AVERAGE MAN A MYTH

Hawera Star, Volume L, 7 February 1931, Page 9

AVERAGE MAN A MYTH

H E was an ordinary and respectable draper in a small Midland town, and he had parted fro,m his wife. She sued him for support. Just before the ease came on he met with a motoring accident, in which the first joints of the fingers of one hand were taken oil. On receipt of the summons he packed the severed joint in a box and posted them to his wife with this message:— “Here’s a bit of your pound of flesh.” I haven’t invented that, writes Thomas Burke, in the “Sunday News,”

It was reported in the Press late last year, and the man was not a coarse and violent brute. He was a nice, wellbehaved, reasonable Englishman who had a sudden moment of bad temper, and indulged it in this rather horrid fashion.

He was not unique. Nice, well-be-haved and reasonable people are continually doing little wayward things of this sort.

Moving as I do in all sorts of worlds, and making acquaintances among all •classes, and conditions, I have met people of such extravagant colour of character that if I presented any of them in a novel the critics would tell me to concentrate on life, not on pantomime, and to take my characters from the everyday world, not the lunatic asylum. But, alas! these limited creatures, whoso view of life is clouded by the covers of a book, do not know that me everyday world is far too. purple for the pale pages of fiction. I know a serious and intelligent doctor, with a large practice in one of the more expensive suburbs. Nobody could be more grave and conventional in appearance than this doctor. Yet, whenever his wife’s relations visit the house, he goes to the drawing-room, stands before the fireplace, takes from his pocket a foolscap document, which he bought specially for these occasions, and reads it aloud to them.

It is a copy of the Riot Act, which, as you probably know, calls upon unlawful assemblies to disperse under pain of physical force. You couldn’tput that into a serious novel. Another case from my family circle occurs to me. A serious old lady of GB, a keen student of economics, and the author of some pamphlets on the subject, was found lying beside ner bed with a fractured rib. In her hands she held a moutlyorgan, When asked how the accident happened, she explained that she suffereu from sleeplessness, and that she found that it soothed her, in the wakeful hours of the night, to play soft tunes on a mouth-organ.

We Are All Eccentric in Our Lives

She had got out of bed to get her mouth-organ wnon she slipped. I have met many well-knowu people who arc popularly said to be eccentric, but their eccentricities have never surprised me. They are conventional eccentricities, and one suspects that they are deliberately assumed. But the eccentricities of the ordinary man are Hot assumed; they are native to him, and, because he is accepted as ordinary, his eccentricities are all the more surprising. Gerard do Nerval, walking through the streets of Paris.’ leading a lobster on' a string, aoes not surprise', because the business is deliberately and publicly done with the intention of surprising. But I was surprised when I heard tlie story of a staid, conventional man well known on the .Stock Exchange. Ho was found one evening by a friend, who liad called in for a chat, sitting in a chair with one arm handcuffed to the chair. Calmly, as though talking of the weather, he explained that his w T ife had objected to his going out after dinner because it meant that' he did not return till after midnight. She liad therefore adopted this means of keeping him at home; and this head of a business employing seventy clerks, and known as a powerful and ruthless man in his world, had tamely submitted to this ridiculous captiivty. We are average men only in moments and for purposes of general citizenship. When we are really ourselves wa are fantastically eccentric. When we say that another person is eccentric, wc arc only saying that he is doing something tliat appears to us to be silly. But everything that I do. or that you do, appears to be silly to some people. Some may think it very silly that a serious and elderly woman should play a mouth-organ in bed. But, to me, that is no sillier than collecting foreign postage stamps, or snuff-boxes, or first editions, or sitting for hours watching men play with bats and balls, or paying out money to prove how sincerely you believe that one horse can run' faster than other horses.

We all like to think that we are normal, but none of us Is, and if ever we did find a really normal man we should all agree that he was a lunatic who ought to be put under control.

We are all eccentric; those of us, that is, who do what we want to do, without considering whether, in our set, it is “done.” In other words, all of us who are really alive.