'Home Is the Hunter'

BEING listened to by strangers in public for five weeks on end can work amazing changes in the quietest soul. Although you may have left home a person interested in conversation, when next you are heard from there you are apt to be a monologist. You do not know this. But your friends do. And, being friends, they are quick to tell you.

People have been kind to you — incredibly kind. They have lunched you, dined you, met you at trains, interviewed you, driven you about in their cars, shown you the sights, granted you the run of their homes, and given parties for you even after you have had your say. In a thousand flattering ways they have applied helium to your vanity. No wonder you return home a Pekingese acting like a lion.

Above everything else, people have listened to you. A Bedouin or so may have bobbed up here or there who wandered out during your sandstorm of words. But you have grown accustomed to excusing yourself, even if you cannot quite forgive them. ‘Diabetics, no doubt,’ you have comforted yourself by thinking, without pausing for an adjective. A couple of Rip Van Winkles may have dozed off during one of your talks. ‘Up too late last night,’ you have said to yourself, looking quickly to the other side of the auditorium. A big man walked out suddenly in the middle of your favorite paragraph. ‘A doctor on emergency call,’ you thought.

Still — people have listened. They have listened for an hour or more. They have had to — the doors were shut. You forget this, although they may not. What is more, these same good listening people have not interrupted you. They have been too polite, too embarrassed, too kind to do so. You forget this also. And, forgetting it, you have got so that you can’t ask for the salt without acting as if you had swallowed a Public Address System.

But your friends are not like those good listening people. They are different — bruisingly different. There is not an upturned face among them.

The deflation they have in store for you is never delayed for long. It sets in with merciless swiftness soon after your train has returned you to the Pennsylvania Station in New York. As a rule the first impact of this deflation is felt at the dinner party which your wife, in the sweetness of her heart, has arranged for you a day or so after your return. When it comes, it comes with a bang.

‘I’ve asked some people for dinner tonight,’ she says. ‘Just a few old friends who are crazy to hear about your trip.’

‘Good,’ you reply, eager to be with them once again, and, being with them, share your impressions of the country.

They arrive, these old friends: Tom, Dick, and Harry; Mary, Helen, and Jane. And they seem almost as glad to see you as you are to see them.

The cocktail hour goes off well enough. It is filled with those antiphonal cries of ‘How are you?’ — ‘Did you know?’ — ‘Have you heard?’ which always pass for answers at such a time. You are glad you took that nap in the afternoon. You wanted to be in good form this evening. After all, you invariably try to get a nap before a lecture. That’s only fair to the audience, and a means, though not so sure as one might wish, of keeping them from napping when you are awake.

The first twenty minutes have been so crowded with salutations, exchanged largely between your friends rather than addressed to you, that you decide they must all have been away on trips too. But no — it seems they just have not seen each other for two or three days. And the fodder for much good talk can be garnered in that time — subjects pressing because of their immediacy, dear because of their triviality, absorbing because no other people would find them so. What is said to and of those present, and especially about others not there, may be neither witty nor deserved. But it is cherished nonetheless because of the details which each line adds to portraits, long since familiar, that can never be finished inasmuch as they are always being joyously reworked.

Just as private affairs are the public property of intimates, so world events lose their public quality among good friends. They too are reduced to personal terms. They too become part of a quick exchange, so derived from experiences tangled and shared, so filled with sudden allusions and transitions which assume that all explanations are unnecessary, and so alive with insults — professional as well as personal — which only friendship could endure or provoke, that a stranger, wandering into such a closed corporation, would need to have at least half of what is said there decoded for him.

The talk is fast and furious. To outsiders it might seem as silly as other people do when you have watched them dancing without being able to hear the music. You can hear this babble, however, and to you it is a welcome tune. ‘Later,’ you keep saying to yourself, ‘later. My time will come!’

Anyway, you have been busy. As a matter of fact, you have been so busy mixing drinks and filling glasses that your hands have scarcely left the cocktail shaker. In other words, you have been luckier than you know. For this means that no one has been able to observe the operatic dimensions your gestures have taken on.

It is not until shortly before dinner is announced that the first lighted cigarette is put to the balloon which is you. Harry has asked you, when you have chanced to encounter him as he moves with ease from what you have found to be one closed circle to another, ‘What is the Middle West thinking?’

