E-text prepared by Gerard Arthus, Josephine Paolucci, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
MORE TRIVIA
by
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Author of "Trivia"
New York
Harcourt, Brace and Company
1921
Copyright, 1921, by
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
Printed in the U. S. A. by
The Quinn & Boden Company
Rahway N. J.
CONTENTS
A GREETING _ix_
REASSURANCE _3_
THE GREAT ADVENTURE _4_
THE BEATIFIC VISION _5_
FACES _6_
THE OBSERVER _7_
CHAOS _8_
THE GHOST _9_
THE HOUR-GLASS _10_
THE LATCHKEY _11_
GOOD PRACTICE _12_
EVASION _13_
DINING OUT _14_
WHAT'S WRONG _15_
AT SOLEMN MUSIC _17_
THE GOAT _18_
SELF-CONTROL _19_
THE COMMUNION OF SOULS _20_
WAXWORKS _21_
ADJECTIVES _22_
WHERE? _23_
IN THE STREET _24_
THE ABBEY AT NIGHT _25_
DESPERANCE _26_
CHAIRS _27_
A GRIEVANCE _28_
THE MOON _29_
LONGEVITY _30_
IN THE BUS _31_
JUSTIFICATION _32_
THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET _33_
MONOTONY _34_
DAYDREAM _35_
PROVIDENCE _36_
ACTION _37_
WAITING _38_
THE WRONG WORD _40_
IONS _41_
A FIGURE OF SPEECH _42_
A SLANDER _43_
SYNTHESIS _44_
THE AGE _45_
COMFORT _46_
APPEARANCE AND REALITY _47_
LONELINESS _48_
THE WELSH HARP _49_
MISAPPREHENSION _51_
THE LIFT _52_
SLOAN STREET _53_
REGENT'S PARK _54_
THE AVIARY _55_
ST. JOHN'S WOOD _56_
THE GARDEN SUBURB _57_
SUNDAY CALLS _59_
AN ANOMALY _60_
THE LISTENER _61_
ABOVE THE CLOUDS _62_
THE BUBBLE _63_
CAUTION _64_
DESIRES _65_
MOMENTS _66_
THE EPITAPH _67_
INTERRUPTION _68_
THE EAR-TRUMPET _70_
GUILT _71_
CADOGAN GARDENS _72_
THE RESCUE _73_
CHARM _74_
CARAVANS _75_
THE SUBURBS _76_
THE CONCERTO _77_
SOMEWHERE _78_
THE PLATITUDE _79_
THE FETISH _80_
THE ECHO _81_
THE SCAVENGER _82_
THE HOT-BED _83_
APHASIA _84_
MAGIC _85_
MRS. BACKE _86_
WHISKERS _87_
THE SPELLING LESSON _88_
JEUNESSE _89_
HANGING ON _90_
SUPERANNUATION _91_
AT THE CLUB _92_
DELAY _93_
SMILES _94_
THE DAWN _95_
THE PEAR _96_
INSOMNIA _97_
READING PHILOSOPHY _98_
MORAL TRIUMPH _99_
A VOW _100_
THE SPRINGS OF ACTION _101_
IN THE CAGE _102_
SHRINKAGE _103_
VOICES _104_
EVANESCENCE _105_
COMPLACENCY _106_
MY PORTRAIT _107_
THE RATIONALIST _108_
THOUGHTS _109_
PHRASES _110_
DISENCHANTMENT _111_
ASK ME NO MORE _112_
FAME _113_
NEWS ITEMS _114_
JOY _115_
IN ARCADY _116_
WORRIES _117_
THINGS TO WRITE _118_
PROPERTY _119_
IN A FIX _120_
VERTIGO _122_
THE EVIL EYE _123_
THE EPITHET _124_
THE GARDEN PARTY _125_
WELTSCHMERZ _126_
BOGEYS _127_
LIFE-ENHANCEMENT _129_
ECLIPSE _130_
THE PYRAMID _131_
THE FULL MOON _132_
LUTON _133_
THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH _134_
THE SONNET _136_
WELTANSCHAUUNG _137_
THE ALIEN _138_
HYPOTHESES _139_
THE ARGUMENT _140_
A GREETING
'What funny clothes you wear, dear Readers! And your hats! The thought
of your hats does make me laugh. And I think your sex-theories quite
horrid.'
Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting
to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call
Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my
readers--urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the
pleasure of reading 'More Trivia.'
MORE TRIVIA
REASSURANCE
I look at my overcoat and my hat hanging in the hall with reassurance;
for although I go out of doors with one individuality to-day, when
yesterday I had quite another, yet my clothes keep my various selves
buttoned up together, and enable all these otherwise irreconcilable
aggregates of psychological phenomena to pass themselves off as one
person.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
Before opening the front-door I paused, for a moment of profound
consideration.
Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all
around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and
muffled, the tides of multitudinous traffic, sounding along their ways.
Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to
adventure out into that dangerous world again?
Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its
tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.
