Chapter I: Part 1

MORE TRIVIA

by

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

Author of "Trivia"

New York Harcourt, Brace and Company 1921

Copyright, 1921, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

Printed in the U. S. A. by The Quinn & Boden Company Rahway N. J.

CONTENTS

A GREETING _ix_

REASSURANCE _3_

THE GREAT ADVENTURE _4_

THE BEATIFIC VISION _5_

FACES _6_

THE OBSERVER _7_

CHAOS _8_

THE GHOST _9_

THE HOUR-GLASS _10_

THE LATCHKEY _11_

GOOD PRACTICE _12_

EVASION _13_

DINING OUT _14_

WHAT'S WRONG _15_

AT SOLEMN MUSIC _17_

THE GOAT _18_

SELF-CONTROL _19_

THE COMMUNION OF SOULS _20_

WAXWORKS _21_

ADJECTIVES _22_

WHERE? _23_

IN THE STREET _24_

THE ABBEY AT NIGHT _25_

DESPERANCE _26_

CHAIRS _27_

A GRIEVANCE _28_

THE MOON _29_

LONGEVITY _30_

IN THE BUS _31_

JUSTIFICATION _32_

THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET _33_

MONOTONY _34_

DAYDREAM _35_

PROVIDENCE _36_

ACTION _37_

WAITING _38_

THE WRONG WORD _40_

IONS _41_

A FIGURE OF SPEECH _42_

A SLANDER _43_

SYNTHESIS _44_

THE AGE _45_

COMFORT _46_

APPEARANCE AND REALITY _47_

LONELINESS _48_

THE WELSH HARP _49_

MISAPPREHENSION _51_

THE LIFT _52_

SLOAN STREET _53_

REGENT'S PARK _54_

THE AVIARY _55_

ST. JOHN'S WOOD _56_

THE GARDEN SUBURB _57_

SUNDAY CALLS _59_

AN ANOMALY _60_

THE LISTENER _61_

ABOVE THE CLOUDS _62_

THE BUBBLE _63_

CAUTION _64_

DESIRES _65_

MOMENTS _66_

THE EPITAPH _67_

INTERRUPTION _68_

THE EAR-TRUMPET _70_

GUILT _71_

CADOGAN GARDENS _72_

THE RESCUE _73_

CHARM _74_

CARAVANS _75_

THE SUBURBS _76_

THE CONCERTO _77_

SOMEWHERE _78_

THE PLATITUDE _79_

THE FETISH _80_

THE ECHO _81_

THE SCAVENGER _82_

THE HOT-BED _83_

APHASIA _84_

MAGIC _85_

MRS. BACKE _86_

WHISKERS _87_

THE SPELLING LESSON _88_

JEUNESSE _89_

HANGING ON _90_

SUPERANNUATION _91_

AT THE CLUB _92_

DELAY _93_

SMILES _94_

THE DAWN _95_

THE PEAR _96_

INSOMNIA _97_

READING PHILOSOPHY _98_

MORAL TRIUMPH _99_

A VOW _100_

THE SPRINGS OF ACTION _101_

IN THE CAGE _102_

SHRINKAGE _103_

VOICES _104_

EVANESCENCE _105_

COMPLACENCY _106_

MY PORTRAIT _107_

THE RATIONALIST _108_

THOUGHTS _109_

PHRASES _110_

DISENCHANTMENT _111_

ASK ME NO MORE _112_

FAME _113_

NEWS ITEMS _114_

JOY _115_

IN ARCADY _116_

WORRIES _117_

THINGS TO WRITE _118_

PROPERTY _119_

IN A FIX _120_

VERTIGO _122_

THE EVIL EYE _123_

THE EPITHET _124_

THE GARDEN PARTY _125_

WELTSCHMERZ _126_

BOGEYS _127_

LIFE-ENHANCEMENT _129_

ECLIPSE _130_

THE PYRAMID _131_

THE FULL MOON _132_

LUTON _133_

THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH _134_

THE SONNET _136_

WELTANSCHAUUNG _137_

THE ALIEN _138_

HYPOTHESES _139_

THE ARGUMENT _140_

A GREETING

'What funny clothes you wear, dear Readers! And your hats! The thought of your hats does make me laugh. And I think your sex-theories quite horrid.'

Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my readers--urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the pleasure of reading 'More Trivia.'

MORE TRIVIA

REASSURANCE

I look at my overcoat and my hat hanging in the hall with reassurance; for although I go out of doors with one individuality to-day, when yesterday I had quite another, yet my clothes keep my various selves buttoned up together, and enable all these otherwise irreconcilable aggregates of psychological phenomena to pass themselves off as one person.

THE GREAT ADVENTURE

Before opening the front-door I paused, for a moment of profound consideration.

Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and muffled, the tides of multitudinous traffic, sounding along their ways. Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to adventure out into that dangerous world again?

Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.

THE BEATIFIC VISION

Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the clay beneath it, as I bump my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated; from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.

One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic--I leaning back like God on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.

FACES

Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his daydream-larder.

Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring on the tops of busses; and the Gods themselves can be seen promenading up and down Piccadilly.

