The feeling of irritation in its earliest form once overtook a little girl whose mother had enforced a wholesome bit of discipline. In a great state of wrath the little girl went to her room, got out a large sheet of paper, and ruled it heavily down the middle. Then she headed one column “People I Like,” and crowded that half of the sheet with the names of all her acquaintances. The other half of the page she headed “People I Don't Like,” and in that column listed one word only—“Mama.” This done, she locked the grim document in her safe-deposit box, and hid the key.That glowering deed was the very ritual of irritation. The feeling of irritation is not merely one of heat; it is a tall wave of violent dislike that goes mounting up our blood. When we have it, it feels permanent. Our friend is not what we thought he was—our family is not what it should be—our job is a failure—we have placed our affections in the wrong quarter. When young politicians have this feeling, they bolt the ticket; when young employees have it, they resign. The first time when young married people have it, they think that love is dead. If they have too much wealth and leisure, they fly apart and eventually get a decree. But in households where the budget does not cover alimony, they commonly stay together and see for themselves how the wave of wrath goes down. The material inconveniences of resignations, abscondings, law-suits, and the like have been a great safeguard in many a career. Nothing in Barrie's plays is more subtle than the perfect moment when the young couple decide to postpone separation until the laundry comes home.

It is not necessary to be a “temperamental” person or a fire-eater of any sort in order to know how it feels to be irritated—and irritating. The gentlest folk are capable of both sensations. Any one who has seen a lovely lady deliberately stir up strife in the bosom of a genial story-teller, by correcting his facts for him and exposing his fictions, will remember the tones of restrained choler with which the merry tale progressed. Who has not remarked to a kind relative, “Well, if you know so much about it, why don't you tell it yourself?”

There is no ratio or proportion at all between the cause of irritation and the ensuing state of mind. In our moments of ferment we lose the faculty of discrimination. We hardly ever refer our exasperation to the trivial detail that brought it on. We feel that the detail is simply an indication of the great flaws in the whole situation. We have a crow to pluck, not only with our friend, but—to use the words of Quiller-Couch—with everything that appertains to that potentate.

For example, suppose that we are at loggerheads with a fellow-member of a public-welfare committee. He opposes a measure that we endorse. He will not see reason. We therefore refer him to his class: he is a typical politician, a single-track mind, a combination of Mugwump and Boss Tweed. We ourselves, meanwhile, are a blend of Martin Luther, John Huss, and the prophet Isaiah, with tongs from the altar.

Or perhaps we are irritated with a colleague on a teaching-staff after the events of a varied day. Irrelevant matters have happened all the morning in amazing succession: an itinerant janitor filling inkwells; an inkwell turning turtle—blotters rushed to flood-sufferers; an electrician with tall step-ladder and scaling-irons to repair the electric clock; a fire-drill in examination period; one too many revolutions of the pencil-sharpener; one too many patriotic “drives” involving the care of public moneys kept in a candy-box. And now our zealous academic friend calls an unexpected committee meeting to tabulate the results of intelligence-tests.

We are in no mood for intelligence-tests. We object. He persists. We take umbrage. He still calls the meeting. Then, up rears the wave of dislike and irritation, not at the details that have brought us to our crusty state—not dislike of ink and electricity and patriotism and intelligence—but dislike of our friend and of the Art of Teaching that he represents. The trouble with our friend, we decide, is his academic environment. He is over-educated—attenuated; a Brahmin. Nobody in touch with Real Life could be so thoroughly a mule and an opinionist. Better get out of this ultra-civilized atmosphere before our own beautiful catholicity of thought is cramped, crippled, like his. At these moments we do not stop to remember that people are opinionated also on the island of Yap.

Most frequently of all, we apply our dudgeon to the kind of community in which we live. We are nettled at a bit of criticism that has reached our ears. Instantly we say cutting things about the narrow ways of a small community, with page-references to “Main Street” and the Five Towns. We forget that our friends in great cities might be quite as chatty. Margot Asquith lives and thrives in crowds.

We refer our irritation, also, to types. Any skirmish in a women's organization is referred to women and their catty ways. Any Church or Red Cross breeze is an example of the captious temper of the godly. All friction between soldiers of different nations is a sign of Race Antagonism; the French are not what we had inferred from Lafayette.

In short, the whole history and literature of dissension shows that people have always tried to make their irritations prove something about certain types, or situations, or nations, or communities. Whereas the one thing that has been eternally proved is the fact that human beings are irritable.

