PAY DAY

Evening Star, Issue 22086, 20 July 1935, Page 2

PAY DAY

[Written by Panache, for the ‘ Evening Star.’]

Travellers in the Sahara stare from sand-blighted eyes over arid wastes of interminable desert Columbus’s toilweary mariners gazed despondently out over leagues of hopeless ocean. The Arab has faith in air oasis; it was Columbus’s firm belief that he would reach land. So in the arid wastes .of the longest month, long enough to gratify an emperor’s vanity, the traveller on short rations has the illusion of an oasis at the end, complete with sparkling streams of silver, and rest from financial -worries under the palm trees of plenty. So from the trough of mid-July, the honest worker, far from the shore, with deep seas and treacherous shoals yet to navigate, strains towards the haven of pay day.

There are some who are not called on ,to> navigate great landless oceansfor 31, days. Safer and less adventurous they sail' on weekly cruises over tidy landlocked seas, with a snug little harbour waiting : for them every Friday. Yet even landlocked seas can be choppy, and there is much sympathy for those' who go to and fro on coastal voyages. Such a pull have these people on the public heartstrings that if, on your way home from your club any night, you drop an envelope containing a pound note, the only certain way' of recovering it is to advertise over an anonymous number —“ Lost, Week’s Wages, by working girl.” You may make as much as three pounds out of this; but you must not paint the lily, and by adding “ keepsake,” arouse suspicion.

Those who struggle from Friday to Friday, or from one month’s end to the next, however varied and strenuous their adventures, appear safe and bourgeois to those who live in a more buccaneering spirit, and who seem pirates compared with regular merchantmen. ■ Remittance men are like reformed pirates, and receive regular cheques for keeping clear of certain well-charted seas. Among the buccaneers may be classed those professional men who live gilded lives among motor cars and uniformed nurses, or who shelter behind phalanxes of clerks and barrages of glass doors inscribed with their names. They turn well-groomed fronts to meet disaster, but they never know for certain when their pay days are coming. The end of the month is nothing to them.

Whatever the onerous duties of kingship to-day, evolving new devices for filling the Treasury is not one of them, and his spendthrift ancestors must look quizzically upon a monarch who need not tease his brain over puzzles of blank charters and monopolies. We are not told whether King George does frantic sums in the middle of the month, wondering if the Civil List will stretch, out to the end. We do not see the stubbs of his cheque book, and we do not know whether his inheritance of “ noblesse oblige ” prevents him from embarrassing the Old Lady of Threadneedle street by mentioning an overdraft. The dress allowances of princesses have not been bountiful, but when girls inherit coffers of pearls, ostrich feathers, and ermine they can probably make a foundation out of very little.

If Royalty is ever short of ready money it must be depressing for princes to stroll among countless treasures of gold and greenstone, reflecting how little is pawnable, since most is inscribed. The wage-earner can always have recourse to uncle. The salaried, in desperate straits, can .visit the second-hand dealer, especially on dark winter evenings, when, disguised as connoisseurs of antiques, they may sell old novels or old clothes. Their experiences will make them wish they had a little shop in the family, though there are drawbacks to keeping a little store, especially one of those in which the bell above the door 'tolls for indigestion throughout meal times. Still in the very humblest shop there is always ready money in the till, and it must be comforting to hear the rattle of fat half-crowns and the timid chink of church money in the mid-month doldrums.

Life slips past while the harassed look beyond it to the end of the month. When pay day comes there is but meagre ceremony, apart from individual celebrations in hotels and milk bars. The night before a leaf is torn from the calendar to curl and blacken in the fire. The thrifty contribute their monthly remark that they cannot understand the excitement as their last pay envelope is still unopened or their last cheque paid in full into the bank. If the day is a flag day, people pride themselves on hearing their pennies dropping. The Government, so officious in parcelling out the earnings of the people into multitudinous taxes, does not try to make pay day a day of blessed memory. A dictator with imagination could decree that every citizen should spend a shilling in the pound on violets. Thousands of homes would be sweet and glowing, arid no real Government would be perturbed at accusations of wet-nursing florists. Laws more unreasonable and less beautiful have been submitted to calmly, but pay day remains an ordinary day.

Through deep seas of debt, through treacherous shoals of borrowing, the worker has steered his course. Through the dark unfathomable twenties he has floundered, through the shallows of the thirties until he has reached the end of the month, the haven of security and ready money. But on the shore are bands of smooth-tongued creditors with phrases about little matters that have been overlooked, about obliging at one’s early convenience. Beneath the palm trees are suave-fingered men ready*to dip into the silver stream. The oasis is but a caravanserai, and the traveller who has staggered to the end of July has to set out immediately on another journey, through the waste of August, another month made long to gratify the vanity of an emperor.