_"Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: Through spacious streets
conduct thy bard along."_
Gay's _Trivia, or New Art of Walking Streets of London._
_L'oiseau Bleu_
What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that
I am looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to
me as if I were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings
sweetly as it floats about from one place to another.
When I find myself however among persons of middle age and settled
principles, see them moving regularly to their offices--what keeps
them going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.
There is though a Philosophic Doctrine--I studied it at College,
and I know that many serious people believe it--which maintains
that all men, in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live
alike for Pleasure. This theory certainly brings portly,
respected persons very near to me. Indeed with a sense of low
complicity I have sometimes followed and watched a Bishop. Was
he too on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing his Bird?
_At The Bank_
Entering the Bank in a composed manner, I drew a cheque and
handed it to the cashier through the grating. Then I eyed him
narrowly. Would not that astute official see that I was only
posing as a Real Person? No; he calmly opened a little drawer,
took out some real sovereigns, counted them carefully, and
handed them to me in a brass-tipped shovel. I went away feeling
I had perpetrated a delightful fraud. I had got some of the gold
of the actual world!
Yet now and then, at the sight of my name on a visiting card, or
of my face photographed in a group among other faces, or when I
see a letter addressed in my hand, or catch the sound of my own
voice, I grow shy in the presence of a mysterious Person who is
myself, is known by my name, and who apparently does exist. Can
it be possible that I am as real as any one else, and that all
of us--the cashier and banker at the Bank, the King on his
throne--all feel ourselves like ghosts and goblins in this
authentic world?
_Mammon_
Moralists and Church Fathers have named it the root of all Evil,
the begetter of hate and bloodshed, the sure cause of the soul's
damnation. It has been called "trash," "muck," "dunghill
excrement," by grave authors. The love of it is denounced in all
Sacred Writings; we find it reprehended on Chaldean bricks, and
in the earliest papyri. Buddha, Confucius, Christ, set their
faces against it; and they have been followed in more modern
times by beneficed Clergymen, Sunday School Teachers, and the
leaders of the Higher Thought. But have the condemnations of all
the ages done anything to tarnish that bright lustre? Men dig
for it ever deeper into the earth's intestines, travel in search
of it farther and farther to arctic and unpleasant regions.
In spite of all my moral reading, I must confess that I like to
have some of this gaudy substance in my pocket. Its presence
cheers and comforts me, diffuses a genial warmth through my
body. My eyes rejoice in the shine of it; its clinquant sound is
music in my ears. Since I then am in his paid service, and
reject none of the doles of his bounty, I too dwell in the House
of Mammon. I bow before the Idol, and taste the unhallowed
ecstasy.
How many Altars have been overthrown, and how many Theologies
and heavenly Dreams have had their bottoms knocked out of them,
while He has sat there, a great God, golden and adorned, and
secure on His unmoved throne?
_I See the World_
"But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world," my cousins said.
Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to which I am now
and then invited, I find, as a matter of fact, that I get really
much more pleasure by looking in at windows, and have a way of
my own of seeing the World. And of summer evenings, when motors
hurry through the late twilight, and the great houses take on
airs of inscrutable expectation, I go owling out through the
dusk; and wandering toward the West, lose my way in unknown
streets--an unknown City of revels. And when a door opens and a
bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets unrolled by
powdered footmen, I can easily think her some great Courtezan,
or some half-believed Duchess, hurrying to card-tables and lit
candles and strange scenes of joy. I like to see that there are
still splendid people on this flat earth; and at dances,
standing in the street with the crowd, and stirred by the music,
the lights, the rushing sound of voices, I think the Ladies as
beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes of light past our
rows of vagabond faces; the young men look like Lords in novels;
and if (it has once or twice happened) people I know go by me,
they strike me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when on
hot nights windows are left open, and I can look in at Dinner
Parties, as I peer through lace curtains and window-flowers at
the silver, the women's shoulders, the shimmer of their jewels,
and the divine attitudes of their heads as they lean and listen,
I imagine extraordinary intrigues and unheard of wines and
passions.
_Social Success_
The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of
self-satisfaction I walked out into the night. "A delightful evening," I
reflected, "the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and
French philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a
pig squealing."
