The Plain Man and His Wife | Page 5

the plain man. So the
reputation of Timbuctoo as a pleasure resort remains entirely
unimpaired, and the pilgrimages continue with unabated earnestness.
And there is another and a paramount reason why the pilgrimages
should continue. The two men in the parable both said that they just
had to start--and they were right. We have to start, and, once started, we
have to keep going. We must go somewhere. And at the moment of

starting we have neither the sagacity nor the leisure to invent fresh
places to start for, or to cut new paths. Everybody is going to
Timbuctoo; the roads are well marked. And the plain man, with his
honour of being peculiar, sets out for Timbuctoo also, following the
signposts. The fear of not arriving keeps him on the trot, the fear of the
unknown keeps him in the middle of the road and out of the forest on
either side of it, and hope keeps up his courage.
Will any member of the Society for the Suppression of Moral
Indignation step forward and heatedly charge the plain man with
culpable foolishness, ignorance, or gullibility; or even with cowardice
in neglecting to find a convincing answer to the fundamental question
about the other end of his life?

IV
There is, however, a third form of the fundamental question which is
less unanswerable than the two forms already mentioned. The plain
man may be excused for his remarkable indifference as to what his
labour and his tedium will gain for him "later on," when "later on"
means beyond the grave or thirty years hence. But we live also in the
present, and if proper existence is a compromise between the claims of
the present and the claims of the future the present must be considered,
and the plain man ought surely to ask himself the fundamental question
in such a form as the following: "I am now--this morning--engaged in
something rather tiresome. What do I stand to gain by it this evening,
to-morrow, this week--next week?" In this form the fundamental
question, once put, can be immediately answered by experience and by
experiment.
But does the plain man put it? I mean--does he put it seriously and
effectively? I think that very often, if not as a general rule, he does not.
He may--in fact he does--gloomily and savagely mutter: "What
pleasure do I get out of life?" But he fails to insist on a clear answer
from himself, and even if he obtains a clear answer--even if he makes
the candid admission, "No pleasure," or "Not enough pleasure"--even

then he usually does not insist on modifying his life in accordance with
the answer. He goes on ignoring all the interesting towns and oases on
the way to his Timbuctoo. Excessively uncertain about future joy, and
too breathlessly preoccupied to think about joy in the present, he just
drives obstinately ahead, rather like a person in a trance. Singular
conduct for a plain man priding himself on common sense!
For the case of the plain man, conscientious and able, can only too
frequently be summed up thus: Faced with the problem of existence,
which is the problem of combining the largest possible amount of
present satisfaction with the largest possible amount of security in the
future, he has educated himself generally, and he has educated himself
specially for a particular profession or trade; he has adopted the
profession or trade, with all its risks and responsibilities--risks and
responsibilities which often involve the felicity of others; he has bound
himself to it for life, almost irrevocably; he labours for it so many hours
a day, and it occupies his thoughts for so many hours more. Further, in
the quest of satisfaction, he has taken a woman to wife and has had
children. And here it is well to note frankly that his prime object in
marrying was not the woman's happiness, but his own, and that the
children came, not in order that they might be jolly little creatures, but
as extensions of the father's individuality. The home, the environment
gradually constructed for these secondary beings, constitutes another
complex organization, which he superimposes on the complex
organization of his profession or trade, and his brain has to carry and
vitalize the two of them. All his energies are absorbed, and they are
absorbed so utterly that once a year he is obliged to take a holiday lest
he should break down, and even the organization of the holiday is
complex and exhausting.
Now assuming--a tremendous assumption!--that by all this he really is
providing security for the future, what conscious direct, personal
satisfaction in the present does the onerous programme actually yield? I
admit that it yields the primitive satisfaction of keeping body and soul
together. But a Hottentot in a kraal