The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks, Page 21

  • FRIDAY •

  A man asked me today if I had heard of the theory that the North American Indians are of partial Welsh descent, stemming from a pre-Leif-Erickson Cymric explorer? I have gone farther; I think I have proved the theory to be correct. About two years ago I chanced to meet an Indian in a woodland walk, and I facetiously addressed him thus:

  MARCHBANKS: “Dyna gapel y Bedyddwyr, onid e?” (Translation: “Look you, are you not the son of Mrs. Jones the Gas?”)

  INDIAN: “Nage, nage; dyna gapel y Methodistiad Calfinaidd.” (Translation: “Indeed to goodness no! I am the love-child of Rev. Hopkin Hopkins.”)

  MARCHBANKS: “Ple mae’r Ficerdy?” (Translation: “Pless my soul, whateffer! do you understand me?”)

  INDIAN: “Dyna fe; dyna’r Ficer hefyd.” (Translation: “Yes indeed, whateffer.”)

  MARCHBANKS: “Dyna deulu’r gof yn cerdded gyda mama modryba chwaer y crydd.” (Translation: “Then let us sit down here and refresh ourselves with elegant conversation.”)

  INDIAN: (Speaking Indian for a change) “Golliwogagog, hoganogagog egganoggagog.” (Translation: “I am all agog.”)

  • SATURDAY •

  Visited a friend this evening who had procured a bottle of a very special tonic called Noilly Prat; in the interest of temperance, we experimented to see how much of the tonic it was necessary to put with a jigger of gin in order to kill the horrid taste. After several tries we got the measurements exactly right…. Driving home, passed through a small town where Saturday Night was in full swing. Farmers shouted conversation from buggy to buggy; their wives stood in the general store, gossiping and criticizing the goods; girls walked up and down the street, arm in arm, pretending not to notice the young men who leaned on doorposts, haw-hawing and passing remarks. It was all rather idyllic and rural, and reminded me of my far-off youth in Skunk’s Misery, before I was tarnished by the fetid breath of city life. I suppose everybody has these soft-headed spells, when they think it would be fun to live in a small town. They pass quickly, of course.

  -L-

  • SUNDAY •

  A man was lecturing me on the benefits of deep breathing this evening. “Fresh air cleanses the bloodstream and keeps the mind alert,” he said, sucking in deep draughts of cigar smoke which undoubtedly polluted his bloodstream and fogged his brain. “When you’ve got pneumonia—gasping for breath—you pay a pretty penny for oxygen out of a tank; but all day, every day, the precious stuff is everywhere around you, begging to be breathed, and do you breathe it?” He puffed in my face, ferociously. “No, you don’t. You’re a shallow breather, a thorax-man, like millions of others. Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you.” I promised that I would never say he didn’t tell me, and felt rather guilty about the whole matter. Walking home, I breathed as deeply as I could for several blocks. It made me dizzy. I am a poor creature unworthy of the fresh air which Providence has lavished upon me.

  • MONDAY •

  My brother Fairchild has been having rather a difficult time with magic. Hoping to ingratiate himself with his children, he bought them some magic tricks, with which he thought that they might mystify their little friends. Having made this false step, he was soon involved in the appalling task of teaching the children to perform the tricks. Teaching a child to do even the simplest sleight-of-hand is like teaching a hippopotamus to embroider pillow-slips. The result of the whole mad scheme was tears, bad temper, and frustration for Fairchild…. I sympathize with him. Once, in the bleak past, I cherished a desire to be a magician; I would have been quite content if I could have achieved the modest skill of say, Dante or Blackstone.15 I laboured before a mirror with coins, cards, eggs, handkerchiefs and billiard balls for weeks, my arms aching, until one bitter day when I came to my senses and admitted that nothing short of psycho-analysis and blood transfusions could make a conjuror of me. For the same reasons that I cannot carpenter shelves, fix leaky taps or tend a furnace, I was unable to pluck fifty quarters out of the air or pull a rabbit out of a hat.

  • TUESDAY •

  Passed a bank this evening which was being re-modelled. Workmen were taking down the iron cages in which the tellers used to be kept. If anything marks the decline of belief in private property, it is this. Not so long ago, putting a teller into his cage was a solemn ceremony; the manager locked him in, and there he stayed until the manager let him out; while he was in the cage he spoke in a hushed voice, like a man who had swallowed a bomb, and he handled money with a kind of religious awe. But the modern teller is a carefree soul, able to run all over the bank if he likes, and ready to hobnob with Tom, Dick and Harry. It is all part of the breakdown of the monetary system.

