Twixt Desk and Shelves
by James Leatham
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE TWO – What it is to be eccentric.
Swearwords: None.
Description: EPISODE TWO – What it is to be eccentric.
First published in The Gateway in August 1916.
Is Mr Haldane about?... Where have you met me? You never did meet me. And yet I seem to know you quite well. I am assuming you are the same eccentric bookseller of Haltemprise whose talks I used to read in The Pelican in Italy, Germany, and all sorts of places. My parents are Mr and Mrs Fenby, of the Council Schools, Haltemprise. They used to send me The Pelican. I could hardly believe it was the same Henry Haldane when I read the name. What has brought you to this part of the world?
She was a charming young gentlewoman, and her card indicated that she travelled for a great university press.
Printer: Well, this is my native country, you know. There had got to be no peace in Haltemprise. The Germans tried to bomb me during ten months, off and on. The last time they came they broke all my windows and burnt open the door. So as I had no particular tie to that part of the country, I came away.
The Lady: You don’t mean to say you were frightened?
Printer: (smiling) I’d rather not be shot at than otherwise. I should be ashamed not to be frightened. It is true that dull people and pigs are not frightened. But the pigs and the dull people are killed. In one raid a row of eleven houses got wrecked; but the people being normal human beings had cleared out, and the only casualty was a pig that had not understood and was not frightened. I assure you I am normal, although you used the word ‘eccentric’ just now.
She: I beg your pardon. I believe the word in the sub-title of your series was ‘unconventional’.
He: Now you have it. I beg to assure you that I am not eccentric except when I can’t help it – say when I am tired and not myself.
She: What exactly do you mean? Eccentricity is the normal state of the eccentric, whether they are tired or not. Eccentric means odd, queer.
He: Quite so. Eccentric means irregular, a deviation from type. In mechanics an eccentric is a wheel or disc with a break or a dip in it, or a lump upon it. And I find that there are more eccentric people than normal in the world. The people who are true to type in every way are so rare that their appearance or their speech instantly attracts attention.
She: Yes, Bernard Shaw says that most people have defective or untrue vision, and that his eyes are medically certified as physically true.
He: Yes, so normal that they are abnormal. Just like a perfect ox or pigeon, so true to type that it gets a prize, while eccentric oxen or pigeons are so common that the judges pass them by without a second look. Applying the same text to humans, the average man is usually in some way defective. Any observant teacher knows that ordinary children come to school with all sorts of defects. Some have a stutter, some experience difficulty with the letter ‘l’, some with the ‘r’, some have no sense of time, some are without time, many can’t even breathe properly. Margaret MacMillan has pointed out that poor children, when they get new clothes, often put them on above the old and have layers and layers of clothes upon them, even in summer time. To be simple, natural, seems to require a liberal education.
She: Yes, backwardness in speaking, an inability to say the right thing even in the simplest matters, is so common that a child of normal intelligence in talk is called ‘bright’ or ‘forward’.
He: Ah, you must have been one of the bright ones. Well, seeing you already have my point, I need only to beg you that I am quite normal. I have no stutter, no difficulty with l, r or n. I am not a tee-totaller, nor a bachelor, nor a vegetarian, nor a non-smiler. I have no prejudices about eating or drinking. To some men stout is like a physic and beer is as poison. Others find wine tasteless, and whisky maddening. I can enjoy them all. Poll the town of St. Congan, and probably one half of the inhabitants would say they could not eat mushrooms. Thirty years ago probably as many would have declared against tomatoes. I never needed any education, I liked them from the first.
She: I’m glad to say I can write ditto to all that.
He: And did no one ever call you queer?
She: I haven’t lived so much in the public eye as you have. But one never knows what one is called behind one’s back.
He: I was called ‘queer’ the other day by a whisky traveller who weighs eighteen stone, though he is several inches shorter than I am. Incidentally, I may say he is as mad as a March hare about Home Rule and Tariff Reaction. He is in favour of Belgium for the Belgians, but does not believe in Ireland for the Irish: and as regards Tariff Reaction he thinks everybody would be better off if their food were taxed. That’s what I call queer.
She: Yes, both mentally and physically. Did you let him out?
He: I heaped coals of fire on his head.
She: Drinks, I suppose? That would only help to swell the eccentricities. The coals ought to have been applied where they would make him perspire. All the same, the average man is not far out when he regards the genius as queer.
He: (bowing gravely) I salute you, madame, at the implied compliment.
