[PART IV]
THE MAN IN THE PUBLIC-HOUSE
I
As an eager and passionate student of the Life of my day there are, within limits, few places that I don't visit and few people I don't on occasion talk to. I say "within limits," since I admit that there may be grades at one end of the scale at which I draw the line, while at the other end there may conceivably be those who draw the line at me. But within these extremes, if not always familiarly, yet on the whole without constraint, I sup at coffee-stalls or dine in quite good company more or less indifferently.
I have found that the best strategic jumping-off-points for the satisfying of this curiosity about the preponderating average of Life are two. One—the Public-house—I have already mentioned. There only a glass screen may divide you from the hawker who has left his barrow for a few minutes in somebody else's charge, or from the gibused and silk-mufflered figure who finds a glass of sherry a convenient way of getting small change for his taxi. The other point of vantage is the Club, where that same taxi is paid off, but where liveried chauffeurs may stand for hours by the waiting cars.
I shall come to the Man in the Club by and by. For the present I wish to return to the Man in the Public-house.
I won't say that I always love him, but I always recognize that I have him very seriously to deal with. I am not thinking of him now either as a reader of my journalism or as a potential buyer of my novels, but as a larger phenomenon. I am thinking of him—loosely I admit—very much as some political cartoonist might think of a generalized and consolidated figure that turns a deaf ear to the Bolshevist and his sinister whisperings on the one side, while the other ear is no less stopped to the honeyed blandishments of the statesman who so frequently and extraordinarily seeks to cajole him with flatteries that are both out-of-touch and out-of-date.