Читать книгу A Sheaf - John Galsworthy - Страница 7

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Before I could comment on my friend’s narrative we were spattered with mud by passing riders, and stopped to repair the damage to our coats.

“Jolly for my new coat!” I said. “Do you notice, by the way, that they are cutting men’s tails longer this spring? More becoming to a fellow, I think.”

He raised those quizzical eyebrows of his and murmured:

“And horses’ tails shorter. Did you see those that passed just now?”

“No.”

“There were none!”

“Nonsense!” I said. “My dear fellow, you really are obsessed about beasts! They were just ordinary.”

“Quite—a few scrubby hairs, and a wriggle.”

“Now, please,” I said, “don’t begin to talk of the cruelty of docking horses’ tails, and tell me a story of an old horse in a pond.”

“No,” he answered, “for I should have to invent that. What I was going to say was this: Which do you think the greater fools in the matter of fashion—men or women?”

“Oh! Women.”

“Why?”

“There’s always some sense at the bottom of men’s fashions.”

“Even of docking tails?”

“You can’t compare it, anyway,” I said, “with such a fashion as the wearing of ‘aigrettes.’ That’s a cruel fashion if you like.”

“Ah! But you see,” he said, “the women who wear them are ignorant of its cruelty. If they were not, they would never wear them. No gentlewoman wears them, now that the facts have come out.”

“What is that you say?” I remarked.

He looked at me gravely.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, “that any woman of gentle instincts, who knows that the ‘aigrette,’ as they call it, is a nuptial plume sported by the white egret only during the nesting season—and that, in order to obtain it, the mother-birds are shot, and that, after their death, practically all their young die from hunger and exposure—do you mean to tell me that any gentlewoman, knowing that, wears them? Why! most women are mothers themselves! What would they think of gods who shot women with babies in arms for the sake of obtaining their white skins or their crop of hair to wear on their heads, eh?”

“But, my dear fellow,” I said, “you see these plumes about all over the place!”

“Only on people who don’t mind wearing imitation stuff.”

I gaped at him.

“You need not look at me like that,” he said. “A woman goes into a shop. She knows that real ‘aigrettes’ mean killing mother-birds and starving all their nestlings. Therefore, if she’s a real gentlewoman she doesn’t ask for a real ‘aigrette.’ But still less does she ask to be supplied with an imitation article so good that people will take her for the wearer of the real thing. I put it to you, would she want to be known as an encourager of such a practice? You can never have seen a lady wearing an ‘aigrette.’ ”

“What!” I said. “What?”

“So much for the woman who knows about ‘aigrettes,’ ” he went on. “Now for the woman who doesn’t. Either, when she is told these facts about, ‘aigrettes’ she sets them down as ‘hysterical stuff,’ or she is simply too ‘out of it’ to know anything. Well, she goes in and asks for an ‘aigrette.’ Do you think they sell her the real thing—I mean, of course, in England—knowing that it involves the shooting of mother-birds at breeding time? I put it to you: Would they?”

His inability to grasp the real issues astonished me, and I said:

“You and I happen to have read the evidence about ‘aigrettes’ and the opinion of the House of Lords’ Committee that the feathers of egrets imported into Great Britain are obtained by killing the birds during the breeding season; but you don’t suppose, do you, that people whose commercial interests are bound up with the selling of ‘aigrettes’ are going to read it, or believe it if they do read it?”

“That,” he answered, “is cynical, if you like. I feel sure that, in England, people do not sell suspected articles about which there has been so much talk and inquiry as there has been about ‘aigrettes’ without examining in good faith into the facts of their origin. No, believe me, none of the ‘aigrettes’ sold in England can have grown on birds.”

“This is fantastic,” I said. “Why! if what you’re saying is true, then—then real ‘aigrettes’ are all artificial; but that—that would be cheating!”

“Oh, no!” he said. “You see, ‘aigrettes’ are in fashion. The word ‘real’ has therefore become parliamentary. People don’t want to be cruel, but they must have ‘real aigrettes.’ So, all these ‘aigrettes’ are ‘real,’ unless the customer has a qualm, and then they are ‘real imitation aigrettes.’ We are a highly-civilized people!”

“That is very clever,” I said, “but how about the statistics of real egret plumes imported into this country?”

He answered like a flash: “Oh, those, of course, are only brought here to be exported again at once to countries where they do not mind confessing to cruelty; yes, all exported, except—well, those that aren’t!”

“Oh!” I said: “I see! You have been speaking ironically all this time.”

“Have you grasped that?” he answered. “Capital!”

After that we walked in silence.

“The fact is,” I said, presently, “ordinary people, shopmen and customers alike, never bother their heads about such things at all.”

“Yes,” he replied sadly, “they take the line of least resistance. It is just that which gives Fashion its chance to make such fools of them.”

“You have yet to prove that it does make fools of them.”

“I thought I had; but no matter. Take horses’ tails—what’s left of them—do you defend that fashion?”

“Well,” I said, “I——”

“Would you if you were a horse?”

“If you mean that I am a donkey——?”

“Oh, no! Not at all!”

