You’d Better Come Quietly – Three Sketches, Some Outlines And Additional Notes

I

I shall make it my business to go back nine or ten years, as the movies can, and I shall figuratively plant my camera and sound-machine on the deck of an Italian liner, three days out from Naples and en route to New York, just passing, when we board it, the last fringes of shore on the outposts of the Azores.

Let us not blame the boat for the dreary individual I shall describe traveling thereon. He simply happened to take an Italian liner at Naples. He might, if he had cared to, have gone to Cherbourg and come home on the Ile de France, or the Berengaria. The same situation would have occurred, and the tale now being told would be exactly the same.

Now that we are on the boat, a good way to get a locale will be to go to the B deck (the fashionable one in the de luxe section) and follow Chico, the deck-steward, as he passes down the line of steamer chairs, dispensing to blanketed sea-gazers their afternoon rations of crackers and tea. (There’s chicken soup, too, if you wish it, and an uncountable variety of pastries.)

Chico wheels a wagon, and each customer is expected to stop him and select from an assortment of trays whatever delectables or drinkables may suit his fancy. As we go along with Chico we see people sprawled on deck-chairs in all attitudes of repose, proving what an infinite number of designs the human body can assume when the will abandons it to the law of gravity. In that long procession of distorted figures, you will observe a rhombus, a rhomboid, a truncated prism, a parallelopiped, and will be tempted to poke each with a stick to see what sort of human personality emerges from the diagram. Let us examine one.

That right-angle triangle, with its feet stuck out in front of it and a folded blanket on its stomach, is Mr. Wells, a thin, sad-faced little man of middle age, possessed of a moustache and an evident dyspepsia, who looks during journeys as if he wished he had never taken them, and who is particularly pitiable at sea. Mr. Wells has been asleep, but wakes up when Chico confronts him, and after a bewildered conference with himself selects a cup of tea with lemon and no sugar, and an innocuous cracker unviolated by any icing. Mr. Wells stares at his food, and when he has assured himself that the tea is really tea and the cracker really a cracker, he smiles a tired smile, indicating not that he is too tired to smile, but that he is tired of trying to find something worth smiling at.

Mr. Wells could easily be dispensed with, but, now that I have stopped to notice him, I must not in charity leave him unexplained. His pitiableness cannot be all due to dyspepsia. Indeed, one wonders if some of his dyspepsia is not due to his pitiableness — a vicious circle in the physio-psychological order, for soul and body can get at each other in this way and undigested ideas will often cause a good dinner to be badly assimilated.

Mr. Wells is suffering from — I feel certain of it — ocean trouble. Ocean trouble is not to be confused with seasickness; the latter is an affair of the intestines, the former of the intellect. If I may put it boldly, Mr. Wells is mentally unable to digest the ocean. You see, he has assumed that the ocean is a problem, and it is not, it is a mystery.

There is a great difference between a problem and a mystery. In the one you expect ultimately to find a solution, although you are in darkness about it when you tackle it for the first time. In the other you never expect to find a solution, but keep on getting more and more light as you go on. A problem is exhaustible, a mystery never. A problem is meant for one’s scientific mind, a mystery for one’s poetic and religious mind. A problem caters to one’s sense of curiosity, a mystery to one’s sense of wonder. A crossword puzzle is a problem, and so is a detective story (erroneously called a “mystery story”), and the fact that such diversions are taken so seriously in our day is a sign that our sense of religion and poetry has begun to decay. In solving a crossword puzzle you begin with a maximum of perplexity and proceed through a maximum of annoyance until you come to a maximum of light. And then what? And then nothing! No truth has been acquired, the mind has enlarged in scope not one inch. A disorder deliberately planned by the crossword puzzle maker has been untangled. Interest in the subject ceases immediately and permanently. For there is nothing in the world so uninteresting as a completed crossword puzzle, unless it be a completed detective story when the last chapter has been reached and the “mystery” solved.

This question of problems would be innocent enough if it were confined to the realm of recreation and entertainment. Puzzles, charades and make-believe murders serve their purpose in refreshing the mind when it is tired. But in the ethos of which Mr. Wells is a product, it is assumed that the mind is always tired, incapable of ever grappling with thought in its own right, and needing constantly to be fed formulas that promise ultimately to do away with the necessity of thinking altogether. Through a mass of informative literature, compendious in content, ranging all the way from prophecies (about the past) to histories (about the future), Mr. Wells has managed to touch spots in the whole field of knowledge. But unfortunately he has studied each subject with the wrong side of his brain. He has learned theology from a mathematician, ethics from a physiologist, metaphysics from a novelist, and psychology from a breeder of rats. He has studied chemistry theologically, theology biologically, biology sociologically, and sociology paleontologically. He is already on the verge (with the aid of a Sunday magazine Messiah) of studying his own existence fourth dimensionally, which offers difficulties when one has only a three-dimensioned head. Problems are sometimes not fun.

