ON UMBRELLA MORALS

A sharp shower came on as I walked along the Strand, but I did not put up my umbrella.  The truth is I couldn’t put up my umbrella.  The frame would not work for one thing, and if it had worked, I would not have put the thing up, for I would no more be seen under such a travesty of an umbrella than Falstaff would be seen marching through Coventry with his regiment of ragamuffins.  The fact is, the umbrella is not my umbrella at all.  It is the umbrella of some person who I hope will read these lines.  He has got my silk umbrella.  I have got the cotton one he left in exchange.  I imagine him flaunting along the Strand under my umbrella, and throwing a scornful glance at the fellow who was carrying his abomination and getting wet into the bargain.  I daresay the rascal chuckled as he eyed the said abomination.  “Ah,” he said gaily to himself, “I did you in that time, old boy.  I know that thing.  It won’t open for nuts.  And it folds up like a sack.  Now, this umbrella....”

But I leave him to his unrighteous communings.  He is one of those people who have what I may call an umbrella conscience.  You know the sort of person I mean.  He would never put his hand in another’s pocket, or forge a cheque or rob a till—­not even if he had the chance.  But he will swop umbrellas, or forget to return a book, or take a rise out of the railway company.  In fact he is a thoroughly honest man who allows his honesty the benefit of the doubt.  Perhaps he takes your umbrella at random from the barber’s stand.  He knows he can’t get a worse one than his own.  He may get a better.  He doesn’t look at it very closely until he is well on his way.  Then, “Dear me!  I’ve taken the wrong umbrella,” he says, with an air of surprise, for he likes really to feel that he has made a mistake.  “Ah, well, it’s no use going back now.  He’d be gone. And I’ve left him mine!”

It is thus that we play hide-and-seek with our own conscience.  It is not enough not to be found out by others; we refuse to be found out by ourselves.  Quite impeccable people, people who ordinarily seem unspotted from the world, are afflicted with umbrella morals.  It was a well-known preacher who was found dead in a first-class railway carriage with a third-class ticket in his pocket.

And as for books, who has any morals where they are concerned?  I remember some years ago the library of a famous divine and literary critic, who had died, being sold.  It was a splendid library of rare books, chiefly concerned with seventeenth-century writers, about whom he was a distinguished authority.  Multitudes of the books had the marks of libraries all over the country.  He had borrowed them and never found a convenient opportunity of returning them.  They clung to him like precedents to law.  Yet he was a holy man and preached admirable sermons, as I can bear witness.  And, if you press me on the point, I shall have to own that it is hard to part with a book you have come to love.