THE BEATIFIC VISION
Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones
about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the
clay beneath it, as I bump my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated;
from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists
and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world
that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.
One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem
for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which
floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic--I leaning back
like God on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.
FACES
Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes
for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his
expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his
daydream-larder.
Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the
street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring
on the tops of busses; and the Gods themselves can be seen promenading
up and down Piccadilly.
THE OBSERVER
Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of
human insects I like to note and study.
Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards
Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs.
Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction.
Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and
manoeuvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in
the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and
down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated
sounds.
These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic
performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one
of them, that I was observing these Bipeds.
CHAOS
Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the
obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside
me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a
looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a
dream.
THE GHOST
When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition
by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets,
the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent,
which lurks in the plate-glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors
to waylay me.
THE HOUR-GLASS
At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my
neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus.
'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?'
'It's an hour-glass,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I
saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-glass to
measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it!
See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my
hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all
essences--Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows--but I say! There's
your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!'
THE LATCHKEY
I was astonished, I was almost horror-struck by the sight of the New
Moon at the end of the street. In bewilderment and Blake-like wonder I
stood and gazed at it on my doorstep. For what was I doing there; I, a
wanderer, a pilgrim, a nomad of the desert, with no home save where the
evening found me--what was my business on that doorstep; at what
commonplace had the Moon caught me with a latchkey in my hand?
GOOD PRACTICE
We met in an omnibus last evening. 'And where are you going now?' she
asked, as she looked at me with amusement.
'I am going, if the awful truth must be told, to dine in Grosvenor
Square.'
'Lord!' she colloquially replied, 'and what do you do that for?'
'I do it because I am invited. And besides,' I went on, 'let me remind
you of what the Persian Mystics say of the Saints--that the Saints are
sometimes rich, that God sometimes endows them with an outward show of
wealth to hide them from the profane.'
'Oh, does He? Hides them in Grosvenor Square?'
'Very well, then, I shall tell you the real truth; I shall tell you my
real reason for going to dine there. Do you remember what Diogenes
answered when they asked him why he had asked for a statue at the public
expense?'
'No; what did he say?'
'He said--but I must explain another time. I have to get off here.
Good-night.'
I paused, however, at the door of the bus. 'He said,' I called back, '"I
am practising Disappointment." That--you know whom I mean?--was his
answer.'
EVASION
'What do you think of the International Situation?' asked that foreign
Countess, with her foreign, fascinating smile.
Was she a Spy? I felt I must be careful.
'What do I think?' I evasively echoed; and then, carried away by the
profound and melancholy interest of this question, 'Think?' I queried,
'do I ever really think? Is there anything inside my head but
cotton-wool? How can I call myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?' I
pursued the sad inquiry: 'A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninnyhammer, a
bubble on the wave, a leaf in the wind, Madame!'
DINING OUT
When I think of Etiquette and Funerals; when I consider the euphemisms
and rites and conventions and various costumes with which we invest the
acts of our animal existence; when I bear in mind how elegantly we eat
our victuals, and remember the series of ablutions and preparations and
salutations and exclamations and manipulations I went through when I
dined out last evening, I reflect what creatures we are of ceremony; how
elaborate, how pompous and polite a simian Species.
WHAT'S WRONG
From the corner of the dim, half-empty drawing-room where they sat, they
could see, in a great mirror, the other dinner-guests linger and depart.
But none of them were going on--what was the good?--to that evening
party. They talked of satiety and disenchantment, of the wintry weather,
of illness and old age and death.
'But what really frightens me most in life,' said one of them, 'what
gives me a kind of vertigo or shiver, is--it sounds absurd, but it's
simply the horror of Space, _l'epouvante siderale_,--the dismay of
Infinity, the black abysses in the Milky Way, the silence of those
eternal spaces beyond the furthest stars.'
'But Time,' said another of the group, 'surely Time is a worse
nightmare. Think of it! the Past with never a beginning, the Future
going on for ever and ever, and the little present in which we live for
a second, twinkling between these two black abysses.'
'What's wrong with me,' mused the third speaker, 'is that even the
Present eludes me. I don't know what it really is; I can never catch the
moment as it passes; I am always far ahead or far away behind, and
always somewhere else. I am not really here now with you, though I am
talking to you. And why should I go to the party? I shouldn't be there,
either, if I went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation--if you
can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past
that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and
unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak
of it, after all?'
They rose, and their images too were reflected in the great mirror, as
they passed out of the drawing-room, and dispersed, each on his or her
way, into the winter night.
AT SOLEMN MUSIC
I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust, and her high-coloured
wig. And how could I listen to music in the close proximity of those
loud stockings?
Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we
both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of
musical, shared delight, my soul and the soul of that large lady, joined
hands and sang like the morning stars together.
THE GOAT
In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me--had I told
them about this Goat before? And then as I talked there gaped upon
me--abyss opening beneath abyss--a darker speculation: when goats are
mentioned, do I automatically and always tell this story about the Goat
at Portsmouth?