And yet, confronted on a sea voyage with that large, importunate item, the ocean, Mr. Wells feels faint rumblings in his conscience, more poignant even than the rumblings in his stomach, warning him that all is not well when one tries to dismiss the ocean as a problem. For the ocean is, as far as the imagination goes, an infinite thing. True, the ocean is in fact limited, and conceptually we know that it has boundaries, and that navigators and surveyors can mark them. But our imaginations can never stretch as far as our numerical calculations. A thousand miles of water, two thousand miles of water, are all the same to the imagination. Add the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and imaginatively you have the same ocean, because the picture-making faculty in man’s mind is incapable of snap-shotting even a millionth part of either. It is the same way with the stars. A million stars or two million stars, though mathematically vastly dissimilar, make exactly the same imaginative and emotional impression on the mind.

God intended it this way, and wanted, as far as was possible, to represent His own infinity in the magnitude of the created things He sets before our eyes. Benedicite, sol et luna Domino: Benedicite, stellae coeli, Domino: Benedicite, maria et flumina, Domino. From the imaginary infinity of the things we see we are intended to rise to the actual infinity of Him Whom we cannot see. This is the ocean’s chief purpose — compared to which its secondary purpose as a usable thing is almost nil — namely, to be a religious symbol proclaiming its Creator’s immeasurableness and everlastingness. But to a non-contemplative intelligence like Mr. Wells’s, filled with the rubbish of tinkerism and problemism, the ocean is merely a bulky absurdity, an extravagant squandering of water, ceaselessly swishing and swaying, put there by nobody, serving no purpose and making no sense.

To one in this frame of mind (and the steamship companies assume that all their passengers are in this frame of mind) there is only one thing to do about the ocean when it confronts you, surrounds you, overwhelms you on all sides. Ignore it. Turn your attention to those distractive enterprises abundantly supplied by the steamship companies for the diversion of passengers to whom Earth’s wonders have no spiritual significance. Go in heavily for hoop-throwing, ping-pong, shuffle-board, or horse-racing with wooden horses. You may not enjoy yourself — recreation is never enjoyable when it is made a career — but at least you will avoid that mental mal de mer that comes from being stumped by the too-muchness of the Atlantic.

It is to Mr. Wells’s credit that although the ocean bores him, he is even more exasperated by the skittishness of steamship entertainment. He has already told his wife what profane terms he wishes to apply to ping-pong as a way for a sensible man to spend an afternoon at sea; and she has also learned that he prefers to be polysyllabically damned rather than dress up in his pajamas, come down to the dining hall, and compete for a prize in the masquerade.

I admire Mr. Wells in these matters both for the strength of his aversions and the strength of his epithets. And so I leave him, sitting on a deck chair, gazing blankly at the briny deep, with a cup of tea gurgling in his stomach, and a couple of sea waves slopping in his head.

II

But, if the reader insists, there may be a certain amount of pleasure in seeing this little gentleman in action before I leave him forever. I offer him in an altercation with his wife, at the point in their voyage when they are passing the islands of the Azores.

In the course of their argument it will be convenient to refer to him as Edgar, and to Mrs. Wells as Eleanor. She is a large, pleasant-faced woman, who has endured this waspy little bozo for well on to thirty years. Her patience is as inexhaustible as her stupidity is innocuous and as his conceit is acid. They begin:

Eleanor (dropping her knitting and pointing in the distance): Edgar, is that island way over there an Azore?

Edgar (awakening from a drowse): Is what a what?

Eleanor: That island! Is it an Azore?

Edgar: My dear, you don’t say an Azore. The islands are called The Azores. But you don’t call one of them an Azore.

Eleanor: What do you call one of them?

Edgar: You call one of them one of the Azores.

Eleanor: Oh, what’s the difference!

Edgar: My dear, there’s a lot of difference. An Azore is a solecism.

Eleanor: It’s a what?

Edgar: It isn’t said. People don’t use the expression an Azore.

Eleanor: I don’t see that it matters what expression you use as long as you make yourself clear.

Edgar: But that’s the point! You don’t make yourself clear. Furthermore, you made the same sort of silly mistake when we were in Switzerland.

Eleanor: What did I say in Switzerland?

