Part 9

‘Servants are so ridiculous and tiresome,’ I said. ‘I should think your maid might have found time to bring up our beef-tea, instead of that dreadful girl. I don’t know where you get your servants from.’

‘Barton went to bed yesterday with influenza,’ said Helen wheezily. ‘She is very feverish--worse than Legs.’

I can’t say why, but this news made me feel rather better, so I lit a cigarette. It tasted exactly as if it had been made of the green weed which grows on stagnant horse-ponds. I felt much worse again at once, and was quite sure my temperature was going up. But I could not have the mournful satisfaction of knowing that this was true, because the thermometer was broken. And my finger continued to bleed. The blood was very bright red--probably arterial. Yet, whatever was happening, it seemed impossible that things were as desperate as I thought them, and I made the excellent determination to do something.

‘Will it disturb you if I play the piano?’ I asked Helen.

‘Not the least.’

I attempted to play the ‘Etudes Symphoniques,’ beginning with the last variation, by reason of the sky-scraping spirits of it. I don’t think I played any correct notes at all, and Helen (again to annoy me) made the noise which tiresome people make to show that a wrong note gets on their highly sensitive nerves. It consists of a whistling intake of the breath. Though I had only played a dozen bars, the white notes in the treble were spotted with blood, as if I was a Jew and the piano was the lintel of the door on Passover night. It was absurd to go on playing on a blood-boltered piano, even if I could play the right notes, which I could not. So again, with the laudable idea of doing something, I staggered upstairs, brought down a moistened towel, and proceeded to clean the keys. I struck notes from time to time, and Helen kept on wincing.

‘Is that necessary?’ she asked at length.

‘Yes, because I have bled over the piano. Besides, I’m cleaning it with the soft pedal down.’

The door was flung open, and the Awful Thing appeared.

‘Dinner,’ she said, and left the door open.

We went downstairs. ‘Dinner’ in Raikes’ indisposition was huddled on to the table. There were pieces of moist fish under one cover. There was a ginger pudding under another. There were large potatoes under a third; and under the fourth a rich and red beef-steak. Then despair descended on me.

‘Is the cook ill, too?’ I asked of the Awful Thing.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Who cooked this? Or, rather, didn’t?’

‘Please, sir, I did.’

Then quite suddenly, both for Helen and me, dawn began to break for a little. Here was three-quarters of the establishment incapacitated, and the Awful Thing was calmly doing everybody’s work as well as her own, which was that of a housemaid. Helen cheered up at once.

‘Please give me some fish,’ she said to me. ‘It looks quite excellent.’

I helped her largely and sumptuously. We both understood each other at this moment, and I put a thumping helping on to my own plate.

Helen, greatly daring, took a greedy mouthful, and spoke to the Awful Thing, who was beginning to beam largely on us.

‘Delicious,’ she said to her. ‘I had no idea you could cook so beautifully. You needn’t wait; we will ring. And you must have help in at once. Will you telephone to Mrs. Watkins’ agency, asking for a--(she paused, and I know she was going to say ‘cook’)--a housemaid?’

The Awful Thing smiled from ear to ear, and a moment afterwards we heard the insane ringing of the telephone.

‘Oh, I _couldn’t_ send for a cook just this moment,’ said Helen, when the girl had left the room. ‘She was bursting with pride at having cooked this. But if I eat it I shall be sick. What are we to do?’

The girl in her enthusiasm had built the fire three-quarters of the way up the chimney, though the day was muggy and warm beyond all telling. Into the heart of the blaze we stuffed large pieces of fish, which burned with a blue and oily flame.

‘Now ring,’ said Helen.

The girl returned after a long pause.

‘Please ‘m, Mrs. Watkins hasn’t a housemaid to send, by reason of so much illness. But she can send a cook,’ she said, and her face fell.

‘It’s such a pity, when you can cook so well,’ said Helen; ‘but we must have somebody. You can’t do all the work.’

‘A char and I could manage, ‘m,’ she said, changing the plates with an awful clatter.

