dorsetshire, but what you decided years ago that it was a nice thing to think about the scenery of any county. The apples were all right in their place, but why fall back on them?
I once had a cook who greeted me every morning with the same remark, “There’s nothing left but just the spinach.” She pronounced it “spinack,” which made the offence worse, and she referred to the fact that we had eaten all the other vegetables in our twice-a-weekly hamper from the country. Conversation among careful people has, as a rule, very little left in it besides “just the spinack.” I mentioned this to Polly one day, and she said at once, without a moment’s reflection: “I have just had a luncheon-party, and there is nothing left of me but just the spinack, I can tell you. Another quarter of an hour and I should have fallen back on the apples.”
“I thought your party was delightful,” said Mrs. Spicer, who happened to be present.
“Of course it was,” said Polly, “because I gave you the best I had. It wasn’t much compared to the intellectual treat you might have had if I happened to be one of the Great Spirits of the Age, but it was all I had in the box; it wasn’t ‘just the spinack.’ I kept nothing from you.”
“But—” Mrs. Spicer seemed about to raise an objection, and hesitated.
“Yes?” said Polly; “don’t hover round your mind, please, rejecting things; we’re not tied to the apples.”
“You said yourself,” Mrs. Spicer reminded her boldly, “that you advised me never to say what I thought about anything—that it was not safe—that the weather was the only possible subject of conversation.”