Climbing out, I look up and see dark birds with spread wings zooming between earth and heaven. Was I too there? Did I so soar, sail between worlds and worlds, winnow the buxom air, gazed by terrestrial eyes?
It is a pity that one feels after it a negligible but a just noticeable trifle of giddiness. Do the fowls of the air also so? It is said that some fishes are sea-sick, even after all these æons.…
Still, enormous bliss.
Following the Fashion
I have a dress with puffed sleeves; the skirt is very long and full; about ten yards of silk, I think it took. It hangs in the wardrobe, taking a lot of room, because of the sleeves.
I have shoes with high heels; about three inches, I dare say. I can wear them if I want to.
I think I shall change my Morris, and get a small stream-lined green thing, and look smarter in the streets. It will not be so good for touring, but it will look better.
I may paint my nails red; or green, if that is coming in.
I shall write my memoirs, I think. I shall bring in every one I know, and have an index, so they can find themselves and their friends. There are plenty of things I can say about them. If they do not like it, they can lump it. It will serve them right, for having met me.
I may write a book about contemporary writers, too. They won’t like that either, the things I shall say about them.
I can write tough-guy stories. What I mean is, I can write stories like this:
She was a grand girl. You’re drunk, she said. But I wasn’t so drunk, either. I mean, I’d had a few, but I could see straight; and I could hold the wheel. I had the headlights on, too. To hell with those lamps, she said, and switched them down. Do you want to dazzle everything on the road, she said, so it rushes into us? You’re nuts.
She was a grand girl. You’re a grand girl, I said, and I switched on the big lamps again, and I held her waist with my left, and hugged her up to me close, so as I felt her warmth. That’s the style, I said, and I saw the needle get up to sixty. Oh, you’re crackers, she said. Driving like hell with the big lamps on and necking me with one arm. How to-night’ll end, she said, I don’t know. I really don’t, do you? Like most nights end, I guess, said I, and that’s when comes the dawn. Aw, you’re crazy, said she. I told mother I’d be in by four. Well, you won’t be in by four; maybe by eight. That’s time enough for breakfast, isn’t it? I know a swell place down the river. Oh, for heaven’s sake, said she; we shall never get any place at this rate. And what must she do but start grabbing at the wheel, crying out I was all over the road. And so we were, after she started grabbing. Then she screamed out, and something hit us and we slewed right round.
There was the hell of a mess on the road. One of those little Austins, it was, and all crumpled up, and a man and a girl all crumpled up too. There was blood and glass and things around. But my Buick had only buckled a wing.
See here, I said, we can’t do a thing. We’d best get on. She was being sick in the road; the blood had turned her up, I think. That and the shock. And seeing those two.
Here, I said, come on out of this. We can’t do a thing. I put her in the Buick, and slewed around again and drove off. There was something banging loose, and I got out to look; it was the number plate, so I wrenched it off and took it inside. We didn’t have the headlamps on now; the off one was smashed, anyway, by that bloody little Austin. I drove away. The steering was a bit funny, too. She never stopped crying and talking, it made me tired. Women can’t get this: when a thing’s done it’s done. That’s a thing no woman can ever get. They can’t let it be. Hell, did I want that bloody little car to muscle into us that way? Aw, forget it.
All the time as I drive I seem to hear that damned radio saying, in its polite Oxford-Cambridge voice, “Before the news, there is a police message. Between two and three on Sunday morning an Austin seven car came into collision with another car, which apparently failed to stop.…” Failed nothing. I did stop, see? I stopped, and saw there wasn’t a thing I could do, so I went on again.
Oh, to hell with your noise.…
Yes: I could write a story like that if I liked. Perhaps I will. Fine magazine stuff. What I mean is, a magazine would take it.
And I can write tough-guy poetry. A magazine would take that, too. I can write poetry like this (I call this one To the Barricades):
Mr. Jiggins goes to the circus.
(The girls, the hoops, the clowns, the seals, the hoopoes.)
He has donned his Harrow tie,
But Borstal was his alma mater true.