She: (laughing) Oh, I wasn’t thinking of you. I think it will be found that geniuses have been cynical, and the average person shies off from cynicism. Fielding, Voltaire, Wilde, Shakespeare, Milton and Scott.
He: But cynicism may not be unpleasant. Shaw is a cynic but keeps his audience laughing whether with his plays or his speeches.
She: But what I mean by cynicism is, I suppose, what people would call immorality. I draw a distinction between morals and ethics. Morals are conventional good behaviour. Ethics are the abstract standards of right and wrong, which do not vary with time and place.
He: I do not think morals and ethics are different, and I certainly do not think that the geniuses required any allowance to be made for them. Right and wrong do not vary so much. It has always been considered wrong to steal, tell lies, and commit murder. If you are thinking of the landladies Fielding bilked, my sympathies are with the landladies every time. But the names you mention are, after all, those of lesser lights. Shakespeare paid his debts, and put his debtors in court when they didn’t stump up. Scott died slaving to pay off the debts of other men with whom he was commercially involved. Milton lived a frugal life, and –
She: Yes, yes: plain living and high thinking.
He: Wordsworth and Southey were models of propriety. And you are wrong about Voltaire. He was a very good neighbour at Ferney. He even built a church.
She: (looking round) What a nice place you have here. Did you have it built?
He: Oh no, it’s just paint and whitewash.
She passes through to the machine room, commenting intelligently upon the machinery and fittings. As she is about to go she recollects that she has not bought anything.
She: I am going on to Banff for tea, and I want something for the train.
He: Most people would think that books would be coals to Newcastle with you.
She: Of course I have read the books I sell. (She stoops and opens a box of samples she has been carrying and gives him one book and lends him another with shrewd comments on both. She then selects a book by G. K. Chesterton, for which she insists upon paying the full price when he offers her trade discount. So he lends her one of Morris’s prose tales.)
He: I hope you have done good business in St. Congan’s.
She: I was calling only on the headmaster of your secondary school. It’s all right. I’m quite satisfied. Good bye! Good luck!
No Pig in a Poke
‘I hear ye want a girl?’ half-asked, half-affirmed a sad-faced country woman, who broke into a ghastly mechanical smile when she caught the printer’s eye: for that type of person does not necessarily look at you mostly because she (or more often he) happens to be addressing you.
He: Yes, I do. But as I can only have one at present, I want a good one. And I’m entitled to a good one. Nobody can be too good for the work I have to do. The hours are short, the pay better than usual and the world is interesting to a clever girl. There is no blind-alley business about it. There is something to be learned all the time. Is your daughter a reading girl? Is she spirited? Has she good hands? I like them nice looking too: for I find that looks and brains go together, and nice-looking girls are pleasant-mannered because the world is good to them.
She (looking rather bewildered): What do you want them to do? Just anything?
He: No ‘just anything’ means nothing in particular. I want them to help me with the printing; and ability to read and more or less understand handwriting is necessary. I require them to fold and stitch pamphlets and ‘a turn for the shop’ is also desirable. All these things go quite naturally together. The person who has nous for one thing has it for another.
Countrywoman (slowly and refusing to give up the direct answer): She’s nae my lassie. But I’ve brocht her up. She’s sixteen, an’ she’s still at the school, an’ it’s aboot time she was doin’ something. She’s some dull. (silent, sluggish) I tell her whiles she’ll need to brighten up.
Printer: (who has suspected there would be no great liveliness from anyone belonging to this woman’s household): Is she a reading girl? I don’t mean a ‘good scholar’ – the kind of ‘diligent’ girl who gets up lessons docilely and forgets all about it as soon as the lesson is pat. I got one girl who was recommended by her teacher as having never missed in attendance. I thought that was no recommendation – I’m no great admirer of the milestone virtues. A quick, clever, sensitive girl would pretty often have some little ailment and would be sure to miss attendances. Does your adopted daughter care for the pleasure of reading?
Countrywoman: What do you mean, like? She reads her lesson-books rael willin’ly.
Printer: I mean does she want to sit up later than you will allow her reading ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, or ‘A Peep Behind the Scenes’, or the tales of Scott, Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte or the A.L.O.E? That’s natural, you know, in a young person who has everything to learn and is full of healthy curiosity.
Countrywoman (so slowly): Na, I couldna say that. Ye see we’re in the country. An’ there’s a gey lot o’ lessons.