SELF-CONTROL
Still I am not a pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it
all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity
of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave--all this I put up
with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then
for a moment it seems too much; if I get my feet wet, or have to wait
too long for tea, and my soul in these wanes of the moon cries out in
French _C'est fini!_ I always answer _Pazienza!_ in Italian--_abbia la
santa Pazienza!_
THE COMMUNION OF SOULS
'So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?' Then, lifting
the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher
level, 'this notion of Free Will,' I went on, 'the notion, for instance,
that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you
think of it--at least to me it seems--a wretched notion really. I like
to feel that I must follow the things I desire as--how shall I put
it?--as the tide follows the Moon; that my actions are due to necessary
causes; that the world inside me isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world
of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the
Stars are governed.'
'Ah, how I love the Stars!' murmured Lady Hyslop. 'What things they say
to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions; the promise of
ineffable mitigations.'
'Mitigations?' I gasped, feeling for a moment a little giddy. But it
didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most
wonderful conversations.
WAXWORKS
'But one really never knows the Age one lives in. How interesting it
would be,' I said to the lady next me, 'how I wish we could see
ourselves as Posterity will see us!'
I have said it before, but on this occasion I was struck--almost
thunder-struck--by my own remark. Like a rash enchanter, the spirit I
had raised myself alarmed me. For a queer second I did see ourselves in
that inevitable mirror, but cadaverous and out-of-date and palsied--a
dusty set of old waxworks, simpering inanely in the lumber-room of Time.
'Better to be forgotten at once!' I exclaimed, with an emphasis that
seemed to surprise the lady next me.
ADJECTIVES
But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no
longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of
eloquent Death, and the negro and star-enamelled Night?
WHERE?
I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch
the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I
find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the
waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing?
Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among
deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens imagined
by Chinese poets beyond the great cold palaces of the Moon?
IN THE STREET
These eye-encounters in the street, little touches of love-liking; faces
that ask, as they pass, 'Are you my new lover?' Shall I one day--in Park
Lane or Oxford Street perhaps--see the unknown Face I dread and look
for?
THE ABBEY AT NIGHT
And as at night I went past the Abbey, saw its walls towering high and
solemn among the autumn stars, I pictured to myself the white population
in the vast darkness of its interior--all that hushed people of
Heroes--; not dead, I would think them, but animated with a still kind
of life; and at last, after all their intolerable toils, the sounding
tumult of battle, and perilous seapaths, resting there, tranquil and
satisfied and glorious, amid the epitaphs and allegorical figures of
their tombs--those high-piled, trophied, shapeless Abbey tombs, that
long ago they toiled for, and laid down their gallant lives to win.
DESPERANCE
'Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More
and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We
dress, we go out to dinner,' I went on, 'but surely we walk in a vain
show. How good this asparagus is! I often say asparagus is the most
delicious of all vegetables. And yet, I don't know--when one thinks of
fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus, as one can of
strawberries--but tender peas I could eat forever. Then peaches, and
melons;--and there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. One
of my favourite daydreams for the long afternoon of life is to live
alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say
in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with
apricots and figs and peaches: and there are precious pears, too, of my
own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a
gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment I
shall pick another pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to
say--'
CHAIRS
In the streets of London there are door-bells I ring (I see myself
ringing them); in certain houses there are chairs covered with chintz or
cretonne in which I sit and talk about life, explaining often after tea
what I think of it.
A GRIEVANCE
They are all persons of elegant manners and spotless reputations; they
seem to welcome my visits, and they listen to my anecdotes with
unflinching attention. I have only one grievance against them; they will
keep in their houses mawkish books full of stale epithets, which, when I
only seem to smell their proximity, produce in me a slight feeling of
nausea.
There are people, I believe, who are affected in this way by the
presence of cats.
THE MOON
I went in and shook hands with my hostess, but no one else took any
special notice; no one screamed or left the room; the quiet murmur of
talk went on. I suppose I seemed like the others; observed from outside
no doubt I looked more or less like them.
But inside, seen from within...? Or was it a conceivable hypothesis that
we were all alike inside also--that all those quietly-talking people had
got the Moon, too, in their heads?
LONGEVITY
'But when you are as old as I am!' I said to the young lady in pink
satin. 'But I don't know how old you are,' that young lady answered
almost archly. We were getting on quite nicely.
'Oh I'm endlessly old; my memory goes back almost forever. I come out of
the Middle Ages. I am the primitive savage we are all descended from; I
believe in Devil-worship, and the power of the Stars; I dance under the
new Moon, naked and tattooed and holy. I am a Cave-dweller, a
contemporary of Mastodons and Mammoths; I am pleistocene and neolithic,
and full of the lusts and terrors of the great pre-glacial forests. But
that's nothing; I am millions of years older; I am an arboreal Ape, an
aged Baboon, with all its instincts; I am a pre-simian quadruped, I have
great claws, eyes that see in the dark, and a long prehensile tail.'