But soon after, "God, it's awful," I muttered, "I wish I were dead."
_Apotheosis_
But Oh, those heavenly moments when I feel this trivial universe
too small to contain my Attributes; when a sense of the divine
Ipseity invades me; when I know that my voice is the voice of
Truth, and my umbrella God's umbrella!
_The Spring in London_
London seemed last winter like an underground city; as if its
low sky were the roof of a cave, and its murky day a light such
as one reads of in countries beneath the earth.
And yet the natural sunlight sometimes shone there; white clouds
voyaged in the blue sky; the interminable multitudes of roofs
were washed with silver by the Moon, or cloaked with a mantle of
new-fallen snow. And the coming of Spring to London was to me
not unlike the descent of the maiden-goddess into Death's
Kingdoms, when pink almond blossoms blew about her in the gloom,
and those shadowy people were stirred with faint longings for
meadows and the shepherd's life. Nor was there anything more
virginal and fresh in wood or orchard than the shimmer of young
foliage, which, in May, dimmed with delicate green all the
smoke-blackened London trees.
_Fashion Plates_
I like loitering at the bookstalls, looking in at the windows of
printshops, and romancing over the pictures I see of shepherdesses
and old-fashioned Beauties. Tall and slim and crowned with plumes
in one period, in another these Ladies become as wide-winged as
butterflies, or float, large, balloon-like visions, down summer
streets. And yet in all shapes they have always (I tell myself)
created thrilling effects of beauty, and waked in the breasts of
modish young men ever the same charming Emotion.
But then I have questioned this. Is the emotion always precisely
the same? Is it true to say that the human heart remains quite
unchanged beneath all the changing fashions of frills and
ruffles? In this elegant and cruel Sentiment, I rather fancy
that colour and shape do make a difference. I have a notion that
about 1840 was the Zenith, the Meridian Hour, the Golden Age of
the Passion. Those tight-waisted, whiskered Beaux, those
crinolined Beauties, adored one another, I believe, with a
leisure, a refinement, and dismay not quite attainable at other
dates.
_Mental Vice_
There are certain hackneyed Thoughts that will force them-selves
on me; I find my mind, especially in hot weather, infested and
buzzed about by moral Platitudes. "That shows--" I say to
myself, or, "How true it is--" or, "I really ought to have
known!" The sight of a large clock sets me off into musings on
the flight of Time; a steamer on the Thames or lines of
telegraph inevitably suggest the benefits of Civilization, man's
triumph over Nature, the heroism of Inventors, the courage, amid
ridicule and poverty, of Stephenson and Watt. Like faint, rather
unpleasant smells, these thoughts lurk about railway stations. I
can hardly post a letter without marvelling at the excellence
and accuracy of the Postal System.
Then the pride in the British Constitution and British Freedom,
which comes over me when I see, even in the distance, the Towers
of Westminster Palace--that Mother of Parliaments--it is not
much comfort that this should be chastened, as I walk down the
Embankment, by the sight of Cleopatra's Needle, and the Thought
that it will no doubt witness the Fall of the British, as it has
that of other Empires, remaining to point its Moral, as old as
Egypt, to Antipodeans musing on the dilapidated bridges.
I am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral for
everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key,
like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning
but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of
Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once
explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with
Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees,
and preaching animals. The benefits of Civilization cloy me. I
have seen enough shining of the didactic Sun.
So gazing up on hot summer nights at the London stars, I cool my
thoughts with a vision of the giddy, infinite, meaningless waste
of Creation, the blazing Suns, the Planets and frozen Moons, all
crashing blindly forever across the void of space.
_The Organ of Life_
Almost always In London--in the congregated uproar of streets,
or in the noise that drifts through wails and windows--you can
hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which
sounds like the actual voice of the human Heart, singing the
lost joys, the regrets, the loveless lives of the people who
blacken the pavements, or jolt along on the busses.
"Speak to me kindly," the hand-organ implores; "I'm all alone!"
it screams amid the throng; "thy Vows are all broken," it
laments in dingy courtyards, "And light is thy Fame." And of hot
summer afternoons, the Cry for Courage to Remember, or Calmness
to Forget, floats in with the smell of paint and asphalt--faint
and sad--through open office windows.
