THE SKETCHER

Otago Witness, Issue 4069, 8 March 1932, Page 66

THE SKETCHER

TRAVELLING SALESMEN. ’Fri>ci». Mobile, Sehenaetady — He fled before reality. For thirty years he kept ahead Of the dark terror that he lied. He merely visited at home. Knowing how many ills can come To those fixed walls; he let his wife Combat them while he lied for life. Whooping cough. taxes, callers' appeals. I’ll miter's i ndifference, ch i I dren’s squeals— These were the things that gave him pain. He lied by auto. rail, or "plane. After throe decades he grew fagged With running; when his footsteps Reality caught up with him In a hotel in Calem grim. Face to the wall, he shook with fear. Knowing reality was near. He died, afraid to look and find She had an honest face and kind. —Althea Bass, in an exchange. GOODWILL TOWARDS—THE “ BEST PEOPLE.” The more people one knows, the more one knows of life. The more one knows of life, the more broadminded one becomes. And the more broad-minded one becomes the happier one is. You will find that the happiest people are the most easy-going; those who are anxious to understand rather than to condemn. But it is impossible to understand without knowledge and experience, and it is equally impossible without knowledge and experience of humanity, without knowing human beings.

Yet how many of us take the trouble to cultivate fresh acquaintances? One in twenty would be a generous estimate. The remainder of us just drift along knowing the same people, talking the same things, doing the same things, sinking deeper and deeper into a rut. It is the easiest thing in the world to sink into a rut. It happens without one noticing it. for nobody has enough spare time. Most of the day is spent in working, and when work is finished we are too tired for anything but the easiest of occupations.

Every girl has a few girl friends; often they are old school friends, or girls who work in the same office. If she makes new friends they are usually young men, and when she meets one particular young man she naturally drops all the others. It is the same with a young man. An engaged couple, or a young married couple, are the most limited company in the world. Two people who love each other are sufficient unto themselves. And when the freshness of each other’s company has worn off there is still no time for making new acquaintances. There is a home to run, no easy job in these days, especially if the family enlarges itself.

Thus they sink into the rut without realising that they should spare no effort to avoid it. For a dearth of acquaintances leads inevitably to narrow-mind-edness. and the price of narrow-minded-ness is loneliness.

Insularity is the curse of our nation. We have very little of the easy comradeship of the average European or the American. We mistrust people before we know them, and dislike them if they are at all different from ourselves. Though we should value our friends for the things they have in common with ourselves, we should choose our acquaintances for their differences.

There would be fewer lonely women in England if only they had learned to cultivate acquaintances. Every town, large or small, is crowded with middleaged and elderly women who have scarcelv any friends.

That curious insularity which they impose upon themselves is the cause of most of their unhappiness. And they are, most of them, miserably unhappy. “ I cannot,” they have said all their lives. “ possibly know such-and-such a person. He or she is not in my set.” As if one couldn’t know almost anybody. One should try to.

If I had not made a habit of encouraging the confidences of the people who talk to me on trains, who cut my hair, who serve me in shops, or wait on me in restaurants, I should be a far less happy person than I am. As a journalist I am forced to meet a number of celebrities—the kind of people everybody wants to know—but I can truthfully say that none of these have afforded me a more stimulating sense of life than that afforded me by a policeman I asked in to have a drink one evening, and who in

return invited me to supper with'his family. ¥ ¥ ¥ “ She is not the kind of woman one knows,’’ an elderly (and lonely) lady, talking of a new neighbour, said to me recent! v. ‘■Why?” I asked. “ She is fast.” came the reply. Doubting this, I sought proof, and discovered that all my friend had against her new neighbour was the fact that she wore black pyjamas in the garden! Subsequently she has come to know—and like —that neighbour. Now, I am not saying that all people are as suspicious as my friend. But her attitude is one which I find all too common. Of the people I know, who are known to you all —by name, at least —Ethel Mannin is an excellent example of the woman who is intelligent enough to cultivate acquaintances whenever the opportunity occurs. Some time ago Miss Mannin. together with several other novelists, was elected to judge a beauty competition. After the prizes had been given, the other celebrities returned, alone, to their distinguished homes. Only Miss Mannin had the notion of asking the winner of the competition — a girl in humble circumstances —to visit her. From that girl’s account of what she intended doing with her prize-money, Ethel Mannin learned more of human nature than she would have done by reading all the novels written by the other judges.