  • WEDNESDAY •

  Two different manifestations of the same attitude toward women forced themselves on my notice this afternoon. On the street I passed a young couple just as the boy wrenched the girl toward him by the shoulder. “Aw, yuh little nincompoop, yuh!” he said, as he gave her a shake; she replied with a spirited, but uncultured, reflection on his legitimacy. Five minutes later I opened a magazine at a luridly coloured advertisement for perfume. In it another young man, in evening dress, was gazing at the shoulder of his female companion with glowing eyes, like a vegetarian about to bite into an onion; his hands hovered in the air behind her, as though he might suddenly snatch her, just as the boy in the street had snatched. The caption of the picture was “Potent Essence of Desire to Touch”…. I shall never understand life, but I suppose the lesson of this is that if young men do not grab you and call you a little nincompoop, you need a perfume which will force them to do so. The girl in the advertisement was cool, exquisite and beautiful; the girl in the street was tousled, and had been barking her shins on rocking-chairs for weeks, I should judge. But both of them, apparently, were able to rouse men to wild flights of shouldermadness.

  • THURSDAY •

  Heard a lady greeting her physician this afternoon…. “Well, doctor,” she said, breezily, “I hope you’ve been keeping well?” He gulped a couple of times and staggered a little, but his presence of mind did not desert him, for he immediately turned the conversation to a less ticklish subject. Of course it is terribly bad form to ask a doctor how he feels; it is almost the same thing as giving him a dig with a surgical scalpel, or telling him that he would not puff so much if he got more exercise. Doctors like to give the impression that they have no fluctuations of health, and are always in the absolute pink of condition.

  • FRIDAY •

  Did some more odds and ends of Christmas shopping today. Bought fifteen dozen handkerchiefs for female relatives. I don’t know what women do with their handkerchiefs; every year I give away a car-load of them, but I have never known a woman who had a handkerchief on her person at any time when she needed one. Older women always keep their handkerchiefs upstairs so that they can send their younger relatives after them. And why are women’s handkerchiefs so small? What a woman really needs is a handkerchief as big as a tablecloth, pinned to her bosom with a blanket-pin.

  • SATURDAY •

  The pest who was nagging me last week about deep-breathing was at me this evening on the subject of water-drinking. “How much water do you drink a day?” he asked, finishing a glass of my beer. “About half a paper cupful,” I replied, knowing that it was not a satisfactory answer. He made a great show of disgust. “Four gallons a day is the minimum—the bare minimum,” he said, when he could speak. “That would be about two pails,” I said mildly…. Later he phoned me. “By the way,” he said, trying to be casual, “I made a slight mistake. Should have said four quarts—not four gallons.” He is reading a health book, and giving all his acquaintances the benefit. It is one of the mistakes of democracy that it teaches such people to read.

  -LI-

  • SUNDAY •

  Rummaging in some of my personal debris today I found two Christmas cards which I bought in 1939 and forgot to send out. They will be very handy this year if I can find envelopes to fit them…. I was really searching f
or pen nibs, of which I have a large but unsatisfactory store. In these days when people write with ballbearings and solid ink, and at the bottom of the lake while swimming, and otherwise miraculously, I am an embittered reactionary scraping away with a wooden pen which I dip after every eighth word. I do this because I like a particular sort of flexible nib which cannot be obtained in any fountain pen that I have ever owned or tried. But alas! such nibs are now very hard to find, and in despair I buy every nib I see, hoping to find a substitute for my unobtainable favourites. Consequently I have enough nibs to open a stationery store, none of which really pleases me. I know that I am at anchor in the stream of progress, but I don’t care. It has pleased God to make me a dipper man, and who am I to struggle against the Divine Will?

  • MONDAY •

  I get the strangest stuff in the mail. A letter turned up this morning which began “Dear God—,” but what followed was so confused that I could not make out whether this was a cry from the writer’s heart, or a somewhat elaborate compliment to myself. The same post brought an invitation from the Book-of-the-Month Club, asking me to bestow the benediction of my presence upon its membership. The pamphlet by which this invitation was conveyed was beautifully printed and ornamented with finely reproduced illustrations from Alice In Wonderland. The richness of the printing, however, was not balanced by the literary quality of the matter printed, which was, for a book club, rather poorly expressed.

