Chapter 2

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.'