Printer: Oh, she wouldn’t have lessons in the holidays or at weekends. My own girls were very good scholars, and they had all read the kind of books I mean by the time they were sixteen, and had lots of music and romps too. As for being in the country, she ought to have read all the more for that. There are no theatres or picture palaces, not so many distractions and disturbances of any kind in the country. However, I can’t engage the girl without seeing her. I have had several applicants who have come in person, and that is what I like. (Smiling.) If one should not buy a pig in a poke, still less should one engage an assistant without seeing her. Tell her to call, will you? And don’t you come with her, please. She must learn to go through the world on her own a little.
The sad-faced woman said, ‘Weel, weel,’ very slowly, and looked round as if she had meditated some way of leaving the shop otherwise than by the door, which stood immediately behind her.
The printer engaged a nicely dressed girl who called later in the evening and conducted her own case. The sad-faced woman, in spite of her having been forbidden, called with her protégé the following evening late. When the printer saw the girl he was glad to be able to say the post was filled. He took the name and address of this belated applicant, but without much idea of using them. No need to send anyone away with an ill answer.
An Offer
‘The St. Congan’s Press, please,’ said a nice lad, playing with the ready penny in his hand.
The printer liked his face and was sorry he did not know better. But he could not resist the temptation of playing with him a little.
‘Well, this is rather sudden,’ he said, ‘but I’m not surprised either. It’s rather a desirable show, isn’t it? I’ll take six hundred pounds for the lot, exclusive of the copyrights of the books.’
The lad stopped twirling the penny between his forefinger and thumb and looked a trifle blank. The printer had intended to go on with a rigmarole about the type, paper, presses, and goodwill, and the terms of payment, and was even shaping an undertaking to leave the town, but the absurdity was too much for him. He could not keep his face.
‘It was a paper I wanted,’ said the youth.
‘Oh, if you mean The Pelican, the price is threepence.’
The lad muttered something, and beat a retreat.
Is Mr Haldane about?... Where have you met me? You never did meet me. And yet I seem to know you quite well. I am assuming you are the same eccentric bookseller of Haltemprise whose talks I used to read in The Pelican in Italy, Germany, and all sorts of places. My parents are Mr and Mrs Fenby, of the Council Schools, Haltemprise. They used to send me The Pelican. I could hardly believe it was the same Henry Haldane when I read the name. What has brought you to this part of the world?
She was a charming young gentlewoman, and her card indicated that she travelled for a great university press.
Printer: Well, this is my native country, you know. There had got to be no peace in Haltemprise. The Germans tried to bomb me during ten months, off and on. The last time they came they broke all my windows and burnt open the door. So as I had no particular tie to that part of the country, I came away.
The Lady: You don’t mean to say you were frightened?
Printer: (smiling) I’d rather not be shot at than otherwise. I should be ashamed not to be frightened. It is true that dull people and pigs are not frightened. But the pigs and the dull people are killed. In one raid a row of eleven houses got wrecked; but the people being normal human beings had cleared out, and the only casualty was a pig that had not understood and was not frightened. I assure you I am normal, although you used the word ‘eccentric’ just now.
She: I beg your pardon. I believe the word in the sub-title of your series was ‘unconventional’.
He: Now you have it. I beg to assure you that I am not eccentric except when I can’t help it – say when I am tired and not myself.
She: What exactly do you mean? Eccentricity is the normal state of the eccentric, whether they are tired or not. Eccentric means odd, queer.
He: Quite so. Eccentric means irregular, a deviation from type. In mechanics an eccentric is a wheel or disc with a break or a dip in it, or a lump upon it. And I find that there are more eccentric people than normal in the world. The people who are true to type in every way are so rare that their appearance or their speech instantly attracts attention.
She: Yes, Bernard Shaw says that most people have defective or untrue vision, and that his eyes are medically certified as physically true.
He: Yes, so normal that they are abnormal. Just like a perfect ox or pigeon, so true to type that it gets a prize, while eccentric oxen or pigeons are so common that the judges pass them by without a second look. Applying the same text to humans, the average man is usually in some way defective. Any observant teacher knows that ordinary children come to school with all sorts of defects. Some have a stutter, some experience difficulty with the letter ‘l’, some with the ‘r’, some have no sense of time, some are without time, many can’t even breathe properly. Margaret MacMillan has pointed out that poor children, when they get new clothes, often put them on above the old and have layers and layers of clothes upon them, even in summer time. To be simple, natural, seems to require a liberal education.
