Chapter 3

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.

But when I found that I hadn't any matches, that--hang it!--there wasn't a box of matches anywhere, then, with this vexation, life came flooding back--the warm, familiar sense of my own existence, with all its exasperation, and incommunicable charm.

CHARM

'Speaking of Charm,' I said, 'there is one quality which I find very attractive, though most people don't notice it, and rather dislike it if they do. That quality is Observation. You read of it in eighteenth-century books--"a Man of much Observation," they say. So few people,' I went on, 'really notice anything--they live in theories and thin dreams, and look at you with unseeing eyes. They take very little interest in the real world; but the Observers I speak of find it a source of inexhaustible fascination. Nothing escapes them; they can tell at once what the people they meet are like, where they belong, their profession, the kind of houses they live in. The slightest thing is enough for them to judge by--a tone of voice, a gesture, a way of putting on the hat--'

'I always judge people,' one of the company remarked, 'by their boots. It's people's feet I look at first. And bootlaces now--what an awful lot bootlaces can tell you!'

As I slipped my feet back under my chair, I subjected my theory of Charm to a rapid revision.

CARAVANS

Always over the horizon of the Sahara move those soundless caravans of camels, swaying with their padded feet across the desert I imagine, till in the shadowy distance of my mind they fade away, and vanish.

THE SUBURBS

What are the beliefs about God in Grosvenor Gardens, the surmises of South Kensington concerning our fate beyond the Grave? On what grounds does life seem worth living in Pimlico; and how far in the Cromwell Road do they follow, or think they follow, the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount?

If I can but dimly discern the ideals of these familiar regions, how much more am I in the dark about the inner life of the great outer suburbs. In what works of local introspection can I study the daydreams of Brixton, the curiosities and discouragements of Camberwell or Ealing?

More than once I have paused before a suburban villa, telling myself that I had after all but to ring the bell, and go in and ask them. But alas, they would not tell me; they could not tell me, even if they would.

THE CONCERTO

'What a beautiful movement!' she murmured, as the music paused.

'Beautiful!' I roused myself to echo, though I hadn't heard a note.

Immediately I found myself again in the dock; and again the trial began, that ever-recurring criminal Action in which I am both Judge and culprit, all the jury, and the advocate on either side.

I now pleaded my other respectable attainments and previous good character; and winning a favourable verdict, I dropped back into my dream, letting the violin wail unheard through the other movements, and the Grand Piano tinkle.

SOMEWHERE

Somewhere, far below the horizon, there is a City; some day I shall sail to find that sun-bright harbour; by what star I shall steer my vessel, or where that seaport lies, I know not; but somehow, through calms and storms and all the vague sea-noises I shall voyage, until at last some mountain peak will rise to tell me I am near my destination; or I shall see, some day at dusk, a lighthouse twinkling at its port.

THE PLATITUDE

'It's after all the little things in life that really matter!' I exclaimed. I was as much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this involuntary outbreak; but I have become an expert in that Taoist art of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of 'sitting and forgetting.' I have learnt to lay aside my personality in awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading; to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on according to the heavens' rolling, with rocks and stones and trees.

THE FETISH

Enshrined in a box of white paste-board upstairs I keep a black, ceremonial object; 'tis my link with Christendom and the world of grave custom; only on sacred occasions does it make its appearance, only at some great tribal dance of my race. To pageants of Woe I convey it, or of the hugest Felicity: at great Hallelujahs of Wedlock, or at last Valedictions, I hold it bare-headed as I bow before altars and tombs.

THE ECHO

Now and then, from the other end of the table, words and phrases reached us as we talked.

'What do they mean by complexes?' she asked. 'Oh, it's only one of the catchwords of the day,' I answered. 'Everything's a complex just now.'

'The talk of most people,' I went on, 'is simply--how shall I put it?--simply the ticking of clocks; it marks the hour, but it has no other interest. But I like to think for myself, to be something more than a mere mouthpiece of the age I live in--a mere sounding-board and echo of contemporary chatter.'

'Just listen!' I said as again their raised voices reached our ears.

'It's simply one of the catchwords of the day,' some one was shouting, 'the merest echo of contemporary chatter!'