Just when you are about to answer by telling him what you think the Middle West is thinking, which amounts to the same thing as telling him what you were thinking in the Middle West, and before you notice that Harry has turned to Helen to ask her about a book which has come out two days before, your index finger has, from sheer force of habit, shot up like a coastal gun.

‘Oh, Dr. Munyon, I presume,’ you hear Dick laughing behind you, as he approaches with an empty glass. Although you pretend not to notice this, from then on whenever possible you either sit on your hands or dig them deep into your pockets.

When the first course is over, a course devoted largely at your end of the table to hearing about Jane’s two children, Tom, who is seated one down from Jane on your left, has begun to eye her with an expression worthy of Herod.

Tom’s chance to escape from Jane’s nursery comes when Jane, from sheer hoarseness, has finally been compelled to take a drink of water in the middle of some saga about what little Henry, aged four, said to Wendell Willkie when he happened to see him on Fifth Avenue. Later you discover, because Jane is not lacking in conversational stamina, that little Henry’s uproarious remark was ‘Who is that man, Marmee?’ But that is much later. Tom, blessed always with enviable luck, never hears it.

‘What about Texas and the Defense Program down there?’ he asks the minute he sees the glass raised to Jane’s lips.

Texas! Here at last is your chance. You may not know much about the Defense Program down there, but it offers you that springboard for which you have been longing. You have a lot to say about Texas. You love Texas. Jane and Helen are listening. So, in a minute, is Harry. So, before too long, is the whole table. Hitler is stopped. No one offers Churchill, Roosevelt, or Waved free advice. The war is halted. Peace reigns.

This attentive silence is more like it. This is what you have grown accustomed to. This is what you have been deceived into believing you can command at the drop of a sentence. Without being aware of it, you have pushed your head back a little and rested your hands on the table as if it were the lectern. Texas is a state you could talk about by the hour. But just when you are beginning to do so Harry cries, ‘All right, Brown, all right. Get down off the platform, will you? Remember, you’re not being paid now.’

Everyone laughs like Little Audrey at this. You try to force a laugh, too. But you haven’t really enjoyed it. It is almost harder to control a blush than your temper. You comfort yourself by thinking you have at least kept the latter in fair check. Moreover, as time has gone on, you have not derived true pleasure from those shouts of ‘Hire a hall!'— ‘Got your slides with you?’ — ‘Is there a Helen Hokinson in the house?’ — ‘When’s your next lecture?’ which have greeted almost everything you have said that has involved a considered opinion.

Even when the men are alone, and you would think the state of the nation would be very much their concern, you can’t help realizing that your repertory of anecdotes is strangely limited, inasmuch as you remember that some of the best ones you have been telling around the country as your own were originally told you by these same friends.

Sadly but slowly you become aware that no one wants to hear about those things which recently have loomed large in your life. Your friends show only the mildest interest in the people on the road that you have liked and they have never known. They listen with their lids drooping like the films which can gather over a parrot’s eyes as you talk to them of cities they have neither visited nor planned to go to. They are frankly bored with those statistics about trains and hotels, auditoriums and audiences, chairmen and hosts, which are endlessly fascinating to all lecturers, and create a happy freemasonry among those who have ever gone on such tours.

All trips are, of course, unsharable, as everyone who has ever taken one soon learns to his sorrow. Only the novices, the bores, and the pith-helmet boys persist in trying to share them. But lecture tours are more unsharable than any other journeys. When you return from the others, your mistake is trying to bring back what you have seen. When you return from a lecture tour, your allunconscious error is trying to bring back what you have tried to be. This is far worse, and naturally not only more objectionable but more unforgivable.

Little by little, out of hurt feelings and bewilderment, you find yourself, as the evening progresses, reduced to monosyllables — then to short, ‘humphs’ which Indians alone would understand. But before that first reunion is over you forget that you are hurt. You understand more completely than you ever thought you would how a defeated candidate must feel when he returns home.

Suddenly you are listening. Yes, really listening. What is more, you are enjoying it. Plank by plank, you have been robbed of your platform manner. But even as you listen you keep hoping to yourself that some day, somewhere, some kind people will perhaps be willing to listen to you again.