Groups
A SPRY old lady in a New England hill-town had been invited to visit cousins who lived some twenty miles away. On the day appointed she rose at two o’clock in the morning, and set out on foot along the starlit roads, arriving at her destination in good time for breakfast. Later in the day, someone asked her how she happened to choose that early hour for her long walk.
‘Because,’ said she crisply, ‘I did n’t want to be reined up and asked where I was going.’
When we cast in our lot with groups, we run large risks of being occasionally reined up. A family, a department, an orchestra, a neighborhood, a political party, a committee, a college faculty, or a club will sometimes rein up its members and ask them where they are going. Membership in any one of these assemblies is an education in itself; but the fact remains that two o’clock in the morning on an empty road is the time for sequestered enterprise.
In spite of this, the magnetic human race needs slight provocation to arrange itself in groups. Take three old rowboats, and beach them high on the shore not far from the seaside post-office, and they will form the perfect gathering-place for a group that will camp there among the sandpipers when it is time for the mail. Waiting for the mail to be put out is a social vacation act. Each cottage sends down its most serviceable or public-spirited or mercurial souls. A convention of family errand-runners is always a distinguished lot. You may know them by the memoranda in their hands. The weathered dories dry-docked on the sunset beach are all the forum that they need for wise and confidential speech. The punctual trusties who perch and talk there are fully provided with the three social elements that have held together all the famous clubs and coteries of the world: are as on for coming, a point of view, and a place to sit.
Groups have their chosen geography in all lands, certain recognized places accepted as the natural meeting-ground of talking folk — in Italy a fountain, in India a stream, in old England a tavern-yard, in the desert a palm tree, in Syria a well, in society a tea. The friendly group talks most freely in its accustomed scene, whether the traditional setting chances to be a fireside, a dinner-table, a crossroads, an oasis, a salon, or the sunny side of a barn.
The man who, as a stranger, enters one of these groups for the first time without a particle of personal misgiving or secret fear, has in him some of the traits of a great, actor, or of a great scout. Edwin Booth and ForbesRobertson, we know, could enter any stage, in any costume, at any point, and grace the scene, though given no hint beforehand whether the play going on was the School for Scandal, the Romancers, Rip Van Winkle, or the Book of Job. And as to scouts, we know that Daniel Boone and Colonel Roosevelt would be equally intrepid at a pow-wow, or in the Valley of the Kings, or in a Kraal. It would be something to be able to search the inmost souls of great actors and great pioneers, and inquire if there is any social situation that has power to freeze their blood.
Full of curiosity on this point, I asked that question of an actor who was also a suave and worldly gentleman in society, a regular Beau Brummel at a reception, and at dinner a very Chauncey Depew. He said yes, there was one group that he feared with a fear that he could never get over: a party of ladies grouped upon a porch, raised somewhat above him as he came up the drive on an errand to the house. He did not fear them, he said, if the verandah was on the level of the ground. But to be obliged to mount a flight of steps toward them, with all their eyes upon him and greetings to be performed, was the thing in life that he could not consider with any trace of calm.
It is upon this unreasoning sort of fear that the advertisements have been playing of late. One hardly picks up a paper without seeing a personal question confronting one with alarming memories. ‘ Do you know the comfort,’ reads one circular that lies at hand, ‘of being always at ease, of being sure of yourself, calm, dignified, self-possessed ? Do you wonder what people are thinking of you ? Do you ever wish that you had n’t done a certain thing, or said a certain thing? Protect yourself against all the little embarrassments that waylay the person who does not know, who is not sure, who never thinks of the right word to say.’ These remarks usually lead up to an offer of books to read for fifteen minutes a day, or of compendia on good form, or of courses in ‘Personality.’ The great vogue of such works is explained entirely by the fact that each mortal who has felt what Emily Dickinson calls ‘zero at the bone’ when entering strange groups believes that he is in some degree uncivilized, unbalanced, and alone.
The one episode which completely dramatizes for me this state of social desperation, happened to my brother Geoffrey in his student days. He had nearly missed the morning boat that plied between our summer colony and Boston, but, making a record run for it, he had dodged past the guards on the gang-plank just in time. Spying some friends of ours on board, he deployed hastily around them and vanished up the stairs to catch his breath in peace. But as he rushed headlong up to safety and out through the narrow hatchway to the hurricane deck, he was fairly caught by a gay group of girls already there — girls just enough older than he to be out of his set, but well enough acquainted to claim him as their squire.
