Read Ebook: More Trivia by Smith Logan Pearsall

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Ebook has 453 lines and 18747 words, and 10 pages

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

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 ; 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

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