Barry Pain

“ I once held a subordinate position in the laundry, but in imagination I was the manager; and now I am the manager, and in imagination am asked to join the Board of Directors. As the poet Longfellow so wisely said—Excelsior. Engraved in letters of gold on the heart of the ambitious are these words: ‘And the next article?’ At this present moment I am having a cup of tea with by far the most brilliant and beautiful girl of my acquaintance, but in imagination——”
And it was just there that the tactless waitress interrupted us so rudely. ”

“ When she wrote that last instalment in “The Sunday Times,” the power of criticism had gone to have the valves ground in.
I will now ask your kind attention for my estimate of me, Marge Askinforit, by myself.
There is just one quality which I claim to have in an even greater degree than my prototype. She is unlike real life—no woman was ever like what any woman supposes herself to be—but I am far more unlike real life. I have more inconsistency, more self-contradiction, more anachronism, more impossibility. ”

“ In adding my humble wreath to the flatteries—in their sincerest form—which she has already received, I should like to point out that a parody of an autobiography should not be a caricature of the people biographed—some of whom must already have suffered enough. ”

“ I told him that I was staying with mamma, and mentioned a suitable hotel, adding that I was so sorry I had to return to town that afternoon, as I had begun to love the scholastic peace of Oxbridge and valued so much the opportunity of meeting its greatest men. I was bright and poetical in streaks, and every shy—if I may use the expression—hit the coco-nut. Sometimes I glanced at Willie, my pseudo-brother. His face twitched a little, but he never actually gave way to his feelings. The Dean had ceased to pay much attention to him. ”

“ Only in whispers at the dead of night to the most trusted friend under the seal of secrecy can we think of criticizing it. But holding, as I do, perhaps the most important public position in the Continent of Europe, if not in the whole world—responsible, as I am, for what may be called the sustenance of the next generation—I do feel called upon to carry out any repairs and re-decoration of the social fabric that may be required. ”

“ Facts speak louder than words. All we ask you to do is to trust the evidence of your own eyes.”
The window proved a great attraction. The crowd before it was most numerous about four o’clock, because every day at that hour a dramatic and exciting scene was witnessed. Putting down his newspaper, Hugo struck a bell on a little table by his side. A page entered through the excessively plush curtains at the back, and Hugo gave a brief and haughty order. The boy somewhat overacted respectful acquiescence, retired through the curtains, and reappeared again with tea and thin bread and butter. ”

“ The greatest is my own self-estimate of me myself. It demands and shall receive a chapter all to itself. Wipe your feet, take off your hat, assume a Sunday expression, and enter upon it reverently.
After all, the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us is not to be desired. ”

“ Yet one more quotation from the last column of the last extract:
“If I had to confess and expose one opinion of myself which might differentiate me a little from other people, I should say it was my power of love coupled with my power of criticism.”
No, never mind. The power of love is not an opinion ”

“ When you have not got enough of anything, always try to persuade people that you want less. But your rouge-et-noir make-up is right off the map. If you could manage to get some of the colours in some of the right places, people would laugh less. And I can never quite decide whether it’s your clothes that are all wrong, or if it’s just your figure. I wish you’d tell me. Anyhow, you should try for a job at a photographer’s—you’re just the girl for a dark-room.”
Really, that’s all I said—just affectionate, lambent, helpful criticism, with a little Tarragon in it. ”

“ Marge: Anything—but temporary parlour-maid is my strong suit.
Chummie: And what’s your game?
Marge: I’m sick of patronizing politicians and want to patronize a poet. When all’s said and done, Inmemorison is a proper certificated poet. Besides, I want to put something by for my rainy autobiography.
Chummie: Oh, well. I’ll try and lay a pipe for it. May come off or may not.
Chummie managed the thing to perfection. My sister Casey wrote me one of the best testimonials I have ever had, and by Christmas I was safely installed for a week. ”

“ Then an uneducated policeman came up to me and asked me to pass along, please, adding that Mr. Lloyd George was not in London. So, simply replying “All right, face,” I passalongpleased.
However, in spite of all that bound me so closely to the great political world, I could not help feeling the claims of literature. I am sensitive to every claim. It is the claim of history, for example, that compels me to write my autobiography. I seem to see all around me a thousand human arts and activities crying for my help and interest. They seem to say “Marge, Marge, more Marge!” ”

