Soon another visitor arrived. Since my master has very few friends, it’s almost unbelievable that so many of those he has should choose to call today: indeed, I’ve never known such numbers visit in the space of a single day. Still, there it is. The visitors did come, and this particular visitor was a very rare specimen. I hasten to clarify that I shall be writing about him at some length not because of his rarity but because he has a significant part to play in that promised aftermath which I am still in process of describing. I do not know the man’s name, but he looks about forty and sports a smart goatee on his long face. Just as I think of Waverhouse as an aesthete, I see this new arrival as a philosopher. It’s not that he’s laid any kind of claim to philosophic status or blown his own trumpet in the Waverhouse style, but simply that, as he talks to my master, he looks to me as a philosopher should look. I deduce that he must be another of my master’s school mates, for they speak to each other in the familiar manner of very close old friends.
“You mentioned Waverhouse. Now there’s an extraordinary man, as light and flossy as goldfish food floating around on a pond. Don’t you agree? Someone was telling me that only the other day he went out walking with a friend and, as they passed the gates of some peer or other, no one of course whom Waverhouse had ever met, he dragged his companion right into the house on the grounds that it would be pleasant to call on the owner and take a dish of tea. He really is the giddy limit!”
“And what happened?”
“I didn’t bother to find out. Something eccentric, I’ve no doubt. The man was born that way, not a thought in his head; unadulterated goldfish food. And Suzuki? You see him here? Well, well. That one’s clever all right, but not a man of the mind, not the kind I’d have thought you’d care to have around. He’s the type to whom money and a gold watch seem to gravitate. Worldly wise but ultimately worthless. A shallow man, and restless. He’s always talking about the importance of smooth-ness, of doing things smoothly, smoothing one’s way through life. But he understands nothing. Nothing at all. Not even the meaning of smooth-ness. If Waverhouse is goldfish food, Suzuki’s common jelly paste: a thing unpleasantly smooth which shakes and trembles, a thing fit only to be strung on straw, available for sale to any passerby.”
My master seems to be much impressed by this flow of denigrating simile for, which he rarely does, he broke into hearty laughter and enquires, “That’s Waverhouse and Suzuki. Now what about you?”
“Me? Well, maybe I’m a yam—long in shape and buried in mud.”
“At least you seem carefree, always so self-controlled and self-composed. How I envy you.”
“But I’m much the same as anyone else. There’s nothing about me particularly to be envied. Still, I have the luck not to envy anyone.
Which is just about the only good thing about me.”
“Financially, are you now well off?”
“No, the same as ever. Little enough, but just sufficient to eat, so there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Myself, I feel so deeply discontented that I’m always losing my temper. I grouse and grumble and hardly anything else.”
“There’s nothing wrong with grumbling. When you feel like grumbling, grumble away. At least it brings one interim relief. You see, everyone is different. You can’t refashion others to be like you. Consider chopsticks and bread: you’ve got to hold chopsticks as everyone does or you’ll find it hard to eat rice; however, bread can be cut, and is best cut, in accordance with your own particular liking. A suit made by a good tailor fits like a glove from the moment you put it on, but something run up by a shoddy craftsman takes years of tiresome wearing before it adjusts itself to your own particular bone structure. If competent parents produced children all neatly shaped to fit the ways of our present world, all would be happily well. But if you have the misfortune to be born bungled, your only choice is either to suffer as a misfit or to hang on grimly until the world so changes its shape as to suit yours.”
“I see no prospect that I shall ever fit in. It’s a depressing prospect.”
“If one forces one’s way into a suit too small for one’s body, of course one tears the stitchings, by which I mean that persons violently ill suited to the world they seek to inhabit are those who pick quarrels, commit suicide, even incite real riots. But you, to be frank, are merely discontented. You’re not going to do yourself in and you’re not a natural brawler. You could be a lot worse off than you are.”
“On the contrary, I find I’m picking quarrels morning, noon, and night. When I lack a subject on whom to vent my spleen, I live in a constant fume of anger. Even such undirected ire amounts to brawling, doesn’t it?”
“I see, you brawl with yourself. Interesting. But what’s wrong with that? Brawl away to your heart’s content.”
“But I’ve grown bored with brawling.”
“Then just stop it.”
“I understand what you’re driving at, but whatever you may say, one cannot do what one likes with one’s own mind.”
“My point is that one can. But leaving that aside, what do you think is the root cause of your self-wounding discontent?”
In response to that sympathetic invitation, my master poured out before his friend the long sad catalogue of his woes and grievances.
Beginning with an account of his war with the schoolboys, he proceeded to list, in manic detail and a neatly ordered, reverse chronology, every single fretfulness, right back to the days of the terracotta badger, Savage Tea, and his petty provocations by conniving colleagues on the staff of his own school.
The visiting philosopher listened in complete silence, but, allowing a long pause after Mr. Sneaze had finished his jeremiad to add its weight to his response, offered the following sagacities. “You should pay no regard whatsoever to the things said by your staff colleagues, which were anyway all complete rubbish. The schoolkids from the Hall are not to be taken seriously, grubby little vermin, existences not worthy even to be noticed by a man at your level of intellectual attainment. What?