Edgar: Don’t you remember in the hotel in Interlaken, when you were pointing out the window at one of the mountains, and you asked Mrs. Featherstone: Is that an Alp?

Eleanor: Well, it was an Alp, wasn’t it?

Edgar: It was not an Alp. The term is incorrect. It was one of the Alps, do you see? . . . It was one of Thee Alps!

Eleanor: I don’t see why you have to say one of Theee Alps in order to speak about a simple Alp.

Edgar: Listen, my dear! Will you please listen? . . . There are certain nouns in the English language — I mean the English language as intelligent people speak it — there are certain nouns, I say, which we call collective nouns, and they have no singular form.

Eleanor: Oh, don’t bother going into details.

Edgar: I will bother. I have to go around with you constantly, and listen to your asinine mistakes . . . and I have to suffer shame because of your ignorance. And I want you to correct it. I am trying to explain the whole thing to you in a nutshell. Can’t you see what I’m trying to do?

Eleanor: Well, go on.

Edgar (becoming very professorial): Now, we call our country The United States of America. Is that correct? . . . E leanor! Am I right in saying that we call our country The United States of America?

Eleanor: (yawns by way of saying): “Yes!”

Edgar: Very good. And that’s a collective noun. United States of America is a collective noun. . . . But you wouldn’t say of one of the States — let us say Michigan — you wouldn’t say of Michigan that it was A United State, would you?

Eleanor: I don’t see why not, if they’re all United States.

Edgar: Wrong, my dear. You’d say of Michigan that it was one of the United States.

Eleanor: Yes, but there are forty-seven others!

Edgar: There are forty-seven others? What the devil has that got to do with it?

Eleanor: Edgar, you’re getting all excited about such a simple little thing.

Edgar: Good grammar, my dear, is not a simple little thing. It’s a necessary adjunct of correct thought. And when a man has to go around, as I do, listening to his wife perpetrate the most outrageous barbarisms . . .

Eleanor: I don’t perpetrate outrageous barbarisms. I made two teeny little mistakes, an Alp and an Azore, and now you’re flying off the handle.

Edgar: I’m not flying off the handle. . . . I am talking to you very calmly, very, very calmly. But I am going to explain this matter to you if it takes me all night! Do you hear?

Eleanor: Please hurry. The bell for dinner will be ringing soon, and you know I must go down and dress.

Edgar: (getting back to work again): Listen, my dear! You’ve heard of a disease called the mumps, haven’t you? You remember Gladys had the mumps when she was a child?

Eleanor: Of course.

Edgar: Well, when Gladys had the mumps, would you ever think of pointing to one of the swellings on her neck and saying: That’s a mump? Would you ever think of saying such a thing?

Eleanor: No, I’d call it a lump!

Edgar: Eleanor, please! Don’t be so tantalizing. . . . Will you please stick to the point? . . . Would you or would you not call one of Gladys’ mumps a mump? Answer me!

Eleanor: A mump or a lump, what’s the difference?

Edgar: The next thing you’ll be wanting to do is to call me, your husband, a Well. I’m not a Well. I’m a Wells and you’re a Wells: and together we’re the Wellses, do you see? We’re not the Wells!

Eleanor: Why not?

Edgar: Because Wells is a singular noun.

Eleanor: It sounds plural to me.

Edgar: My dear, it is not plural.

Eleanor: Every noun ending in s is plural; I learned that when I was a little girl at school.

Edgar: Damnation, Eleanor! Listen! There are thousands of nouns ending in s that are not plural. Thouuuuusands of them!

Eleanor: Name one!

E dgar (he cannot think of one at the moment, which annoys him greatly; finally, after an intense cerebration he breaks out with): Well, how about basis? Ha. Thought I couldn’t think of one, eh? Well how will basis suit you? That ends in s. Is it singular or plural?

Eleanor: I don’t know.

Edgar: You don’t know!!

Eleanor: It sounds just as plural to me as it does singular.

Edgar: My dear, it is not plural. The singular is basis, and the plural is bases. You’ve often heard me say I’d like to put my business on a sound basis, haven’t you? You never heard me say I’d like to put my business on a sound bases, did you?

Eleanor: Oh dear, you give me a word with so many s’s in it that the singular, if there is a singular, sounds just as plural to me as the plural does.

Edgar: All right, I’ll give you a word with only one stinking s in it and see how that satisfies you.

Eleanor: I’m afraid there isn’t any such word, Edgar.

Edgar: And I’m afraid there is, Eleanor. And I’ve got it. Dais! Dais! Do you know what a dais is?