“ If you say what your opinion is, you should take care to be beautiful but unintelligible. Commit yourself to nothing. Words were given us to conceal our thoughts, and with a little practice and self-discipline will conceal them even from ourselves. ”

“ I have been studying the beautiful pages of the autobiography of my Great Example—hereinafter to be called the G.E. It is wonderful to be admitted to the circle of the elect, week after week, at the low rate of twopence a time. Why, I’ve paid more to see the pictures.
Considering the price, one ought not to carp. The G.E. says in one extract that she has lost every female friend she ever had, with the exception of four. In a subsequent extract she names six women whose friendship has remained loving and true to her since girlhood. ”

“ That freak, Millie Wyandotte, sent me a plated toast-rack and a letter from which I extract the following:
“If you were half as extraordinary as you [Pg 92] think you are, this would be a miserable marriage. Anybody who married it would get lost, bewildered, and annoyed, and the hymn for those at sea should be sung at the wedding ceremony. But cheer up, old girl. Really extraordinary people never think it worth while to prove that they are extraordinary, and mostly would resent being told it. ”

“ Alfred?
Birsch: Yes, my son.
Marge: But I have never even seen him.
Birsch: And when you have you’ll probably [Pg 53] wish you hadn’t. But don’t let that prejudice you. It’s the inside of the head that counts. That boy’s got a perfect genius for cottage property and real tact with it. Only last week he raised an old woman’s rent a shilling a week, and when he left she gave him a rosebud and said she’d pray for him. It takes some doing—a thing like that. Now, I want a public career for that boy, and if he marries you he can’t miss it. Do you know what Mr. Bunting said to me about you? ”

“ A boarding-house is a congeries of people who have come down. The proprietoress never dreamed that she would have to earn her own living like that—though she gets everything to a knife-edge certainty in the first week. Then in the drawing-room you have military people who have thundered, been saluted, been respected—and superseded. And nobody can make worse clothes look better. The cook explains why she’s not in Grosvenor Square, and the elderly Swiss waiter says that he has been in places where pace was not everytink. ”

“ But when you go into the great world (basement entrance) and have a bad night, or the flies are troublesome, you do get a feeling of passionate economy; you realize that there are people you can do without, and you do without them. This is the whole truth about a little failing of which my detractors have made the most. Calumny and exaggeration have been carried to such an extent that more than once I have been accused of being habitually irritable.
My revered model wrote that she had always been a collector “of letters, old photographs of the family, famous people and odds and ends.” ”

“ Nobody in the parody is intended to be a representation, or even a misrepresentation, of any real person living or dead. For instance, Inmemorison [Pg 8] is not intended to be a caricature of Tennyson, but the passage which deals with him is intended to parody some of the stuff that has been written about Tennyson.
No doubt the author of the original has opened to the public several doors through which it is not thinkable that a parodist would care to follow her. Apart from that, parody should be brief, just as autobiography should be long—ars brevis, vita longa. ”

“ I have not the least doubt that she would have convinced a famous physicist who, curiously enough, is weak on facts, or a writer of detective stories who, equally curiously, is weak on imagination. I am sorry to say that she would never give me the winner of the next Derby, nor do I remember that she ever used this special and exclusive information for her own benefit. But, like other mediums, she could always give a plausible reason for avoiding any test that was really a test ”

“ Society? It is a great mystery. I can hardly think of it without taking off my boots and prostrating myself orientally. To criticize it is a mistake; it is even, if I may for once use a harsh word, subversive. It is the only one we’ve got. ”

“ Less than a week later, Lord Baringstoke’s public recantation was the talk of London. In a speech of considerable eloquence he [Pg 42] showed how the merciless logic of facts had convinced his intellect, and his conscience had compelled him to abandon the position he had previously taken up. Fortunately, you can prove absolutely anything about Ireland. It is merely a question of what facts you will select and what you will suppress.
Mr. Bunting is, I believe, still with Lord Baringstoke. This was, perhaps, one of the principal triumphs of the Soles. ”