_Humiliation_
"My own view is," I began, but no one listened. At the next
pause, "I always say," I remarked, but again the loud talk went
on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, "I often
think--"; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly
or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the
thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded
attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza
or Abraham Lincoln.
_Green Ivory_
What a bore it is, waking up in the morning always the same
person. I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big,
bushy eyebrows and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep
Thinker, or a great Ventriloquist.
I should like to be refined and melancholy, the victim of a
hopeless passion; to love in the old, stilted way, with
impossible Adoration and Despair under the pale-faced Moon.
I wish I could get up; I wish I were the world's greatest
Violinist. I wish I had lots of silver, and first Editions, and
green ivory.
_In The Park_
"Yes," I said one afternoon in the Park, as I looked rather
contemptuously at the people of Fashion, moving slow and
well-dressed in the sunshine, "but how about the others, the
Courtiers and Beauties and Dandies of the past? They wore
fine costumes, and glittered for their hour in the summer
air. What has become of them?" I somewhat rhetorically asked.
They were all dead now. Their day was over. They were cold
in their graves.
And I thought of those severe spirits who, in garrets far from
the Park and Fashion, had scorned the fumes and tinsel of the
noisy World.
But, good Heavens! these severe spirits were, it occurred to me,
all, as a matter of fact, quite as dead as the others.
_The Correct_
I am sometimes visited by a suspicion that everything isn't
quite all right with the Righteous; that the Moral Law speaks in
muffled and dubious tones to those who listen most scrupulously
for its dictates. I feel sure I have detected a look of doubt
and misgiving in the eyes of its earnest upholders.
But there is no such shadow or cloud on the faces in Club
windows, or in the eyes of drivers of four-in-hands, or of
fashionable young men walking down Piccadilly. For these live
by a Rule which has not been drawn down from far-off and
questionable skies, and needs no sanction; what they do is
Correct, and that is all. Correctly dressed from head to foot,
they pass, with correct speech and thoughts and gestures,
correctly across the roundness of the Earth.
_"Where Do I Come In?"_
When I read in the _Times_ about India and all its problems and
populations; when I look at the letters in large type of
important personages, and find myself face to face with the
Questions, Movements, and great Activities of the Age, "Where do
I come in?" I ask myself uneasily.
Then in the great _Times_-reflected world I find the corner
where I play my humble but necessary part. For I am one of the
unpraised, unrewarded millions without whom Statistics would be
a bankrupt science. It is we who are born, who marry, who die,
in constant ratios; who regularly lose so many umbrellas, post
just so many unaddressed letters every year. And there are
enthusiasts among us who, without the least thought of their own
convenience, allow omnibuses to run over them; or throw
themselves month by month, in fixed numbers, from the London
bridges.
_Microbes_
But how Is one to keep free from those mental microbes that
worm-eat people's brains--those Theories and Diets and Enthusiasms
and infectious Doctrines that we are always liable to catch from
what seem the most innocuous contacts? People go about laden with
germs; they breathe creeds and convictions on you whenever they
open their mouths. Books and newspapers are simply creeping with
them--the monthly Reviews seem to have room for nothing else.
Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; and how shall
he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel
schemes of Salvation?
Can he ever be sure that he won't be suddenly struck down by the
fever of Funeral, or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with
a new Sex Theory?
But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty universe
really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and
sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can
make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can
free us from the dominion of Death; if the belief that Bacon
wrote Shakespeare gives a peace that the world cannot give, why
pedantically reject such kindly solace? Why not be led with the
others by still waters, and be made to lie down in green
pastures?
_The Quest_
"We walk alone in the world," the Moralist, at the end of his
essay on Ideal Friendship, writes somewhat sadly, "Friends such
as we desire are dreams and fables," Yet we never quite give up
the hope of finding them. But what awful things happen to us?
what snubs, what set-downs we experience, what shames and
disillusions. We can never really tell what these new unknown
persons may do to us. Sometimes they seem nice, and then begin
to talk like gramophones. Sometimes they grab at us with moist
hands, or breathe hotly on our necks, or make awful confidences,
or drench us from sentimental slop-pails. And too often, among
the thoughts in the loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly
caterpillars.
