How to be poor

was deeply hurt. He did not invite
me at all and never spoke to me again.
    It was years afterwards that I met
his wife in someone else’s house. I thought she, too, would turn away from me
in disgust but she greeted me warmly.
    “I was delighted by your attitude.
You were the first and the last person to speak out. It was only after you said
that, that I myself dared to confess to myself — and my husband — that I
detested those royal visits. I was not allowed to speak freely in my own house,
I had to wait until I was spoken to. I could not even go to bed when I meant
to, I had to wait until I was, so to say, dismissed or rather until my royal
guest decided to turn in. And she turned in at three or four in the morning.’
    A sadly typical story of seemingly
fulfilled dreams: a man dreams of going to bed with a princess; instead, he is
landed with a princess who does not let him go to bed.

Meanness

     
    All of us , even the most generous among us, can be
incredibly mean on occasions. Most people would hotly deny this and would
rationalise their meanness and feel deep contempt for the meanness of others.
Mark Twain, as usual, was wiser. He admitted: “Like most people, I often feel
mean, and act accordingly.” I know a very charming and otherwise madly
extravagant lady who is painfully conscious of the price of petrol. She is
prepared to drive for miles (and waste an immense amount of petrol) in order to
find a station where she can buy a gallon half a penny cheaper. (And she does
not even pay for the petrol from her own pocket.) I am not money conscious at all
but I collect plastic shopping bags with zeal and devotion. I often find myself
without a bag when I need one and when I have to buy one for ready money ( 5 P, perhaps i op — I do not even know the price) I feel upset. A man I
know — otherwise an overwhelmingly, embarrassingly generous host, absolutely
refuses to buy cigarettes for his guests. Not that he hates the smoke — he
smokes himself, like a chimney. “People should buy their own cigarettes!” And
what if they run out? “People should buy enough cigarettes if they want to
smoke.” There is plenty of evidence in history of such pettiness. Maria
Theresa, when Frederick the Great started blackmailing her, and all her friends
and allies left her in the lurch, travelled to Hungary, appeared at the Diet at
Pozsony, and appealed to the noblemen assembled there, holding her little son
(the future Joseph II) in her arms. The gallant Hungarian noblemen could never
resist a beautiful woman, so they jumped up, like one man and shouted (in
Latin, the official language):
    “Vitam and sanguinem pro Rege nostro,
Maria Theresia!” (Our
life and blood for our King, Maria Theresa. Note that they called her King, not
Queen. This was soon after the Pragmatica Sanctio, which enabled the
first Habsburg woman to occupy the Imperial throne. The English, two centuries
later, when they elevated the first woman to the Bench, addressed her for a
while as “Mr Justice Soandso,” trying to disregard the painful fact that she
was not a Mr. So Maria Theresa, too, was King.)
    After these emotional scenes of
gallantry the Queen (or King — as you wish) told them, as gently as she could,
that enthusiasm, although touching, was not enough and asked for cash or at
least fodder for the horses of her army. One gallant nobleman jumped up and
shouted:
    “Vitam and sanguinem pro Rege nostro,
Maria Theresia, sed avenam non!”
    In colloquial translation: “Our life
and blood for our King, Maria Theresa, but she might as well forget about
oats.”
    This, by the way, has become a
customary pattern for some people’s generosity. They offer everything to the
needy, except the one thing he really needs.
    It is not only the rich who are mean.
It is preoccupation with money, not the possession of it, that makes one mean.
A man’s past history is no guide. Some rich people who used to be very poor
children are extremely open-handed and large-hearted. On the other hand, some
people who have achieved the legendary American career in reverse — started as
millionaires and ended up as newspaper boys — are as stingy as people born
rich. But an avaricious and miserly poor man is more easily forgivable than an
avaricious and miserly rich one. Jokes about the meanness of the Scots used to
be popular until people started to understand that the Scots were not mean,
just extremely poor. That was the end of those jokes — as if one