The moon is coming, cries someone; and, sure enough, a rose-gold haze flushes the eastern horizon, heralding the golden rim, like the segment of an orange, that will rise and rise from the dark sea until it is a whole orange climbing up the sky, to flood the night and dim the stars. My father quotes Ben Jonson, who was so wrong about Hesperus entreating the moon’s light, for how should one of the sun’s goddess lovers entreat the advent of another, who must dim her?
But, for our part, we welcome the moon, swinging up among silver flames, flinging her golden causeway across the bay to the ripples at our feet.
Astronomy is over. Like the monkeys and marmosets of whom Mutianus tells, we hop and dance beneath the moon. A pig chase, we cry: for this pastime always concludes our astronomy. We race and chase about the brightening shore, up and down between the garden and the sea, in and out of the ripples that now glow gold as they curvet and spark, splashing lightly on damp sand. We flee and chase until we are as hot as if the moon were the sun, until we have no more breath to chase with or to flee.
At chasing and fleeing, I am as good as the next man; it is one of my stronger points. But deep in my heart there lies a shame; I am always the last to discern the Pole Star and the Bears. And sometimes I say that I see them without conviction, and fear, uneasily, that this may be an Untruth. Do the others really see these heavenly constellations as quickly as they make out?
Bakery in the Night
How sweet a waft of warm bakery breathes up from the nether world below the pavement, as I pass the baker’s at midnight! All night they are at it, it would seem, making and baking that doughy substance which smells so much better in the making than ever it tastes when made. Fried fish is otherwise; it tastes good, but smells terrible when frying. That is one of the things about fish; it always smells ill—fishy, in fact—but tastes good, and not fishy at all. There would be few ichthy-ophagi if we judged fishes by their smell. Some bold and hungry experimenter must have ventured long since to disregard the fishy savour and try it in the mouth; he was rewarded, justified, and the tradition was established. The same with meat. But bread, poor enough stuff in the mouth, is delicious, when preparing, to the nose. Unfortunately this wears off after baking, and a fresh loaf smells of nothing in particular, while a stale one smells of mould.
But so delicious is this warm and bready odour that breathes up through a grating in the pavement that I pause entranced to sniff. For a moment I am persuaded that the bread I shall eat to-morrow will taste like this celestial smell; it will be manna, not mere bread. Nay, it will be ambrosia, such as is heaped on the tables of gods; it will be food for angels, for gourmets, for Lucullus at his solitary suppers. The sweet yeasty fragrance steals on the night, lingering on the air like the gentlest pretty insinuating tune. No wonder that men have sold their bodies and their souls for bread, if this is what bread is. Bread and circus games—the Romans were right in demanding these, in feeling that, together, they made the adequate life.
But, as I stand there and smell, strange unwelcome stories recur to my memory, of how bakers make bread. Has it not been said that, if we should watch them at it, bread-consumption would slump down, the staff of life would bend under us, and we should have recourse to potatoes and cabbage, rice, and even sago? It is the same, of course, with jam, with sausages, with veal. Better see no food prepared. Close the eyes, open the mouth, and say a grace that you were not there at the making of the pleasant finished product that slips so agreeably down your throat and into your system. And, if you come to that, what would your system look like, do you suppose, if you should have the misfortune to see that? It ill behoves us, with our insides, to be dainty about looking upon the manufacture of anything that goes into them; at its worst stage the object to be consumed can scarcely have presented so ill an appearance as does the place prepared for its reception.
Bathing
1. Off the Florida Keys
Over the pale jade-green shallows, a tiny breeze runs, ruffling the surface of the Florida Straits into ribbed glass, setting little ripples slapping against the mangrove-grown clumps of earth that enisle these strange seas. You may wade a mile out from the white beach, palm-fringed, of the Keys; wade towards Havana, ankle-deep, knee-deep, thigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep. Can one wade right across the straits to Cuba or Havana? I do not know: evening falls, and I have reached neither. Evening falls, and the sea, sunset-drenched, glows from green to rose, like gardens of ripening fruit beneath a glass roof. On the ribbed floor of sand gleam the coral forests: I stoop and break off brittle twigs and branches and flowers, as one gathers mushrooms or raspberries in a field. Through the forests dart slippery fishes, silver, coral and turquoise, or striped black like little zebras; they glance through my hands. Here is a tiny goblin being in gleaming blue, with horns and a hump and goggling eyes; it is not fleet enough, and I cup it between my hands, and guide it to the nearest island, scoop a hole for it in the sand and fill it with water; it swims round and round, goblin eyes seeking escape; it feels its position acutely; it must be turned adrift again into the Florida seas, to join its goblin kind.