'Good gracious!' said the terrified young lady in pink satin. Then she
turned, and for the rest of the dinner talked in a hushed voice with her
other neighbour.
IN THE BUS
As I sat inside that crowded bus, so sad, so incredible and sordid
seemed the fat face of the woman opposite me, that I interposed the
thought of Kilimanjaro, that highest mountain of Africa, between us; the
grassy slopes and green realms of negro kings from which its dark cone
rises, the immense, dim, elephant-haunted forests which clothe its
flanks; and above, the white crown of snow, freezing in eternal
isolation over the palm trees and deserts of the African Equator.
JUSTIFICATION
Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon? Do I not owe it
to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I
always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And how
about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the
dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted; Deborah sing without blame
how she arose a mother in Israel, and David boast of his triumph over
the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in His confabulations
with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the Universe Himself
take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance,
His power, His glory?
Was I not made in His image?
THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET
All this hurry to dress and go out, these journeys in taxi-cabs, or in
trains with my packed bag from big railway stations--what keeps me
going, I sometimes ask myself; and I remember how, in his 'Masnavi I
Ma'navi' or 'Spiritual Couplets,' Jalalu 'D-Din Muhammad Rumi says that
our Desires, the swarm of gaudy Thoughts we pursue and follow, are
short-lived like summer insects, and must all be killed before long by
the winter of age.
MONOTONY
Oh, to be becalmed on a sea of glass all day; to listen all day to rain
on the roof, or wind in pine trees; to sit all day by a waterfall
reading exquisite, artificial, monotonous Persian poems about an
oasis-garden where it is always spring--where roses bloom and lovers
sigh, and nightingales lament without ceasing, and white-robed figures
sit in groups by the running water and discuss all day, and day after
day, the Meaning of Life.
DAYDREAM
In the cold and malicious society in which I live, I must never mention
the Soul, nor speak of my aspirations. If I ever once let these people
get a glimpse of the higher side of my nature, they would set on me like
a pack of wolves and tear me in pieces.
I wish I had soulful friends-refined Maiden Ladies with ideals and long
noses, who live at Hampstead or Putney, and play Chopin with passion. On
sad autumn afternoons I would go and have tea with them, and talk of the
spiritual meaning of Beethoven's late Sonatas; or discuss in the
twilight the pathos of life and the Larger Hope.
PROVIDENCE
But God sees me; He knows my beautiful nature, and how pure I keep amid
all sorts of quite horrible temptations. And that is why, as I feel in
my bones, there is a special Providence watching over me; an Angel sent
expressly from heaven to guide my footsteps from harm. For I never trip
up or fall downstairs like other people; I am not run over by cabs and
busses at street-crossings; in the worst wind my hat never blows off.
And if ever any of the great cosmic processes or powers threaten me, I
believe that God sees it: 'Stop it!' He shouts from His ineffable
Throne, 'Don't you touch my Chosen One, my Pet Lamb, my Beloved. Leave
him alone, I tell you!'
ACTION
I am no mere thinker, no mere creature of dreams and imagination. I
stamp and post letters; I buy new bootlaces and put them in my boots.
And when I set out to get my hair cut, it is with the iron face of those
men of empire and unconquerable will, those Caesars and Napoleons, whose
footsteps shake the earth.
WAITING
We met at Waterloo; as we were paying the same visit, we travelled in
the train together; but when we got out at that country station, she
found that her boxes had not arrived. They might have gone on to the
next station; I waited with her while enquiries were telephoned down the
line. It was a mild spring evening: side by side we sat in silence on a
wooden bench facing the platform; the bustle caused by the passing train
ebbed away; the dusk deepened, and one by one the stars twinkled out in
the serene sky.
'How peaceful it is!' I remarked at last. 'Is there not a certain
charm,' I went on after another pause, 'in waiting like this in silence
under the stars? It's after all a little adventure, is it not? a moment
with a certain mood and colour and atmosphere of its own.'
'I often think,' I once more mused aloud, 'I often think that it is in
moments like this of waiting and hushed suspense, that one tastes most
fully the savour of life, the uncertainty, and yet the sweetness of our
frail mortal condition, so capable of fear and hope, so dependent on a
million accidents.'
'Luggage!' I said, after another silence, 'is it not after all absurd
that minds which contemplate the universe should cart about with them
brushes and boots and drapery in leather boxes? Suppose all this paltry
junk,' I said, giving my suitcase, which stood near me, a disdainful
poke with my umbrella, 'suppose it all disappears, what after all does
it matter?'
At last she spoke. 'But it's not your luggage,' she said, 'but mine
which is lost.'
THE WRONG WORD
We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared
that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since faced
the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears, and was
completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said, was a great
meaningless machine; Man, with his reason and moral judgments, was the
product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon destroy him,
he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate with passionless
despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront the hostile powers
with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the Gorgon face of Destiny,
to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling defiance at the icy
stars--this, he said, was his attitude, and it produced, as you can
imagine, a very powerful impression on the company. As for me, I was
completely carried away by my enthusiasm.