‘Oh, not with Mr. Legs ill,’ said Helen. ‘We shall have you knocked up next, and where should we be then?’

The radiant smile returned to the girl’s face.

‘Give me some steak, Jack,’ said Helen, ‘and a potato. How delicious it smells!’

The Awful Thing again left the room, leaving, as it were, the fragrance of her smile behind her.

We made no attempt to eat any of the second course, but put two large slices of steak, two potatoes, and a big spoonful of perspiring cauliflower into the fire. Pieces of ginger-pudding followed it to the burning ghaut, and soon the door again opened, and coffee was brought in. This was an after-thought, I fancy, though ill-inspired and gritty. But there was a coal-scuttle.

I am afraid we both relapsed again after lunch, though for a time the shining example of the housemaid who had done the work of everybody else inspired us to attempt to play piquet, bezique, and the piano. But these were all hopeless: it did not seem worth while dealing, and, in point of fact, the attempt at a duet came to a conclusion at the end of the first page, for Helen only groaned and said:

‘I can’t turn over.’

But that, I am thankful to say, was our low-water mark.

* * * * *

Sunshine began to shine more strongly on the wreck when Legs, two days afterwards, came downstairs, with the cheering remark that he felt so ill that he was sure he couldn’t be as ill as he felt. Soon after he burst into hoarse laughter.

‘I shall cheer up when I have counted ten,’ he remarked.

Well, on the whole, when it was put simply and firmly like that, it seemed the best thing to do. Legs took change of the cheering process, and ordered a basin, soap, and three churchwarden pipes, and we blew soap-bubbles, which, though it may not be in itself a work of high endeavour, had at least the result of making us do something, which is always a good thing. So, when that was over, in order to contribute to the wholesome atmosphere of employment, I brought in and read to him and Helen what I had written that morning, and had designed to appear in the book you I are now reading. It was--I will not deceive you--a string (a long one) of cheap and gloomy reflections on the mutability of life, the reality of suffering, and the certainty of death. I had taken some trouble with it, but the most poignant and searing sentences made Legs simply roll in his chair with laughter that was noiseless merely because his throat was in such a state of relaxation that it could not make sounds. But with eyes streaming and in a strangled whisper he said:

‘Oh, do stop a moment till I don’t hurt so much with laughing, and then read it again.’

I looked at Helen. She had a handkerchief to her face, and her shoulders shook with incontrollable laughter.

‘It’s much the funniest thing you ever wrote,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it, now? Begin again at “All the pain and sorrow with which we are surrounded”--oh, no, before that--something about “It is when we are racked with suffering ourselves.” Oh, Legs, isn’t it heavenly?’

Legs had recovered himself a little, but still drummed with his feet on the carpet.

‘I never knew I could feel so much better so quickly,’ he said. ‘I felt a mere worm when I proposed soap-bubbles. I want it all again from the beginning, where what you thought was sunlight was barred with strange shadows. O Lor!’

So I gave them this intellectual--or should I say spiritual?--treat once more, and then threw the manuscript into the fire, amid the shrill expostulations of the others. Legs made heroic attempts to save it, but fruitlessly, or, indeed, I would print it here, as a warning to those who do not feel very well to postpone their meditations upon life and death until they feel a little better. Also, I do not think that one’s reflections on any subject are likely to be of much value unless they are founded on some sort of experience, and, to be quite honest, I had founded my views that morning on the mutability of life and the anguish of the world on the depression which was the result of a feverish cold. They were depressing enough, but I do not think that they were of sufficiently solid foundations. They proved, it is true, extraordinarily cheering to Helen and Legs, but one cannot be certain that the rest of the world would be equally exhilarated. They might be taken seriously, though Helen says I need not have been afraid of that.

