Джером К. Джером
Idle Ideas in 1905
WHAT MRS. WILKINS THOUGHT ABOUT IT
Last year, travelling on the Underground Railway, I met a man; he was one of the saddest-looking men I had seen for years. I used to know him well in the old days when we were journalists together. I asked him, in a sympathetic tone, how things were going with him. I expected his response would be a flood of tears, and that in the end I should have to fork out a fiver. To my astonishment, his answer was that things were going exceedingly well with him. I did not want to say to him bluntly:
“Then what has happened to you to make you look like a mute at a temperance funeral?” I said:
“And how are all at home?”
I thought that if the trouble lay there he would take the opportunity. It brightened him somewhat, the necessity of replying to the question. It appeared that his wife was in the best of health.
“You remember her,” he continued with a smile; “wonderful spirits, always cheerful, nothing seems to put her out, not even – ”
He ended the sentence abruptly with a sigh.
His mother-in-law, I learned from further talk with him, had died since I had last met him, and had left them a comfortable addition to their income. His eldest daughter was engaged to be married.
“It is entirely a love match,” he explained, “and he is such a dear, good fellow, that I should not have made any objection even had he been poor. But, of course, as it is, I am naturally all the more content.”
His eldest boy, having won the Mottle Scholarship, was going up to Cambridge in the Autumn. His own health, he told me, had greatly improved; and a novel he had written in his leisure time promised to be one of the successes of the season. Then it was that I spoke plainly.
“If I am opening a wound too painful to be touched,” I said, “tell me. If, on the contrary, it is an ordinary sort of trouble upon which the sympathy of a fellow worker may fall as balm, let me hear it.”
“So far as I am concerned,” he replied, “I should be glad to tell you. Speaking about it does me good, and may lead – so I am always in hopes – to an idea. But, for your own sake, if you take my advice, you will not press me.”
“How can it affect me?” I asked, “it is nothing to do with me, is it?”
“It need have nothing to do with you,” he answered, “if you are sensible enough to keep out of it. If I tell you: from this time onward it will be your trouble also. Anyhow, that is what has happened in four other separate cases. If you like to be the fifth and complete the half dozen of us, you are welcome. But remember I have warned you.”
“What has it done to the other five?” I demanded.
“It has changed them from cheerful, companionable persons into gloomy one-idead bores,” he told me. “They think of but one thing, they talk of but one thing, they dream of but one thing. Instead of getting over it, as time goes on, it takes possession of them more and more. There are men, of course, who would be unaffected by it – who could shake it off. I warn you in particular against it, because, in spite of all that is said, I am convinced you have a sense of humour; and that being so, it will lay hold of you. It will plague you night and day. You see what it has made of me! Three months ago a lady interviewer described me as of a sunny temperament. If you know your own business you will get out at the next station.”
I wish now I had followed his advice. As it was, I allowed my curiosity to take possession of me, and begged him to explain. And he did so.
“It was just about Christmas time,” he said. “We were discussing the Drury Lane Pantomime – some three or four of us – in the smoking room of the Devonshire Club, and young Gold said he thought it would prove a mistake, the introduction of a subject like the Fiscal question into the story of Humpty Dumpty. The two things, so far as he could see, had nothing to do with one another. He added that he entertained a real regard for Mr. Dan Leno, whom he had once met on a steamboat, but that there were other topics upon which he would prefer to seek that gentleman’s guidance. Nettleship, on the other hand, declared that he had no sympathy with the argument that artists should never intrude upon public affairs. The actor was a fellow citizen with the rest of us. He said that, whether one agreed with their conclusions or not, one must admit that the nation owed a debt of gratitude to Mrs. Brown Potter and to Miss Olga Nethersole for giving to it the benefit of their convictions. He had talked to both ladies in private on the subject and was convinced they knew as much about it as did most people.
“Burnside, who was one of the party, contended that if sides were to be taken, a pantomime should surely advocate the Free-Food Cause, seeing it was a form of entertainment supposed to appeal primarily to the tastes of the Little Englander. Then I came into the discussion.
“‘The Fiscal question,’ I said, ‘is on everybody’s tongue. Such being the case, it is fit and proper it should be referred to in our annual pantomime, which has come to be regarded as a review of the year’s doings. But it should not have been dealt with from the political standpoint. The proper attitude to have assumed towards it was that of innocent raillery, free from all trace of partisanship.’
“Old Johnson had strolled up and was standing behind us.