'By Jove, that is a stunt!' I cried.
IONS
'Self-determination,' one of them insisted. 'Arbitration!' cried
another.
'Co-operation?' suggested the mildest of the party.
'Confiscation!' answered an uncompromising female.
I, too, became slightly intoxicated by the sound of these vocables. And
were they not the cure for all our ills?
'Inoculation!' I chimed in. 'Transubstantiation, Alliteration,
Inundation, Flagellation and Afforestation!'
A FIGURE OF SPEECH
Though I sometimes lay down the law myself on public questions, I don't
very much care to hear other people do it. The heavy talker, however,
who was now holding forth about finance, showed such a grasp of his
subject, and made such mincemeat of a rash opponent, that I thought it
best, for the moment, to say nothing.
'So what you allege,' he triumphed in his overbearing manner, 'is
perfectly irrelevant. My withers are unwrung. It does not affect my
position in the least.'
And then I lightly flung my Goliath pebble. 'Withers?' I ingenuously
asked, 'what are the withers, anyhow?'
He turned on me a glance of anger and contempt. 'Withers--why the
withers--' 'It's only--only a figure of speech,' he stammered.
'Oh!' I said, with a look at the company full of suggestion, 'a figure
of speech--I see.'
A SLANDER
'But I'm told you don't believe in love--'
'Now who on earth could have told you that?' I cried indignantly. 'Of
course I believe in it--there is no one more enthusiastic about Love
than I am. I believe in it at all times and seasons, but especially in
the Spring. Why, just think of it! True-love amid the apple-blossoms,
lovers who outwake the nightingales of April, the touch of hands and
lips, and the clinging of flower-soft limbs together; and all this amid
the gay, musical, perfumed landscape of the Spring. Why, nothing, Miss
Tomkins, could be more appropriate and pretty!'
'Haven't I said so again and again, haven't I published it more than
once in the weekly papers?'
SYNTHESIS
'It's awful,' I said, 'I think it simply wicked, the way you tear your
friends to pieces!'
'But you do it yourself, you know you do! You analyse and analyse
people, and then you make them up again into creatures larger than
life--'
'That's exactly it,' I answered gravely. 'If I take people to pieces, I
do it in order to put them together again better than they were before;
I make them more real, so to speak, more significant, more essentially
themselves. But to cut them up, as you do, and leave the fragments lying
around anywhere on the floor--I can't tell you how cruel and heartless
and wrong I think it!'
THE AGE
Again, as the train drew out of the station, the old gentleman pulled
out of his pocket his great shining watch; and for the fifth, or, as it
seemed to me, the five-hundredth time, he said (we were in the carriage
alone together) 'To the minute, to the very minute! It's a marvellous
thing, the Railway; a wonderful age!'
Now I had been long annoyed by the old gentleman's smiling face,
platitudes, and piles of newspapers; I had no love for the Age, and an
impulse came on me to denounce it.
'Allow me to tell you,' I said, 'that I consider it a wretched, an
ignoble age. Where's the greatness of life? Where's dignity, leisure,
stateliness; where's Art and Eloquence? Where are your great scholars,
statesmen? Let me ask you, sir,' I cried glaring at him, 'where's your
Gibbon, your Burke or Chatham?'
COMFORT
People often said that there was nothing sadder, she mourned, than the
remembrance of past happiness; but to her it seemed that not the way we
remembered, but the way we forgot, was the real tragedy of life.
Everything faded from us; our joys and sorrows vanished alike in the
irrevocable flux; we could not stay their fleeting. Did I not feel, she
asked, the sadness of this forgetting, this out-living all the things we
care for, this constant dying, so to speak, in the midst of life?
I felt its sadness very much; I felt quite lugubrious about it. 'And
yet,' I said (for I did really want to think of something that might
console this lamentable lady), 'and yet can we not find, in this fading
of recollection, some recompense, after all? Think, for instance--' But
what, alas, could I suggest?
'Think,' I began once more after a moment of reflection, 'think of
forgetting, and reading over and over again, all Jane Austen's novels!'
APPEARANCE AND REALITY
It is pleasant to saunter out in the morning sun and idle along the
summer streets with no purpose.
But is it Right?
I am not really bothered by these Questions--the hoary old puzzles of
Ethics and Philosophy, which lurk around the London corners to waylay
me. I have got used to them; and the most formidable of all, the biggest
bug of Metaphysics, the Problem which nonplusses the wisest heads on
this Planet, has become quite a familiar companion of mine. What is
Reality? I ask myself almost daily: how does the External World exist,
materialised in mid-air, apart from my perceptions? This show of streets
and skies, of policemen and perambulators and hard pavements, is it a
mere vision, a figment of the Mind; or does it remain there, permanent
and imposing, when I stop thinking about it?
