|I have long laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person.
It is an entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in
conversation, I do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am
idle, in fact, to prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art
of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a
verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm
you by laying down my arms. “Ah, ah,” I expect you to say. “Ah, ah, you
an idle person. Well, that is good.” And if you do not say it I at least
give myself the pleasure of believing that you think it.
This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things
about ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about
us. We say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way
some people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their
early decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as
remote as it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating
the sorrow it will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be
missed. We all like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember
a nice old gentleman whose favourite topic was “When I am gone.” One day
he was telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee,
what would happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up
cheerfully and said, “When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at
the funeral?” It was a devastating question, and it was observed that
afterwards the old gentleman never discussed his latter end with his
formidable grandchild. He made it too painfully literal.
And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were
to express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad
as the old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and
I daresay I should take care not to lay myself open again to such
_gaucherie_. But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling
self-deception. I can speak the plain truth about “Alpha of the Plough”
without asking for any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how
he suffers. And I say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was
never more satisfied of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has
been engaged in the agreeable task of dodging his duty to _The Star_.
It began quite early this morning--for you cannot help being about
quite early now that the clock has been put forward--or is it back?--for
summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and
there at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved
to write an article _en plein air_, as Corot used to paint his
pictures--an article that would simply carry the intoxication of
this May morning into Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare
carolling with larks, and make it green with the green and dappled
wonder of the beech woods. But first of all he had to saturate himself
with the sunshine. You cannot give out sunshine until you have taken it
in. That, said he, is plain to the meanest understanding. So he took it
in. He just lay on his back and looked at the clouds sailing serenely in
the blue. They were well worth looking at--large, fat, lazy, clouds
that drifted along silently and dreamily, like vast bales of wool being
wafted from one star to another. He looked at them “long and long” as
Walt Whitman used to say. How that loafer of genius, he said, would have
loved to lie and look at those woolly clouds.
And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not
have a picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began
enumerating the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the
wings of the west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could
hear if one gave one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin
whisper of the breeze in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of
the woodland behind, the dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech
near by, the boom of a bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of
the meadow pipit rising from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo
sailing up the valley, the clatter of magpies on the hillside, the
“spink-spink” of the chaffinch, the whirr of a tractor in a distant
field, the crowing of a far-off cock, the bark of a sheep dog, the ring
of a hammer reverberating from a remote clearing in the beech woods,
the voices of children who were gathering violets and bluebells in the
wooded hollow on the other side of the hill. All these and many other
things he heard, still lying on his back and looking at the heavenly
bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him; their billowy softness
invited to slumber....
When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and
the best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the
blossoms falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you
preaching the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He
would catch something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did
not lie about on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds.
To them, life was real, life was earnest. They were always “up and
doing.” It was true that there were the drones, impostors who make ten
times the buzz of the workers, and would have you believe they do all
the work because they make most of the noise. But the example of these
lazy fellows he would ignore. Under the cherry tree he would labour like
the honey bee.
But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came
out to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives
alone, but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put
on a veil and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time
flies when you are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do
and see. You always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure
that she is there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took
more time than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one
of the hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other
hives, and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was
visible. The frames were turned over industriously without reward. At
last, on the floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found.
This deepened the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason,
rejected her sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne
appeared and given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last
the new queen was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of
her subjects. She had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped
notice when the brood frames were put in and, according to the merciless
law of the hive, had slain her senior. All this took time, and before
he had finished, the cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard
announced another interruption of his task.
And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article
about how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one
virtue. It exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
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