  • TUESDAY •

  This afternoon a little girl demanded that I do something miraculous, so I swallowed a fork, and, after feigning indigestion very laughably, I produced it from the sole of my boot. She was impressed, but not completely satisfied. “There’s no blood on it,” said she…. Children have disgustingly literal minds and hearts of stone.

  • WEDNESDAY •

  Thought a good deal today about games for a Christmas party. There are plenty of dull games, of course, in which one is given a piece of paper and put off in a corner to write the names of all the rivers one can think of beginning with “G”, and there are embarrassing games in which one is tied back to back with a total stranger of the opposite sex and instructed to get free without breaking the strings. But between boredom and ribald lunacy there are some excellent games; the kind I particularly like are those in which one runs all over the house, hiding in the bathtubs and the coalpile, and jumping at people in the dark; the nearer a game approximates to the plot of a Boris Karloff film, the better I like it. There are also games in which the whole company passes judgment on the intelligence, charm and youth of each player in turn; the delight of such amusements is the narrow path they tread between good humour and malignance; many a beautiful friendship has been ruptured by such shenanigans.16

  • THURSDAY •

  At last it seems that I have a Christmas gift for everybody who has a right to expect one from me, and for a few who have none. I see no signs whatever that anyone has a gift for me, but I am used to that; I have always found it more pleasant to give than to receive. (Advt.)…. A man was complaining to me today about the agonies he goes through with Athlete’s Foot; apparently his wife and his daughter suffer from this ailment also. He seemed to think that there was something rather distinguished about having Athlete’s Foot as badly as he had it; he ranked it with such noble maladies as Coronary Thrombosis and Paralysis Agitans. I was not impressed. At one time in my life I mixed a good deal with shepherds and sheep-breeders, and a lot of their sheep suffered from Athlete’s Foot, only they called it foot-rot, pronounced “futrot.” The sheep got it by standing around in damp grass, staring at one another. Futrot was treated with a nasty substance called Stockholm Tar; if it brought no relief, the sheep was knocked over the head with a club. I think I shall suggest to my friend that he and his wife and daughter try Stockholm Tar for a few weeks, and if they do not improve, the next step is obvious.

  • FRIDAY AND PARCELMAS •

  Frantic wrapping of parcels. Through some idiosyncracy of character, I always seem to give people things which are hard to wrap. I refuse to put my gifts under the Christmas tree unwrapped, for part of the pleasure of Christmas is watching the faces of the recipients of one’s gifts as they tear off the concealing folds. Sometimes the objects of my benevolence have been moved to tears; often they are so thunderstruck that they cannot speak.

  • SATURDAY AND CHRISTMAS EVE •

  Christmas Eve, and a great deal of scurrying hither and yon, and lending one’s forefinger to people who want to use it in tying knots. Having wrapped my gifts in the attic, I have to carry them down to the foot of the Christmas tree. As I did all my Christmas shopping in a hardware store this is no easy task, and a couple of adzes and some axe-helves slipped out of my arms and tumbled down the stairs with deafening crashes at every step…. When the others had gone to bed, crept down to the Christmas tree and read all the tags on the parcels, by the light of a candle-end: very few for me. Heard a thumping in the fireplace and thought for a wild moment that it was Santa Claus, but it was my brother Fairchild, covered with soot; he too had been peeping and had taken refuge up the chimney when he heard me coming. We retired to the kitchen, and ate pieces of cold plum pudding.

  -LII-

  • SUNDAY AND CHRISTMAS •

  Christmas Day: hurry-scurry, hamper-scamper, tohu-bohu and brouhaha. The happy excited voices of children sounding like the laughter of angels at 8 a.m. and sounding rather more like the squeaking of slate pencils or the filing of a tin can at 5 p.m. Conversations conducted in yells, and the incessant rustling of tissue paper. Everyone lays claim to a Dickensian appetite, but shows signs of latter-day squeamishness when faced with a third helping of plum pudding. In some cases, torpor and somnolence have their way; in others, excitement rises to the point of acute Anxiety Neurosis. But it is all very happy, with occasional surface irritations…. Christmas is best for children, and for those who are growing old; in middle life one’s capacity for enjoyment is under the constraint of a thousand responsibilities.