“ He’s the exhibit from the Auto-extensor Co.’s in Regent Street. You can pull out the rest of him and see if he isn’t.”
“That’s what I told the cabman,” said the policeman. “I said to him: ‘You juggins,’ I said, ‘do you think a burglar who wants to get into a house waits till a cab’s going past and then gives a acrobatic exhibition to attract the driver’s attention? That’s some young fool after one of the maids.’ No, I don’t want to see the rest of the young man—not if he’s like the sample. Get him unwound as soon as you can, and send him about his [Pg 62] business. ”

“ It is indeed from one point of view a mercy that [Pg 38] most people are too cowardly or too ashamed to say that they have failed to comprehend. Yet if they had my passion for truth it might be better. Truth is very precious to me—sometimes too precious to give away. ”

“ I have increased the remoteness from real life—which was sometimes appreciable in the original—to such an extent that it should be impossible to suppose that any of the grotesques of the parody is intended for anybody in real life. ”

“ Spearmint, my eldest surviving brother, came much under the influence of Alexis Chopitoff, and entered the same profession. Simple and unassuming, no one would have supposed that in one year he had backed the winner in all the principal races. But such was veritably the case.
“There’s nothing in it, Marge,” he said to me one evening. “There’s only one sure way to win—back every horse in the race with another man’s money. I tell a customer the tale that I was shaving a well-known trainer that morning, and that the trainer had given me a certainty ”

“ Percy Binder had stolen these lines from the autobiography of my own G.E. She says, by the way, that their author was “the last of the wits.” But how can you be last in a race in which you never start? It is always safe to say what you think, but sometimes dangerous to give your reasons for thinking it.
That, however, is a digression. Percy Binder was given to understand that we did not know him in future. Mr. Bunting was so upset that he declared the competition cancelled, and smoked the prize himself. ”

“ The young man never forgave it. And that, so I have always been told, is how the [Pg 34] first Browning Society came to be founded.
It was a meeting with this undergraduate—purely accidental on my part—in the romantic garden of the poet’s house that first turned my mind towards the university town of Oxbridge. I had no difficulty in finding employment as a waitress there in a restaurant where knowledge of the business was considered less essential than a turn for repartee and some gift for keeping the young of our great nobility in their proper place. ”

“ But I am talking about collecting other people. I am wandering from my subject. I must collect myself.
At a very early age I caught the measles and a little later on the public eye. The latter I still hold. But I do not often lose anything except friends, and occasionally the last ’bus, and of course my situations. My [Pg 81] great model says it is a positive punishment to her to be in one position for long at a time, and I must be something like that—I rarely keep a place much longer than a month. ”

“ Truth compelled me to answer in the negative. The voice of conscience said: “Take a good thing when you see it. People have lost fortunes by opening their mouths too wide.”
On the other hand there were two considerations of importance. I might possibly receive a better offer. If I had been quite sure that Hector would have taken it nicely, I would have asked him for a three months’ option to see if anything better turned up, but I knew that with his sensitive nature he might be offended. ”

“ He replied on a postcard: “Don’t approve of women in the profession, and you’d better cut it out. It’s hard enough for a man bookmaker to scrape a living, with everybody expecting the absurd prices quoted in the press.”
Many of the contemporary testimonials that I have received are so cautiously framed and so wanting in warmth that I decline to make any use of them. I have always hated cowardice. I have the courage of my opinions. Why cannot others have the same.
However, I have through my sister Chlorine succeeded in securing the opinions of some of the greatest in another century. ”

“ It is claimed for the Auto-extensor system that there is absolutely no limit to the increase in height which may be obtained by it, provided of course, that the system is followed exactly, that nothing happens to prevent it, and that the rain keeps off. ”

“ Of these delicacies Hugo partook coram populo. This carried conviction with it. One onlooker would say to another: “Shows you he’s real, don’t it? At one time I thought it was only a dummy.” And for some time afterwards the assistant in the shop would be kept busy, handing out the gratis explanatory booklet of the Auto-extensor Co.
It was in this window that I first saw Hugo. I arrived a little late that afternoon, and missed the first act, where he puts down the newspaper and rings the bell. ”