The Plain Man and His Wife | Page 7

It was the wrong phrase to use. And any phrase
would have been the wrong phrase. She ought to have caressed him, for
to a caress there is no answer.)
"You know perfectly well that nothing can be done!" he snaps her up,
like a tiger snapping at the fawn. And his eyes, challenging hers, seem
to say: "Can I neglect my business? Can I shirk my responsibilities?
Where would you be if I shirked them? Where would the children be?
What about old age, sickness, death, quarter-day, rates, taxes, and your
new hat? I have to provide for the rainy day and for the future. I am
succeeding, moderately; but let there be no mistake--success means that
I must sacrifice present pleasure. Pleasure is all very well for you others,
but I--" And then he will finish aloud, with the air of an offended and
sarcastic martyr: "Something be done, indeed!"
She sighs. The domestic scene is over.
Now, he may be honestly convinced that nothing can be done. Let us
grant as much. But obviously it suits his pride to assume that nothing
can be done. To admit the contrary would be to admit that he was
leaving something undone, that he had organized his existence clumsily,
even that he had made a fundamental miscalculation in the arrangement
of his career. He has confessed to grave dissatisfaction. It behoves him,
for the sake of his own dignity and reputation, to be quite sure that the
grave dissatisfaction is unavoidable, inevitable, and that the blame for it
rests with the scheme of the universe, and not with his particular
private scheme. His rôle is that of the brave, strong, patient victim of an
alleged natural law, by reason of which the present must ever be
sacrificed to the future, and he discovers a peculiar miserable delight in
the rôle. "Miserable" is the right adjective.

II
Nevertheless, in his quality of a wise plain man, he would never agree
that any problem of human conduct, however hard and apparently
hopeless, could not be solved by dint of sagacity and
ingenuity--provided it was the problem of another person! He is quite
fearfully good at solving the problems of his friends. Indeed, his friends,
recognizing this, constantly go to him for advice. If a friend consulted
him and said:
"Look here, I'm engaged in an enterprise which will absorb all my
energies for three years. It will enable me in the meantime to live and to
keep my family, but I shall have scarcely a moment's freedom of mind.
I may have a little leisure, but of what use is leisure without freedom of
mind? As for pleasure, I shall simply forget what it is. My life will be
one long struggle. The ultimate profit is extremely uncertain. It may be
fairly good; on the other hand, it may be nothing at all."
The plain man, being also blunt, would assuredly interrupt:
"My dear fellow, what a fool you've been!"
Yet this case is in essence the case of the wise plain man. The chief
difference between the two cases is that the wise plain man has
enslaved himself for about thirty years instead of three, with naught but
a sheer gambling chance of final reward! Not being one of the rare
individuals with whom business is a passion, but just an average plain
man, he is labouring daily against the grain, stultifying daily one part of
his nature, on the supposition that later he will be recompensed. In
other words, he is preparing to live, so that at a distant date he may be
in a condition to live. He has not effected a compromise between the
present and the future. His own complaint--"What pleasure do I get out
of life?"--proves that he is completely sacrificing the present to the
future. And how elusive is the future! Like the horizon, it always
recedes. If, when he was thirty, some one had foretold that at forty-five,
with a sympathetic wife and family and an increasing income, he would
be as far off happiness as ever, he would have smiled at the prophecy.

The consulting friend, somewhat nettled by the plain man's bluntness,
might retort:
"I may or may not have been a fool. That's not the point. The point is
that I am definitely in the enterprise, and can't get out of it. And there's
nothing to be done."
Whereupon the plain man, in an encouraging, enheartening, reasonable
tone, would respond:
"Don't say that, my dear chap. Of course, if you're in it, you're in it. But
give me all the details. Let's examine the thing. And allow me to tell
you that no case that looks bad is as bad as it looks."
It is precisely in this spirit that the plain man