  • MONDAY AND POSTMORTEMAS •

  Boxing Day. There is a tradition that one will have a happy month in the coming year for every mince pie one eats on this day. In deference to tradition I did what I could, but choked on the first bite of October, and had to lie down with a cold cloth on my brow for some time afterward.17

  • TUESDAY •

  Was reading the funnies today (just to keep in touch with what the common people are thinking) and was struck by the change in what may be called the dynamics of humour. When I first began to read the funnies this subject was simple; the greatest professor of humorous dynamics was Bud Fisher, the creator of Mutt and Jeff. When Mutt hit Jeff with a spittoon, the noise which came out of Jeff’s head was “Pow,” which was clearly printed at the appropriate spot; if Mutt threw Jeff out of a window, the trajectory of his flight was labelled “Zowie.” Jiggs never made these noises; nothing ever came out of his head except stars and comets. But nowadays this dynamic field is vastly expanded. When a boxer is given a knockout blow his chin emits the word “BLAM” in big letters; when a man is kicked by a horse or a mule his afflicted part says “Zok!” Two of the dynamic sounds greatly used in Barney Google, have vanished from my ken; they were “Plop” (for falling on the floor) and “Wham” for being struck with a broom. There’s no doubt about it, science is on the march in every sphere.

  • WEDNESDAY •

  This morning was compelled to listen to a long distance call. The telephone company was, as usual, quick and polite in getting my office, but then I became involved in a sparring match with the caller’s secretary, who was determined not to let me speak to him until his full impressiveness and executive splendour had been paraded before me. This involved many repetitions of “Are you ready to speak to Mr. Squealy?” “Just a moment please,” “Are you ready at your end, Mr. Marchbanks?” “Hold the line, please, Mr. Squealy isn’t quite ready yet.” This went on for quite a time and was punctuated with sounds like “Bzzzzt” which I think the secretary caus
ed by blowing a raspberry into the phone. All this nonsense begot a somewhat morose attitude in my mind, and when at last Mr. Squealy burst upon me in all his glory, I was surly with him. Secretaries who seek to build up their bosses by such means merely make their Mr. Squealies detested by all honest men.

  • THURSDAY •

  A bus driver was telling me today about how he had been robbed of his underwear and a package of pork chops while driving his bus. Unfortunately a traffic snarl cut him off in the middle of the story, and I did not find out whether he was wearing the underwear at the time or whether it was in the parcel. I have seen a conjuror take off his shirt without removing his coat, and I suppose a clever thief might strip a man in the same way. I brooded on this problem for some time, and was reminded of my cousin Manfred Marchbanks, the organist, who once shocked the daylights out of a lady pupil by telling her that he was going to show her how to change her combinations without taking her feet off the pedals….

  • FRIDAY •

  I see by the papers that Paramount is going to make a film called Coming Through The Rye in which the chief part of Robbie Burns will be played by Bing Crosby. It is to be “a semi-biographical story,” I observe. I can just imagine it. Young Bing Burns is the child of poor but talkative parents who have Scotch accents. As Bing grows to manhood (or what passes for it in the movies) he discovers that he has The Gift Of Song. One day, when he is coming through the rye, he meets a body, and thinks that it is a sheep, and nonchalantly kicks it out of the way; it proves to be Highland Mary (Linda Darnell) who has a Brooklyn accent, and has disguised herself as a sheep in order to keep warm. Bing tells her that his Love is Like A Red, Red Rose. But there is an impediment; she is loved also by a birkie ca’d a lord, wha struts and stares, and a that; though thousands tremble at his word he’s but a coof for a’ that. Bing rouses the tenantry against him, and personally brains him with an oat-cake. George Washington, who happens to be visiting Scotland, recognizes that Bing Burns is a true democrat and invites him to America. Bing and Linda marry, and get tight on Scotch whisky; they are na’ fu’, they’re nay tha’ fu’, they’ve but a drappie in their ee’. They are last seen on a boat bound for America, and Bing is singing a special number composed by Eli Feitelbaum, called The Star-Spangled Briar-Bush.