Every man, even a pessimist, is supposed to have a perfect right to form his own opinions, but if I had my way (there is not the least likelihood of it) I should establish a censorship of the press, which should be in the hands of six young and cheerful optimists, who should decide whether such opinions were fit for publication. Quite rightly literature of an indecent nature, and work which may be supposed to have a tendency encouraging to criminals, is not allowed to be disseminated. I should put a similar prohibition on the dissemination of discouraging books, books which might be expected to suggest or foster the opinion that the world is a poor sort of place, and that God isn’t in His heaven at all. Even if this was proved to be true, I would count it criminal to attempt to convince anybody of it; it would be a murderous assault on the happiness of private individuals. The law does not allow one to poison a man’s bread with impunity, so how much more stringently should it forbid the poisoning of the inward health of his soul! Nothing but harm ever came from the dissemination of depressing truths, nothing but good from the dissemination of innocent and joyful beliefs, even should it be proved that they had no foundation whatever. For if the world is a dreary and painful place, so much more need is there of courage and a high heart to render it the least tolerable, and if we are to be snuffed out like candles when we come to the end of our few and evil years, how much more is it the part of wisdom to snatch a little happiness out of the circumambient annihilation!

And to think that only this morning I had actually tried to commit this crime, and was only saved from it by Legs’ unutterable laughter. To be truthful, I felt a little offended when he first began to laugh, and inwardly hoped that he would soon grow depressed and thoughtful as I continued to tell my rosary of discouraging things. But I need not have indulged that hope; it was forlorn from the beginning.

Instead, it made both him and Helen feel much better. I am so content to leave it at that. I had hoped--I had, indeed--when I wrote those depressing pages (which I wish to Heaven I had not burned) that possible readers might see part of the serious side of things under the discouragement of my winged words. But now--two days later--I am far more content that those two darlings should have laughed at what was written with such seriousness, than that all those into whose hands the printed record of that manuscript might have fallen should have sighed once over my jaundiced views about life and death, and sickness and mutability.

Of course, death is an extremely solemn affair, but it seems to me now--we are all recovering fast, and are drinking hypophosphates, and beginning to be greedy again--that the solemnity of it ought to have been discounted long ago, if it is going to be solemn at all. Everyone, of course, is at liberty to take life solemnly from the time he begins to think at all. But whatever our attitude towards life is, the same ought to be our attitude towards death, whether we believe that there is a continuance of life afterwards, or whether we are so unfortunate as to believe that there is the quenched candle. For in the one case death is but the opening of a door into a fuller light, a thing, it is true, that may affect one for the moment, since from the weakness of the flesh we cling to what we know, while in the other death is just extinction, a consummation which no pessimist should fear, since while he lived he had held so poor an opinion of life. So whether we regard life as a pleasant interlude in something else, or whether we regard death--a thing unthinkable to me--as the extinction of consciousness, I cannot believe that he is not a guest who is welcome when he comes. Personally I do not want him to come for a long time, since I am delighted with the world, and it would be most annoying to die now when one is just recovering from influenza, and hopes to go to the Richter concert to-morrow. But whatever one’s belief about the future is, I cannot see that there is an essential horror about death. I can conjure up horror of some kind about going to the dentist, about looking up trains in a Bradshaw, since the print is so execrable and the connections so unruly, but I go my journey, or I go to the dentist, and get to my destination, or am relieved of a troublesome tooth. Life does not seem to me the least troublesome, it is true, but let us take it that by death I get to my destination, or in any case get nearer it.

Besides, how frightfully interesting!

I did not die, but went to the Richter concert instead. Legs wished to go, too, but that was clearly idiotic, and so Helen and I tossed up as to which of us should go, and which remain at home. I won, and went.

