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'I ought to have told Soames, he thought, 'that I think him comic. Ah! but he's tragic, too! Was there anything, indeed, more tragic in the world than a man enslaved by his own possessive instinct, who couldn't see the sky for it, or even enter fully into what another person felt!
If you have ever lived with a clock afflicted with that perversity, you know how vexing it is such a stoppage. I was vexed with Marlow. He was smiling faintly while I waited. He even laughed a little. And then I said acidly: "Am I to understand that you have ferreted out something comic in the history of Flora de Barral?" "Comic!" he exclaimed. "No!
I watched them as they retreated over the plain to their deserted homes, and I took a coldly polite farewell of the Koordi. The looks of astonishment of the Koordi's troops as I passed through their camp were almost comic.
A year ago, in the comic papers, between John Bull and Uncle Sam, it was not Uncle Sam who got the worst of it. Then the war came and with it, in the feeling toward ourselves, a complete change. A year ago we were almost one of the Allies, much more popular than Italians, more sympathetic than the English. To-day we are regarded, not with hostility, but with amazed contempt.
Here begins one of those unseen comedies, played in the secret regions of the consciousness between two beings of whom one will be the dupe of the other, though it keeps on this side of wickedness; one of those dark and comic dramas to which that of Tartuffe is mere child's play, dramas that do not enter the scenic domain, although they are natural, conceivable, and even justifiable by necessity; dramas which may be characterized as not vice, only the other side of it.
You will have noticed the disposition of common-sense, under pressure of some pertinacious piece of light-headedness, to grow impatient and angry. That is a sign of the absence, or at least of the dormancy, of the Comic idea.
But legislation which laid stress not on the indecorum but on the accessibility to the young, which hammered with every clause upon that note, is an altogether different matter. We want to make the pantomime writer, the proprietor of the penny "comic," the billsticker, and the music-hall artist extremely careful, punctiliously clean, but we do not want, for example, to pester Mr. Thomas Hardy.
"Out of the question," says the coroner. "You have heard the boy. 'Can't exactly say' won't do, you know. We can't take THAT in a court of justice, gentlemen. It's terrible depravity. Put the boy aside." Boy put aside, to the great edification of the audience, especially of Little Swills, the comic vocalist. Now. Is there any other witness? No other witness. Very well, gentlemen!
We followed the advice with great pleasure. The next day, the Provencal, rather crestfallen, came to share my dinner, and I gave him a friendly welcome. Thus was ended that comic adventure, to the great satisfaction of M. de la Haye.
To the unprejudiced observer who reads the comic papers and goes to afternoon receptions, it would seem that each woman should have several husbands, to pay her bills and see that she is suitably escorted to various social affairs. If a woman had seven husbands, for instance, it is possible that some one of them would be willing to take her out whenever she wanted to go.
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