Agley
By STRIX rrt trn, is one of my favourite characters in literature. I enjoy every line on the twenty- three pages which, in Some People, Sir Harold Nicolson devotes to his disastrous career in the Diplomatic Service; but I think my favourite passage is that dealing with Titty's social aberra- tions while briefly en poste at Constantinople.
'On passing down the Grande Rue de Pera I observed Titty in his little brown hat strolling slowly along the pavement accompanied by two elderly gentlemen in pearl-grey suits and yellow button boots. Titty had many curious friends and would walk uo and down with them after tea, gazing into .3 wide lighted windows of Tokatlian's restaurant, and admiring the powdered ladies who sat there drinking iced Coffee and eating little sugared cakes. This Latin propensity was irritating to us, and he knew that these his habits were disapproved. 1 therefore indicated to him that evening that once again, under the street lamps of the Grande Rue de Pera, he had been observed. "Who," I said, "were those two men you were walking with this evening?" "Oh, one of them," Titty answered, "was an Armenian." "And the other?" I ques- tioned: "Oh, the other," he replied lightly, "was an Armenian too." '
* * *
I think of Titty whenever 1 read that one or other of the armed services of the United States has discharged a mouse-into -outer space. In all our lives there are things of Which we have no real reason to be ashamed but about which we decide that it will be better, on the whole, to say nothing. Should they subsequently come to light—and this often happens—we become painfully aware that it would have been wiser to make no bones about them in the first place.
These American mice seem to me not to belong to this category, to be essentially unblurt- worthy. One applauds the manly frankness of the authorities in revealing to the world that they have been launched into outer space in the noses of rockets; yet one cannot help feeling that this was an occasion when it would have paid to wait and see what happened before taking the little creatures. off the secret list.
I should perhaps explain to those of my readers who are not abreast with the latest scien- tific thought that if yott poop off a mouse into space one of three things is virtually bound to happen, viz. (a) the mouse will be recovered alive, (b) the mouse will be recovered dead, or (c) the mouse will not be recovered at all. (a) means success, (b) failure, (c) a complete flop.
I hOpe that no one will accuse me of casting unwarrantable aspersions on a small but engag- ing quadruped when I say that mouse-participa- tion in a national defence programme is not an unmixed blessing from the public relations aspect. I am not thinking primarily of the protests lodged at American Embassies by humanitarian societies; am thinking primarily of mice.
* * * Men have never satisfactorily adjusted their relations with mice. A long-standing convention relegates these puny animals to the bottom of the whole bestiary. The 'question, 'Are you a man or a mouse?' implies that 'mousehood is as far removed as it is possible to be from manhood.
Yet if we stop to think we have to admit that the evidence does not justify this harsh verdict. We have imposed our will on the brontosaurus and the 'sabre-toothed tiger; the wolf and the wild boar are no longer a source of anxiety. But we have made no impression at all on the mouse, who continues to share our homes, to eat our food, and at night to thunder enigmatically up and down in the ceiling over our heads. Nor is it easy, or indeed becoming, for any man to treat with ridicule and disdain an animal which by merely presenting itself to view can cause almost any woman to climb, screaming, on top of the furniture. Few of us can claim a comparable power over the opposite sex.
* * * However, just as an army of occupation will never admit that even the most successful resistance movement has anything admirable about it, so men have tacitly combined to decry mice. Their symbolic value is so low as to be a minus quantity; I think I am right in saying that in the Boy Scout Movement, although its sub-units are named after such enemies of man as the lion and even the rattlesnake, there is nowhere to be found a Mouse Patrol.
It must follow that in the Cold War the mouse is an ally, or an auxiliary, of doubtful value. I am sure that the Pentagon would have done better to keep its space-rodents under its hat. The failure to do so has committed America, for reasons of prestige, to repeating the experiments until they are successful; in these matters it is scarcely possible to laugh off a first attempt as a mere whim or aberration, and now mouse after mouse will have to hurtle up from Cape Canaveral until the Navy brings one back alive.
It will be a great day for science when it does; but until it does cartoonists on both sides of the Iron Curtain will continue to have a whale of a time. And there is no doubt, as between mice and men, whom they are taking the mickey out of.
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