If we accept that fact as a normal thing, we find ourselves ready for one more great truth. Violent irritation produced on small means is a deeply human thing, a delicately unbalanced thing, something to reckon with, and something from which we eventually recover on certain ancient and well-recognized lines. When our feeling is at its height, we are ready to throw away anything, smash anything, burn all bridges. Nothing is too valuable to cast into the tall flame of our everlasting bonfire. This sounds exaggerated. Emotion remembered in tranquillity is a pallid thing, indeed. But it is hot enough at the time. The whole range of sensation and emotion may be travelled in an hour, at a pace incredible—a sort of round-trip survey of the soul.

The father of a large family sat in church at one end of a long pew. His wife sat at the other end of the pew, with a row of sons, daughters, and guests ranged in the space between. Near the close of the sermon one morning, the father glanced down the line, gazed for a horrified moment at his eldest daughter, Kate, got out his pencil, wrote a few words on a scrap of paper, put the paper into his hat, and passed the hat down the line. As the hat went from hand to hand, each member of the family peered in, read the message, glanced at Kate, and began to shake as inconspicuously as is ever possible in an open pew. Kate, absorbed in the sermon, was startled by a nudge from her brother, who offered her the hat, with note enclosed. She looked in and read, “Tell Kate that her mouth is partly open.”

Kate remembered that it must have been. The whole pew was quivering with seven concentrated efforts at self-control.

Now, one would think that a moment like this would be jolly even for the cause of laughter in others. But it was not. Kate knew that they had been laughing before the note reached her, and she was hurt. If they loved her as she loved them, they would not want to laugh. She set her jaw like iron, and looked straight ahead. This started them all off again. With the instinct of a well-trained elder sister, she knew that if she wanted any peace she ought to turn and smile and nod cordially all down the row, as at a reception. But it was too late for that. She had taken the proud line, and she would follow it.

As her expression grew more austere, the boys grew more convulsed. Aloof now, cut off from her kin entirely, she sat seething. Floods of scarlet anger drowned the sermon's end. The closing hymn was given out, but she declined the offered half of her brother's hymnal. “Tell Kate she can open it now,” telegraphed one of the boys as the congregation began to sing. Here was Kate's chance to unbend and join the group and nod and smile again, but she was too far gone. She received the message with lifted eyebrows, and stood with cold pure profile averted until after the benediction. Then she turned away from her reeling family, and walked off in a white heat. Her anger was not at her father whose note caused the stir. She had no resentment toward him at all. If one's mouth is open, one would wish to be advised of the fact. Her feeling was the mighty wrath of the person who has been laughed at before being told the joke. Unwilling to face her family, she went up to take dinner at her grandmother's house, that refuge for all broken hearts.

After dinner, Kate looked out of the window and saw her family coming up the drive. They filed into the house and gathered in a group. “I think,” said one of the boys, “that in the cause of friendship we owe Kate an apology.”

The grand manner of formal apology from one's relatives is the most disarming thing in the world. Friendly conversation flowed back into the normal at once. But it was years before it was quite safe for Kate to rest her chin on her hand in church.Very often our most genuine irritations appear unreasonable to our friends. For instance, why should people object to being called by each other's names? Two brilliant young lawyers once developed animosity against each other because their names Stacey and Stanton were constantly interchanged. Children suffer from this sort of thing continually; grown people tend to confuse brothers and to call them by one another's names promiscuously. We may love our brother tenderly, and yet not like to be confounded with him. Even parents sometimes make slips. The smallest boy in a lively family had a mother who used to call the roll of all her children's names, absent-mindedly, before she hit upon the right one. Consequently, the smallest boy learned to respond to the names George, Alice, Christine, and Amos. But the thing had happened to him once too often. One morning he came down to breakfast with a large square of cardboard pinned to his bosom; and on the placard in large letters was printed the word “Henry.” Rather go through life with a tag around his neck than be called Alice any more.

All these capricious facts about irritability rather explode the old adage that it takes two to make a quarrel. If we are really on the rampage, the other person may be a perfect pacifist and still call down our ire. We can make the hot-foot excursion to the heights of madness, for instance, when a friend with whom we are arguing whistles softly away to himself while we talk. Even worse is the person who sings a gay little aria after we are through. In the presence of such people, we feel like the college girl who became annoyed with her room-mate, and, reflecting prudently upon the inconveniences of open war, rushed out of the room and down the stairs to relieve her feelings by slamming the front door. She tore open the great door with violent hands, braced it wide, and flung it together with all her might. But there was no crash. It was the kind of door that shuts with an air-valve, and it closed gradually, tranquilly, like velvet; a perfect lady of a door. People who sing and hum and whistle softly to themselves while we rage, are like that door.