There was Isolde in his high chair. (Probably an intelligent critic will say that Isolde was a woman, and I mean Tristan. But I don’t.) He waved a little wand, and the spirit of the Meistersingers filled the hall. It was not, so it struck me, a remembrance only of their harmonious joviality, a mere picture of them; it was they who rollicked and made processions in the great thumping triads of their march. There they sat, each with his business, town clerk, and vintner burgomaster, and lawyer, and, best of all, the old tender-hearted shoemaker, on whose kindly face upturned to the sky one feather of the bird of love had fallen, though it had never come and nestled in his bosom. But it was not with bitterness that so great a loss had filled him; it had but refined him to a mellow kindliness that made all young things love him. There they all sat, so the band told me, over their songs and their sober carousing, till the others went home, and Sachs was left alone with music yet unsung echoing in his kind old head, and throbbing in his youthful heart. But he knew that such Divine melody was not to be realized by him; some master of music had yet to come and put into notes and audible harmony that which existed but in the temple of his dreams, in the garden of things a man may conceive, but may not realize. Then came there the gracious young knight, and Sachs heard that of which he had dreamed, the song taught by the birds and the choirs of Nature to the ardent heart of youth.

The triumph took wings and soared, lifting Sachs with it, him and his yearnings, and that fine old music, too, which was his. Inextricably mingled, they were knit one into each other, soaring into the sunrise.

* * * * *

Thereafter we were taken to the bleak mountain, where should gather the maidens of storm, who did the will of Wotan. It was high and exposed above the region of the trees, and shrill blew the winds over it, and the heavens streamed above it. Fast and thick rode the army of menacing clouds, for the tempest in which the Valkyries rejoice, riding their untamed steeds down the swift roadway of the winds, was broken out in mad fury. Yelling and screaming, it drove in mad circles of wrath round the place where the nine maidens should foregather that evening, each with the fruit of her day’s quest slung across her saddle, each with a hero who should drink that night of the wine of the gods, which should pour into his veins the fire of eternal life in place of the faint mortal blood that had beaten there before. Yet it was not love the maidens sought. It was danger and death and heroic enterprise that bore them so swiftly on their errands, and lit in them a fire brighter than love has ever kindled. Their wine was the buffet of the tempest, their meat the strong winds of God.

Then there was heard, faint at first, the beating of the immortal hoofs in the rush of flying steeds; from east and west there shone out remote fires in the bedlam of the clouds, increasing, getting nearer and more blinding, till through the darkness of the tempest could be seen the figures of the maidens gathering to their trysting-place, some at the gallop, some flying, and all drunk with adventure and swift deeds. Each that day had prospered, each had a hero at her saddle, swooning now in death, but soon to be restored to the fuller life.

So gathered they, but as yet one was still missing--Brünnhilde, the swiftest and best of them all, the dearest to the heart of Wotan, for, indeed, she was none other than his heart and his inviolable will. And while yet the others wondered at her tarrying, she came. But no hero had she. She but led a woman into the midst of her sisters, for pity had touched her fierce heart with so keen and intimate a pang that she had disobeyed the behest of Wotan, and saved her of the race which he had doomed to destruction.... The sorrow and the pain of the world had entered into her. Henceforth no more there would be for her the starry splendour of Valhalla, throned on the thunder and rosy with the light of eternal dawn. Soon for this her deed should another light shine on tower and palace wall--the light of the flames that consumed it.

* * * * *

Tempest, and love, and sorrow, and the doom of the immortal gods all made audible in the eternal kingdom of the air! How is it that, when once one has heard a miracle like this, one can ever so far forget it as to go back to the meanness of little miry ways? There are so many big things in the world, and though one knows that, and has, according to one’s scale, seen and understood their size, yet we can still be so gross of perception that one can sit down, blear-eyed of vision, to write two-penny-halfpenny reflections about sorrow and mutability! (And be rather pleased with them, too, until Legs and Helen laughed themselves all out of shape.)