THE OBSERVER

Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of human insects I like to note and study.

Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs. Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction. Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and manoeuvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated sounds.

These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one of them, that I was observing these Bipeds.

CHAOS

Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a dream.

THE GHOST

When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets, the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent, which lurks in the plate-glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors to waylay me.

THE HOUR-GLASS

At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus.

'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?'

'It's an hour-glass,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-glass to measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it! See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all essences--Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows--but I say! There's your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!'

THE LATCHKEY

I was astonished, I was almost horror-struck by the sight of the New Moon at the end of the street. In bewilderment and Blake-like wonder I stood and gazed at it on my doorstep. For what was I doing there; I, a wanderer, a pilgrim, a nomad of the desert, with no home save where the evening found me--what was my business on that doorstep; at what commonplace had the Moon caught me with a latchkey in my hand?

GOOD PRACTICE

We met in an omnibus last evening. 'And where are you going now?' she asked, as she looked at me with amusement.

'I am going, if the awful truth must be told, to dine in Grosvenor Square.'

'Lord!' she colloquially replied, 'and what do you do that for?'

'I do it because I am invited. And besides,' I went on, 'let me remind you of what the Persian Mystics say of the Saints--that the Saints are sometimes rich, that God sometimes endows them with an outward show of wealth to hide them from the profane.'

'Oh, does He? Hides them in Grosvenor Square?'

'Very well, then, I shall tell you the real truth; I shall tell you my real reason for going to dine there. Do you remember what Diogenes answered when they asked him why he had asked for a statue at the public expense?'

'No; what did he say?'

'He said--but I must explain another time. I have to get off here. Good-night.'

I paused, however, at the door of the bus. 'He said,' I called back, '"I am practising Disappointment." That--you know whom I mean?--was his answer.'

EVASION

'What do you think of the International Situation?' asked that foreign Countess, with her foreign, fascinating smile.

Was she a Spy? I felt I must be careful.

'What do I think?' I evasively echoed; and then, carried away by the profound and melancholy interest of this question, 'Think?' I queried, 'do I ever really think? Is there anything inside my head but cotton-wool? How can I call myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?' I pursued the sad inquiry: 'A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninnyhammer, a bubble on the wave, a leaf in the wind, Madame!'

DINING OUT

When I think of Etiquette and Funerals; when I consider the euphemisms and rites and conventions and various costumes with which we invest the acts of our animal existence; when I bear in mind how elegantly we eat our victuals, and remember the series of ablutions and preparations and salutations and exclamations and manipulations I went through when I dined out last evening, I reflect what creatures we are of ceremony; how elaborate, how pompous and polite a simian Species.

WHAT'S WRONG

From the corner of the dim, half-empty drawing-room where they sat, they could see, in a great mirror, the other dinner-guests linger and depart. But none of them were going on--what was the good?--to that evening party. They talked of satiety and disenchantment, of the wintry weather, of illness and old age and death.

'But what really frightens me most in life,' said one of them, 'what gives me a kind of vertigo or shiver, is--it sounds absurd, but it's simply the horror of Space, _l'epouvante siderale_,--the dismay of Infinity, the black abysses in the Milky Way, the silence of those eternal spaces beyond the furthest stars.'

'But Time,' said another of the group, 'surely Time is a worse nightmare. Think of it! the Past with never a beginning, the Future going on for ever and ever, and the little present in which we live for a second, twinkling between these two black abysses.'

'What's wrong with me,' mused the third speaker, 'is that even the Present eludes me. I don't know what it really is; I can never catch the moment as it passes; I am always far ahead or far away behind, and always somewhere else. I am not really here now with you, though I am talking to you. And why should I go to the party? I shouldn't be there, either, if I went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation--if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of it, after all?'

They rose, and their images too were reflected in the great mirror, as they passed out of the drawing-room, and dispersed, each on his or her way, into the winter night.

AT SOLEMN MUSIC

I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust, and her high-coloured wig. And how could I listen to music in the close proximity of those loud stockings?

Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of musical, shared delight, my soul and the soul of that large lady, joined hands and sang like the morning stars together.

THE GOAT

In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me--had I told them about this Goat before? And then as I talked there gaped upon me--abyss opening beneath abyss--a darker speculation: when goats are mentioned, do I automatically and always tell this story about the Goat at Portsmouth?

SELF-CONTROL

Still I am not a pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave--all this I put up with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then for a moment it seems too much; if I get my feet wet, or have to wait too long for tea, and my soul in these wanes of the moon cries out in French _C'est fini!_ I always answer _Pazienza!_ in Italian--_abbia la santa Pazienza!_

THE COMMUNION OF SOULS

'So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?' Then, lifting the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher level, 'this notion of Free Will,' I went on, 'the notion, for instance, that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you think of it--at least to me it seems--a wretched notion really. I like to feel that I must follow the things I desire as--how shall I put it?--as the tide follows the Moon; that my actions are due to necessary causes; that the world inside me isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the Stars are governed.'

'Ah, how I love the Stars!' murmured Lady Hyslop. 'What things they say to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions; the promise of ineffable mitigations.'