The boat that lies tethered to a mangrove tree on one of the islands is unmoored; one rows her back, while the others wade beside, shoving her over the sandy shallows, to beach her on the palm-fringed Key, where the evening breeze goes rustling among the star-shaped heads of slender, leaning royal palms, and the small waves shuffle sighing on white sand.
It has been a lovely bathe, an exquisite wade, an immersion, however partial, in enchanted waters. Nevertheless, of all the world’s uneasy beds on which to tread, on which to sit, a bed of coral is the least deserving of that name. Of what is the marine cœlenterate polyps thinking, that he builds him of the skeletons of his tribe such harsh, such jagged arborescent beds for his habitation?
Rise, rise, and heave thy rosie head
From thy coral-pav’n bed.…
One is happy to know that the spirit was here mistaken, and that dear Sabrina, sitting under the glassy, cool, translucent wave of the Severn, was not sitting on coral, nor, as his excited fancy elsewhere tries to make out, on diamond rocks. We may be sure that Sabrina’s bed and seats were of Severn mud, and fortunate she was that this was so. She would have said, I think, with Clive, and with all who have waded sandal-less off the Florida Keys, “I have no desire for coral.”
2. Off the Ligurian Coast
The sea’s warm edge sways lisping on hot sand, curling into tiny ripples, hissing, creaming, running delicately back. Wade in, take five steps in water as warm as a tepid bath, and the sharply shelving beach fails beneath your feet and leaves you swimming. Lapped in the clear, thin stuff, so blue, so buoyant, so serene, you can conceive no reason for ever leaving it. Strange element, on which you may lie stretched full length as on a bed, eyes closed, the sun hot on your face, wriggling your spread hands now and then like fins to propel you; or you may stand upright with folded arms, treading the sea with your feet; or hurl yourself through the water arm over arm; or dive down to the bottom of the deep, gather a handful of seaweed or pebbles, and shoot up. You may start swimming out to sea, heading for Corsica; swim and swim, until you are suddenly afraid you will meet a shark, and turn and race panicking for shore. Yes, there have been sharks in our bay; we have never met one, but we sometimes fear that we may.
Often we take out the canoe when we bathe. Three sit in the middle and one on each end, when it capsizes, we ride astride on its backside. Oh, pleasure, reeling goddess, I have spent much time with you, but I think that while bathing of an August afternoon in our bay with the canoe, we know you at your most reeling, your most zoneless. Such felicity seems to know no limit; measureless to man, it seems the pleasure of some celestial state, in which we swim and sport in the blue and heavenly inane, like the putti that leap through wreaths of flowers upon a painted ceiling.
Such pleasure, I say, like the pleasures of paradise, should know no term; it should endure for ever. But to our bathing a term is set. Unlike the c
hildren of the Italian bagnanti, we are summoned from the sea. We leave that lovely, that clear and celestial element, for thin air quivering with heat.
3. In the Cam
The birds wake me; many minds with but a single thought, they all break out singing at once; one does not know why. They wake me; they would wake the dead, if the dead lay where I lie, in an open arbour in a little wood by the river’s edge. The river, pale and secret, slides past, between the green shadow of willows and the grey light of dawn and the white shining of the hanging may-bushes and the deep green of the waving weeds. It flows towards Cambridge, but will be long, at this rate, in arriving at that learned town, for it scarcely seems to move. Sluggishly the weeds wave, and with them the gold and white chalices with their broad-leafed saucers. A phantom stream, a pale dream of green shadow and grey light. Alone in the dawn world, a pink climbing rose gives colour, a pure sharp note in a faint chromotone of greys.