THE SCAVENGER

'My parlour-maid and cook both gave notice--'

'My stomach is not at all what it should be--'

'Of course the telephone was out of order--'

'The coal they sent was all stones and coal-dust--'

'All the electric wiring has had to be renewed--'

'I find it impossible to digest potatoes--'

'My aunt has had to have eighteen of her teeth extracted--'

Am I nothing but a dust-bin or kitchen-sink for other people's troubles? Have I no agonies, no indigestions of my own?

THE HOT-BED

It was too much: the news in the paper was appalling; Central Europe and the Continent of Asia in a state of chaos; no comfort anywhere; tempests in the Channel, earthquakes, famines, strikes, insurrections. The burden of the mystery, the weight of all this incorrigible world was really more than I could cope with.

'To prepare a hot-bed for early vegetables, equal quantities are taken of horse-manure and fallen leaves; a large heap is built in alternate layers,' I read with passionate interest, 'of these materials; it is left for several days, and then turned over. The site of the hot-bed should be sheltered from cold winds, but open to the sunshine. Early and dwarf varieties of potatoes should be chosen; asparagus plants may be dug up from the open garden--'

APHASIA

'But you haven't spoken a word--you ought to tell us what you think.'

'The truth is,' I whispered hoarsely in her unaverted ear, 'the truth is, I talk too much. Think of all the years I have been wagging my tongue; think how I shall go on wagging it, till it is smothered in dust!'

'And the worst of it is,' I went on hoarsely vociferating, 'the horror is that no one understands me; I can never make clear to any one my view of the world. I may wear my tongue to the stump, and no one will ever know--I shall go down to the grave, and no one will know what I mean.'

MAGIC

'Do you think there are ghosts?' she foamed, her eyes ablaze, 'do you believe in Magic?' I had no intention of discussing the supernatural with this spook-enthusiast.

'Magic,' I mused aloud, 'what a beautiful word Magic is when you think of it.'

'Are you interested in etymology?' I asked. 'To my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the derivation of words--it's full of the romance and wonder of real life and history. Think of _Magic_, for instance; it comes, as no doubt you know, from the Magi, or ancient priests of Persia.'

'Don't you love our deposit of Persian words in English? To me they glitter like jewels in our northern speech. _Magic_ and _Paradise_, for instance; and the names of flowers and gems and rich fruits and tissues--_Tulip_ and _Lilac_ and _Jasmin_ and _Peach_ and _Lapis Lazuli_,' I chanted, waving my hands to keep off the spooks, 'and _Orange_ and _Azure_ and _Scarlet_.'

MRS. BACKE

Mrs. Backe would be down in a few minutes, so I waited in the drawing-room of this new acquaintance who had so kindly invited me to call.

It is indiscreet, but I cannot help it; if I am left alone in a room, I cannot help peering about at the pictures and ornaments and books. Interiors, the habitations people make for their souls, are so fascinating, and tell so much; they interest me like sea-shells, or the nests of birds.

'A lover of Switzerland,' I inferred, 'has travelled in the East--the complete works of Canon Farrar--that big bust with whiskers is Mendelssohn, no doubt. Good heavens! a stuffed cat! And that Moorish plaque is rather awful. Still, some of the nicest people have no taste--'

Then I saw the clock. One look at that pink china clock, with the face of a monkey, was enough. Softly from that drawing-room, softly I stole downstairs, and closed the front door of that house softly behind me.

WHISKERS

There was once a young man who thought he saw Life as it really is, who prided himself on looking at it grimly in the face without illusions. And he went on looking at it grimly, as he thought, for a number of years. This was his notion of himself; but one day, meeting some very young people, he saw, reflected as it were in their eyes, a bland old gentleman with a white waistcoat and Victorian whiskers, a lover of souls and sunsets, and noble solutions for all problems--

That was what he saw in the eyes of those atrocious young men.

THE SPELLING LESSON.

The anecdote which had caused the laughter of those young people was not a thing to joke about. I expressed my conviction briefly; but the time-honoured word I made use of seemed unfamiliar to them--they looked at each other and began whispering together. Then one of them asked in a hushed voice, 'It's what, did you say?'

I repeated my monosyllable loudly.

Again they whispered together, and again their spokesman came forward.

'Do you mind telling us how you spell it?'

'I spell it with a W!' I shouted.

'W-r-o-n-g--Wrong!'

JEUNESSE

Mind you, I don't say that their eyes aren't bigger than ours, their eyelashes longer, their faces more pink and plump--and they can skip about with an agility of limb which we cannot equal. But all the same a great deal too much is made of these painted dolls.