'Mitigations?' I gasped, feeling for a moment a little giddy. But it didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most wonderful conversations.

WAXWORKS

'But one really never knows the Age one lives in. How interesting it would be,' I said to the lady next me, 'how I wish we could see ourselves as Posterity will see us!'

I have said it before, but on this occasion I was struck--almost thunder-struck--by my own remark. Like a rash enchanter, the spirit I had raised myself alarmed me. For a queer second I did see ourselves in that inevitable mirror, but cadaverous and out-of-date and palsied--a dusty set of old waxworks, simpering inanely in the lumber-room of Time.

'Better to be forgotten at once!' I exclaimed, with an emphasis that seemed to surprise the lady next me.

ADJECTIVES

But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, and the negro and star-enamelled Night?

WHERE?

I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing?

Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens imagined by Chinese poets beyond the great cold palaces of the Moon?

IN THE STREET

These eye-encounters in the street, little touches of love-liking; faces that ask, as they pass, 'Are you my new lover?' Shall I one day--in Park Lane or Oxford Street perhaps--see the unknown Face I dread and look for?

THE ABBEY AT NIGHT

And as at night I went past the Abbey, saw its walls towering high and solemn among the autumn stars, I pictured to myself the white population in the vast darkness of its interior--all that hushed people of Heroes--; not dead, I would think them, but animated with a still kind of life; and at last, after all their intolerable toils, the sounding tumult of battle, and perilous seapaths, resting there, tranquil and satisfied and glorious, amid the epitaphs and allegorical figures of their tombs--those high-piled, trophied, shapeless Abbey tombs, that long ago they toiled for, and laid down their gallant lives to win.

DESPERANCE

'Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We dress, we go out to dinner,' I went on, 'but surely we walk in a vain show. How good this asparagus is! I often say asparagus is the most delicious of all vegetables. And yet, I don't know--when one thinks of fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus, as one can of strawberries--but tender peas I could eat forever. Then peaches, and melons;--and there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. One of my favourite daydreams for the long afternoon of life is to live alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with apricots and figs and peaches: and there are precious pears, too, of my own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment I shall pick another pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to say--'

CHAIRS

In the streets of London there are door-bells I ring (I see myself ringing them); in certain houses there are chairs covered with chintz or cretonne in which I sit and talk about life, explaining often after tea what I think of it.

A GRIEVANCE

They are all persons of elegant manners and spotless reputations; they seem to welcome my visits, and they listen to my anecdotes with unflinching attention. I have only one grievance against them; they will keep in their houses mawkish books full of stale epithets, which, when I only seem to smell their proximity, produce in me a slight feeling of nausea.

There are people, I believe, who are affected in this way by the presence of cats.

THE MOON

I went in and shook hands with my hostess, but no one else took any special notice; no one screamed or left the room; the quiet murmur of talk went on. I suppose I seemed like the others; observed from outside no doubt I looked more or less like them.

But inside, seen from within...? Or was it a conceivable hypothesis that we were all alike inside also--that all those quietly-talking people had got the Moon, too, in their heads?

LONGEVITY

'But when you are as old as I am!' I said to the young lady in pink satin. 'But I don't know how old you are,' that young lady answered almost archly. We were getting on quite nicely.

'Oh I'm endlessly old; my memory goes back almost forever. I come out of the Middle Ages. I am the primitive savage we are all descended from; I believe in Devil-worship, and the power of the Stars; I dance under the new Moon, naked and tattooed and holy. I am a Cave-dweller, a contemporary of Mastodons and Mammoths; I am pleistocene and neolithic, and full of the lusts and terrors of the great pre-glacial forests. But that's nothing; I am millions of years older; I am an arboreal Ape, an aged Baboon, with all its instincts; I am a pre-simian quadruped, I have great claws, eyes that see in the dark, and a long prehensile tail.'

'Good gracious!' said the terrified young lady in pink satin. Then she turned, and for the rest of the dinner talked in a hushed voice with her other neighbour.

IN THE BUS

As I sat inside that crowded bus, so sad, so incredible and sordid seemed the fat face of the woman opposite me, that I interposed the thought of Kilimanjaro, that highest mountain of Africa, between us; the grassy slopes and green realms of negro kings from which its dark cone rises, the immense, dim, elephant-haunted forests which clothe its flanks; and above, the white crown of snow, freezing in eternal isolation over the palm trees and deserts of the African Equator.

JUSTIFICATION

Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon? Do I not owe it to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And how about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted; Deborah sing without blame how she arose a mother in Israel, and David boast of his triumph over the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in His confabulations with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the Universe Himself take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance, His power, His glory?

Was I not made in His image?

THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET

All this hurry to dress and go out, these journeys in taxi-cabs, or in trains with my packed bag from big railway stations--what keeps me going, I sometimes ask myself; and I remember how, in his 'Masnavi I Ma'navi' or 'Spiritual Couplets,' Jalalu 'D-Din Muhammad Rumi says that our Desires, the swarm of gaudy Thoughts we pursue and follow, are short-lived like summer insects, and must all be killed before long by the winter of age.

MONOTONY

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.'

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.