Eleanor: What did you say?

Edgar: I said: do you know what a dais is?

Eleanor: Flowers?

Edgar: Flowers!!

Eleanor: Aren’t they?

Edgar: Aren’t who? Aren’t what? What the devil are you talking about?

Eleanor: Daisies.

Edgar: I never mentioned the word daisies. I’m not asking you what are daisies. I’m asking you if you know what a dais is? A dais is a throne, or rather a little platform that elevates the throne. “The Queen stood on the dais.” That means she stood on the little platform that elevates the throne. And the word is singular, do you hear? And it ends in s. And there is only one s in it! (He sits back triumphantly in his chair, and draws a deep breath.)

Eleanor: You can’t expect me to use a word I never heard of.

Edgar: I’m not asking you to use it, my dear. I’m merely asking you to acknowledge it. Dais is the word we have both been looking for.

Eleanor: (candidly): I haven’t been looking for it. And I think you made it up.

Edgar (sitting up rigidly again): Made it up! Do you mean to accuse me of dishonesty?

Eleanor: You’re losing your temper. I think it’s silly of you to lose your temper. Why can’t you smile once in a while?

Edgar: Do you expect me to smile at your ignorance, your crass and astounding ignorance, in not knowing that there is a word in the English language called dais. It’s spelt d-a-i-s, and pronounced day-iss. There’s a diaeresis over the i. . . . There’s another word, by the way, diaeresis. That ends in s too. But, damnation, if you don’t know what a dais is, how can I expect you to know what a diaeresis is?

Eleanor: I’m willing to let the matter drop.

Edgar (firmly): And I too, if you are convinced. Are you convinced?

Eleanor: I’ll be convinced when you give me a word, a sensible word that people understand, that ends in s and is singular.

Edgar: I gave you such a word, my dear.

Eleanor: You said there were thousands of such words. You had an awfully hard time to think of even one. And it’s a word I never heard of.

Edgar: There are thousands. And if you’ll be patient, I’ll be glad to give you another one. (suddenly.) Asparagus! Just thought of it! Fancy my not remembering dear old asparagus! Don’t tell me you don’t know what asparagus is?

Eleanor: Yes, but it’s plural.

Edgar (stumped): Asparagus is plural?

Eleanor: Isn’t it?

Edgar (he sees he had better watch his step): It can be plural, Eleanor. It can be, my dear. But it can also be singular. (And then petulantly.) It counts for me, my dear, just as much as it counts for you. You can say asparagus of a quantity, or an asparagus of a single item.

Eleanor: Edgar! You know right well you ought to say a piece of asparagus if you’re talking of only one.

Edgar (completely on the defensive): I maintain you can say both, my dear; asparagus, for a number, and an asparagus for one. The word has to have a singular form, and if it hasn’t a singular form, you have to invent one. Otherwise, you can’t talk about the thing intelligently.

Eleanor: Oh dear! That’s why I said an Azore; and there you go blaming me and starting such a quarrel.

Edgar: Ugh! (It has been the knock-out blow; he subsides in his chair, folds his hands on his stomach, and is in evident intestinal distress.)

Eleanor (genuinely repentant): There now, Edgar! The last thing I wanted to do was to make you cross. And I’ll bet you’ll get indigestion again from becoming so excited. . . . I’ll go and get you a glass of water and a soda-mint tablet. (She gets up and covers him with a blanket; he moans slightly and peers at her through the slits of his eyelids. She bulks large in silhouette against the horizon; and as she proceeds to waddle down the promenade deck, like something inflated in a Mardi Gras procession, he is seized with a sudden inspiration. . . . He throws the blanket to the floor, leaps to his feet, cups his hands about his mouth and shouts after her):

Edgar: Hippopotamus! Eleanor? Hippopotamus! Now try to argue that away!!

Mr. Wells, flushed with satisfaction because of this final, palpable and uncharitable hit, stretches his legs, exercises his arms, buttons his coat, and decides to set out on a constitutional walk around the boat. Nothing like keeping fit for future arguments, future problems. So off he goes, jauntily, with exalted nose, inhaling deep lungfuls of air, restored, it would seem, to a normal function in his digestive processes.

Meanwhile the Azores vanish in the distance, the sky begins to be dotted with early stars. The great expanses of the thunderous Atlantic encircle the ship on all sides. Nature, in the wonderful simplicities of sky and sea, pleads for attention, begs to be assumed for the mystery she is and to be used in symbol for purposes of adoration and prayer; and gets in return only a series of sniffs from Mr. Wells’s nose, as he whirls around the boat.