Geoffrey, panting, but ever willing to oblige, bestirred himself nobly fetching chairs. He had seated all the girls but one, and for her he was bringing one of those old-time collapsible cane-seated steamer-chairs, elaborately subdivided and hinged at every joint. Just as Geoffrey with his ungainly burden reached the group, the foot-rest section of the chair unfolded itself with great suddenness, caught the hat of one of the girls on its waving feet, and plucked it neatly from her head. Horrified, Geoffrey staggered backward, the chair meanwhile unfolding another joint — and stepped squarely on the foot of another girl.
‘Oh!’ ejaculated Geoffrey, still clasping his chaise-longue tightly to his breast, ‘excuse me very much.’
Geoffrey told this grim story of himself that evening to convince us, his sisters, that it was of no use for him to try to be pleasing in a group. ‘Any fellow,’ said he conclusively, ‘who knocks off the hat of one girl and steps on another, and then says Excuse me very much, is n’t fit to enter society, much less move in it.’
Embarrassed in a group, one feels unique. Never was another soul equally ill at ease. And so the advertising circulars play upon this, our lonely sense of the inept.
The preliminary shiver before strange groups, however, if one has it at all, is entirely independent of training, aristocracy, age, experience, native talent, or Christian nurture. It is far more primitive and central than all of these.
Most people have it under control a good part of the time, but now and then it reverts and overwhelms us. At such times, the motto on our banner should be, ‘Excuse me very much.’
A somewhat flustered gentleman was once taking an intelligence test, the first question of which called for the definition of the word jeopardy. ‘Jeopardy,’ he wrote, ‘is the act of behaving like a jeopard.’ At the time, this answer made quite a little stir. The local newspapers ran a contest to see who could draw the best picture of a jeopard, and jeopards came in with horns and spots and stripes and cloven hoofs. But to me, this happy word is the one accurate term to describe the person who finds himself uneasy in a group. He feels exactly like a jeopard, a jeopard in a parlor, in a china-shop — a jeopard who, like Kipling’s cat, would much prefer to walk in the Wild Wood by his wild lone.
Some time ago, I was confiding such troubles to a veteran toastmaster, one who seemed the genial Spirit of social ease and savoir faire. ‘Last evening at a reception,’ said I, ‘a lady asked me a casual question about how I liked the weather; and for the life of me I could not remember whether it was hot or cold, until she had gone on and it was too late.’
‘Oh, yes, I know,’ exclaimed the white-haired dignitary; ‘someone asks me about the weather quite suddenly at a tea, and my brain goes like a pinwheel and I think hastily to myself,
"The weather the weather the weather? I know the Chief of the Weather Bureau in Washington quite well, but as to the weather —” It is the great rapidity and jumpiness of small-talk,’ he confided, ‘ that troubles me. I always have a wealth of observations to make on the second topic before the last that was dropped three minutes ago.’
The suddenness of it all is comparable to the game we played as children, called ‘ Beast, Bird, or Fish.’ The boy in the centre of the circle cried out ‘Duck!’ perhaps, and if he pointed at you, you had to classify ducks before he counted ten. It was the nervous haste that lent hazard to the game. No third-grader with time to think would ever call a duck a fish.
This about groups, then, many of us sometimes fear. We are not afraid of the people, not even of their congregate opinion. We are simply a trifle apprehensive for fear that we may not have our wits about us always in the current moment — for fear that we may be what Einstein would call a ‘retarded potential.’ At a crisis we may not be quite all there. We have known ghostly moments when our real selves went completely away and left us like something forgotten and uncalled for, a quaint stiff object made out of papier mâché. We were present only in effigy. We were like marionettes without any wires, or anyone behind the scenes to speak our lines.
Curiously enough, we persons who have now and then felt this sense of social jeopardy are often the very ones who memorize groups most by heart, and who are capable of the most profound and sensitive satisfactions when we strike a glorious combination in which we suddenly find ourselves at home. Perhaps it is on the same principle as the fact that the lad who is most afraid of girls falls, when the right one welcomes him, most utterly in love. Apprehension is a notable sharpener of the eyes. We are constantly in a state of mind to observe and appreciate most keenly. Nothing escapes us, and when the richest moments come, they are not wasted.
