that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower
in Browning's grim poem of 'Childe Roland.' Then is the time to strop your favorite razor! I wonder, while stropping mine, if any man still lives who uses a moustache cup?
OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA!
Any man who knows that, sooner or later, he must go to another afternoon tea cannot but rejoice at the recent invention of an oval, platter-like saucer, large enough to hold with ease a cup, a lettuce or other sandwich, and a dainty trifle of pastry. The thing was needed: the modesty of the anonymous inventor—evidently not Mr. Edison—reveals him one of the large body of occasional and unwilling tea-goers. We, the reluctant and unwilling, are all strangely alike at these functions; and we have all been embarrassed by the old-fashioned saucer. Circular in shape, and hardly larger than the cup that belies its reputation and dances drunkenly whenever another guest joggles our elbow,—which happens so often that we suspect conspiracy,—the old-fashioned saucer affords no reasonably secure perch for a sandwich; responds with delight to the law of gravitation if left to itself; and sets us wishing, those of us who think scientifically, that evolution had refrained from doing away with an extension by which alone we could now hope to manage it. We mean a tail! If afternoon teas had been started in the Oligocene Epoch instead of the seventeenth century, we are convinced that evolution, far from discarding this useful appendage, would have perfected it. A little hand would have evolved at the end of it—such a one as might hold a Perfect Gentleman's saucer while he sipped from his tea-cup.
Nay, more. In many ways that will at once occur to the intelligent reader this little hand would be helpful in our complex modern civilization. It would hold this essay. It would turn the music at the piano. It would enable two well-disposed persons cordially to shake hands when their four other hands were busy with bundles. It would slap the coward mosquito that stabs in the back. It would be absolutely perfect for waving farewell. Nor would there be anything 'funny' about it, or shocking to the most refined sensibilities: the vulgar would laugh and the refined would hide a shudder at the sight of a man with no tail! We would, of course, all look like the Devil, but everybody knows that his tail has never yet kept him out of polite society.
This digression, however, leads us away from our subject into alien regrets. We put it behind us.
The truth is, we do not like your afternoon teas—except those little ones, like the nice children of an objectionable mother, that are informal, intimate, and not destructive of our identity. At larger gatherings we have no identity: we are supernumeraries, mere tea-cup bearers, wooden Indians who have been through Hampton, hand-carved gentlemen, automaton tea-goers. In short, we are so many lay figures, each with a tea-cup in one hand and food in the other; we know that we are smiling because we can feel it; we remain where we are laid until forcibly moved to another spot, and we are capable, under pressure, of emitting a few set phrases that resemble human speech.
Yet within this odd simulacrum of a worldly, entertaining, and interested gentleman, a living mind surveys the gay scene with a strange, emotionless detachment—just so, perhaps, will it eventually survive the body. We are really alive, conscious that we dislike change, nervous when moved and stood up in another place, and intellectually certain that no real harm can come to us. One is reminded of Seneca's observation: Vere magnum, habere fragilitatem hominis, securitatem dei. There is about us something of the frailty of a man, something of the security of a god; the pity of it is that we cannot follow Seneca to his conclusion and comfort ourselves with the thought that we are 'truly great.'