He meets Mrs. Fortescue-Fox,
With a jade cigarette-holder, long and green like asparagus or a dead woman’s fingers
Or the pale weeds swaying in the duck-pond,
But never a sprig of rue.
You’re so handsome, where you going?
Don’t know where I’m going, where I am, where you are, where the sweet hell anyone is.
(Forward to the barricades! To the barricades–where else?)
Ohé! Ohé! mes brave petits! the fat is in the fire!
As Lucian pointed out, things can always be worse.
Pink and stout he was, pranked out with rings and gold chains, he was.
What a fool he looked!
Dites donc, monsieur, si qu’on irait se coucher, n’est-ce pas?
Festinare nocet, tempore quœque suo qui facit, ille sapit. In fact, no hurry.
(March, march, march, the feet of a thousand men marching as one. No hurry?)
They trample like artillery in my head.
Allons, allons, faites donner la garde!
But Mrs. Fortescue-Fox,
Unable to wait, flung herself upon the obdurate rocks.
Life is like that.
“But never mine,” Mr. Jiggins cried.
And up washed the running tide,
Flowing up, casting corpses on the slimy beach,
Casting statues, casting coins, casting mermen and mermaids and old bowler hats.
Ting-a-ling-a-ling ring the bells of hell; where you bound now?
Allons, companions, we march to the barricades.
In the grey dawn of yesterday
We wipe away all tears:–perhaps.
There’s another I call Petrol Pumps. But that’s longer, and I won’t print it here. It’s fine magazine stuff too.
I like being in the fashion.
I may join the Communists.
Or I may write a novel a million words long, and very strong; the longest and strongest novel of the season.
The trouble about the fashions is, there are too many going on at once, and you can’t follow them all.
Sometimes I think I will give them all up, and just be dowdy.
Fraternal
In how Gentle and civilised an adult group we sit about the room! We talk, we read, we listen, we discuss, argue, contradict; but we are polite, considerate, forbearing: we behave, on the whole, grown-up. At meals, we pass things about; we help one another to food; we do not care who gets the most. We listen to one another’s stories; we respect (within limits, and with considerable dissension) one another’s opinions; we admire one another’s several experiences and lives. We are assembled from far places; behind one of us is a background of hot Indian plains and rice swamps, of prowling snakes and tigers, of rice-devouring brown men. Behind another, prairies roll, skis and sledges glide over snow-bound plains, pineclad mountains guard great lakes, moose and coyotes and gophers leap. Each trails behind him or her the clouds of a separate environment, a strange and different life.
You pass me honey: you do not watch how much of it I shall take. For all you observe, I may take it all, and there will be none left for any one else. Time was when you would have said, “That is too much; leave some for the rest of us.” Time was when we should have eyed one another’s plates with the zealous justice of the savage, feeling that good things should be apportioned in equal shares; we approved Miss Edgeworth’s Frank, bidden by his papa to divide the sugared cake into eq
ual parts and weigh them with scales.
The years roll back: a curtain lifts. I am no more in a drawing-room among adult beings having tea. I am seated at a table, among my savage kind; a nurse presides, feeding us with bread and butter. One eats the crumb; one arranges the bitten crusts in a circle under one’s saucer, out, so one hopes, of sight. One tilts one’s chair back on its hind legs, rocking to and fro.
“Now then, Miss R., don’t tilt your chair.”
“But A. is tilting his. May A. tilt his chair?”
Telling tales. We do not tell tales of one another now.…
Some one is licking the treacle from her bread.
“Now then, Miss J., that’s not pretty. How often have I told you? … Master W.!”
Master W., in mood of ill-timed levity, has flung his bread and treacle at the ceiling. To our delight, it sticks there for a moment, before falling down. It leaves on the ceiling a sticky golden-brown smudge. Master W. is in trouble.