Think of the thinness of their conversation!

Depicted in gaudy tints on the covers of paper novels they look well enough; and they make a better appearance in punts, I admit, than we do. But is that a reason why they should be allowed to disturb the decorum of tables, and interrupt with their giggles and squeaks our grave consultations?

HANGING ON

If it didn't all depend on me; if there was any one else to decide the destinies of Europe; if I wasn't bound to vindicate the Truth on all occasions, and shout down every falsehood, standing alone in arms against a sea of error, and holding desperately in place the hook from which Truth and Righteousness and Good Taste hang as by a thread and tremble over the unspeakable abyss; if but for a day or two;--it cannot be, I cannot let Art and Civilisation go crashing into chaos. Suppose the skies should fall in while I was napping; suppose the round world should take its chance to collapse into Stardust again?

SUPERANNUATION

'What an intolerable young person!' I exclaimed, the moment he had left the room. 'How can one sit and listen to such folly? The arrogance and ignorance of these young men! And the things they write, and their pictures!'

'It's all pose and self-advertisement, I tell you--'

'They have no reverence!' I gobbled.

Now why do I do it? I know it turns the hair grey and stiffens the joints--why, then, by denouncing them in this unhygienic fashion, do I talk myself into an invalid and old fogey before my time?

AT THE CLUB

'It's the result of Board School Education--'

'It's the popular Press--'

'It's the selfishness of the Working Classes--'

'It's the Cinema--'

'It's the Jews--'

'Paid Agitators!--'

'The decay of faith--'

'The disintegration of family life--'

'I put it down,' I said, 'to sun-spots. If you want to know what I think,' I went inexorably on, 'if you ask me the cause of all this modern unrest--'

DELAY

I was late for breakfast this morning, for I was delayed in my heavenly hot bath by the thought of all the other Earnest Thinkers, who, at that very moment--I had good reason to believe it--were blissfully soaking the time away in hot baths all over London.

SMILES

When people smile to themselves in the street, when I see the face of an ugly man or uninteresting woman light up (faces, it would seem, not exactly made for happy smiling), I wonder from what visions within those smiles are reflected; from what footlights, what gay and incredible scenes they gleam of glory and triumph.

THE DAWN

My Imagination has its dancing-places, like the Dawn in Homer; there are terraces, with balustrades and marble fountains, where Ideal Beings smile at my approach; there are ilex-groves and beech trees in whose shadows I hold forth for ever; gardens fairer than all earthly gardens where groups of ladies grow never weary of listening to my voice.

THE PEAR

'But every one is enthusiastic about the book!' I protested. 'Well, what if they are?' was the answer.

I too am a Superior Person, but the predicament was awkward. To appear the dupe of a vulgar admiration, to be caught crying stale fish at a choice luncheon party!

'Oh, of course!' I hit back, 'I know it's considered the thing just now to despise the age one lives in. No one, even in Balham, will admit that they have read the books of the day. But my attitude has always been' (what had it been? I had to think in a hurry), 'I have always felt that it was more interesting, after all, to belong to one's own epoch; to share its dated and unique vision, that flying glimpse of the great panorama, which no subsequent generation can ever recapture. To be Elizabethan in the age of Elizabeth; romantic at the height of the Romantic Movement--'

But it was no good: I saw it was no good, so I took a large pear and eat it in silence. I know a good deal about pears, and am particularly fond of them. This one was a _Doyenne du Comice_, the most delicious kind of all.

INSOMNIA

Sometimes, when I am cross and cannot sleep, I begin an angry contest with the opinions I object to. Into the room they flop, those bat-like monsters of Wrong-Belief and Darkness; and though they glare at me with the daylight faces of bullying opponents, and their voices are the voices that often shout me down in argument, yet, in these nocturnal controversies, it is always my assertions that admit no answer.

I do not spare them; it is now their turn to be lashed to fury, and made to eat their words.

READING PHILOSOPHY

'The abstractedness of the relation, on the other hand, brings to consciousness no less strongly the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena. In its widest formulation--' Mechanically I turned the page; but what on earth was it all about? Some irrelevant fancy must have been fluttering between my spectacles and the printed paper.