And yet we brush our hats, pull on our gloves, and go out and
ring door-bells.
_The Kaleidoscope_
I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a
curious collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining
and fading for no reason. Sometimes they are views in no way
remarkable-the corner of a road, a heap of stones, an old gate.
But there are many charming pictures, too: as I read, between my
eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest fields her chill
of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the leaves falling, or
swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts, with the rain
beating forever on the fields. Then Winter's upward glare of
snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the
windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and youths
bathing in Summer's golden heats.
And as I walk about, certain places haunt me: a cathedral rises
above a dark blue foreign town, the colour of ivory in the
sunset light; now I find myself in a French garden full of
lilacs and bees, and shut-in sunshine, with the Mediterranean
lounging and washing outside its walls; now in a little college
library, with busts, and the green reflected light of Oxford
lawns--and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the familiar
Oxford hours.
_Oxford Street_
One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of
vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I
was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted
shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had
faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods
displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share
in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious
faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London
traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant
and sad--into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which
sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence,
blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore,
the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace
beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. _Om Mani
padme hum_--I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the
pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked
that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was
enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the
Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that
turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.
_Beauty_
Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face
made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens
to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for
a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to
follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises
they promise.
Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to
think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine
revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a
mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flashing on us in
the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we
should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will
lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too,
keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to
their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so
sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their
stars to listen.
But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do
get us into!
_The Power of Words_
I thanked the club porter who helped me into my coat, and
stepped out lightly into the vastness and freshness of the
Night. And as I walked along my eyes were dazzling with the
glare I had left; I still seemed to hear the sound of my speech,
and the applause and laughter.
And when I looked up at the Stars, the great Stars that bore
me company, streaming over the dark houses as I moved, I felt
that I was the Lord of Life; the mystery and disquieting
meaninglessness of existence--the existence of other people,
and of my own, were solved for me now. As for the Earth,
hurrying beneath my feet, how bright was its journey; how
shining the goal toward which it went swinging--you might
really say leaping--through the sky.
"I must tell the Human Race of this!" I heard my voice; saw my
prophetic gestures, as I expounded the ultimate meaning of
existence to the white, rapt faces of Humanity. Only to find the
words--that troubled me; were there then no words to describe
this Vision--divine--intoxicating?
And then the Word struck me; the Word people would use. I
stopped in the street; my Soul was silenced like a bell that
snarls at a jarring touch. I stood there awhile and meditated on
language, its perfidious meanness, the inadequacy, the ignominy
of our vocabulary, and how Moralists have spoiled our words by
distilling into them, as into little vials of poison, all their
hatred of human joy. Away with that police-force of brutal words
which bursts in on our best moments and arrests our finest
feelings! This music within me, large, like the song of the
stars--like a Glory of Angels singing--"No one has any right to
say I am drunk!" I shouted.
_Self-Analysis_
"Yes, aren't they odd, the thoughts that float through one's
mind for no reason? But why not be frank--I suppose the best of
us are shocked at times by the things we find ourselves
thinking. Don't you agree," I went on, not noticing (until it
was too late) that all other conversation had ceased, and the
whole dinner-party was listening, "don't you agree that the
oddest of all are the improper thoughts that come into one's
head--the unspeakable words I mean, and Obscenities?" When I
remember that remark, I hasten to enlarge my mind with ampler
considerations. I think of Space, and the unimportance in its
unmeasured vastness, of our toy solar system; I lose myself in
speculations on the lapse of Time, reflecting how at the best
our human life on this minute and perishing planet is as brief
as a dream.
_The Voice of the World_
"And what are you doing now?" The question of these school
contemporaries of mine, and their greeting the other day in
Piccadilly (I remember how shabby I felt as I stood talking
to them)--for a day or two that question haunted me. And
behind their well-bred voices I seemed to hear the voice of
Schoolmasters and Tutors, of the Professional Classes, and
indeed of all the world. What, as a plain matter of fact, was I
doing, how did I spend my days? The life-days which I knew were
numbered, and which were described in sermons and on tombstones
as so irrevocable, so melancholy-brief.