Nobody should ever miss a chance of making new acquaintances. And if he does find himself talking to a burglar? Well, the probability is that he'll learn something about the gentler side of that profession. Edgar Wallace—whose list of acquaintances was probably one of the longest and most interesting in the world—knew celebrities whose records are at Scotland Yard, as well as those out of De Brett. If it takes all sorts to make a world, it's up to us to learn all we can about them. Therefore, make a new acquaintance—-to-day! —A writer in Home Chat. ZEOTROPE. A round brown slitted drum whirled to the hand, Queer figures jigged most curiously in motion. A mere ingenious toy, a German notion, The earliest cinema our childhood scanned. Now garish pleasure-domes throughout the land Exalt the films from west to eastern ocean, Claiming full measure of the crowd’s devotion, Parading scenes from Nome to Samarkand. All active life, even its very sound. The whole wide world, caught in the camera’s eye, Moves on the screen; a marvel, and a bore. Yet once that drum of cardboard twirling round. That strip of printed figures flickering by Wrought Merlin-magic on the nursery floor. —M illiam Rose Benet, in the Bookman. ARE MEN PALS POSSIBLE? Cynthia has been telling us for years that Peter is only a pal. “ There’s nothing in it,” she explains when someone comments on their constant companionship. “We like to be together, and we’re just friends—that’s all.” But when Cynthia returned to the office from a week's sick leave, in that lowspirited state which is the aftermath of ’flu, she wept copious confidential tears on her chum's neck, and told a different story. ”We promised to be just pals, and nothing more,” she sobbed. “ So, of course, he can’t propose, but really I do feel that he loves me, and I love him so much that I don’t know what to do! ” Now, if Peter truly loved her wouldn’t he propose? Undoubtedly he would! No amount of shyness, nor hard-up-ness, nor any other obstacle would keep a young man silent, if he felt he had really found the right woman. ¥ ¥ ¥ Poor Cynthia has reached the stage when she would prefer Peter on any terms, rather than have no Peter at all. She can make any amount of excuses for him in her own mind, though the friendship is becoming an agony of unsatisfied longing to her. She dare not tell Peter, for fear he should remind her of their bargain, and she dreads losing him altogether. In her unhappy state of mind she feels: Love that seemed so light a thing When you and I began,

Is weary as a winter night And heavier than a man. She isn’t alone in this feeling. So many girls agree to be “just friends,” and get the worst of the bargain. To have boy friends in a general sense is, of course, a very good thing, but to devote all one’s time and energies to keeping one male entertained, is a different matter, and is nearly always a mistake.

Cynthia feels that she mustn't tell Peter that she loves him, yet if he fell in love, he is just the type of young man to blame her for not understanding him. And supposing he never does propose, what is to happen to Cynthia? A man who wants to be “ just pals” indefinitely is usually one who is too selfish to want to burden himself with the responsibility of a sweetheart or wife, and there are a good many Peters about. ¥ ¥ ¥ "I thought you were coming away with me this week-end,” says Cynthia’s chum, stifling a little sigh of disappointment when Cynthia cancels their arrangement. “ I really did mean to. old thing.” apologises Cynthia, “ but Peter would hate me not to go to the Cup Final; he seemed so upset when I told him we were going to Sleepy Green.” And when party time comes Cynthia is desperately sorry that she can’t afford a ticket for the tennis club dance. “ But you see, I had to spend more than I meant to do on that new russet coat; Peter hated my blue one, though I did mean to make it do another winter,” she explains regretfully.

One can’t say much to Cynthia, but why should she look her smartest, and be always at the beck and call of a man who may any day “ cry off ” their friendship in favour of someone he really means to marry? My advice to her, and to many other unhappy little “ pals ” the world over, is to break it off before the hurt goes too deep. It sounds a cruel counsel, and there’s no denying it will cause dreadful heartache for a little time, but it’s worth being brave about it for the relief of mind that will surely follow. Besides, who knows, Mr Right may be waiting round the corner after all!—Mary Eversley, in Women’s Weekly.

