VII

THE PRACTICAL JOKE 

IT WAS not, I fear, a very edifying experience, but it was enough to set me thinking. I was walking home the other evening just as dusk was falling. I suddenly came upon a lady evidently searching for something. When I first saw her, she was bending down, closely scrutinizing the pavement. As I drew nearer, she turned from her inspection of the footpath and carefully examined the contents of the little black bag that hung from her wrist. She was in obvious perplexity. I paused and inquired if I could be of any assistance to her. She was just explaining that she distinctly heard something drop, when I detected a suspicious rustle and a smothered chuckle on the other side of the hedge. Looking over the gate, I discovered the crouching forms of three boys fumbling with a length of string. On the appearance of my face above the palings they sprang up, burst into peals of laughter, and scampered off as fast as their legs would carry them. The lady blushed; bowed ; she went one way and I another ; and thus the incident closed. But, as I have said, it set me thinking. 

For the practical joke takes some explaining. It is all very well to walk on up the street, wearing a benevolent and condescending smile, and saying to oneself, ‘Boys will be boys.’ That is merely a cowardly way of begging an awkward question. Indeed, it is worse than that. It is a tacit defence of the practical joke. It is a recognition of the place of the practical joke in the eternal scheme of things. Boys will be boys, indeed! And what would you have boys to be but boys? And if boys do but reveal their essential boyishness by perpetrating the practical joke, then, quite obviously, the practical joke is a perfectly natural and perfectly healthy symptom. Its absence, in that case, would be matter for disquietude and alarm. It would be as though the teeth had failed to appear or the hair to grow. The development of teeth and the production of hair are natural and wholesome processes. You do not blame a boy for passing through these stages. They are incidental to him. And if you admit that the practical joke is equally incidental, and that he perpetrates it just because ‘boys will be boys,’ have you not put the practical joke on precisely the same plane as the teeth and the hair? 

It seems to me, therefore, that, if you admit as much as you are in the habit of admitting, you set the highest sanction upon the practical joke, and firmly establish it as a constituent part of the furniture of the solar system. You confess that the practical joker is, like Yum Yum, a child of Nature, and takes after his mother. Now is that true? Does Nature indulge in such sport at our expense ? And if, shocked at the bare suggestion, you tender a bald and unqualified negative in reply, you must be prepared to define the precise distinction between the freaks and pranks of the ordinary jester and those tricks and illusions by means of which Nature so often makes us her victims. To be perfectly satisfactory, the difference must be, not merely a distinction in degree, but a distinction in kind. The jokes of the schoolboy must be seen to fall naturally into one category; the deceptions of Nature must be seen to fall just as naturally into quite another. It is not enough to say that the mysterious phenomena in the natural world are capable, on investigation, of scientific explanation. The impositions inflicted upon us on the first of April are capable, on investigation, of being accounted for in the same way. The essential thing about the practical joke is that it has no other motive but the motive of mischief. If the practical joker is to be deprived of his plea that, being the child of Nature, he but inherits from her his prankish propensities, it must be shown that Nature never stoops to become purely mischievous. 

Now can such a defence be established? Or must we recognize the practical joke as one of the standard items in the programme of the universe ? Is there not a certain elfishness in Nature? Who that has watched the gambols and antics of a pair of kittens can have failed to observe the one’s enjoyment of the other’s discomfiture? Who that has kept both a dog and a cat has not marked the smug satisfaction of Carlo when he has led poor puss into an awkward scrape? And is not the monkey an incorrigible practical joker? What are we to say of the story of the cat and the chestnuts? Do the Brer Rabbit stories — most of them stories of practical jokes — derive none of their piquancy from their fidelity to Nature ? Is “The Jackdaw of Rheims” purely a freak of the poet’s fancy ? 

The priests with awe,
As such freaks they saw,
Said : ‘The devil must be in that tittle jackdaw.’

It is difficult to see, as long as Nature expresses herself in the shape of kittens and monkeys, parrots and jackdaws, how she can be entirely acquitted of an element of roguishness. And then, as we have seen, there is the boy ; and the boy is at least as much the product of Nature as the monkey or the jack-daw. And what about the mirage? The Press Association, in its detailed account of the fighting in Mesopotamia, reported that in the first battle between the Turks and the British force marching to the relief of Kut our troops found themselves seriously confused by a mirage, the worst effect of which was to prevent the artillery from properly covering the advance of the infantry. ‘It seems odd,’ remarks the Manchester Guardian, ‘to read of the operations of a modern army being embarrassed by so old a practical joke on the part of Nature as a mirage.’ But there you are! ‘So old a practical joke on the part of Nature!’ What are we to make of that ? Is there not an irresistible analogy between the chimera that mocks the landscape and the trickery of the schoolboy ? 