I decided to change my life. I too would be somebody in my time
and age; my contemporaries should treat me as an important person.
I began thinking of my endeavours, my studies by the midnight
lamp, my risings at dawn for stolen hours of self-improvement.
But alas, the day, the little day, was enough just then. It
somehow seemed enough, just to be alive in the Spring, with the
young green of the trees, the smell of smoke in the sunshine; I
loved the old shops and books, the uproar darkening and
brightening in the shabby daylight. Just a run of good-looking
faces--and I was always looking for faces--would keep me amused.
And London was but a dim-lit stage on which I could play in
fancy any part I liked. I woke up in the morning like Byron to
find myself famous; I was drawn like Chatham to St. Paul's, amid
the cheers of the Nation, and sternly exclaimed with Cromwell,
"Take away that bauble," as I sauntered past the Houses of
Parliament.
_And Anyhow_
And anyhow, soon, so soon (in only seven million years or
thereabouts the Encyclopaedia said) this Earth would grow cold,
all human activities end, and the last wretched mortals freeze
to death in the dim rays of the dying Sun.
_Drawbacks_
I should be all right.... If it weren't for these sudden
visitations of Happiness, these downpourings of Heaven's blue,
little invasions of Paradise, or waftings to the Happy Islands,
or whatever you may call these disconcerting Moments, I should
be like everybody else, and as blameless a rate-payer as any in
our Row.
_Talk_
Once in a while, when doors are closed and curtains drawn on a
group of free spirits, the miracle happens, and Good Talk
begins. 'Tis a sudden illumination--the glow, it may be of
sanctified candles, or, more likely, the blaze around a cauldron
of gossip.
Is there an ecstasy or any intoxication like it? Oh? to talk, to
talk people into monsters, to talk one's self out of one's
clothes, to talk God from His heaven, and turn everything in the
world into a bright tissue of phrases!
These Pentecosts and outpourings of the spirit can only occur
very rarely, or the Universe itself would be soon talked out of
existence.
_The Church of England_
I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there that Sunday
afternoon, in the Palladian interior of the London Church, and
listened to the unexpressive voices chanting the correct service,
I felt a comfortable assurance that we were in no danger of
being betrayed into any unseemly manifestations of religious
fervour. We had not gathered together at that performance
to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark
Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles
and sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly
respected Anglican First Cause--undemonstrative, gentlemanly
and conscientious--whom, without loss of self-respect, we
could sincerely and decorously praise.
_Misgiving_
We were talking of people, and a name familiar to us all was
mentioned. We paused and looked at each other; then soon, by
means of anecdotes and clever touches, that personality was
reconstructed, and seemed to appear before us, large, pink, and
life-like, and gave a comic sketch of itself with appropriate
poses.
"Of course," I said to myself, "this sort of thing never happens
to me." For the notion was quite unthinkable, the notion I mean
of my own dear image, called up like this without my knowledge,
to turn my discreet way of life into a cake-walk.
_Sanctuaries_
She said, "How small the world is after all!"
I thought of China, of a holy mountain in the West of China,
full of legends and sacred trees and demon-haunted caves. It
is always enveloped in mountain mists; and in that white thick
air I heard the faint sound of bells, and the muffled footsteps
of innumerable pilgrims, and the reiterated mantra, _Nam-Mo,
O-mi-to-Fo_, which they murmur as they climb its slopes. High
up among its temples and monasteries marched processions of
monks, with intoned services, and many prostrations, and lighted
candles that glimmer through the fog. There in their solemn
shrines stood the statues of the Arahats, and there, seated
on his white elephant, loomed immense and dim, the image of
Amitabha, the Lord of the Western Heavens.
She said "Life is so complicated!" Climbing inaccessible cliffs
of rock and ice, I shut myself within a Tibetan monastery beyond
the Himalayan ramparts. I join with choirs of monks, intoning
their deep sonorous dirges and unintelligible prayers; I beat
drums, I clash cymbals, and blow at dawn from the Lamasery roofs
conches, and loud discordant trumpets. And wandering through
those vast and shadowy halls, as I tend the butter-lamps of the
golden Buddhas, and watch the storms that blow across the barren
mountains, I taste an imaginary bliss, and then pass on to other
scenes and incarnations along the endless road that leads me to
Nirvana.