She: Yes, backwardness in speaking, an inability to say the right thing even in the simplest matters, is so common that a child of normal intelligence in talk is called ‘bright’ or ‘forward’.
He: Ah, you must have been one of the bright ones. Well, seeing you already have my point, I need only to beg you that I am quite normal. I have no stutter, no difficulty with l, r or n. I am not a tee-totaller, nor a bachelor, nor a vegetarian, nor a non-smiler. I have no prejudices about eating or drinking. To some men stout is like a physic and beer is as poison. Others find wine tasteless, and whisky maddening. I can enjoy them all. Poll the town of St. Congan, and probably one half of the inhabitants would say they could not eat mushrooms. Thirty years ago probably as many would have declared against tomatoes. I never needed any education, I liked them from the first.
She: I’m glad to say I can write ditto to all that.
He: And did no one ever call you queer?
She: I haven’t lived so much in the public eye as you have. But one never knows what one is called behind one’s back.
He: I was called ‘queer’ the other day by a whisky traveller who weighs eighteen stone, though he is several inches shorter than I am. Incidentally, I may say he is as mad as a March hare about Home Rule and Tariff Reaction. He is in favour of Belgium for the Belgians, but does not believe in Ireland for the Irish: and as regards Tariff Reaction he thinks everybody would be better off if their food were taxed. That’s what I call queer.
She: Yes, both mentally and physically. Did you let him out?
He: I heaped coals of fire on his head.
She: Drinks, I suppose? That would only help to swell the eccentricities. The coals ought to have been applied where they would make him perspire. All the same, the average man is not far out when he regards the genius as queer.
He: (bowing gravely) I salute you, madame, at the implied compliment.
She: (laughing) Oh, I wasn’t thinking of you. I think it will be found that geniuses have been cynical, and the average person shies off from cynicism. Fielding, Voltaire, Wilde, Shakespeare, Milton and Scott.
He: But cynicism may not be unpleasant. Shaw is a cynic but keeps his audience laughing whether with his plays or his speeches.
She: But what I mean by cynicism is, I suppose, what people would call immorality. I draw a distinction between morals and ethics. Morals are conventional good behaviour. Ethics are the abstract standards of right and wrong, which do not vary with time and place.
He: I do not think morals and ethics are different, and I certainly do not think that the geniuses required any allowance to be made for them. Right and wrong do not vary so much. It has always been considered wrong to steal, tell lies, and commit murder. If you are thinking of the landladies Fielding bilked, my sympathies are with the landladies every time. But the names you mention are, after all, those of lesser lights. Shakespeare paid his debts, and put his debtors in court when they didn’t stump up. Scott died slaving to pay off the debts of other men with whom he was commercially involved. Milton lived a frugal life, and –
She: Yes, yes: plain living and high thinking.
He: Wordsworth and Southey were models of propriety. And you are wrong about Voltaire. He was a very good neighbour at Ferney. He even built a church.
She: (looking round) What a nice place you have here. Did you have it built?
He: Oh no, it’s just paint and whitewash.
She passes through to the machine room, commenting intelligently upon the machinery and fittings. As she is about to go she recollects that she has not bought anything.
She: I am going on to Banff for tea, and I want something for the train.
He: Most people would think that books would be coals to Newcastle with you.
She: Of course I have read the books I sell. (She stoops and opens a box of samples she has been carrying and gives him one book and lends him another with shrewd comments on both. She then selects a book by G. K. Chesterton, for which she insists upon paying the full price when he offers her trade discount. So he lends her one of Morris’s prose tales.)
He: I hope you have done good business in St. Congan’s.
She: I was calling only on the headmaster of your secondary school. It’s all right. I’m quite satisfied. Good bye! Good luck!
No Pig in a Poke
‘I hear ye want a girl?’ half-asked, half-affirmed a sad-faced country woman, who broke into a ghastly mechanical smile when she caught the printer’s eye: for that type of person does not necessarily look at you mostly because she (or more often he) happens to be addressing you.
He: Yes, I do. But as I can only have one at present, I want a good one. And I’m entitled to a good one. Nobody can be too good for the work I have to do. The hours are short, the pay better than usual and the world is interesting to a clever girl. There is no blind-alley business about it. There is something to be learned all the time. Is your daughter a reading girl? Is she spirited? Has she good hands? I like them nice looking too: for I find that looks and brains go together, and nice-looking girls are pleasant-mannered because the world is good to them.