“‘The very thing I have been trying to get hold of for weeks,’ he said – ‘a bright, amusing resumé of the whole problem that should give offence to neither side. You know our paper,’ he continued; ‘we steer clear of politics, but, at the same time, try to be up-to-date; it is not always easy. The treatment of the subject, on the lines you suggest, is just what we require. I do wish you would write me something.’
“He is a good old sort, Johnson; it seemed an easy thing. I said I would. Since that time I have been thinking how to do it. As a matter of fact, I have not thought of much else. Maybe you can suggest something.”
I was feeling in a good working mood the next morning.
“Pilson,” said I to myself, “shall have the benefit of this. He does not need anything boisterously funny. A few playfully witty remarks on the subject will be the ideal.”
I lit a pipe and sat down to think. At half-past twelve, having to write some letters before going out to lunch, I dismissed the Fiscal question from my mind.
But not for long. It worried me all the afternoon. I thought, maybe, something would come to me in the evening. I wasted all that evening, and I wasted all the following morning. Everything has its amusing side, I told myself. One turns out comic stories about funerals, about weddings. Hardly a misfortune that can happen to mankind but has produced its comic literature. An American friend of mine once took a contract from the Editor of an Insurance Journal to write four humorous stories; one was to deal with an earthquake, the second with a cyclone, the third with a flood, and the fourth with a thunderstorm. And more amusing stories I have never read. What is the matter with the Fiscal question?
I myself have written lightly on Bime-metallism. Home Rule we used to be merry over in the eighties. I remember one delightful evening at the Codgers’ Hall. It would have been more delightful still, but for a raw-boned Irishman, who rose towards eleven o’clock and requested to be informed if any other speaker was wishful to make any more jokes on the subject of Ould Ireland; because, if so, the raw-boned gentleman was prepared to save time by waiting and dealing with them altogether. But if not, then – so the raw-boned gentleman announced – his intention was to go for the last speaker and the last speaker but two at once and without further warning.
No other humourist rising, the raw-boned gentleman proceeded to make good his threat, with the result that the fun degenerated somewhat. Even on the Boer War we used to whisper jokes to one another in quiet places. In this Fiscal question there must be fun. Where is it?
For days I thought of little else. My laundress – as we call them in the Temple – noticed my trouble.
“Mrs. Wilkins,” I confessed, “I am trying to think of something innocently amusing to say on the Fiscal question.”
“I’ve ’eard about it,” she said, “but I don’t ’ave much time to read the papers. They want to make us pay more for our food, don’t they?”
“For some of it,” I explained. “But, then, we shall pay less for other things, so that really we shan’t be paying more at all.”
“There don’t seem much in it, either way,” was Mrs. Wilkins’ opinion.
“Just so,” I agreed, “that is the advantage of the system. It will cost nobody anything, and will result in everybody being better off.”
“The pity is,” said Mrs. Wilkins “that pity nobody ever thought of it before.”
“The whole trouble hitherto,” I explained, “has been the foreigner.”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “I never ’eard much good of ’em, though they do say the Almighty ’as a use for almost everything.”
“These foreigners,” I continued, “these Germans and Americans, they dump things on us, you know.”
“What’s that?” demanded Mrs. Wilkins.
“What’s dump? Well, it’s dumping, you know. You take things, and you dump them down.”
“But what things? ’Ow do they do it?” asked Mrs. Wilkins.
“Why, all sorts of things: pig iron, bacon, door-mats – everything. They bring them over here – in ships, you understand – and then, if you please, just dump them down upon our shores.”
“You don’t mean surely to tell me that they just throw them out and leave them there?” queried Mrs. Wilkins.
“Of course not,” I replied; “when I say they dump these things upon our shores, that is a figure of speech. What I mean is they sell them to us.”
“But why do we buy them if we don’t want them?” asked Mrs. Wilkins; “we’re not bound to buy them, are we?”
“It is their artfulness,” I explained, “these Germans and Americans, and the others; they are all just as bad as one another – they insist on selling us these things at less price than they cost to make.”
“It seems a bit silly of them, don’t it?” thought Mrs. Wilkins. “I suppose being foreigners, poor things, they ain’t naturally got much sense.”
“It does seem silly of them, if you look at it that way,” I admitted, “but what we have got to consider is, the injury it is doing us.”
“Don’t see ’ow it can do us much ’arm,” argued Mrs. Wilkins; “seems a bit of luck so far as we are concerned. There’s a few more things they’d be welcome to dump round my way.”