The east too grows rose-pink, beyond the grey pricks of the willow leaves. Drowsily I lie, and watch the sun rise to the clamour of the birds. When it looks above the pollarded head of the large willow on the opposite bank, I shall bathe.
The river emerges from greyness into deep green colour and clear light. The sun tops the pollard. I throw off blankets and night clothes and slip from the bank into the cold stream. Spreading my arms wide, I let the slow flow carry me gently along through shadow and light, between long weedy strands that slimily embrace me as I drift by, between the bobbing white and gold cups and slippery juicy stems, beneath willows that brush my head with light leaves, beneath banks massed high with may, smelling sharp and sweet above the musky fragrance of the tall cow-parsley. Buttercup fields shine beyond those white banks; the chestnuts lift their candles high against the morning sky.
But suddenly there sprung,
A confident report, that through the country rung,
That Cam her daintiest flood, long since entituled Grant …
Is sallying on for Ouze, determin’d by the way
To entertain her friends the Muses with a lay.
Wherefore to show herself ere she to Cambridge came,
Most worthy of that town to which she gives the name,
Takes in her second head, from Linton coming in,
By Shelford having slid, which straightway she doth win;
Than which a purer stream, a delicater brook,
Bright Phœbus in his course doth scarcely overlook.
Thus furnishing her banks, as sweetly, she doth glide
Towards Cambridge, with rich meads laid forth on either side;
And with the Muses oft did by the way converse …
A wondrous learned flood. …
Possibly. But possibly also, by the mud of three centuries, a less pure stream, a less delicate brook now than then.
Beneath a hanging may-tree, a thin cheeping comes; a brood of baby moor-chicks has hatched in the night, and now swims out to explore the green and gold world, four small black balls behind their mother, chirping their excitement to the morning.
I splash up stream against the flowing weeds, scramble out and dry myself. The pure stream, the delicate brook, the learned flood, has a floor of soft mud, and is cold before the sun is high. I creep again into blankets, and would sleep the day in, but for the indefatigably cantiferous birds.
Bed
1. Getting into it
When I consider how, in a human creature’s normal life, each day, however long, however short, however weary, however merry, circumstanced by whatever disconcerting, extravagant, or revolting chances of destiny, ends in getting into bed—when I consider this, I wonder why each day is not a happy, hopeful, and triumphant march towards this delicious goal; why, when the sun downs and the evening hours run on, our hearts do not lighten and sing in the sure and certain hope of this recumbent bliss. If it were a bliss less recurrent, more rare and strange, its exquisite luxury would surely seem a conception for the immortal gods, beyond any man’s deserts. Even through the cold and sober definition given by the dictionary, comfort and anticipation warmly throb. “It consists for the most part of a sack or mattress of sufficient size, stuffed with something soft or springy, raised generally upon a ‘bed-stead’ or support, and covered with sheets, blankets, etc., for the purpose of warmth. The name is given both to the whole structure in its most elaborate form, and, as in ‘feather-bed,’ to the stuffed sack or mattress which constitutes its essential part. (A person is said to be in bed, when undressed and covered with the bedclothes).”
What delicious memories and hopes do the quiet words evoke! A sack or mattress of sufficient size, stuffed with something soft or springy, raised generally upon a bed-stead or support, and covered with sheets, blankets, etc., for the purpose of warmth. Can well-being further go? Yes: for the purpose of even greater warmth, there may be a rubber bottle filled with hot water. Reflecting on, and still more, experiencing, this state of Olympian, of almost lascivious pleasure, how one pities Titania sleeping sometime of the night on her bank among thyme, oxlips, violets and snakes, her only coverlet the cast skins of these reptiles, which serve us not for sheets but for shoes. She was but a fairy queen, and knew nothing of our soft human elaborations of comfort. “Thou shalt lie in a bed stuffed with turtle’s feathers; swoon in perfumed linen, like the fellow was smothered in roses.”
