The Poor Mouth_ A Bad Story About the Hard Life - Flann O'Brien [31]
sophisticated and genial people, all well-to-do, impatient with snivellers, sneaks and politicians on the make; not really a Utopia but a society in which all unnecessary wrongs, failures, and misbehaviours are removed. The simplest way to attack this problem is to strike at the cause, which is ignorance and non-education, or miseducation Every day you meet people going around with two heads. They are completely puzzled by life, they understand practically nothing and are certain of only one thing—that they are going to die. I am not going to go so far as to contradict them in that but I believe I can suggest to them a few good ways of filling, up the interval. A week ago I met a nice class of a negro, apparently a seaman, in a pub in Tower Bridge Road. He was a gloomy character at first but in three meetings I taught him to play chess. Now he is delighted with himself and thinks he is a witch-doctor. I also had a night’s drinking with one of the thousands of ladies who flood the streets here. She wanted me to go with her but no fear. By her accent I knew she was Irish; so she was, Castleconnell on the Shannon. Same old story about a job as a maid, a tyrannical mistress and a young pup of a son that started pulling her about when she was making the beds. She came to the conclusion that if that sort of thing was the custom of the country, she might as well get paid for it. There is some logic in her argument but it is painfully clear that she knows next to nothing about business. I talked to her about her mother and the green hills of Erin and in no time I had her sniffling, though maybe it was the gin. Those girls are very fond of that stuff. But don’t get the impression that I’m a preacher saving souls every night by infesting the pubs. It’s only an odd night I do that, and when I’m on my own. I’m far too busy for that sort of gallivanting. The total staff in the office just now is four—a typist, a clerk and One Other. The One Other is my partner, who has put a decent share of spondulics into the venture. With his money and my brains, I do not see what there is to stop us. Better still, he has a well-to-do mother who lives in a grand house in Hampstead. He does not live with her or in fact get on with her too well, apparently because she made him spend two years at Oxford when he was younger. He says he was horrified by that place. He signs his name M. B. Barnes. When I looked for his Christian name—and you can’t have a partner in a new resounding enterprise without using his Christian name, even when reprimanding or insulting him—I found that his full name was Milton Byron Barnes. Maybe this got him jeered at by the Oxford ignoramuses and made him sour for life. He is a gloomy type but knows what work is; and he knows how to talk to people. He is not a poet, of course, but is convinced that his father, long dead, thought he was a poet and that he owed it to the masters of the past to commemorate their genius by saddling his unfortunate son with their names. At the moment we are nursing a slight difference between us. He feels one of the fields we must cover is advertising, newspaper and magazine and otherwise. He is convinced that this is the coming thing and keeps quoting High o’er the fence leaps Sunny Jim, FORCE is the food that raises him. He is right that there is big money to be made there but we have not got the captial to wade in—yet. I keep telling him more satisfaction and happiness can be achieved by teaching 10,000 Englishmen to play billiards properly at four guineas for four lessons than by grappling and grovelling in this underground of publicity but his answer is that he does not want to make anybody happy and certainly doesn’t want to be happy himself; he just wants to make a lot of money. I find that mentality a bit cynical, but I’m sure I’ll bring him round to my own sound views in good time. We had dinner with his old lady twice and I found her quite good and intelligent. I feel it will not be long until she becomes a patron of our Academy and help it along at important stages with infusions of the