Why Does the Guest Beat His Breast?

Because There is Something Odious in the Guestiness of Guest-hood.

GEORGE S. CHAPPELL

THERE is a dark passage in one of the poets—but that is an infelicitous start which sounds as if I were describing a badly planned country house. ... there is, then, a cryptic couplet by one of our bards which states:

"The wedding guest here beat his breast For he heard the loud bassoon."

To some it may seem evident that the sound of a loud bassoon is in itself an excuse for breast-beating. Such a one does not know his bassoon. (To digress; have you not noticed that this instrument is, in fact, a long and low comedian? To it are given the big laughs of the orchestra, the plaguing of Peer Gynt, the pranks of Till Eulenspiegel, even as to the oboe are entrusted the forty-minute sighs of Tristan and the plaintive flutings of the lulubird, and; have you not often seen audiences staggering out of the side-splitting comic opera, Die Meistersinger, roaring at the bassoonplayers' imitation of Hans Sachs and saying— "My, aren't those German composers simply too funny for words!" End of digression.)

NO, it couldn't have been the bassoon which thus upset the wedding-guest. Was it the wedding, then? Weddings do upset one, you know. In fact, at the last which I attended I was so upset that I had to occupy, temporarily, the guest-room reserved for the bride's mother —but that is neither here nor there. In the case of the quotation alluded to, the guest had not been to the wedding yet, so it could not have disagreed with him.

The orchestra was just tuning up; the loud bassoon was getting the fog out of its throat, and the couplet becomes more cryptic as you look at it. It is really a sticker.

For my part, the question has been as clear as noonday since, in the still, sleepless, strange bed hours of my last week-end visit, 1 hit on a great luminous truth—one of those big elemental facts that can only be thought out at night and are completely gone in the morning. They are truly the touch-stones of life. My idea, which for the sake of clarity I will cast into philosophic form, is this: "There is something inherently odious in the guestiness of guest-hood." Try this over on your ukulele. Isn't it true, or isn't it? There is something inherently,—why, it is so obvious! It was simply the fact that he was a guest at the wedding that made that poor benighted old person suddenly attack himself.

IF my readers will kindly stop edging over toward the margin of the paper and trying to slip into the corset advertisement, I will try to make this clear, because I started this .iscussion and I've got to go through with it. Attention, please.

It is remarkable how a big thought clears up a lot of things. You have such a feeling of release and freedom and gladness, both pat and mat-ernal, when you realize that you have had a he-idea and that you are both of its parents.

Here is my big thought. The Guest suffers more than the Host—always! There, I have said it at last. After saying it, I have absolutely ceased to worry about many problems which used to perplex me. Take, for instance, the remark of the old Babylonian philosopher: "It is more blessed to give than to receive." I spent sleepless nights over that phrase. Casting aside things like measles or the bubonic plague, I couldn't think of a single object that I wouldn't rather receive than give. I began to wonder if I wasn't supremely selfish—some of my relatives had so implied—; then I became sceptical and treated the matter as primitive persiflage put over by a pre-historic Billy Sunday on the early Chaldeans. It was not until I hit on my deathless truth about hosts and guests that the sentence shone out like a Broadway chewing-gum sign.

The old philosopher who invented the line had been a guest somewhere. It was hospitality he was talking about. Can't you see the old boy from here? He had probably run down to the George W. Cecrop's for a week-end at their villa "Sandhurst," Sahara County, and the mosquitoes had got him, and he had broken his niblick against a pyramid and, once back in his Babylonian flat, overlooking the hang ing gardens of Skoop (dancing after 9:30), he had seized a cold-chisel and graved on tinwall his great touchstone of truth—"It is more blessed to give than to receive," expressed very neatly by three hens and a bottle-opener.

HOSPITALITY!

O! what a sermon could be preached on that text. "The wedding guest here ..." but need we go further. He was a guest ... assez; genug and basta.

Were you ever the recipient of a surpriseparty? It is one of the most terrible things in the world to see the expressions on the faces of the family of the deceived, and the surprisee herself, when the guests swoop in through the back door and begin to unlimber the sandwiches and spread mayonnaise on the family album. For they are not really guests, the) are hosts; uproariously gleeful and enjoying the party because they are giving it. "It is more blessed ..."

