Also Serving
WHEN I consider how my life is spent, — standing and waiting for my wife during many weary half hours at a stretch, — I cannot feel that I am among the elect who ‘also serve’ — except as a warning.
For as my better and busier half is constitutionally tardy, while I am constitutionally punctual, perhaps neither of us deserves blame or praise for a quality as inherent as the shape of our noses; but this temperamental difference provides the material whereof domestic drama is made, quite as inevitably as through a mistaken alliance between crabbèd age and youth. Many of the long hours that I have spent impersonating the uninspiring figure of Patience on her monument have been passed in trying to reckon how many weeks — or even months — in the course of a year have been wasted in this unproductive employment. Of course I do not count as wasted the years I spent marking time while Cynthia was trying to make up her mind whether she would keep me waiting permanently; I merely mean the ten minutes here, the quarter of an hour there, the half hour everywhere, which, subsequent to our marriage, I have spent waiting for my late wife.
‘Your craze for being punctual is a very serious fault, dear,’ she assures me by way of rejoinder to my unspoken disapproval of her tardiness. ‘You should really struggle to conquer it. Just remember that you live in an imperfect world in which practically everyone but yourself is late, and it is for you to adjust yourself to the majority. It’s just as if you insisted upon living by standard time when the rest of the community had adopted daylight saving.’
The disconcerting part of her immoral code of unpunctuality is that facts bear out its practical wisdom. If I am ever invited to a social or business festivity without my wife, and arrive with scrupulous promptness, I generally find that my host himself has not yet appeared, and I overhear sundry exclamations of disgust from above stairs which do not tend to increase my sense of social ease.
But when I arrive late, in my lady’s breathless train, how different is the result! Our host and hostess greet us with cries of ecstasy, intensified by a tincture of relief at finding that we had not forgotten our engagement and so thrown out their dinner table. The little group of guests who have already assembled turn from their arduous labors as manufacturers of small talk and beam gratefully at my guilty partner as she sails triumphantly before the wind of approval, tossing a word here and bestowing a smile there, while easy apologies fall from her facile lips. Everyone else in the room assumes the attitude of minor characters in a stock company, while my outrageous wife makes a heroine’s entrance and wins all the applause through the simple expedient of being the last comer! For a moment, and simply owing to my association with Cynthia, I feel that I am playing the rôle of leading man — not because I lead, but simply because I follow, tied to the tail of my domestic comet, and thereby winning laurels which would be torn from my brow, had I, chronologically speaking, led the little expectant group.
Cogitation on the subject (indulged in as usual while waiting) has led me to believe that a fault is sometimes as desirable — and quite as difficult to encourage — as a virtue. I can no more be late than Cynthia can be on time; and if I surreptitiously put her watch forward I find that she has already set mine back, for, although this laggard is always behind, it is not easy to get ahead of her.
On one of the rare occasions when — through a more than usually flagrant lack of punctuality — it really seems as if Cynthia were going to fail to have her cake and eat it too, I venture a mild reproof and murmur sententiously, ‘ You see, my dear, the early bird does sometimes catch the worm,’ she only replies laconically, ‘I hate worms.’
WILMOT PRICE