The greatest story in our literature of a practical joke is the ghost episode in The Channings. Mrs. Henry Wood’s readers can never forget her vivid description of the dark night ; the timid boy ; the silent graves ; the weird sense of apprehension ; the mortal agony of fear. And then the hideous apparition ; the wild scream of terror ; the frantic rash, on and on, until ‘ the unhappy boy plunged into the river, another and a last wild cry escaping him as the waters closed over his head.’ Is there anything comparable with this in the realm of natural phenomena? I think there is. I shall never forget that, one day, many years ago, a doctor in New Zealand drove me down to see the harbour. As soon as we reached the bustling wharves a great steamer swung from her moorings and put out to sea. But right in the harbour’s mouth there stood a massive, rocky island. Towards this rugged isle the great ship made her way, as though bent on self-destruction. I expected every moment to see her change her course either to port or to starboard, and seek one of the channels between the island and the shore. But, to my horror, she held desperately on. I thought the captain must have lost his reason ; I held my breath in terrified anticipation, listening for, and yet dreading, the inevitable crash. And just as my heart was standing still with sheer affright, the ship sailed clean through the island as if it were not there! I turned in bewilderment to the doctor sitting in the car beside me, whose very presence I had forgotten during those tense, exciting moments. He was smiling serenely. ‘I thought you would be interested in seeing the mirage,’ he said. Is there not a close resemblance between the admixture of tragedy and comedy in the schoolboy prank and in the freak of Nature ? 

Now this brings us to the threshold of the vast realm of natural illusion. It is like entering the magician’s hall of mystery. There is some satisfaction for prosaic adults in the reflection that, if childhood is specially the age of impishness, it is also specially the age of victimization. Nature tricks the child into believing a thousand absurdities. When I was a small boy, Nature was always playing her pranks upon me. She told me that the earth was standing still and the sun and stars all moving ; and for a long time I believed her. I was one day invited to go fishing with a Mend. As I sat in the railway train, Nature pointed out to me that all the trees and telegraph-posts were flying past me at a prodigious pace. And for a minute or two I believed her. During that hot summer’s afternoon I let the end of my beautiful new fishing-rod fall in the stream. ‘Ah!’ cried Nature, ‘now see what you have done I You have bent it!’ It really looked like it, and I was terribly frightened. I pulled it out in alarm to see if I could straighten it ; but it was not bent at all ; Nature was at her tricks again I She was just frightening me for fun. 

I have read of a Prince of Siam who was being entertained at the court of Holland. The gentlemen in attendance there told the Prince all kinds of wondrous tales, only some of which contained any considerable spice of truth. The Prince believed every word. But at last they told him that, at one season of the year, the water in Holland became solid, and could be carried about in blocks. The Prince turned away in disgust. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I perceive that you are fooling me!’ Why, unless Nature be fond of a practical joke, does she love to make the truth look so false, and the false look so true ? 

Of late years this matter has invaded a very sombre realm. It has become the key-note of philosophy and even of ethics. Berkeley held that matter itself is all an illusion, a mirage, a practical joke. ‘I observed to Dr. Johnson,’ says Boswell, ‘that, though we are satisfied this doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which the doctor answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it. ‘I refute it thus!’ he said, ‘Quite recently Bergson has been telling us that everything — time, space, and all beside — is merely an illusion, a mirage, a practical joke. That is as it may be ; I cannot discuss the matter now. But the inquiry that awaits the investigator of to-morrow is concerned with the why and the wherefore of it all. Why is the illusion so like the reality ? Why is the false so like the true? Why is the transitory so much more realistic than the eternal ? 

I remember visiting, in Westminster Abbey, the tomb of John Gay, the seventeenth-century poet. On his monument I read the couplet which he himself composed and ordered to be inscribed upon his grave : Life is a jest, and all things show it; I thought so once, and now I know it. It is not true, of course ; and yet it sometimes looks very like it, just as it looked for awhile as if my lovely fishing-rod was bent. What had really happened was that, like me, poor John Gay had been deceived by the trickery of appearances. 

Half the tragedies of life come along this line. We are too easily taken in. I was standing not long ago on the deck of a ship lying outside a certain harbour. We were fogbound. The heads were scarcely a mile away, yet we could see no glimpse of land. Long grey banks of mist lay between us and the coast. ‘Suppose,’ I said to myself, ‘suppose a visitor from Mars were suddenly to alight upon this deck, could I convince him that those long white hills are really unsubstantial and transitory, and that the mountains behind, which are now invisible, are the real abiding things?’ I doubt it. But we are all visitors from another world; and we are all being hoodwinked by the tricks and illusions of this one. Time seems so real and eternity so shadowy, the world is so loud and the world-to-come so silent, that we jump to the conclusion that things are what they seem. Paul knew better. No practical joke deceived him. ‘We look,’ says he, ‘not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.’ 

Keen-eyed himself, Paul warned simpler souls against being victimized. ‘Be not tricked,’ he says again and again. It is one of his favourite exhortations. For, like the schoolboy ghost in The Channings, “Satan masquerades” — I quote from Dr. Moffatt’s translation — ‘Satan masquerades as an angel of light.’ By way of a practical joke a schoolboy masquerades as a ghost, and poor Charlie Channing is frightened to death. Satan masquerades as an angel! Wrong tricks itself out as Right! Evil pretends to be Good! Heaven forbid that I should be duped by such a silly ruse as that!