Knowing that human beings are occasionally irritable, that they can recover from their irritation, and that we can also recover from ours, why is it that we ever hold resentment long? Some people, like soap-stones, hold their heat longer than others; but the mildest of us, even after we have quite cooled off, sometimes find ourselves warming up intermittently at the mere memory of the fray. We are like the old lady who said that she could forgive and forget, but she couldn't help thinking about it. We love our friend as much as ever, but one or two of the things he said to us do stay in mind. The dumb animals have an immense advantage over us in this regard. They may be able to communicate, but their language has presumably fewer descriptive adjectives than ours. Words spoken in the height of irritation are easily memorized. They have an epigrammatic swing, and a racy Anglo-Saxon flavor all their own. Unless we are ready to discount them entirely, they come into our minds in our pleasantest moods, checking our impulses of affection, and stiffening our cordial ways.

On this account, the very proud and the very young sometimes let a passing rancor estrange a friend. When we are young, and fresh from much novel-reading, we are likely to think of love as a frail and perishable treasure—something like a rare vase, delicate, and perfect as it stands. One crash destroys it forever. But love that involves the years is not a frail and finished crystal. It is a growing thing. It is not even a simple growing thing, like a tree. A really durable friendship is a varied homelike country full of growing things. We cannot destroy it and throw it away. We can even have a crackling bonfire there without burning up the world. Fire is dangerous, but not final.

Of course, it is in our power to let a single conflagration spoil all our love, if we burn the field all over and sow it with salt, and refuse to go there ever again. But after the fires have gone down on the waste tract, the stars wheel over and the quiet moon comes out—and forever afterwards we have to skirt hastily around that territory in our thought. It is still there, the place that once was home.

Perhaps it is trifling and perverse to be harking back to nature and to childhood for parables. But sometimes there is reassurance in the simplest things. The real war-god in our own family was Geoffrey, and Barbara was his prophet. Many a doughty battle they waged when they both happened to be in the mood. Whenever Barbara wanted a little peace, she used to take her dolls to the attic, saying to our mother as she went, “K. G.” This meant, “Keep Geoffrey.” But one time Barbara was very ill. Geoffrey was afraid that she was going to die, and showered her with attentions assiduously. He even gathered flowers for her every day. The trained nurse was much impressed. One afternoon, when the crisis was passed, the nurse told Geoffrey that she thought that he was very sweet, indeed, to his little sick sister. Geoffrey was squatting on the arm of the sofa, watching Barbara with speculative eye. He considered this new light on his character for a moment, and then remarked, “Well, you just wait until she gets her strength.”

We live in cantankerous days. Anybody who has enough energy to do anything particular in the world has more or less difficulty in getting on with people. Unless he chooses to take his dolls to the attic, he is in for occasional criticisms, laughter, interruptions, and the experience of being called by names that are not his own. The world sends flowers to the dying, but not to people when they get their strength. It is the very rare person, indeed, who goes through life with nothing to ruffle him at all.In moments of irritation at all this, we unconsciously divide the world into two columns: people who agree with us and people who do not; “People I Like,” and “People I Don't Like.” Instinctively we make the lists, and file them away. If we could lay hands on the ghostly files of twenty years and scan them through, we should find that the black-lists were not a catalogue of permanent and bitter hatreds, but a sort of Friendship Calendar. Many of our collisions, after all, were with the people to whom we came most near.

Almost every one wants to be easy to get along with. Some of us find it hard. In those discouraging moments when we have proved obnoxious to our friends, we are inclined to feel that a policy of isolation would be the most attractive thing in the world. But there are practical drawbacks even to isolation.

A blizzard had once drifted all the streets of our town. Our mother, with the true pioneering spirit, decided that she was going out. Our father was urging her to wait until the streets were cleared.

“Now, Endicott,” said our mother reasonably, “the snow-plough has been down, and there's a path.”

“But,” persisted Father, “the wind has drifted it all in again.” He paused while she put on her hat, and then he added earnestly, “You don't know how windy and drifted it really is. I just saw Mrs. Muldoon coming down the street, and she was going along single file, and making hard work of it too.”The family was immensely taken with the picture of Mrs. Muldoon's ample figure going downtown in single-file formation; but, in spite of the jeers of his audience, our father still insisted that Mrs. Muldoon was going single file, and that she was making hard work of it at that.

Now and then there is an extreme individualist who yearns to go through life absolutely unmolested, single file. He is impatient of collisions, and collisions certainly do occur through one's proximity to one's kind. But even the most arrant individualist can hardly go single file all by himself—not without making hard work of it, at least. And even if such a thing were possible it would not be a natural or kindly way of life. Our hardy race has always valued the strength that comes from contacts of every sort and kind. We therefore keep up the hearty old custom of going through life in groups of families and associates and friends—even though, inadvertently, we sometimes do collide.

THE END

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.

Transcriber's Note:

The following is a list of corrections made to the original. The first passage is the original passage, the second the corrected one.

• Page 49:
  up, and his charger backed precipitatly.
  up, and his charger backed precipitately.