“I don’t seem to be putting this thing quite in the right light to you, Mrs. Wilkins,” I confessed. “It is a long argument, and you might not be able to follow it; but you must take it as a fact now generally admitted that the cheaper you buy things the sooner your money goes. By allowing the foreigner to sell us all these things at about half the cost price, he is getting richer every day, and we are getting poorer. Unless we, as a country, insist on paying at least twenty per cent. more for everything we want, it is calculated that in a very few years England won’t have a penny left.”
“Sounds a bit topsy turvy,” suggested Mrs. Wilkins.
“It may sound so,” I answered, “but I fear there can be no doubt of it. The Board of Trade Returns would seem to prove it conclusively.”
“Well, God be praised, we’ve found it out in time,” ejaculated Mrs. Wilkins piously.
“It is a matter of congratulation,” I agreed; “the difficulty is that a good many other people say that far from being ruined, we are doing very well indeed, and are growing richer every year.”
“But ’ow can they say that,” argued Mrs. Wilkins, “when, as you tell me, those Trade Returns prove just the opposite?”
“Well, they say the same, Mrs. Wilkins, that the Board of Trade Returns prove just the opposite.”
“Well, they can’t both be right,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“You would be surprised, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “how many things can be proved from Board of Trade Returns!”
But I have not yet thought of that article for Pilson.
SHALL WE BE RUINED BY CHINESE CHEAP LABOUR?
“What is all this talk I ’ear about the Chinese?” said Mrs. Wilkins to me the other morning. We generally indulge in a little chat while Mrs. Wilkins is laying the breakfast-table. Letters and newspapers do not arrive in my part of the Temple much before nine. From half-past eight to nine I am rather glad of Mrs. Wilkins. “They ’ave been up to some of their tricks again, ’aven’t they?”
“The foreigner, Mrs. Wilkins,” I replied, “whether he be Chinee or any other he, is always up to tricks. Was not England specially prepared by an all-wise Providence to frustrate these knavish tricks? Which of such particular tricks may you be referring to at the moment, Mrs. Wilkins?”
“Well, ’e’s comin’ over ’ere – isn’t he, sir? to take the work out of our mouths, as it were.”
“Well, not exactly over here, to England, Mrs. Wilkins,” I explained. “He has been introduced into Africa to work in the mines there.”
“It’s a funny thing,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “but to ’ear the way some of them talk in our block, you might run away with the notion – that is, if you didn’t know ’em – that work was their only joy. I said to one of ’em, the other evening – a man as calls ’isself a brass finisher, though, Lord knows, the only brass ’e ever finishes is what ’is poor wife earns and isn’t quick enough to ’ide away from ’im – well, whatever ’appens, I says, it will be clever of ’em if they take away much work from you. It made them all laugh, that did,” added Mrs. Wilkins, with a touch of pardonable pride.
“Ah,” continued the good lady, “it’s surprising ’ow contented they can be with a little, some of ’em. Give ’em a ’ard-working woman to look after them, and a day out once a week with a procession of the unemployed, they don’t ask for nothing more. There’s that beauty my poor sister Jane was fool enough to marry. Serves ’er right, as I used to tell ’er at first, till there didn’t seem any more need to rub it into ’er. She’d ’ad one good ’usband. It wouldn’t ’ave been fair for ’er to ’ave ’ad another, even if there’d been a chance of it, seeing the few of ’em there is to go round among so many. But it’s always the same with us widows: if we ’appen to ’ave been lucky the first time, we put it down to our own judgment – think we can’t ever make a mistake; and if we draw a wrong ’un, as the saying is, we argue as if it was the duty of Providence to make it up to us the second time. Why, I’d a been making a fool of myself three years ago if ’e ’adn’t been good-natured enough to call one afternoon when I was out, and ’ook it off with two pounds eight in the best teapot that I ’ad been soft enough to talk to ’im about: and never let me set eyes on ’im again. God bless ’im! ’E’s one of the born-tireds, ’e is, as poor Jane might ’ave seen for ’erself, if she ’ad only looked at ’im, instead of listening to ’im.
“But that’s courtship all the world over – old and young alike, so far as I’ve been able to see it,” was the opinion of Mrs. Wilkins. “The man’s all eyes and the woman all ears. They don’t seem to ’ave any other senses left ’em. I ran against ’im the other night, on my way ’ome, at the corner of Gray’s Inn Road. There was the usual crowd watching a pack of them Italians laying down the asphalt in ’Olborn, and ’e was among ’em. ’E ’ad secured the only lamp-post, and was leaning agen it.