This is what keeps us incorrigibly social under difficulties — the knowledge that the happiness of the perfect hour is well worth many intervals that are not so full of fire. Every now and then we find it, the warm sense of security, a flash of reality and congenial glow; perhaps not in this group, or this, or this, but somewhere surely, on the edges of some or in the hearts of others, we shall find ourselves at home. I do not mean that slight thing which Society would call ‘arrived.’ One may arrive at other inns than home.
It would be hard to say just what it is that makes a thoroughbred jeopard feel at home. If a mystified social Lion should ask the Jeopards to explain, I suppose we could best do it by examples, not by definition. The true Tea-Lion might not have time to listen, but we could all tell him of our favorite memories of perfect groups, each of them in some sense typical, since perfection always grows from some eternal root.
There was once, for instance, an evening camp-fire by a New England lake, and around it grouped our two Fly-Fishermen, our Coffee-Maker, our Fire-Warden, the Mosquito-Chaser, the Tired Newspaperman, and his great collie dog, looking like Ole Br’er Fox in the firelight, with his long bushy tail. Red sparks going up into the sky without a chimney are a great symbol for unforced, inextinguishable talk.
And there was a formal afternoon tea in a great house west of the Alleghanies, with all the delicate stage-properties of hothouse flowers and ices and samovar, with bevies of gracious women drifting in and out, and a butler who looked like Uncle Remus in a dress-suit. That afternoon it was the Dowager, the Debutante, and the Hostess who made the perfect group for me in a vanishing moment of eager talk at parting, when we went out to the garden door and saw the magnolias budding on the slope, and a cardinal bird cocking his crest at us from the top of a locust tree. The fragile unrealities of formal tea-time were an emblem of the exquisite briefness of our glimpse into one another’s thought.
Another time, it was midnight after a community play, when actors and scene-shifters and prompter and coach were gathering up scattered properties after everyone else had gone. The hero sat on a piece of the jungle, putting the Lion’s head into a box. The wife of Androcles balanced upon a bit of the Arena, and Nero was packing wigs. A mutual enterprise well ended unites the spirits in a cordial fraternity of relief.
Or around the fireplace one Sunday evening, we found the best moment when a group of our friends were talking and a neighborly young ship’sengineer dropped in to return a map. He stopped to tell us of a subordinate of his just now stranded without a job in Pittsburgh, that curious place for mariners ashore.
‘He could get a job in a minute on any of the river steamers,’ said the engineer.
‘Why doesn’t he?’ someone asked.
‘Because,’ said the unquenchable seaman, picking up his cap and going to the door, ‘he says he does n’t like to be associated with shallow-water people.’
The responsive chuckles that greeted the sudden philosophy of that remark were the beginning of a conversation that lasted late, until the great slow-burning back-log was almost gone, and heart-of-oak gave out its tall pure flame.
Finally, there was a night last summer when a group of us had been up to see my grandmother, to whom we told all the gossip, each of us waiting for a crack in the conversation to add our hero-tale, knowing that she would enjoy everything and report nothing. It is quite a feat to attain such high honor and gay responsiveness at the age of eighty-three. As we started to go, she called me back and told me to stop in the garden and get our mother a half-opened bud that was on her favorite white-rose bush. I found it in the moonlight, the sweet cool thing — from the Queen to the Duchess, a white rose. And as I hurried after the sauntering figures of Geoffrey and Barbara and Phineas, halfway down the drive, I knew that the ultimate perfection of group-life must embrace the generations.
Lakes and starlit bivouacs, society, enterprise, and the four walls of home! Our favorite groups may take shape like constellations, or scatter like fireflies in a garden, or circulate like goldfish in a bowl. But every so often, when three or more than three expressive people come within each other’s range, a thing happens that cannot be described, but only remotely likened to such vague parallels as electricity in a circuit, music in a perfect chord, magnet and iron-filings, sunlight on opening flowers, high tide at sea. It is the memory and hope of such moments that make even the most spry and independent of us glad that we need not take all of our journeys alone, unquestioned, at two o’clock in the morning, on an empty road.