Often, as I saunter along Piccadilly or Bond Street, I please myself
with the Berkeleian notion that Matter has no existence; that this so
solid-seeming World is all idea, all appearance--that I am carried soft
through space inside an immense Thought-bubble, a floating, diaphanous,
opal-tinted Dream.
LONELINESS
Is there, then, no friend? No one who hates Ibsen and problem plays, and
the Supernatural, and Switzerland and Adultery as much as I do? Must I
live all my life as mute as a mackerel, companionless and uninvited, and
never tell anyone what I think of my famous contemporaries? Must I
plough always a solitary furrow, and tread the winepress alone?
THE WELSH HARP
What charming corners one can find in the immense dinginess of London,
and what curious encounters become a part of the London-lover's
experience! The other day, when I walked a long way out of the Edgware
Road, and stopped for tea at the Welsh Harp, on the banks of the Brent
Reservoir, I found, beyond the modern frontage of this inn, an old
garden adorned with sham ruins and statues, and full of autumn flowers
and the shimmer of clear water. Sitting there and drinking my tea--alone
as I thought at first, in the twilight--I became aware that the garden
had another occupant; that at another table, not far from me, a vague
and not very prosperous-looking woman in a shabby bonnet was sitting,
with her reticule lying by her, also drinking tea and gazing at the
after-glow of the sunset. An elderly spinster I thought her, a
dressmaker perhaps, or a retired governess, one of those maiden ladies
who live alone in quiet lodgings, and are fond of romantic fiction and
solitary excursions.
As we sat there, we two alone in the growing dusk, more than once our
glances met, and a curious relation of sympathy and understanding seemed
to establish itself between us; we seemed to carry on a dialogue full
of tacit avowals, 'Yes,' we seemed to say, as our eyes met over our
suspended tea-cups, 'yes, Beauty, Romance, the Blue Bird that sings of
Happiness--these are the things we care for--the only things that, in
spite of everything, we still care for; but where can we find them in
the dingy London streets and suburbs?'
'And yet,' our eyes seemed to ask each other, 'isn't this garden, in its
shabby, pretentious way, romantic; isn't it like something in a poem of
Verlaine's; hasn't it now, in the dim light, a kind of beauty? And this
mood of meditation after our excellent tea, what name, if we are honest,
can we call it by, if we do not call it Happiness?'
MISAPPREHENSION
People often seem to take me for some one else; they talk to me as if I
were a person of earnest views and unalterable convictions. 'What is
your opinion of Democracy?' they ask: 'Are you in favour of the Channel
Tunnel?' 'Do you believe in existence after Death?'
I assume a thoughtful attitude, and by means of grave looks and evasive
answers, I conceal--or at least I hope I conceal--my discreditable
secret.
THE LIFT
What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom,
having completely forgotten the errand which had carried me upstairs,
leaping two steps at a time.
Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did
gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world, as Dr. Johnson describes it,
bursting with misery?
O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralising way of
regarding natural phenomena--this crying of vanity on the beautiful
manifestations of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out
of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the
law of gravitation, if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or
forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and
several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable
and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?
SLOANE STREET
When I walk out, middle-aged, but still sprightly, and still, if the
truth must be told, with an idiot dream in my heart of some romantic
encounter, I look at the passers-by, say in Sloane Street, and then I
begin to imagine moonfaces more alluring than any I see in that
thoroughfare. But then again vaster thoughts visit me, remote
metaphysical musings; those faces like moons I imagined all wane as
moons wane, the passers-by vanish; and immortal Reason, disdaining the
daymoth she dwells with, turns away to her crystalline sphere of sublime
contemplation. I am lost out of time, I walk on alone in a world of
white silence.
REGENT'S PARK
I wondered, as I passed Regent's Park on my way to Hampstead, what kind
of people live in those great stuccoed terraces and crescents, with
their solemn facades and friezes and pediments and statues. People
larger than life I picture the inhabitants of those inexpensive, august,
unfashionable houses, people with a dignity of port, an amplitude of
back, an emphasis of vocabulary and conviction unknown in other regions;
Dowagers and Dignitaries who have retired from a world no longer worthy
of them, ex-Governors of Dominions, unavailing Viceroys, superannuated
Bishops and valetudinarian Generals, who wear top-hats and drive around
the Park in old-fashioned barouches--a society, I imagine it, not
frivolous, not flippant, entirely devoid of double meanings; a society
in which the memory of Queen Victoria is still revered, and regrets are
still felt, perhaps, for the death of the Prince Consort.
Or, as I have sometimes fancied, are those noble mansions the homes of
the Victorian Statesmen and Royal Ladies and distinguished-looking
Murderers who, in the near-by wax-work exhibition, gaze on the shallow,
modern generation which chatters and pushes all day before the glassy
disapprobation of their eyes?
THE AVIARY
Peacock Vanities, great, crested Cockatoos of Glory, gay Infatuations
and painted Daydreams--what a pity it is all the Blue Birds of
impossible Paradises have such beaks and sharp claws, that one really
has to keep them shut up in their not too cleanly cages!