"But I do wish you would tell me what you really think?"
I fled to Africa, into the depths of the dark Ashanti forest.
There, in its gloomiest recesses, where the soil is stained with
the blood of the negroes He has eaten, dwells that monstrous
Deity of human shape and red colour, the great Fetish God,
Sasabonsum. I like Sasabonsum: other Gods are sometimes moved to
pity and forgiveness, but to Him such weakness is unknown. He is
utterly and absolutely implacable; no gifts or prayers, no
holocausts of human victims can appease, or ever, for one
moment, propitiate Him.
_Symptoms_
"But there are certain people I simply cannot stand. A
dreariness and sense of death come over me when I meet them--I
really find it difficult to breathe when they are in the room,
as if they had pumped all the air out of it. Wouldn't it
be dreadful to produce that effect on people! But they never
seem to be aware of it. I remember once meeting a famous
Bore; I really must tell you about it, it shows the unbelievable
obtuseness of such people."
I told this and another story or two with great gusto, and talked
on of my experiences and sensations, till suddenly I noticed, in
the appearance of my charming neighbour, something--a slightly
glazed look in her eyes, a just perceptible irregularity in her
breathing--which turned that occasion for me into a kind of
Nightmare.
_Shadowed_
I sometimes feel a little uneasy about that imagined self of
mine--the Me of my daydreams--who leads a melodramatic life of
his own, quite unrelated to my real existence. So one day I
shadowed him down the street. He loitered along for a while, and
then stood at a shop-window and dressed himself out in a gaudy
tie and yellow waistcoat. Then he bought a great sponge and two
stuffed birds and took them to lodgings, where he led for a
while a shady existence. Next he moved to a big house in
Mayfair, and gave grand dinner-parties, with splendid service
and costly wines. His amorous adventures in this region I pass
over. He soon sold his house and horses, gave up his motors,
dismissed his retinue of servants, and went--saving two young
ladies from being run over on the way--to live a life of heroic
self-sacrifice among the poor.
I was beginning to feel encouraged about him, when in passing a
fishmonger's, he pointed at a great salmon and said, "I caught
that fish."
_The Incredible_
"Yes, but they were rather afraid of you."
"Afraid of _me_?"
"Yes, so one of them told me afterwards."
I was fairly jiggered. If my personality can inspire fear or
respect the world must be a simpler place than I had thought it.
Afraid of a shadow, a poor make-believe like me? Are children
more absurdly terrified by a candle in a hollow turnip? Was
Bedlam at full moon ever scared by anything half so silly?
_Terror_
A pause suddenly fell on our conversation--one of those
uncomfortable lapses when we sit with fixed smiles, searching
our minds for some remark with which to fill up the unseasonable
silence. It was only a moment--"But suppose," I said to myself
with horrible curiosity, "suppose none of us had found a word to
say, and we had gone on sitting in silence?"
It is the dread of Something happening, Something unknown and
awful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk
from dying out. So travellers at night in an unknown forest keep
their fires ablaze, in fear of Wild Beasts lurking ready in the
darkness to leap upon them.
_Pathos_
When winter twilight falls on my street with the rain, a sense
of the horrible sadness of life descends upon me. I think of
drunken old women who drown themselves because nobody loves
them; I think of Napoleon at St. Helena, and of Byron growing
morose and fat in the enervating climate of Italy.
_Inconstancy_
The rose that one wears and throws away, the friend one forgets,
the music that passes--out of the well-known transitoriness of
mortal things I have made myself a maxim or precept to the
effect that it is foolish to look for one face, or to listen
long for one voice, in a world that is after all, as I know,
full of enchanting voices.
But all the same, I can never quite forget the enthusiasm with
which, as a boy, I read the praises of Constancy and True Love,
and the unchanged Northern Star.