She (looking rather bewildered): What do you want them to do? Just anything?
He: No ‘just anything’ means nothing in particular. I want them to help me with the printing; and ability to read and more or less understand handwriting is necessary. I require them to fold and stitch pamphlets and ‘a turn for the shop’ is also desirable. All these things go quite naturally together. The person who has nous for one thing has it for another.
Countrywoman (slowly and refusing to give up the direct answer): She’s nae my lassie. But I’ve brocht her up. She’s sixteen, an’ she’s still at the school, an’ it’s aboot time she was doin’ something. She’s some dull. (silent, sluggish) I tell her whiles she’ll need to brighten up.
Printer: (who has suspected there would be no great liveliness from anyone belonging to this woman’s household): Is she a reading girl? I don’t mean a ‘good scholar’ – the kind of ‘diligent’ girl who gets up lessons docilely and forgets all about it as soon as the lesson is pat. I got one girl who was recommended by her teacher as having never missed in attendance. I thought that was no recommendation – I’m no great admirer of the milestone virtues. A quick, clever, sensitive girl would pretty often have some little ailment and would be sure to miss attendances. Does your adopted daughter care for the pleasure of reading?
Countrywoman: What do you mean, like? She reads her lesson-books rael willin’ly.
Printer: I mean does she want to sit up later than you will allow her reading ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, or ‘A Peep Behind the Scenes’, or the tales of Scott, Dickens, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte or the A.L.O.E? That’s natural, you know, in a young person who has everything to learn and is full of healthy curiosity.
Countrywoman (so slowly): Na, I couldna say that. Ye see we’re in the country. An’ there’s a gey lot o’ lessons.
Printer: Oh, she wouldn’t have lessons in the holidays or at weekends. My own girls were very good scholars, and they had all read the kind of books I mean by the time they were sixteen, and had lots of music and romps too. As for being in the country, she ought to have read all the more for that. There are no theatres or picture palaces, not so many distractions and disturbances of any kind in the country. However, I can’t engage the girl without seeing her. I have had several applicants who have come in person, and that is what I like. (Smiling.) If one should not buy a pig in a poke, still less should one engage an assistant without seeing her. Tell her to call, will you? And don’t you come with her, please. She must learn to go through the world on her own a little.
The sad-faced woman said, ‘Weel, weel,’ very slowly, and looked round as if she had meditated some way of leaving the shop otherwise than by the door, which stood immediately behind her.
The printer engaged a nicely dressed girl who called later in the evening and conducted her own case. The sad-faced woman, in spite of her having been forbidden, called with her protégé the following evening late. When the printer saw the girl he was glad to be able to say the post was filled. He took the name and address of this belated applicant, but without much idea of using them. No need to send anyone away with an ill answer.
An Offer
‘The St. Congan’s Press, please,’ said a nice lad, playing with the ready penny in his hand.
The printer liked his face and was sorry he did not know better. But he could not resist the temptation of playing with him a little.
‘Well, this is rather sudden,’ he said, ‘but I’m not surprised either. It’s rather a desirable show, isn’t it? I’ll take six hundred pounds for the lot, exclusive of the copyrights of the books.’
The lad stopped twirling the penny between his forefinger and thumb and looked a trifle blank. The printer had intended to go on with a rigmarole about the type, paper, presses, and goodwill, and the terms of payment, and was even shaping an undertaking to leave the town, but the absurdity was too much for him. He could not keep his face.
‘It was a paper I wanted,’ said the youth.
‘Oh, if you mean The Pelican, the price is threepence.’
The lad muttered something, and beat a retreat.
About the Author
James Leatham was born in Aberdeen in 1865 and apprenticed to a printer aged 13½. Over his life he worked for a range of papers/periodicals in the North East of Scotland and England, including the St Nicholas Press, The Workers Herald and The Peterhead Sentinel (editorship of which he took over from David Scott in 1897). He wrote for radical socialist papers throughout his life at a time when socialism and the Labour Party were a febrile battleground of theory and practice. He more than once lost his job because of his political views. In his 50’s he moved back to Aberdeenshire, setting up the Deveron Press in 1916 from his Turriff base. He published many ‘penny pamphlets’ and in book form his publications include the political work Socialism and Character (1897); William Morris: A Master of Many Crafts (1900); and a tribute to David Scott, Daavit (1912).