BAGARROW

Frankly, I detest this Bagarrow.  Yet it is quite generally conceded that Bagarrow is a very well-meaning fellow.  But the trouble is to understand him.  To do that I have been at some pains, and yet I am still a mere theorist.  An anthropometric estimate of the man fails to reveal any reason for the distinction of my aversion.  He is of passable height, breadth, and density, and, save for a certain complacency of expression, I find no salient objection in his face.  He has bluish eyes and a whitish skin, and average-coloured hair—­none of them distinctly indictable possessions.  It is something in his interior and unseen mechanism, I think, that must be wrong; some internal lesion that finds expression in his acts.

His mental operations, indeed, were at first as inconceivable to me as a crab’s or a cockchafer’s.  That is where all the trouble came in.  For that reason alone they fascinated me and aggrieved me.  From the conditions of our acquaintance—­we were colleagues—­I had to study him with some thoroughness, observing him under these circumstances and those.  I have, by the bye, sometimes wondered idly how he would react to alcohol—­a fluid he avoids.  It would, I am sure, be an entirely novel and remarkable kind of Drunk, and I am also certain it would be an offensive one.  But I can’t imagine it; I have no data.  I could as soon evolve from my inner consciousness an intoxicated giraffe.  But, as I say, this interesting experience has hitherto been denied me.

Now my theory of Bagarrow is this, that he has a kind of disease in his ideals, some interruption of nutrition that has left them small and emasculate.  He aims, it appears, at a state called “Really Nice” or the “True Gentleman,” the outward and visible signs of which are a conspicuous quietness of costume, gloves in all weathers, and a tightly-rolled umbrella.  But coupled in some way with this is a queer smack of the propagandist, a kind of dwarfed prophetic passion.  That is the particular oddness of him.  He displays a timid yet persistent desire to foist this True Gentleman of his upon an unwilling world, to make you Really Nice after his own pattern.  I always suspect him of trying to convert me by stealth when I am not looking.

So far as I can see, Bagarrow’s conception of this True Gentleman of his is at best a compromise, mainly holiness, but a tinted kind of holiness—­goodness in clean cuffs and with something neat in ties.  He renounces the flesh and the devil willingly enough, but he wants to keep up a decent appearance.  Now a stark saint I can find sympathy for.  I respect your prophet unkempt and in a hair shirt denouncing Sin—­and mundane affairs in general—­with hoarse passion and a fiery hate.  I would not go for my holidays with nor make a domestic pet of such a man, but I respect him.  But Bagarrow’s pose is different.  Bagarrow would call that carrying things to extremes.  His is an unobtrusive virtue, a compromising dissent, inaggressive aggressions on sin.  So I take it.  And at times he puts it to you in a drawling argument, a stream of Bagarrowisms, until you have to hurt his feelings—­happily he is always getting his feelings hurt—­just to stop the flow of him.