WHY did Mr Philip Chaser neigh as well as employ ordinary human speech? It was a matter for speculation among his large circle of friends and acquaintances. Was he born neighing, did he learn to neigh, or was neighing thrust upon him? Even his dear Millie had no exact knowledge in the matter. When she met and married him, it had already become an essential part of his personality.
There may have been an early stammer and a cure for stammering. Hold your breath for a time, inhale and then speak; the stammer went, and the neigh remained in its place. Observers found it was not an invariable feature of his discourse. He could forget to do it in moments of lively interest. He used it to capture attention. At social gatherings, used loudly, it was as good as the toast-master’s “Pray silence for — so and so.” And it gave him a rallying pause. It arrested interruption while he recovered a train of thought and it warned that something good was coming. He just did it; he never said anything about it. He had a profoundly secretive side to him.
We imagine a number of things about language and most of them are absurd. We imagine we are speaking plainly and clearly and we never do anything of the sort. We do not hear the sounds we make. We think we think and express ourselves. It is 6ur universal delusion. The speech of Homo Tewler, Homo sub-sapiens is still incapable of expressing reality, and his thought at its clearest is a net of misfitting symbols, analogies and metaphors, by which he hopes to ensnare the truth to his desires. If you will listen attentively, if you will read attentively, you will find everyone has protective and habitual mannerisms, makes the most transitory attempts at real expression and lapses into the tricks and devices of — say — something far more natural, a struggle for self-assertion.
It is only in the past few years that the sciences of Signifies and Semantics have opened men’s eyes to the immense inaccuracies and question-begging of language. People talk of pure English, perfect French, faultless German. This possible impeccability is an academic delusion. Only a schoolmaster can really believe in it. Every language changes from day to day and from hour to hour. I am told by those who are better able to judge that Evangeline’s transitory French was far from perfect, gradually it decayed in her memory and passed out of her mind, but it differed only in degree and not in kind from everyman’s French, including this, that and the other sort of Frenchman. Some day ingenious people may devise ways of bringing language which is not only the expression but the instrument of thought, nearer to verifiable reality — in the days when we Tewlers are breaking towards sapiens. But that is not yet.
Meanwhile Speech is mainly our weapon for self-assertion, and from that point of view there is nothing better in this story than Pip Chaser’s long, aggressive, commanding and yet apparently impersonal key. How feeble beside it was Edward Albert’s “Er — mean t’say.” How spurious those long records of empty phrasing with which the public speaker holds his audience in a state of passive nothingness while he recovers the straying argument that has slipped away from his wits!
The last thing a speaker or writer can perceive is his own limitation, and with that the critical hearer and reader must deal. In this story, subject to that qualification, there is a sustained attempt to render life, and particularly one specimen life and group of lives, as starkly as possible, and every individual is shown as truthfully as the writer’s ability permits. And they all, in addition to a general laxness, have their peculiar phrasing and mannerisms and patches of verbal shoddy. Every one of them and everyone you know.
So hey for the merry merry Best Man!
He spent the eve of the appointed day in a vigorous rehearsal of Edward Albert. He had thrown himself into the task with an ever-growing enthusiasm. He found something delightful in our hero which was evidently lost upon the rest of the world. And he loved management. He was born knowing, as his wife said, he had never ‘once looked back from that bright start, and he had an extraordinary detailed knowledge of where and when and how to buy the smartest things at the lowest price for every occasion.
“We’ll have this right to the last button, Teddy. We’ll get photographers from the society papers outside the church. I know a man. . . . How are they to know who we are and who we aren’t?. . . . Oh, you’ll be all right, if you don’t give way in the middle. Like — hey — shutting a knife, I mean.”
He paraded himself and Edward Albeit up and down the bedroom. He took his arm and spun him round to the looking-glass. “Look at us! Pip and Tewler, arrayed for the altar, What’s a funeral to this sort of thing? I ask you,”
“You know I didn’t count on all this.”
“Exactly. That’s where I come in. Now then, my orphan child, that speech — Just once more. Now then, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’”
He was very proud of the speech he had composed for his pupil. “None of your Unaccustomed-as-I-amto-public — speaking stuff for us. No. Something simple, neat and natural. Stand up to the table, so. Now then.”
Edward Albert posed himself at the table. “Lays and gentlemen,” he said and paused. “And you, my dear Evangeline —”
“Good!”
“Er. I never made a speech in my life. P’raps I never shall And now. My heart’s too full. Go. bless you all.”
“Excellent! Touching! Then you ............