What undignified, what compromising situations have I seen you all in, brothers and sisters! Suspended head downwards by the knees from trees, like monkeys by their tails; rolling like barrels down green slopes to lie at the bottom and vomit; crawling along the top of a high wall to inhale the drain-trap placed (surely oddly) thereon; sitting astride on an overturned canoe at sea; slithering bare-legged up and down a rope; prone in impassioned sobbing on the floor; rolling over and over in angry wrestling; pulling hair, pinching, fisticuffing, hiding books under chair-cushions, as a dog buries bones, that no other may have a turn of them. You, sitting reading there with your pipe, I remember your seizing my book and flinging it out of the window, that I might desist from reading. You, who do not smoke, I remember how you and I took the cigar tops cut off by uncles and smoked them; how we all trooped to the village toy-shop and bought Woodbines, and smoked them sitting in a row on the pig-sty roof. I could repeat the precise order in which we each met defeat at this pastime and retired. Yes: I remember all of you in the most ridiculous positions.…
We cannot hide from one another: we know too much. We know one another’s faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws. The remembered jungle is behind us, with its pleasures and pains, its follies, adventures and jests.
Jests: yes. We share a comic background, that could never be explained to others. A chance word may touch a spring set deep in the common stock of memory, and loose on us a joke, a surge of laughter, that is out of all proportion to the word uttered, for it rises from those deeps where forgotten and remembered jokes lie tangled in a giggling past. Giggling is the word for the excessive, the uncontrollable mirth that shook us when young, that shakes us even now when together, and to which no other has the clue.
Contradiction is moderated. Argument, which still rages on every topic, political, theological, literary, sociological, factual, has grown more complex; it no longer tails off into the bald competition in endurance of “it is,” “it isn’t,” “it is,” “it isn’t,” “it is.” Activity has dwindled: no more do we sally forth to climb roofs or trees. Manners have improved: no more do we track passers-by along the street in furtive detective-formation, registering clues in hissing whispers as we go. We behave civilised, even when in a pack. But pack jokes remain. They may be no better than other jokes; they are often worse. But they are jokes by themselves, and are among the marks which distinguish the pleasures of fraternal association from any other.
Getting Rid
Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one’s head above the accumulations, the ever-deepening layers of objects, of litter (for so I call those objects which I do not want), which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow. The danger is (one has heard) that one is lulled to sleep beneath the drifts, and will not (so also one has heard) wake again, but lie for ever besnowed, buried, unable to stir. Courage, then: fight the insidious, the deadly drifts while there is yet time; up and scatter them to the winds, tear them to shreds, fling them into dustbins, into the street, anywhere, and stand up free and disencumbered to abide the next storms.
If one had the wisdom to cast out litter as it arrives each day, one would not have these mighty periodic disencumberments; one would live more easily; but one would miss that tremendous, that spacious, sense of easement which follows a great clearance.
Tear them up, then, those piles of letters which you have never answered, nor will. Are you not born free? Shall anyone with a pen or a typewriter, a stamp or two, and some stationery, have the power to assault you, to bully you, to tear your precious time and your frail brain and attention, so sorely needed elsewhere, to shreds by making you answer his letters? You do not, I am sure, write to all and sundry asking them this and that, requesting them for time, for gifts, for attention to some business in which you, but not they, may chance to be interested: you give them credit for having their own interests, their own work, their own lives and schemes. You let them, in fact (I hope), alone. But how unusual this abstention appears to be! Letters arrive for you; pamphlets, newspaper cuttings, books, discursive remarks, all manner of suggestions and requests. There they lie, reproachful piles, awaiting your attention.
If only you had a secretary.… But I take it that, like most of us, you have not a secretary. Even if you had, you would, I suppose, have to give her some indication of how you wished her to deal with the manifold topics opened up by your correspondents. But you have not even a secretary. You would, should you attempt to cope with the situation, have to find stationery, stamps, words, forms of courteous refusal, idle chat, turn off from your typewriter the paper which waits those laborious stampings and stammerings which it is your profession or your pleasure to make on it, and with which you are already so far behind time, and replace it by one piece of notepaper after another, on which you imprint the date (if you can call it to mind) and the disgusting word “Dear,” and then pause to collect the kind of words apt to the distracting occasion. By the time you have done all this, your somewhat weak (it is probably somewhat weak) intellect will be all-to scattered and depraved, and you will find it hard to turn it again on to its proper tasks. Imagination, after its efforts to find words of polite and idiotic refusal, thanks, and regrets, will lie down fatigued, and boggle when set at its customary courses. You will have to give it a rest, and take the car out instead.