THE PAGAN. Once, on a burning August day Along the plain of France, I saw beside the poplared way A gipsy maiden dance. She had a hemlock in her hand, Her eyes were wild with wine; And round her shoulders bare and tanned I saw a grass-snake twine. Too often now, eyes closed in prayer Among my Christian kind, I watch that serpent-goddess flare On the- greensward of my mind. —Richard Church, in the London Spectator. THE WIND BLOWETH. What a disrespectcr of persons Mr Wind is! He never pauses to think whose is the hat he is about to snatch for a plaything, setting it swirling away along the gutters, gathering up the filth of the streets, careering along in a heedless course until it ends, if unlucky, beneath a motor car, if lucky in the ample arms of a poliiceman! ' It may belong to a judge, or a university professor that hat; it may be the humble head-covering of the butcher’s boy or the scavenger—what recks Mr Wind of that? All mortals are alike in his estimation. He cares not whether it is the judge whom he keeps from his bench or the butcher’s lad whom he withholds from delivering your humble chop. Here is something, then, surely, to supply food for thought! This nasty, unpleasant fellow, this Mr Wind, the world’s practical joker-in-chief, has been trying out all his latest tricks in these recent days (says a writer in the Weekly Scotsman). On the streets he has staged Innumerable “ turns.” Nor has he proved himself any respecter of home life. He has provided notable examples of his chef d’hoeui'res, his prowess in lifting roofs and setting chimneys crumbling into fragments—can’t you see him laughing up his sleeve over that business? And when lie has stopped short of such dire machinations, he has blustered and howled and gathered strength as for some tremendous feat which, goaded to desperation, you wish might reach achievement, even if it brought the chimney down about your ears, thinking that' if he wreaked his worked-up passion in one mad calamitous blast, you would be suddenly wrapped about with soft, encompassing, of-all-things-desirable peace! Unhappy

you, so thinking! He would only start immediately to recuperate his forces, to begin over again. A strangely persistent fellow is Air Wind!

When he has faded out of hearing, on one or two isolated occasions, during these recent days, we have wondered at the silence, felt strangely uneasy, feared that deafness had suddenly been added to the inventory of our possessions! “ The wind bloweth where it listeth ” —yes, we have had good grounds to realise that truth!

At any rate, Mr Wind has successfully impressed upon us a sense of our impotence. “Mummy, put the wind away!’’ was the request of a small child who believed that a mother’s powers of achievement were unlimited. They proved ineffective that time. And yet I wonder if we don’t really owe him a debt of gratitude, simply because he is so irrational, because he recognises no class distinctions, and likes the message boy’s cloth “ bonnet ” just as much as the silk topper of the eminent barrister! For rationalism, it seems to me, is a really terrifying word. We were told the other day by a lady who is an outstanding authority on Burns that we have “come to the end of the age of simple faith and are beginning an industrial and scientific and rational age.” She wasn’t thinking of Air Wind, but could you find a more blatant, rampageous, ungovernable example of irrationalism? A'et it is that word “ rational ” that frightens me. It has such a dry, acrid sound about it; it suggests a lawyer clinching his teeth and pursing his lips with a legal finality, and saying “ This must be so,” without any regard for all the soft, sweet influences of -life that wander, seeming aimlessly like the wind, all about the world, but which will not be cribbed, cabined, or confined by any code. You meet them like wayside flowers, when least expected, like whiffs of memoried perfume borne by the at-other-times treacherous and unreliable Air Wind. You succumb to their influence, why you do not know, only rationalism has little to do with it.

I can imagine no more devastating sound falling on the ears of its possessors than to hear the “ age of faith is past.” For they cannot fight the assailant with his own “ rational ” weapons. They cannot prove its existence with Euclidean conciseness and finality. No more can we prove what love is—the love of a mother, for instance, that is like a fragrance, transforming, ennobling, and spiritualising. And faith, of course, is not exercised solely in matters religous; it enters into our every-day dealings with one another more than we ever take account of. Take our faith in fellows. We say that it is impossible that he or she should act in a certain way; we know that it is so, but logically, rationally, we cannot reason it out, any more than we can reason about a rose’s perfume. Our faith may be wobbly; it may at times require bolstering up. Faith feels more at home with certain people than with others; it will not bear arguing about. Like Tennyson’s young sister all its possessors will sav may be: — I cannot understand : I love. Only it hurts that others should not share their feelings. ¥ ¥ ¥ Air Wind seems to have wafted me about with that tantalising irrationalism with which he tossed the professors’s hat—or was it the cap of the butcher’s boy ? And not only myself alone, or even my bewildered pen. The sense of disordered chaos which he leaves in his tracks is only too suggestive of the world-disorder of the times. Cau’t you see the scientific and rational people getting to work on it, tidying it up, indexing, tabulating, piling things up on shelves—no overcrowding, no orphaned ideas vainly seeking a home, no thoughts or feelings of emotions running round unattached, untabulated, undiagnosed! A neat, tidy, vacuum-cleaned, centrallyheated world they would make in which we shall live according to rule, even more so than in our school-days. A world in which everything is explained, every action accounted for by algebraic formula, where A must fall in love with B as inevitably as the sparks fly upward, but, never, never, with C who is, scientifically, rationally, eugenically—whatever you will!—the undisputed property of D. A world with a place for everything, and everything in its place! But how dull, how desperately, uninterestingly, devastatingly dull! The mere sound of that thin, drab-coloured, musicless word “ rational ” alarms and disturbs me more and more! But if not that—what then? I don’t know. Does anybody know? We try this, we try that. We make many blunders. Yet some of our experiments may succeed. “ Without faith we can do nothing ” —far from any thought of sermonising the words come stealing back to me. And so the world revolves, and we along with it, towards that One far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves. MERCIFUL MEDUSA. Sleep is a merciful Aledusa, bending, Under her sluggish and outrageous hair, A steady gaze of bronze, superbly blending All creatures in her one impersonal stare. Bird, beast, and man, worn out with lovely moving,