And to your more bewitching, see, the proud
Plumpe Bed beare up, and swelling like a cloud. …
… Throw, throw
Your selves into the mighty over-flow
Of that white Pride, and Drowne
The night, with you, in floods of Downe. …
That is better than the bank where the wild thyme grows; better, even, almost certainly, than the bed which Eve made out of flowers in the blissful nuptial bower, or than the roses that smothered the fellow. Not that down is necessary, or even desirable: a good hair mattress over box springs is more resilient, and as accordant to the frame as one can wish. The down can fill the pillows. The sheets are of smooth, fine cambric; not linen, which is heavier, colder, and less pliable, even when perfumed. Blankets should be according to season and temperature; it is well to have one or two in reserve, cast back over the bed’s foot.
Climb, then, into this paradise, this epicurism of pleasure, this pretty world of peace. Push up the pillows, that they support the head at an angle as you lie sideways, your book held in one hand, its edge resting on the pillow. On the bed-head is a bright light canopied by an orange shade; it illustrates the page with soft radiance, so that it shines out of the environing shadows like a good deed in a naughty world. You are reading, I would suggest, a novel; preferably a novel which excites you by its story, lightly titillating, but not furrowing, the surface of the brain. Not poetry; not history; not essays; not voyages; not biography, archæology, dictionaries, nor that peculiar literature which publishers call belles-lettres. These are for daytime reading; they are not somnifacient; they stimulate the mind, the æsthetic and appreciative faculties, the inventive imagination; in brief, they wake you up. You will never, I maintain, get to sleep on Shakespeare, Milton, or Marvell, or Hakluyt, or Boswell, or Montaigne, or Burton’s Anatomy, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Herodotus, or any poetry or prose that fundamentally excites you by its beauty, or any work that imparts knowledge. These will light a hundred candles in your brain, startling it to vivid life. A story, and more particularly a story which you have not read before, will hold your attention gently on the page, leading it on from event to event, drowsily pleased to be involved in such fine adventures, which yet demand no thought. Let the story amuse, thrill, interest, delight, it matters not which; but let it not animate, stimulate or disturb, for sleep, that shy nightbird, must not be startled back as it hovers over you with drowsy wings, circling ever near and nearer, until its feathers brush your eyes, and the book dips suddenly in your hand. Lay it aside then; push out the light; the dark bed, like a gentle pool of water, receives you; you sink into its encompassing arms, floating d
own the wandering trail of a dream, as down some straying river that softly twists and slides through goblin lands, now dipping darkly into blind caves, now emerging, lit with the odd, phosphorescent light of oneiric reason, unsearchable and dark to waking eyes.
But what a small mischance can mar this clinic joy, this opulent bed of pleasure. Adam and Eve doubtless encountered pricks and thorns and crumpled leaves in their roseate couch, though we are reassured as to the completely unentomologous condition of the bridal bower. And our passible frames may meet, in some untended mattress, with a lump. Or, in some alien dwelling, beneath the roof-tree of callous friends, with coverings cold as charity, blankets scant and thin. The eiderdown, if eiderdown there be, may glide and slide to the floor, like a French duvet. The hot-bottle may leak. Your head may face the window, and the curtains be of white casement, with a gap between to admit the dawn. The bird of dawning may sing all night long. A clock may tick, and be too large to be shut in the wardrobe. There may be a thin, transaudient wall, and a snorer beyond it. Or a snorer in your very bed, or even a somniloquent. Worst of all, worse than any other clinic grief, almost too profound a grief to be so much as glanced at in a survey of pleasures, it is conceivable that the light may only be extinguishable by the door. I believe, nay, I assert with confidence and deliberation, having clearly in mind all other bedroom woes—such as hard mattress, flock pillows, scant covering, intrusive dawn, eoan bird-songs, disappointed or fatiguing love, companions lapped and chrysalised in robbed blankets and close-gripped sheets, and yet turning and ever turning still—I say with deliberation, that this is the shrewdest stroke of fortune, the harshest bedroom chance, a light only extinguishable by the door.
Personal Pleasures Page 3