ST. JOHN'S WOOD
As I walked on the air soon lightened; the Throne, the Altar and the
top-hat cast fainter shadows, the figures of John Bright and Gladstone
and Queen Victoria faded from my mind. I had entered the precincts of
St. John's Wood; and as I went past its villas of coquettish aspect,
with their gay Swiss gables, their frivolously Gothic or Italian or
almost Oriental faces, the lighter aspects of existence they represent,
the air they have of not taking life too seriously, began to exert their
influence.
St. John's Wood is the home in fiction of adventuresses and profligacy
and Bohemian supper-parties; often have I read about those foreign
Countesses, of unknown history and incredible fascination, who decoy
handsome young officials of the Foreign Office to these villas, and rob
them, in dim-lit, scented bedrooms, of important documents. But I at
least have never too harshly blamed these young diplomatists. Silent is
the street as the mysterious brougham pauses, lovely the eyes that
flash, and graceful the white-gloved hand that beckons from the carriage
window; and how can they resist (for they are only human) the lure of so
adventurous, so enchanting an invitation?
THE GARDEN SUBURB
I had often heard of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the attempt of its
inhabitants to create an atmosphere of the Higher Culture, to
concentrate, as it were, the essence of the ideal life in one region.
But I must now confess that it was in a spirit of profane curiosity that
I walked up towards its courts and closes. And when I saw the notices of
the Societies for Ethical Culture and Handicrafts and Child Study, the
lectures on Reincarnation, the Holy Grail, the Signs of the Zodiac, and
the Teaching of the Holy Zoroaster, I am afraid I laughed. But how
shallow, how thin this laughter soon sounded amid the quiet amenity, the
beautiful distinction of this pretty paradise! It was an afternoon of
daydreams; the autumnal light under the low clouds was propitious to
inner recollection; and as I walked the streets of this ideal city,
soothed by the sense of order and beautiful architecture all around me,
I began to feel that I too was an Idealist, that here was my spiritual
home, and that it would be a right and seemly thing to give up the
cinemas and come and make my dwelling on this hill-top. Pictures floated
before my eyes of tranquil days, days of gardening and handicrafts and
lectures, evenings spent in perusing the world's masterpieces.
Although I still frequent the cinemas, and spend too much time gazing in
at the windows of expensive shops, and the reverie of that afternoon has
come to no fruition, yet I feel myself a better person for it: I feel
that it marks me off from the merely cynical and worldly. For I at least
have had a Pisgah sight of the Promised City; I have made its ideal my
own, if but for an afternoon, and only in a daydream.
SUNDAY CALLS
'Well, I must say!' Reason exclaimed, when we found ourselves in the
street again.
'What's the matter now?' I asked uneasily.
'Why are you always trying to be some one else? Why not be what you
really are?'
'But what am I really? Again I ask you?'
'I do hate to see you playing the ass; and think how they must laugh at
you!'
The glossy and respected image of myself I had left in the house behind
us began to tarnish.
'And what next?' my querulous companion went on. 'What will you be in
South Kensington, I wonder? a sad and solitary Satan, disillusioned and
distinguished, or a bluff, breezy sailor, fond of his bottle and his
boon companions?'
AN ANOMALY
When people embellish their conversation with a glitter of titles, and
drag into it self-aggrandizing anecdotes, though I laugh at this peacock
vein in them, I do not harshly condemn it. Nay, since I too am human,
since I too belong to the great household, would it be surprising
if--say once or twice in my life--I also should have gratified this
tickling relish of the tongue?
No--but what is surprising, is the way that, as I feel, I alone always
escape detection, always throw dust in other people's eyes.
THE LISTENER
The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't
at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it was
the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I had
been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they were all
impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the fastidious
lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me with almost
ecstatic attention.
As a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so from some morass of
memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I
brushed them aside; they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the mirror of
those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested
explanation of their gaze.
Oh, no! that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the
words, 'She mimics you to perfection,' were nothing but a bit of
unintelligible jabber.
ABOVE THE CLOUDS
'I do so hate gossip,' she murmured.
'How I hate it too!' I heard myself exclaim.
'There is so much that is good and noble in human nature; why not talk
of that?'
'Why not indeed?' I sighed.
'I always feel that it is one's own fault if one dislikes people, or
finds them boring.'
'How I agree with you!' I cried sincerely.
'But people are nowadays so cynical--they sneer at everything that makes
life worth living--Love, Faith, Friendship--'
'And yet those very names are so lovely that even when used in mockery
they shed a radiance--they shine like stars.'
'How beautifully you put it! I have so enjoyed our talk.' I had enjoyed
it too, and felt all the better for it, only a little giddy and out of
breath, as if I had been up in a balloon.