Seek her at night, forlornly and alone, Cry to her to be pitilessly- loving, Look on her face and turn to grateful stone. —Winifred Welles, in the New Republic.

THE CHILD’S POCKET MONEY.

The problem of the child's allowance of money i s one which affects all parents, rich and poor alike, and it is an important problem, because the child’s early attitude towards money may influence him throughout the whole of his life.

It is often difficult to decide at what age a child should be given a fixed allowance. The tim e to give a child an allowance is when he is old enough to spend it —that is to say, when he is competent to go into a shop, ask for what he wants, and cither pay the exact money for it or have a reasonable idea of what change he should receive. This stage of development is normally reached at the age of* five, but some children reach it as young as three, while others mjiy be seven before they begin to get the money sense.

Whatever the circumstances of the parents, the allowance should be just enough to allow the child reasonable purchasing power with a margin for saving. Naturally, nearly all the first purchases will be made at the sweetshop, but as a daily pennyworth of sweets will not hurt the average child, sixpence a week is a good figure for the first allowance. To save out of this sum the child will have to sacrifice sweets on at least one day a week, not counting Sunday.

It is often extremely hard to implant the idea of saving in a child’s mind. The parents are often tempted to avoid trouble by ordering that so much a week shall be saved. This defeats its own purpose; it does not make the child appreciate the benefits of saving—it merely makes him regard it as an inconvenient and irksome idea connected with parents.

Close attention to the child's desires at this period will often enable the parents to point a timely moral. Often the purchase of a small cash-box, complete with key, will stimulate the will to save.

Frequently the child’s sudden appreciation of the idea is far too wholehearted. He may rigorously abstain from buying sweets, hoarding the weekly sixpences like a miser and counting them over with childish pride in self-denial. The eradication of the miser instinct needs considerable tact. The child must obtain some value for money, and having denied himself the pleasure of spending, the natural and human reaction is to gloat over the savings. Usually the miser phase passes as quickly as it comes. The child can then be taught that one penny a week is quite a good rate of saving.

Payment for work done should, as a rule, be additional to the weekly allowance. If the child feels that his weekly sixpence has conditions attached to it the tasks he is given to perform are likely to become irksome. The opportunity to increase the weekly money by performing specified tasks is valuable for building character, and it will encourage the child to do his work well and carefully. Payment for good behaviour is a thoroughly bad principle, which will heap up trouble for unsuspecting parents who adopt it. One of the earliest lessons a child should learn is that good behaviour is a social necessity which has no cash value.—An exchange. THE LAST SONNET. The earthly limitations that are mine Have taught me that I cannot reach one star, For which long years ago I did repine, And worshipped there in ecstasy afar. Sometimes at eventide and morning, too, In the soft twilight and at dawning day When hopes were young and every dream seemed new I thought that always life would be that way. But now I know the fragrant rose must die, That from a heart a tender love will fade, While often in an unexpected way The things at which I laughed leave me afraid. But tho’ despair adds discord to my song The vision of far better things inspires me on. —Charles Bancroft, in the Evening Bulletin.

“Do you believe in love at first sight, Miss Elsa? ”

“ Yes, I do—it is so practical and saves so much time.” • —-lilt for Alla, Stockholm.