No; you were better not to tackle those piles. Let them lie and grow. But, one day when the reproach of the great unanswered becomes too heavy a burden, or when your groaning writing-table is so deep ensnowed that it holds no room for anything you may desire to keep on it on your own account, then rise up, either calmly or in noble rage, and destroy. Shovel the litter into some deep bin; let the scavengers, those kindly, cocked-hatted men, carry it hence, to the great pits and furnaces which shall receive it, and transmute it into the rags whence it came. Eternal process of to-ing and fro-ing, from rags to paper, from paper to rags: whether is the worse condition? A few minutes ago you would have said paper. But now, having rid yourself of papers, you turn, strong and collected, in calm of mind all passion spent, to deal with rags.
Rags! How these encumber cupboards and drawers, hanging on hooks and on pegs, relics of earlier ages, which to be seen abroad in now were very shame, even if they were not so riddled and devoured by those gluttonous lepidoptera who make your cupboards their home. On most occasions, no doubt, you are wearily acquiescent in this; one look at the cup boards or drawers, and you turn away back to more normal and congenial employs. And quite right, too.
Neglected heaps we in by-corners lay,
Where they become to worms and moths a prey,
Forgot, in dust and cobwebs let them rest,
While we return to where we first digrest.
But, now, heartened and strengthened by your victory over the papers, you face the rags, you fling them out, you decide that no cl
aim of old affection or habit shall induce you to wear them again, to clean, to mend or to tolerate them. And, as for leaving them where they are, is it your duty to feed that tribe of greedy stolephage insects who have come unbidden to your table? Experience throughout the ages has shown that you may safely leave that to their Creator. Remove, then, their food; brush and shake it; tie it up in bundles; it is for the Poor. If the Poor reject it, as well they may, it can return to the transmuting furnace and boilers, there to be encharted once again. One day you may be throwing it into your waste-paper basket; and hanging in your cupboards for the moths those letters which you have just now so triumphantly flung for a while out of your life.
This getting rid is a kind of intoxication; be wary lest it carry you too far. Do not lay rash hands on all the letters, all the journals, all the garments, that you see lying about. You may want some of them again. Exercise moderation in destruction, that heady lust.
And when you have finished, you will sit down, happy, victorious and rid, while the enemy creeps on again, seeping in through every crevice, surrounding and submerging you with relentless, unpausing advance. Your pleasure in victory is brief, and haunted by the imminence of future defeats. For riddable litter comes on like the sea, and there is no staying it. Even in prison cells, they say, litter enters and must daily be removed. It is our mortal heritage, and a losing war against nature that we wage.
But, for the moment, those letters, those newspapers, are gone. Thus far, we are, for the moment, one up on nature, that sinister, wily, and determined harridan, against whom civilisation wars perpetually and, for the most part, in vain.
Hatching Eggs
Actually, I do not know that hatching is the right word, for I never, by human warmth, delivered any chicken from its shell. Neither would “sitting on” be correct, for that was not the method adopted. I suppose incubating is the word. Anyhow, the pleasure lay in hope and dreams, never in consummation. We carried our eggs on the person by day, under the pillow by night. Only one at a time, and when it broke we began on another. They were mostly laid by hens, but once I found a duck’s egg in the road, huge and pale green. How far it might already be advanced towards the duckling stage, I had no means of knowing; but I adopted it forthwith and stowed it away in the front of my sailor frock, the largest and proudest of the eggs on the persons of a family at the moment a prey to acute eggomania. There it lay, in that repository designed by heaven for carrying about oranges, books, rabbits, and kittens, so that the wearing of sailor suits, male and female, made a family inclined to thinness bulge in front as if they had been reared on some rich health food. My egg lay, I think, alone, and handkerchief enwrapped; when tree or rock climbing was indulged in, it was removed and carefully laid in some snug cache.
Personal Pleasures Page 11