“It’s going too far,” I said, “to call docking cruel.”

“Personally,” he answered, “I don’t think it is going too far. It’s painful in itself, and Heaven alone knows what irritation horses have to suffer from flies through being tailless. I admit that it saves a little brushing, and that some people are under the delusion that it averts carriage accidents. But put cruelty and utility aside, and look at it from the point of view of fashion. Can anybody say it doesn’t spoil a horse’s looks?”

“You know perfectly well,” I said, “that many people think it smartens him up tremendously. They regard a certain kind of horse as nothing with a tail; just as some men are nothing with beards.”

“The parallel with man does not hold, my friend. We are not shaved—with or against our wills—by demi-gods!”

“Exactly! And isn’t that in itself an admission that we are superior to beasts, and have a right to some say in their appearance?”

“I will not,” he answered, “for one moment allow that men are superior to horses in point of looks. Take yourself, or any other personable man, and stand him up against a thoroughbred and ask your friends to come and look. How much of their admiration do you think you will get?”

It was not the sort of question I could answer.

“I am not speaking at random,” he went on; “I have seen the average lord walking beside the average winner of the Derby.” He cackled disagreeably.

“But it’s just on this point of looks that people defend docking,” I said. “They breed the horses, and have a right to their own taste. Many people dislike long swishy appendages.”

“And bull-terriers, or Yorkshires, or Great Danes, with natural ears; and fox-terriers and spaniels with uncut tails; and women with merely the middles so small as Nature gave them?”

“If you’re simply going to joke——”

“I never was more serious. The whole thing is of a piece, and summed up in the word ‘smart,’ which you used just now. That word, sir, is the guardian angel of all fashions, and if you don’t mind my saying so, fashions are the guardian angels of vulgarity. Now, a horse is not a vulgar animal, and I can never get away from the thought that to dock his tail must hurt his feelings of refinement.”

“Well, if that’s all, I dare say he’ll get over it.”

“But will the man who does it?”

“You must come with me to the Horse Show,” I said, “and look at the men who have to do with horses; then you’ll know if such a thing as docking the tails of these creatures can do them harm or not. And, by the way, you talk of refinement and vulgarity. What is your test? Where is the standard? It’s all a matter of taste.”

“You want me to define these things?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Very well! Do you believe in what we call the instincts of a gentleman?”

“Of course.”

“Such as—the instinct to be self-controlled; not to be rude or intolerant; not to ‘slop-over’; not to fuss, nor to cry out; to hold your head up, so that people refrain from taking liberties; to be ready to do things for others, to be chary of asking others to do things for you, and grateful when they do them?”

“Yes,” I said, “all these I believe in.”

“What central truth do you imagine that these instincts come from?”

“Well, they’re all such a matter of course—I don’t think I ever considered.”

“If by any chance,” he replied, “you ever do, you will find they come from an innate worship of balance, of the just mean; an inborn reverence for due proportion, a natural sense of harmony and rhythm, and a consequent mistrust of extravagance. What is a bounder? Just a man without sufficient sense of proportion to know that he is not so important in the scheme of things as he thinks he is!”

“You are right there!”

“Very well. Refinement is a quality of the individual who has—and conforms to—a true (not a conventional) sense of proportion; and vulgarity is either the natural conduct of people without that sense of proportion, or of people who imitate and reproduce the tricks of refinement wholesale, without any real feeling for proportion; or again, it is mere conscious departure from the sense of proportion for the sake of cutting a dash.”

“Ah!” I said; “and to which of these kinds of vulgarity is the fashion of docking horses’ tails a guardian angel?”

“Imagine,” he answered gravely, “that you dock your horse’s tail. You are either horribly deficient in feeling for a perfectly proportioned horse, or you imitate what you believe—goodness knows why—to be the refined custom of docking horses’ tails, without considering the question of proportion at all.”

“Yes,” I said; “but what makes so many people do it, if there isn’t something in it, either useful or ornamental?”

“Because people as a rule do not love proportion; they love the grotesque. You have only to look at their faces, which are very good indications of their souls.”

“You have begged the question,” I said. “Who are you to say that the perfect horse is not the horse——?”

“With the imperfect tail?”

“Imperfect? Again, you’re begging.”

“As Nature made it, then. Oh!” he went on with vehemence, “think of the luxury of having your own tail. Think of the cool swish of it. Think of the real beauty of it! Think of the sheer hideousness of all that great front balanced behind by a few scrub hairs and a wriggle! It became ‘smart’ to dock horses’ tails; and smart to wear ‘aigrettes.’ ‘Smart’—‘neat’—‘efficient’—for all except the horse and the poor egrets.”

“Your argument,” I said, “is practically nothing but æsthetics.”

He fixed his eyes upon my hat.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I admit that neither on horse nor on man would long tails go at all well with that bowler hat of yours. Odd how all of a piece taste is! From a man’s hat, or a horse’s tail, we can reconstruct the age we live in, like that scientist, you remember, who reconstructed a mastodon from its funny-bone.”

The thought went sharply through my head: Is his next tirade to be on mastodons? Till I remembered with relief that the animal was extinct, at all events in England.