How I Intend To Treat My Enemies

An awful lot of people lately — I’m not sure about the precise number — have been asking after how I intend to treat my enemies. Let’s say somewhere between fifteen and fifty, since some of them may have been the same man in a different outfit on separate occasions.

As the day of my triumph approaches, I find the question put to me more and more often: How do I intend to treat my enemies? Have I given any thought to their upkeep and maintenance? Where will they stay? What items will they be permitted to keep with them, and what is to be done with the rest of their things? Will I set up a little museum displaying their effects for the benefit of the public, or will there be an auction?

I do not reveal the full extent of my plans to the general public. My habit of keeping things pretty close to the vest is well-known. Easy-going, amiable, always willing to lend a hand, it is often said of me — but does he reveal his inmost secrets? Does he invite one into his sanctum sanctorum and give leave to go poking around? He does not. He knows when to smile, and when to be silent, it is pretty generally known.

Consider, I say, how I treat the would-be merger when it pleases me to go driving. When the sun is hot, and the asphalt whistling like a radiator, and the average speed of traffic is just a hair short of backwards, when man turneth against man like a hungry dog, and I see a driver hoping to merge into my lane, do I avert my eyes, pretending not to see him even as we drive neck-and-neck? Do I speed up until I’m driving from the back seat of the next fellow’s car? I do not.

It is known, as surely as day follows night, that if I see a traffic-merge in the offing, I lose no time in making direct eye contact with my supplicant, as if to say, Yes, I see you — you are not beneath my notice even here — my eye is on the sparrow!

And do I not go further even than this? Is it not my custom, after the chappie has clapped his grateful eyes on mine, to slow down even further and wave the hand of friendship letting him in, the hand that says, “Yes, brother, come right in — We’ve long had a place waiting for you here — no one turned away for want of funds — You Belong!” Ask anyone who knows me. I invariably wave, like the emperor of Rome pardoning a gladiator: I wave. With hardly a thought to my own commute, or the commute of the fellow behind me, I wave him in.

And if I can afford to be so generous to total strangers who failed to anticipate something as commonplace as a traffic-merge, how much more so shall I be to my enemies? I have really grown quite fond of the creatures, and take their welfare very seriously.

I have taken a little house in the country for their immediate removal, where they can live out the remainder of their days in quiet dignity.

The only problem with living out the remainder of your days in the country with quiet dignity is that invariably one of them proves to be an early riser, while all the rest of them like to sleep in. So the early riser gets up with the milk, and prowls around the place like a cat burglar, helping himself to the best of everything and hoarding all the vitamins from that early-morning sun (which doctors say is better than almost any other type of sun there is, especially when it comes to counteracting blue light, which is worse than no light at all). This is all well and good for the first few hours, but then he starts to get nervous: clearing his throat loudly in the hall when he thinks it’s time for everyone else to be up, knocking on the bathroom door and saying, “Is anybody in here?” when he knows perfectly well that nobody is, and making everyone else feel positively hunted in their beds.

So he might try to read, to pass the time, but quiet little rental houses in the country only ever have three or four books on the shelves, all with titles like Tall Ships of the Eighteenth Century and Rocks of Berkeley and Doctor Soup’s Garden of Health, which is worse than having no books at all.

So I’m afraid what with one thing and another, my enemies won’t have a very good time of it, after all. If they would only make up their minds to enjoy themselves, they could be happy anywhere. There are plenty of people who would count themselves lucky to hear about Doctor Soup’s nine iron-clad rules for better health. Is it my fault my enemies aren’t one of them?