And men returned from the front to cast
off their bloodstained clothes and wash and bleach their blackened
faces, to put themselves in a pretty livery and drive the ladies and
their Pekinese once more?
A friend of mine once wrote a charming booklet entitled Wheel
Magic, which was all about his rambles on the machine and its
effect on him. He is not an athlete - on the contrary he is a bookish
man who has written books enough to fill a cart, and has had so much to
do with books all his life that one might imagine he had by some
strange accident been born in the reading-room of the British Museum;
or that originally he had actually been a bookworm, a sort of mite,
spontaneously engendered between the pages of a book, and that the
supernatural being who presides over the reading-room had, as a little
pleasantry, transformed him into a man so as to enable him to read the
books on which he had previously nourished himself.
I can't follow my friend's wanderings and adventures as, springing out
of his world of books, he flits and glides like a vagrant, swift-
winged, irresponsible butterfly about the land, sipping the nectar from
a thousand flowers and doing his hundred miles in a day and feeling all
the better for it, for this was a man's book, and the wheel and its
magic was never a necessity in man's life. But it has a magic of
another kind for woman, and I wish that some woman of genius would
arise and, inspired perhaps by the ghost of Benjamin Ward Richardson in
his prophetic mood, tell of this magic to her sisters. Tell them, if
they are above labour in the fields or at the wash-tub, that the wheel,
without fatiguing, will give them the deep breath which will purify the
blood, invigorate the heart, stiffen the backbone, harden the muscles;
that the mind will follow and accommodate itself to these physical
changes; finally, that the wheel will be of more account to them than
all the platforms in the land, and clubs of all the pioneers and
colleges, all congresses, titles, honours, votes, and all the books
that have been or ever will be written.
XXXIII
WASPS AND MEN
I now find that I must go back to the subject of my last paper on the
wasp in order to define my precise attitude towards that insect. Then,
too, there was another wasp at table, not in itself a remarkably
interesting incident, but I am anxious to relate it for the following
reason.
If there is one sweetest thought, one most cherished memory in a man's
mind, especially if he be a person of gentle pacific disposition, whose
chief desire is to live in peace and amity with all men, it is the
thought and recollection of a good fight in which he succeeded in
demolishing his adversary. If his fights have been rare adventures and
in most cases have gone against him, so much the more will he rejoice
in that one victory.
It chanced that a wasp flew into the breakfast room of a country house
in which I was a guest, when we were all - about fourteen in number,
mostly ladies, young and middle-aged - seated at the table. The wasp
went his rounds in the usual way, dropping into this or that plate or
dish, feeling foods with his antennae or tasting with his tongue, but
staying nowhere, and as he moved so did the ladies, starting back with
little screams and exclamations of disgust and apprehension. For these
ladies, it hardly need be said, were not cyclists. Then the son of the
house, a young gentleman of twenty-two, a footballer and general
athlete, got up, pushed back his chair and said: "Don't worry, I'll
soon settle his hash."
Then I too rose from my seat, for I had made a vow not to allow a wasp
to be killed unnecessarily in my presence.
"Leave it to me, please," I said, "and I'll put him out in a minute."
"No, sit down," he returned. "I have said I'm going to kill it."
"You shall not," I returned; and then the two of us, serviettes in
hand, went for the wasp, who got frightened and flew all round the
room, we after it. After some chasing he rose high and then made a dash
at the window, but instead of making its escape at the lower open part,
struck the glass.
"Now I've got him!" cried my sportsman in great glee; but he had not
got him, for I closed with him, and we swayed about and put forth all
our strength, and finally came down with a crash on a couch under the
window. Then after some struggling I succeeded in getting on top, and
with my right hand on his face and my knee on his body to keep him
pressed down, I managed with my left hand to capture the wasp and put
him out.
Then we got up - he with a scarlet face, furious at being baulked; but
he was a true sportsman, and without one word went back to his seat at
the table.
Undoubtedly it was a disgraceful scene in a room full of ladies, but
he, not I, provoked it and was the ruffian, as I'm sure he will be
ready to confess if he ever reads this.
But why all this fuss over a wasp's life, and in such circumstances, in
a room full of nervous ladies, in a house where I was a guest? It was
not that I care more for a wasp than for any other living creature - I
don't love them in the St. Francis way; the wasp is not my little
sister; but I hate to see any living creature unnecessarily,
senselessly, done to death.