How perfectly the saying works out.

But to see hospitality in its most virulent form, you must go to the country, and when you go to the country you must make up your mind that you are really going. Do not haggle with the question. The time for side-stepping and note-writing is past. The date is fixed, your bag is at the station and Thompson, your host, has thrice interrupted the big deal you were about to close, by telephoning you to be sure to take the 'leven-'leven from the lower-level, until you have at last stamped out of the office leaving the big deal still ajar and wishing Thompson were in a level considerably lower than that of any earthly terminal.

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THOMPSON always meets you at the station, with a blonde depot wagon and three dogs. On the way to his farm he talks dogs—which you have always supposed existed only in two classes, watch and lap. Occasionally he addresses a word to a passing peasant in the Westchester wop-dialect, which he seems to speak fluently. "Have to, you know,—all the natives are Italians," he explains.

You feel, as a guest, fearfully sombre and drab beside Thompson, your host.

His face has a fine edam finish and he dresses the part of the country gentleman very carefully. Even when he goes to town he wears puttees and carries a whip as if he thought the stock-exchange were a place where farmers traded cows. You pass many early Italian gardens, manicured to a door-mat neatness, rivalled in antiquity only by the ancient Swedish trails which wind toward the station, worn by the generation of Swedish cooks and housemaids since the beginning of the great war. These Swedes are seldom used now, the fireless cooker having replaced the fired cook. Once out of your hired-mourner clothes and attired in your shredded wheat suit and the tie which you have been wondering when you could wear, you are Thompson's own. There is not a dull instant—for Thompson—in your visit, from the time you look out of the train window and see the posse of mosquitoes lined up to meet you until you drain the last drops of citronella and fall heavily on your couch.

But it is not my intention to horrify my readers with a recital of details with which they are doubtless familiar. The theme of guestiness is an old one and the pessimists have had their say about dinners and house parties.

And here is another thought.

Why doesn't some competent authority (Chautauqua could do it very well) or The Journal of Social Sciences,—or even a serious, matter-of-fact, statistical magazine like Vanity Fair,—why, I say, doesn't it collect, select, edit and expatiate upon, the horrors which the guest is bound to receive on any week-end visit from his host and hostess, and—contrariwise— the horrors which any host and hostess are bound to receive at the hands of their guests. Balance up the atrocities and the horrors and you will find that, as in all the give-and-take relations of social intercourse, the score at the end of the ninth inning is sure to be fifty-fifty.

From the hostess' end of it, consider merely a little item like towels. I have estimated that out of the 100 per cent supply of towels spread out for a house party on Friday afternoon, 25 percent of them—by Monday morning—will have been cut by razor blades, 25 percent of them will have been ruined by bootblacking, 25 percent by rouge and lip salve, and the balance packed away in the portmanteaus of the guests in order to protect their shoes, hair brushes and cologne bottles.

May I not hope, with my humble pen, to leave some imprint on the millions of potential guests who, according to Vanity Fair's circulation manager, always peruse these sacred columns? May I not induce them to think, not so much of themselves, as of those others; I mean their hosts? For the host's is always the bright side of the medal. For him the showing off of his little ones is ecstatic joy. Barbara's finger exercises are ravishing music, and Reginald's recitation is a masterpiece. The last little Reginald I heard reciting wore an elaborate dental plate from which there issued two long tusks and a series of whistling sounds, which sounds, his mother assured me, were Washington's farewell address to Congress. They, may well have been—and they sounded, to me at least, like an extremely long and an extremely sad farewell.

SO, when we go out to the country to spend the hind and front .ends of tv/o perfectly good weeks with some happy host or other, let us think of them and of their hostly happiness.

Isn't that better, now? Isn't it nicer to have happy thoughts rather than black disagreeable thoughts? I think I see my readers brush away from their foreheads those horrid frowns that were never meant to be there, to become again their own sweet and smiling selves. My boys and my girls, I like to call them!

Let that be our thought for the day.