“’Ullo,’ I says, ‘glad to see you ’aven’t lost your job. Nothin’ like stickin’ to it, when you’ve dropped into somethin’ that really suits you.’
“‘What do you mean, Martha?’ ’e says. ’E’s not one of what I call your smart sort. It takes a bit of sarcasm to get through ’is ’ead.
“‘Well,’ I says, ‘you’re still on the old track, I see, looking for work. Take care you don’t ’ave an accident one of these days and run up agen it before you’ve got time to get out of its way.’
“‘It’s these miserable foreigners,’ ’e says. ‘Look at ’em,’ ’e says.
“‘There’s enough of you doing that,’ I says. ‘I’ve got my room to put straight and three hours needlework to do before I can get to bed. But don’t let me ’inder you. You might forget what work was like, if you didn’t take an opportunity of watching it now and then.’
“‘They come over ’ere,’ ’e says, ‘and take the work away from us chaps.’
“‘Ah,’ I says, ‘poor things, perhaps they ain’t married.’
“‘Lazy devils! ’e says. ‘Look at ’em, smoking cigarettes. I could do that sort of work. There’s nothing in it. It don’t take ’eathen foreigners to dab a bit of tar about a road.’
“‘Yes,’ I says, ‘you always could do anybody else’s work but your own.’
“‘I can’t find it, Martha,’ ’e says.
“‘No,’ I says, ‘and you never will in the sort of places you go looking for it. They don’t ’ang it out on lamp-posts, and they don’t leave it about at the street corners. Go ’ome,’ I says, ‘and turn the mangle for your poor wife. That’s big enough for you to find, even in the dark.’
“Looking for work!” snorted Mrs. Wilkins with contempt; “we women never ’ave much difficulty in finding it, I’ve noticed. There are times when I feel I could do with losing it for a day.”
“But what did he reply, Mrs. Wilkins,” I asked; “your brass-finishing friend, who was holding forth on the subject of Chinese cheap labour.” Mrs. Wilkins as a conversationalist is not easily kept to the point. I was curious to know what the working classes were thinking on the subject.
“Oh, that,” replied Mrs. Wilkins, “’e did not say nothing. ’E ain’t the sort that’s got much to say in an argument. ’E belongs to the crowd that ’angs about at the back, and does the shouting. But there was another of ’em, a young fellow as I feels sorry for, with a wife and three small children, who ’asn’t ’ad much luck for the last six months; and that through no fault of ’is own, I should say, from the look of ’im. ‘I was a fool,’ says ’e, ‘when I chucked a good situation and went out to the war. They told me I was going to fight for equal rights for all white men. I thought they meant that all of us were going to ’ave a better chance, and it seemed worth making a bit of sacrifice for, that did. I should be glad if they would give me a job in their mines that would enable me to feed my wife and children. That’s all I ask them for!’”
“It is a difficult problem, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said. “According to the mine owners – ”
“Ah,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “They don’t seem to be exactly what you’d call popular, them mine owners, do they? Daresay they’re not as bad as they’re painted.”
“Some people, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “paint them very black. There are those who hold that the South African mine-owner is not a man at all, but a kind of pantomime demon. You take Goliath, the whale that swallowed Jonah, a selection from the least respectable citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah at their worst, Bluebeard, Bloody Queen Mary, Guy Fawkes, and the sea-serpent – or, rather, you take the most objectionable attributes of all these various personages, and mix them up together. The result is the South African mine-owner, a monster who would willingly promote a company for the putting on the market of a new meat extract, prepared exclusively from new-born infants, provided the scheme promised a fair and reasonable opportunity of fleecing the widow and orphan.”
“I’ve ’eard they’re a bad lot,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “But we’re most of us that, if we listen to what other people say about us.”
“Quite so, Mrs. Wilkins,” I agreed. “One never arrives at the truth by listening to one side only. On the other hand, for example, there are those who stoutly maintain that the South African mine-owner is a kind of spiritual creature, all heart and sentiment, who, against his own will, has been, so to speak, dumped down upon this earth as the result of over-production up above of the higher class of archangel. The stock of archangels of superior finish exceeds the heavenly demand; the surplus has been dropped down into South Africa and has taken to mine owning. It is not that these celestial visitors of German sounding nomenclature care themselves about the gold. Their only desire is, during this earthly pilgrimage of theirs, to benefit the human race. Nothing can be obtained in this world without money – ”
“That’s true,” said Mrs. Wilkins, with a sigh.