THE BUBBLE
Walking home at night, troubled by the world's affairs, and with the
National Debt crushing down my weak shoulders, I sometimes allow my
Thoughts an interlude of solace. From the jar in which I keep my vanity
bottled, I remove the cork; out rushes that friendly Jinn and swells up
and fills the sky. I walk on lightly through another world, a world in
which I cut a very different figure.
I shall not describe that exquisite, evanescent universe; even for me
'tis but the bubble of a moment; I soon snuff it out, or of itself it
melts in the thin air.
CAUTION
With all that I know about life, all this cynical and sad knowledge of
what happens and must happen, all the experience and caution and
disillusion stored and packed in the uncanny, cold, grey matter of my
cerebrum--with all this inside my head, how can I ever dream of banging
it against the Stars?
DESIRES
These exquisite and absurd fancies of mine--little curiosities, and
greedinesses, and impulses to kiss and touch and snatch, and all the
vanities and artless desires that nest and sing in my heart like birds
in a bush--all these, we are now told, are an inheritance from our
pre-human past, and were hatched long ago in very ancient swamps and
forests. But what of that? I like to share in the dumb delights of birds
and animals, to feel my life drawing its sap from roots deep in the soil
of Nature. I am proud of those bright-eyed, furry, four-footed
progenitors, and not at all ashamed of my cousins, the Tigers and Apes
and Peacocks.
MOMENTS
'Awful moments? Why, yes, of course,' I said, 'life is full of them--let
me think--'
'To find other people's unposted letters in an old pocket; to be seen
looking at oneself in a street-mirror, or overhead talking of the Ideal
to a duchess; to refuse Nuns who come to the door to ask for
subscriptions, or to be lent by a beautiful new acquaintance a book she
has written full of mystical slipslop, or dreadful musings in an
old-world garden--'
THE EPITAPH
'But perhaps he is a friend of yours?' said my lips. 'Is it safe?' my
eyes asked, 'Dare I tell you what I think of him?'
It was safe; only silence fell upon them, those Sad Ones, who at my
decease should murmur, 'He never said of any one an unkind word.' 'Alas,
Farewell!' breathed that boyish daydream of my funeral, as it faded.
INTERRUPTION
'Life,' said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever--'life is
a perpetual toothache.'
In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were
discussed of labour troubles, epidemics, cancer, tuberculosis, and
taxation.
Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea,
and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. 'Well, I must say,' she
remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, 'I must say I
enjoy life.'
'So do I,' I whispered.
'When I enjoy things,' she went on, 'I know it. Eating, for instance,
the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always
thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference,' she added, as she
got up to go with the others.
'All the difference in the world,' I answered.
It's too bad that I had no chance for a longer conversation with this
wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot to
tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the mind
with garbage; we make a better use of that divine and adorable
endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the
pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from
our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness
everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at
greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and practice of our
art.
THE EAR-TRUMPET
They were talking of people I did not know. 'How do they spend their
time there?' some one asked.
Then I, who had been sitting too long silent, raised my voice. 'Ah,
that's a mysterious question, when you think of it, how people spend
their time. We only see them after all in glimpses; but what, I often
wonder, do they do in their hushed and shrouded hours--in all the
interstices of their lives?'
'In the what?'
'In the times, I mean, when no one sees them. In the intervals.'
'But that isn't the word you used?'
'It's the same thing--the interstices--'
Of course there was a deaf lady present. 'What did you say?' she
inquired, holding out her ear-trumpet for my answer.
GUILT
What should I think of? I asked myself as I opened my umbrella. How
should I amuse my imagination, that harsh, dusky, sloshy, winter
afternoon, as I walked to Bedford Square? Should I think of Arabia or
exotic birds; of Albatrosses, or of those great Condors who sleep on
their outspread wings in the blue air above the Andes?
But a sense of guilt oppressed me. What had I done or left undone? And
the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had
wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz,
Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski, of all whose works I had
never read a word.
CADOGAN GARDENS
Out of the fog a dim figure accosted me. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, but
could you tell me how to get to Cadogan Gardens?'
'Cadogan Gardens? I am afraid I am lost myself. Perhaps, Sir,' I added
(we two seemed oddly alone and intimate in that white world of mystery
together), 'perhaps, Sir, you can tell me where I can find the Gardens I
am looking for?' I breathed their name.
'Hesperian Gardens?' the voice repeated. 'I don't think I have ever
heard of Hesperian Gardens.'
'Oh, surely!' I cried, 'The Gardens of the Sunset and the singing
Maidens!'
'But what I am really looking for,' I confided to that dim-seen figure,
'what I am always hoping to find is the Fortunate Abodes, the Happy
Orchard, the Paradise our parents lost so long ago.'
THE RESCUE
As I sat there, hopeless, with my coat and hat on in my bedroom, I felt
I had no hold on life, no longer the slightest interest in it. To gain
all that the world could give I would not have raised a listless finger;
and it was entirely without intention that I took a cigarette, and felt
for matches in my pocket. It was the act of an automaton, of a corpse
that twitches a little after life has left it.