第14章

[Fire and the Foreigner.]

They are odd folk, these foreigners.There are moments of despair when I almost give them up--feel I don't care what becomes of them--feel as if I could let them muddle on in their own way--wash my hands of them, so to speak, and attend exclusively to my own business: we all have our days of feebleness.They will sit outside a cafe on a freezing night, with an east wind blowing, and play dominoes.They will stand outside a tramcar, rushing through the icy air at fifteen miles an hour, and refuse to go inside, even to oblige a lady.Yet in railway carriages, in which you could grill a bloater by the simple process of laying it underneath the seat, they will insist on the window being closed, light cigars to keep their noses warm, and sit with the collars of their fur coats buttoned up around their necks.

In their houses they keep the double windows hermetically sealed for three or four months at a time: and the hot air quivering about the stoves scorches your face if you venture nearer to it than a yard.

Travel can broaden the mind.It can also suggest to the Britisher that in some respects his countrymen are nothing near so silly as they are supposed to be.There was a time when I used to sit with my legs stretched out before the English coal fire and listen with respectful attention while people who I thought knew all about it explained to me how wicked and how wasteful were our methods.

All the heat from that fire, they told me, was going up the chimney.

I did not like to answer them that notwithstanding I felt warm and cosy.I feared it might be merely British stupidity that kept me warm and cosy, not the fire at all.How could it be the fire? The heat from the fire was going up the chimney.It was the glow of ignorance that was making my toes tingle.Besides, if by sitting close in front of the fire and looking hard at it, I did contrive, by hypnotic suggestion, maybe, to fancy myself warm, what should I feel like at the other end of the room?

It seemed like begging the question to reply that I had no particular use for the other end of the room, that generally speaking there was room enough about the fire for all the people I really cared for, that sitting altogether round the fire seemed quite as sensible as sulking by one's self in a corner the other end of the room, that the fire made a cheerful and convenient focus for family and friends.

They pointed out to me how a stove, blocking up the centre of the room, with a dingy looking fluepipe wandering round the ceiling, would enable us to sit ranged round the walls, like patients in a hospital waiting-room, and use up coke and potato-peelings.

Since then I have had practical experience of the scientific stove.

I want the old-fashioned, unsanitary, wasteful, illogical, open fireplace.I want the heat to go up the chimney, instead of stopping in the room and giving me a headache, and making everything go round.

When I come in out of the snow I want to see a fire--something that says to me with a cheerful crackle, "Hallo, old man, cold outside, isn't it? Come and sit down.Come quite close and warm your hands.

That's right, put your foot under him and persuade him to move a yard or two.That's all he's been doing for the last hour, lying there roasting himself, lazy little devil.He'll get softening of the spine, that's what will happen to him.Put your toes on the fender.

The tea will be here in a minute."

[My British Stupidity.]

I want something that I can toast my back against, while standing with coat tails tucked up and my hands in my pockets, explaining things to people.I don't want a comfortless, staring, white thing, in a corner of the room, behind the sofa--a thing that looks and smells like a family tomb.It may be hygienic, and it may be hot, but it does not seem to do me any good.It has its advantages: it contains a cupboard into which you can put things to dry.You can also forget them, and leave them there.Then people complain of a smell of burning, and hope the house is not on fire, and you ease their mind by explaining to them that it is probably only your boots.

Complicated internal arrangements are worked by a key.If you put on too much fuel, and do not work this key properly, the thing explodes.

And if you do not put on any coal at all and the fire goes out suddenly, then likewise it explodes.That is the only way it knows of calling attention to itself.On the Continent you know when the fire wants seeing to merely by listening:

"Sounded like the dining-room, that last explosion," somebody remarks.

"I think not," observes another, "I distinctly felt the shock behind me--my bedroom, I expect."Bits of ceiling begin to fall, and you notice that the mirror over the sideboard is slowly coming towards you.

"Why it must be this stove," you say; "curious how difficult it is to locate sound."You snatch up the children and hurry out of the room.After a while, when things have settled down, you venture to look in again.Maybe it was only a mild explosion.A ten-pound note and a couple of plumbers in the house for a week will put things right again.They tell me they are economical, these German stoves, but you have got to understand them.I think I have learnt the trick of them at last:

and I don't suppose, all told, it has cost me more than fifty pounds.

And now I am trying to teach the rest of the family.What I complain about the family is that they do not seem anxious to learn.

"You do it," they say, pressing the coal scoop into my hand: "it makes us nervous."It is a pretty, patriarchal idea: I stand between the trusting, admiring family and these explosive stoves that are the terror of their lives.They gather round me in a group and watch me, the capable, all-knowing Head who fears no foreign stove.But there are days when I get tired of going round making up fires.