“For gold, everything can be obtained. The aim of the mine-owning archangel is to provide the world with gold. Why should the world trouble to grow things and make things? ‘Let us,’ say these archangels, temporarily dwelling in South Africa, ‘dig up and distribute to the world plenty of gold, then the world can buy whatever it wants, and be happy.’
“There may be a flaw in the argument, Mrs. Wilkins,” I allowed. “I am not presenting it to you as the last word upon the subject. I am merely quoting the view of the South African mine-owner, feeling himself a much misunderstood benefactor of mankind.”
“I expect,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “they are just the ordinary sort of Christian, like the rest of us, anxious to do the best they can for themselves, and not too particular as to doing other people in the process.”
“I am inclined to think, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “that you are not very far from the truth. A friend of mine, a year ago, was very bitter on this subject of Chinese cheap labour. A little later there died a distant relative of his who left him twenty thousand South African mining shares. He thinks now that to object to the Chinese is narrow-minded, illiberal, and against all religious teaching. He has bought an abridged edition of Confucius, and tells me that there is much that is ennobling in Chinese morality. Indeed, I gather from him that the introduction of the Chinese into South Africa will be the saving of that country. The noble Chinese will afford an object lesson to the poor white man, displaying to him the virtues of sobriety, thrift, and humility. I also gather that it will be of inestimable benefit to the noble Chinee himself. The Christian missionary will get hold of him in bulk, so to speak, and imbue him with the higher theology. It appears to be one of those rare cases where everybody is benefited at the expense of nobody. It is always a pity to let these rare opportunities slip by.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “I’ve nothin’ to say agen the Chinaman, as a Chinaman. As to ’is being a ’eathen, well, throwin’ stones at a church, as the sayin’ is, don’t make a Christian of you. There’s Christians I’ve met as couldn’t do themselves much ’arm by changing their religion; and as to cleanliness, well, I’ve never met but one, and ’e was a washerwoman, and I’d rather ’ave sat next to ’im in a third-class carriage on a Bank ’Oliday than next to some of ’em.
“Seems to me,” continued Mrs. Wilkins, “we’ve got into the ’abit of talkin’ a bit too much about other people’s dirt. The London atmosphere ain’t nat’rally a dry-cleanin’ process in itself, but there’s a goodish few as seem to think it is. One comes across Freeborn Britons ’ere and there as I’d be sorry to scrub clean for a shillin’ and find my own soap.”
“It is a universal failing, Mrs. Wilkins,” I explained. “If you talk to a travelled Frenchman, he contrasts to his own satisfaction the Paris ouvrier in his blue blouse with the appearance of the London labourer.”
“I daresay they’re all right according to their lights,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “but it does seem a bit wrong that if our own chaps are willin’ and anxious to work, after all they’ve done, too, in the way of getting the mines for us, they shouldn’t be allowed the job.”
“Again, Mrs. Wilkins, it is difficult to arrive at a just conclusion,” I said. “The mine-owner, according to his enemies, hates the British workman with the natural instinct that evil creatures feel towards the noble and virtuous. He will go to trouble and expense merely to spite the British workman, to keep him out of South Africa. According to his friends, the mine-owner sets his face against the idea of white labour for two reasons. First and foremost, it is not nice work; the mine-owner hates the thought of his beloved white brother toiling in the mines. It is not right that the noble white man should demean himself by such work. Secondly, white labour is too expensive. If for digging gold men had to be paid anything like the same prices they are paid for digging coal, the mines could not be worked. The world would lose the gold that the mine-owner is anxious to bestow upon it.
“The mine-owner, following his own inclinations, would take a little farm, grow potatoes, and live a beautiful life – perhaps write a little poetry. A slave to sense of duty, he is chained to the philanthropic work of gold-mining. If we hamper him and worry him the danger is that he will get angry with us – possibly he will order his fiery chariot and return to where he came from.”
“Well, ’e can’t take the gold with him, wherever ’e goes to?” argued Mrs. Wilkins.
“You talk, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, “as if the gold were of more value to the world than is the mine-owner.”
“Well, isn’t it?” demanded Mrs. Wilkins.
“It’s a new idea, Mrs. Wilkins,” I answered; “it wants thinking out.”