How large a place, too, in that which makes for size and the breeziness of living, does Art in some form or other occupy for most of us! Music and painting, literature and drama, are great doors flung wide to admit one to the sunshine of God. Often, even to the spiritually-minded, the avenues of prayer and directer communion seem somehow blocked; to others, the majority, they are never wholly open. But to any who have an appreciation at all of what is beautiful, it must be a dark hour indeed when that approach is altogether shrouded and black, when neither Angelo, nor Velasquez, nor Shelley, nor Wagner, has a candle to give one to light the way. Millions of beautiful minds have their approach here. To millions all idea of a personal God, to be approached directly, seems inconceivable, but it seems to me to be one of the perfectly certain things in this very uncertain world that the passionate worship of beauty, in whatever sort manifested, is no less a direct invocation than prayer and the bent knee. The study and the love for ‘whatsoever things are lovely’ is as royal a road, perhaps, as the other, for the passion for what is beautiful is no less than the passion for the only Beautiful, and by such as feel that, all that is filthy is as unerringly condemned as it is by those who call ‘filthy’ by another name--‘sinful.’ For the perception of anything beautiful has to the perceiver a force of purging, while to the gross sense it is a sealed thing.

‘O world as God has made it, all is beauty; And knowing this is love, and love is duty, What further can be sought for or declared?’

And to that I say ‘Amen.’

* * * * *

The ‘kennel,’ as that same magician of words said, is ‘a-yelp’ at this. Artists, of whatever sort, are supposed to be loose of life. Where that extraordinary delusion arose I have no idea, unless it had its origin in some superficial observer of the manners and ways in the Latin quarter of Paris. That things not technically parochial may have occurred there, who would deny? But for my part I think it just as un-Christian to nag, and to vex, and to be unkind as to be anything else under the sun. In fact, to put it broadly, I would as soon be a drunken and kind man as be a sour and total abstainer. Sour and total abstainers will turn on me their eyes of smiling pity and horror, but perhaps it is only a matter of taste.

But to be ‘nice’ to people seems so immensely important. You may lecture on the Lamentations of Jeremiah for hours together, with a battery of historical facts to help you, and yet do no particular good; but if you help a lame dog, canine or human, over a stile, you have been a far better Christian. I dare say that word offends some people, so I will cancel it, and say that you have been of far greater service in a world that has fortuitously come into being, and will as fortuitously go out of being. Whatever may be the truth about things seen and unseen, happiness is quite certainly better than misery, and laughter is better than the most edifying tears.

The finger of the gloomy moralist is pointed at me. I knew it was going to be pointed--and in a sepulchral voice he says: ‘What about death?’

The fact is that I don’t know (nor does he), and it is not my affair. While I am alive I prefer to drink deep of the joy of life than to speculate about what may come next. I can conjure up my death-bed as often as I choose, and make it a scene of moving pathos and dim vexed doubts. There is nothing so easy. I can without the slightest effort advance really profound problems as to ‘what it all means,’ since there is nothing so easy as asking unanswerable questions. What of the death of the wasp which I killed gleefully last August with a tennis-racquet? I haven’t the slightest idea. All I know is that if next August another ventures to buzz round my head when I am having tea on the lawn after a perspiring set, I shall, if possible, kill it again.

If only the gloomy moralist could give me a reasonable theory to show why I could not exterminate wasps, I would accept it. But he can’t. He only says it puzzles him. It puzzles me, too, but in the interval I kill the wasp.

The fact is (degrading though it may sound) that I do not really believe that we are any of us capable of understanding the mind of the Infinite God. Philosophers try to explain little bits of it, and in their explanation of the little bit of it bang their heads together like children playing hide-and-seek in the dark. _Hinc illæ lacrimæ_. The poor children have terrible headaches. I am extremely sorry, but it is, after all, their fault. Instead of playing hide-and-seek in the dark, they should go out and play in the light; then no heads would be hit together.

It is quite maddening to think of the energy expended over this hide-and-seek, when all the time the garden of the world’s beauty is ready waiting outside the door. If you have the instincts of a beast, perhaps it is better to grope in the dark; but if you have the rudiments of any other condition, go and play. All the beauty that the world holds is at your command. All that really matters in this world is to be enjoyed very cheaply. Most things worth reading can be bought for a shilling or two, and if that is not ‘handy,’ look at a tree instead, and absorb the life that shines in each growing twig of it. Or if you are musically minded, hear, as I have just heard, the glories of the maidens of the storm.