_The Poplar_
There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage
floats high in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and
blackbirds, who fill the late, decorative sunshine with a
shimmer of golden sound. There the nightingale finds her green
cloister; and on those branches sometimes, like a great fruit,
hangs the lemon-coloured Moon. In the glare of August, when all
the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze in those
cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among
its lightly hung leaves.
But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.
_On the Doorstep_
I rang the bell as of old; as of old I gazed at the great
shining Door and waited. But, alas! that flutter and beat of the
wild heart, that delicious doorstep Terror--it was gone; and
with it dear, fantastic, panic-stricken Youth had rung the bell,
flitted round the corner and vanished for ever.
_Old Clothes_
Shabby old waistcoat, what made the heart beat that you used to
cover? Funny-shaped hat, where are the thoughts that once nested
beneath you? Old shoes, hurrying along what dim paths of the
Past did I wear out your sole-leather?
_Youth_
Oh dear, this living and eating and growing old; these doubts
and aches in the back, and want of interest in the Moon and
Roses...
Am I the person who used to wake in the middle of the night and
laugh with the joy of living? Who worried about the existence of
God, and danced with young ladies till long after daybreak? Who
sang "Auld Lang Syne" and howled with sentiment, and more than
once gazed at the summer stars through a blur of great, romantic
tears?
_Consolation_
The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer
myself by thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there
wasn't one of them for which I seemed to care a hang--not
Wine, nor Friendship, nor Eating, nor Making Love, nor the
Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth while then going up in
a lift into a world that had nothing less trite to offer?
Then I thought of reading--the nice and subtle happiness of
reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this
polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long
intoxication.
_Sir Eustace Carr_
When I read the news about Sir Eustace Carr in the morning
paper, I was startled, like everyone else who knew, if only by
name this young man, whose wealth and good looks, whose
adventurous travels and whose brilliant and happy marriage, had
made of him an almost romantic figure.
Every now and then one hears of some strange happening of this
kind. But they are acts so anomalous, in such startling
contradiction to all our usual ways and accepted notions of life
and its value, that most of us are willing enough to accept the
familiar explanation of insanity, or any other commonplace cause
which may be alleged--financial trouble, or some passionate
entanglement, and the fear of scandal and exposure. And then the
Suicide is forgotten as soon as possible, and his memory
shuffled out of the way as something unpleasant to think of. But
with a curiosity that is perhaps a little morbid, I sometimes
let my thoughts dwell on these cases, wondering whether the dead
man may not have carried to the grave with him the secret of
some strange perplexity, some passion or craving or irresistible
impulse, of which perhaps his intimates, and certainly the
coroner's jury, can have had no inkling.
I had never met or spoken to Sir Eustace Carr--the worlds we
lived in were very different--but I had read of his explorations
in the East, and of the curious tombs he had discovered--somewhere,
was it not?--in the Nile Valley. Then too it happened (and this
was the main cause of my interest) that at one time I had seen
him more than once, under circumstances that were rather unusual.
And now I began to think of this incident. In away it was nothing,
and yet the impression haunted me that it was somehow connected
with this final act, for which no explanation, beyond that of
sudden mental derangement, had been offered. This explanation did
not seem to me wholly adequate, although it had been accepted,
I believe, both by his friends and the general public--and with
the more apparent reason on account of a strain of eccentricity,
amounting in some cases almost to insanity, which could be traced,
it was said, in his mother's family.
I found it not difficult to revive with a certain vividness the
memory of those cold and rainy November weeks that I had
happened to spend alone, some years ago, in Venice, and of the
churches which I had so frequently haunted. Especially I
remembered the great dreary church in the piazza near my
lodgings, into which I would often go on my way to my rooms in
the twilight. It was the season when all the Venice churches are
draped in black, and services for the dead are held in them at
dawn and twilight; and when I entered this Baroque interior,
with its twisted columns and volutes and high-piled, hideous
tombs, adorned with skeletons and allegorical figures and angels
blowing trumpets--all so agitated, and yet all so dead and empty
and frigid--I would find the fantastic darkness filled with
glimmering candles, and kneeling figures, and the discordant
noise of chanting. There I would sit, while outside night fell
with the rain on Venice; the palaces and green canals faded into
darkness, and the great bells, swinging against the low sky,
sent the melancholy sound of their voices far over the lagoons.