I turned and caught that pretty Daydream. To be a Wit--yes, while my eyes were reading Hegel, I had stolen out myself to amaze society with my epigrams. Each conversation I had crowned at its most breathless moment with words of double meaning which had echoed all through London. Feared and famous all my life-time for my repartees, when at last had come the last sad day, when my ashes had been swept at last into an urn of moderate dimensions, still then had I lived upon the lips of men; still had my plays on words been echoed, my sayings handed down in memoirs to ensuing ages.

MORAL TRIUMPH

When I see motors gliding up at night to great houses in the fashionable squares, I journey in them: I ascend in imagination the grand stairways of those palaces; and ushered with eclat into drawing-rooms of splendour, I sun myself in the painted smiles of the Mayfair Jezebels, and glitter in that world of wigs and rouge and diamonds like a star. There I quaff the elixir and sweet essence of mundane triumph, eating truffles to the sound of trumpets, and feasting at sunrise on lobster-salad and champagne.

But it's all dust, it's all emptiness and ashes; and I retire to an imagined desert to contend with Demons; to overcome in holy combats unspeakable temptations, and purge, by prodigious abstinences, my heart of base desire. For this is the only imperishable victory, this is the true immortal garland; this triumph over the predilections of our fallen nature crowns us with a satisfaction which the vain glory of the world can never give.

A VOW

Like the Aztec Emperors of ancient Mexico, who took a solemn oath to make the Sun pursue his wonted journey, I too have vowed to corroborate and help sustain the Solar System; vowed that by no vexed thoughts of mine, no attenuating doubts, nor incredulity, nor malicious scepticism, nor hypercritical analysis, shall the great frame and first principles of things be compromised or shaken.

THE SPRINGS OF ACTION

'What am I? What is man?' I had looked into a number of books for an answer to this question, before I came on Jeremy Bentham's simple and satisfactory explanation: Man is a mechanism, moved by just so many springs of Action. These springs he enumerates in elaborate tables; and glancing over them this morning before getting up, I began with _Charity_, _All-embracing Benevolence_, _Love of Knowledge_, _Laudable Ambition_, _Godly Zeal_. Then I waited, but there was no sign or buzz of any wheel beginning to move in my inner mechanism. I looked again: I saw _Arrogance_, _Ostentation_, _Vainglory_, _Abomination_, _Rage_, _Fury_, _Revenge_, and I was about to leap from my bed in a paroxysm of passions, when fortunately my eye fell on another set of motives, _Love of Ease_, _Indolence_, _Procrastination_, _Sloth_.

IN THE CAGE

'What I say is, what I say!' I vociferate, as a Parrot in the great cage of the World, I hop, screeching, 'What I say is!' from perch to perch.

SHRINKAGE

Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations; then all the vast life of the Universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks, it dwindles; and of all that flood which over-brimmed the bowl of the great Cosmos, there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon.

VOICES

'You smoke too much!' whispers the still small voice of Conscience.

'You are a failure, nobody likes you,' Self-contempt keeps muttering.

'What's the good of it all?' sighs Disillusion, arid as a breath from the Sahara.

I can't tell you how all these Voices bore me; but I can listen all day with grave attention to that suave bosom-Jesuit who keeps on unweariedly proving that everything I do is done for the public good, and all my acts and appetites and inclinations in the most amazing harmony with Pure Reason and the dictates of the Moral Law.

EVANESCENCE

How the years pass and life changes, how all things float down the stream of Time and vanish; how friendships fade, and illusions crumble, and hopes dissolve, and solid piece after piece of soap melts away in our hands as we wash them!

COMPLACENCY

Dove-grey and harmless as a dove, full of piety and innocence and pure thoughts, my Soul brooded unaffectedly within me--I was only half listening to that shrill conversation. And I began to wonder, as more than once in little moments like this of self-esteem I have wondered, whether I might not claim to be something more, after all, than a mere echo or compilation--might not claim in fact to possess a distinct personality of my own. Might it not be worth while, I now asked myself, to follow up this pleasing conjecture, to retire like Descartes from the world, and spend the rest of life, as he spent it, trying to prove my own existence?

MY PORTRAIT

For after all I am no amoeba, no mere sack and stomach; I am capable of discourse, can ride a bicycle, look up trains in Bradshaw; in fact, I am and calmly boast myself a Human Being--that Masterpiece of Nature, a rational, polite, meat-eating Man.