Not that it Matters | Page 2

the rest of his life painting the Town
Council of Boffington in the manner of Herkomer. My canvases are
bigger now, but they are still impressionistic. "Pretty, but what is it?"
remains the obvious comment; one steps back a pace and saws the air
with the hand; "You see it better from here, my love," one says to one's
wife. But if there be one compositor not carried away by the mad rush
of life, who in a leisurely hour (the luncheon one, for instance) looks at
the beautiful words with the eye of an artist, not of a wage-earner, he, I
think, will be satisfied; he will be as glad as I am of my new nib. Does

it matter, then, what you who see only the printed word think of it?
A woman, who had studied what she called the science of calligraphy,
once offered to tell my character from my handwriting. I prepared a
special sample for her; it was full of sentences like "To be good is to be
happy," "Faith is the lode- star of life," "We should always be kind to
animals," and so on. I wanted her to do her best. She gave the morning
to it, and told me at lunch that I was "synthetic." Probably you think
that the compositor has failed me here and printed "synthetic" when I
wrote "sympathetic." In just this way I misunderstood my calligraphist
at first, and I looked as sympathetic as I could. However, she repeated
"synthetic," so that there could be no mistake. I begged her to tell me
more, for I had thought that every letter would reveal a secret, but all
she would add was "and not analytic." I went about for the rest of the
day saying proudly to myself "I am synthetic! I am synthetic! I am
synthetic!" and then I would add regretfully, "Alas, I am not analytic!"
I had no idea what it meant.
And how do you think she had deduced my syntheticness? Simply from
the fact that, to save time, I join some of my words together. That isn't
being synthetic, it is being in a hurry. What she should have said was,
"You are a busy man; your life is one constant whirl; and probably you
are of excellent moral character and kind to animals." Then one would
feel that one did not write in vain.
My pen is getting tired; it has lost its first fair youth. However, I can
still go on. I was at school with a boy whose uncle made nibs. If you
detect traces of erudition in this article, of which any decent man might
be expected to be innocent, I owe it to that boy. He once told me how
many nibs his uncle made in a year; luckily I have forgotten.
Thousands, probably. Every term that boy came back with a hundred of
them; one expected him to be very busy. After all, if you haven't the
brains or the inclination to work, it is something to have the nibs. These
nibs, however, were put to better uses. There is a game you can play
with them; you flick your nib against the other boy's nib, and if a lucky
shot puts the head of yours under his, then a sharp tap capsizes him,
and you have a hundred and one in your collection. There is a good
deal of strategy in the game (whose finer points I have now forgotten),
and I have no doubt that they play it at the Admiralty in the off season.
Another game was to put a clean nib in your pen, place it lightly

against the cheek of a boy whose head was turned away from you, and
then call him suddenly. As Kipling says, we are the only really
humorous race. This boy's uncle died a year or two later and left about
œ80,000, but none of it to his nephew. Of course, he had had the nibs
every term. One mustn't forget that.
The nib I write this with is called the "Canadian Quill"; made, I
suppose, from some steel goose which flourishes across the seas, and
which Canadian housewives have to explain to their husbands every
Michaelmas. Well, it has seen me to the end of what I wanted to say--if
indeed I wanted to say anything. For it was enough for me this morning
just to write; with spring coming in through the open windows and my
good Canadian quill in my hand, I could have copied out a directory.
That is the real pleasure of writing.

Acacia Road

Of course there are disadvantages of suburban life. In the fourth act of
the play there may be a moment when the fate of the erring wife hangs