Being Ahead of Time

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THERE is a time for all things, even the convenience of others. Society is necessarily ordered by rule of thumb, and has little use for persons who cannot be “counted on.” It is bad enough to be tardy in the affairs of love, but our awful example of perfidy would be the wretch who dares break a part of the thousandth part of a minute in meeting a dinner appointment. Being behind time is something like being asleep at the switch; people who have been derailed show little consideration for a tired man.

Present witness supposes that punctuality might be added to the list of horological tyrannies the Club has been hearing about of late, but is himself unable to speak to that point. Indeed, though a faithful, and even assiduous, contributor to the Atlantic, he is constrained to doubt his own clubability. He earnestly desires to be sprightly, whimsical, a little irreverent; but such wishes are not horses for an orthodox New Englander. A person who is thoroughly up on verities and infinities can hardly be good at talking like a little fish. He does n’t know how to be skittish, and with the best intentions he can’t always understand skittishness in others.

He does n’t quite know what to make of these lively fellow contributors who don’t care whether they get up in the morning of what day of what year, and if or when the train goes. For himself he sees nothing to be ashamed of in being on time, and nothing to be proud of in being behind it. He has a pretty clear notion that taking liberties with time is not the way to cotton up to eternity. But he may not always realize what constitutes an unjustifiable familiarity of this kind. It is a puzzling fact that frivolous people do not have a monopoly of error. The unco’ guid have something to answer for when it comes to a question of “being ahead of time.” They boast openly of their taking the old gentleman by the forelock, and in practice they do not stick at making free with his scruff. They are in the habit of being a quarter-hour “early” at the station, or a half-hour at the theatre. They “don’t like to hurry,” and they “enjoy seeing the people come in.” Bosh! everybody knows that people like that are always in a hurry, and have a portable horizon situated not far from the ends of their noses. They are very busy with clocks and time-tables, but they have no confidence in them. If they were as weak as that, they would quite expect to be left behind or to miss something. As it is, they spend their allotted days leaping from imaginary crag to crag along a solid highway which might have been pleasantly covered at a mild canter. They stand on the platform for fifteen minutes before the scheduled time, lest the train arrive one minute before it. They hurl themselves at the foremost platform before the train has stopped. They stand in the aisle for the last two or three miles of their journey. A little later they will be found bustling out of the theatre at the critical moment a scene or two from the end of the play. They have plenty of time to hear it out; but they have paid for that privilege, they have known the joys of possession; now for a break-neck plunge into the subway. You cannot trust such a person even at his devotions. He is first man at church; he rises a neck ahead of anybody else, he galls the parson’s kibe with his responses, he imparts a feverishness to the psalter and a tripping tempo to the litany; he is bound for Glory on the double-quick. There is an element of greed involved in this whole business of being early; even good people do not object to a little more than their money’s worth. I suppose they never really get ahead of Time, unless as that venerable reaper encourages them to dispose themselves conveniently to his sickle.