It was here, in this church, that I used to see Sir Eustace Carr;
would generally find him in the same corner when I entered, and
would sometimes watch his face, until the ceremonious extinguishing
of the candles, one by one, left us in shadowy night. It was a
handsome and thoughtful face, and I remember more than once
wondering what had brought him to Venice in that unseasonable
month, and why he came so regularly to this monotonous service.
It was as if some spell had drawn him; and now, with my curiosity
newly wakened, I asked myself what had been that spell? I also
must have been affected by it, for I had been there also in his
uncommunicating company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to
my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I
went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and
almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming
before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or
supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense could hardly
accept it.
For I now saw that the spell which had been on us both at that
time in Venice had been nothing but the spell and tremendous
incantation of the Thought of Death. The dreary city with its
decaying palaces and great tomb-encumbered churches had really
seemed, in those dark and desolate weeks, to be the home and
metropolis of the great King of Terrors; and the services at
dawn and twilight, with their prayers for the Dead, and funereal
candles, had been the chanted ritual of his worship. Now suppose
(such was the notion that held my imagination) suppose this
spell, which I had felt but for a time and dimly, should become to
someone a real obsession, casting its shadow more and more completely
over a life otherwise prosperous and happy, might not this be the
clue to a history like that of Sir Eustace Carr's--not only his
interest in the buried East, his presence at that time in Venice,
but also his unexplained and mysterious end?
Musing on this half-believed notion, I thought of the great
personages and great nations we read of in ancient history, who
have seemed to live with a kind of morbid pleasure in the shadow
of this great Thought; who have surrounded themselves with
mementoes of Death, and hideous symbols of its power, and who,
like the Egyptians, have found their main interest, not in the
present, but in imaginary explorations of the unknown future;
not on the sunlit surface of this earth, but in the vaults and
dwelling-places of the Dead beneath it.
Since this preoccupation, this curiosity, this nostalgia, has
exercised so enormous a fascination in the past, I found it not
impossible to imagine some modern favourite of fortune falling a
victim to this malady of the soul; until at last, growing weary
of other satisfactions, he might be drawn to open for himself
the dark portal and join the inhabitants of that dim region,
"Kings and Counsellors of the earth, Princes that had gold, who
filled their houses with silver." This, as I say, was the notion
that haunted me, the link my imagination forged between Sir
Eustace Carr's presence in that dark Venetian church, and his
self-caused death some years later. But whether it is really a
clue to that unexplained mystery, or whether it is nothing more
than a somewhat sinister fancy, of course, I cannot say.
_The Lord Mayor_
An arctic wind was blowing; it cut through me as I stood there.
The boot-black was finishing his work and complaints.
"But I should be 'appy, sir, if only I could make four bob a
day," he said.
I looked down at him; it seemed absurd, the belief of this
crippled, half-frozen creature, that four-shillings would make
him happy. Happiness! the fabled treasure of some far-away
heaven I thought it that afternoon; not to be bought with gold,
not of this earth!
I said something to this effect. But four shillings a day was
enough for the boot-black.
"Why," he said, "I should be as 'appy as the Lord Mayor!"
_The Burden_
I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History
and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over
books; believing in geological periods, cave-dwellers, Chinese
Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.
Why am I to blame for all that is wrong in the world? I didn't
invent Sin and Hate and Slaughter. Who made it my duty anyhow
to administer the Universe, and keep the planets to their
Copernican courses? My shoulders are bent beneath the weight
of the firmament; I grow weary of propping up, like Atlas,
this vast and erroneous Cosmos.
_Under An Umbrella_
From under the roof of my umbrella I saw the washed pavement
lapsing beneath my feet, the news-posters lying smeared with
dirt at the crossings, the tracks of the busses in the liquid
mud. On I went through this dreary world of wetness. And
through how many rains and years shall I still hurry down
wet streets--middle-aged, and then, perhaps, very old? And
on what errands?
Asking myself this cheerless question I fade from your vision,
Reader, into the distance, sloping my umbrella against the wind.
THE END