第28章 ON BEING SHY.(3)

Now,it is different with the young man who is not shy.He has temptations which his bashful brother never encounters.He looks around and everywhere sees roguish eyes and laughing lips.What more natural than that amid so many roguish ayes and laughing lips he should become confused and,forgetting for the moment which particular pair of roguish ayes and laughing lips it is that he belongs to,go off making love to the wrong set.The shy man,who never looks at anything but his own boots,sees not and is not tempted.Happy shy man!

Not but what the shy man himself would much rather not be happy in that way.He longs to "go it"with the others,and curses himself every day for not being able to.He will now and again,screwing up his courage by a tremendous effort,plunge into roguishness.But it is always a terrible fiasco,and after one or two feeble flounders he crawls out again,limp and pitiable.

I say "pitiable,"though I am afraid he never is pitied.There are certain misfortunes which,while inflicting a vast amount of suffering upon their victims,gain for them no sympathy.Losing an umbrella,falling in love,toothache,black eyes,and having your hat sat upon may be mentioned as a few examples,but the chief of them all is shyness.The shy man is regarded as an animate joke.His tortures are the sport of the drawing-room arena and are pointed out and discussed with much gusto.

"Look,"cry his tittering audience to each other;"he's blushing!""Just watch his legs,"says one.

"Do you notice how he is sitting?"adds another:"right on the edge of the chair.""Seems to have plenty of color,"sneers a military-looking gentleman.

"Pity he's got so many hands,"murmurs an elderly lady,with her own calmly folded on her lap."They quite confuse him.""A yard or two off his feet wouldn't be a disadvantage,"chimes in the comic man,"especially as he seems so anxious to hide them."And then another suggests that with such a voice he ought to have been a sea-captain.Some draw attention to the desperate way in which he is grasping his hat.Some comment upon his limited powers of conversation.Others remark upon the troublesome nature of his cough.

And so on,until his peculiarities and the company are both thoroughly exhausted.

His friends and relations make matters still more unpleasant for the poor boy (friends and relations are privileged to be more disagreeable than other people).Not content with making fun of him among themselves,they insist on his seeing the joke.They mimic and caricature him for his own edification.One,pretending to imitate him,goes outside and comes in again in a ludicrously nervous manner,explaining to him afterward that that is the way he--meaning the shy fellow--walks into a room;or,turning to him with "This is the way you shake hands,"proceeds to go through a comic pantomime with the rest of the room,taking hold of every one's hand as if it were a hot plate and flabbily dropping it again.And then they ask him why he blushes,and why he stammers,and why he always speaks in an almost inaudible tone,as if they thought he did it on purpose.Then one of them,sticking out his chest and strutting about the room like a pouter-pigeon,suggests quite seriously that that is the style he should adopt.The old man slaps him on the back and says:"Be bold,my boy.Don't be afraid of any one."The mother says,"Never do anything that you need be ashamed of,Algernon,and then you never need be ashamed of anything you do,"and,beaming mildly at him,seems surprised at the clearness of her own logic.The boys tell him that he's "worse than a girl,"and the girls repudiate the implied slur upon their sex by indignantly exclaiming that they are sure no girl would be half as bad.

They are quite right;no girl would be.There is no such thing as a shy woman,or,at all events,I have never come across one,and until I do I shall not believe in them.I know that the generally accepted belief is quite the reverse.All women are supposed to be like timid,startled fawns,blushing and casting down their gentle eyes when looked at and running away when spoken to;while we man are supposed to be a bold and rollicky lot,and the poor dear little women admire us for it,but are terribly afraid of us.It is a pretty theory,but,like most generally accepted theories,mere nonsense.The girl of twelve is self-contained and as cool as the proverbial cucumber,while her brother of twenty stammers and stutters by her side.A woman will enter a concert-room late,interrupt the performance,and disturb the whole audience without moving a hair,while her husband follows her,a crushed heap of apologizing misery.

The superior nerve of women in all matters connected with love,from the casting of the first sheep's-eye down to the end of the honeymoon,is too well acknowledged to need comment.Nor is the example a fair one to cite in the present instance,the positions not being equally balanced.Love is woman's business,and in "business"we all lay aside our natural weaknesses--the shyest man I ever knew was a photographic tout.