Personal Pleasures (11 page)

But no; I believe that turtles have been misjudged, and that the gentle crooning which has been taken to indicate grief actually, even in the solitary bird, expresses a tranquil pleasure in existence. I like to think this, for I have (who can other?) a great esteem for this amiable bird, so kind, so passing chaste, a messenger of peace, an ensample of simpleness, clean, plenteous in children, follower of meekness, friend of company, forgetter of wrongs, nicely curious, carrier of letters, emblem of the Holy Ghost. I will not suppose that my chimney-cole culver is a sad widow; she is the most constant pretty cooing turtle, and doubtless a happy, if forgetful, mother, sitting upon an ill made nest up there and crooning to her unborn turtlets. Her voice is so sweet, so comforting, so heavenly, it would convert the sceptical
jeune homme de Dijon
himself, did he hear it as I hear it now, rising, murmuring, falling, dying, melting away to start again—croo, croo, croo.

My chimney is a hospitable lodging for turtles. But what is their fate when they make their home in chimneys which are funnels for fire and smoke? Do they flit away, forgetting their turtlets, at the first alarm, to build in the next chimney? Or do they remain, faithful birds, amid the choking fumes, until, like the Phoenix and the Turtle, they enclosed in cinders lie?

To propel a car through space, to devour the flying miles, to triumph over roads, flinging them behind us like discarded snakes, to rush, like Mulciber, from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, a summer's day, up hill and down, by singing fir woods and blue heath, annihilating counties and minifying kingdoms—here is a joy that Phaethon, that bad driver, never knew. Phaethon, like us, was inebriated with rushing (as he fondly thought) through the air, intoxicated with pride in the great and hazardous car he drove, deeming himself a speed king. He believed himself to be doing his circuit of 583 million miles in twenty-four hours, or about 25,000,000 m.p.h. That is to say, had the sun really been rushing daily round the earth, that is about what it would have had to do, though it is possible that neither Helios nor Phaethon actually knew the mileage. Anyhow, as we now know, Phaethon was not really moving at all; it was the earth that was moving, and Phaethon crashed simply from nerves.

The same might be said of all the charioteers before the present age; they thought they were speeding, but were really scarcely moving at all. Nero fancied himself as a driver: but what was Nero doing? At the most, about fifteen. Bishop Wilkins much praised for their swiftness certain chariots with wheels and sails
that were, said he, driven over land by the wind at a rate far exceeding the swiftness of ships on the sea. Such chariots sailed, he said, over the great smooth plains of China; and there was one at Sceveling in Holland, which that eminent inquisitive man Peireskius travelled to see, and would ever after talk of it, saying that its passengers did not feel the motion of the wind that drove them, since they travelled with equal speed themselves; men running before it seemed to go backwards, and things which seemed at a great distance were presently overtaken and left behind. Grotius was very copious and elegant in the celebration of this invention, and Bishop Wilkins inquires, what could be more delightful than to make use of the wind, which costs nothing and eats nothing, instead of horses. In two hours' space, says he, the Sceveling chariot would travel two and forty miles. So, after all this fuss and travelling to see it and excitement on the part of English bishops and the eminent inquisitive Peireskius and the copious elegant Grotius, the thing could only do twenty-one.

The fact that our grandchildren, nay, our children, will soon be talking with similar contempt of us, rather adds to than detracts from our pleasure. The cars that we send hurtling over the earth by the touch of a foot on a knob are but at the beginning of their race with time and space; we drive slow and clumsy embryos. But they are swift enough to delight us, as with open throttle and hands lightly on the wheel we scud the roads, watching the needle mount, slipping past those
other cars which unfortunately also scud the roads and impede our view.

All is bliss; we hum songs of triumph, as all charioteers have, even when they have been ignobly dragged by the brute creation, instead of by a drop of volatile spirit and a rotating engine, which is so obviously far better. Our song is chorused by the little chirping squeak of the door handles, the faint rattling of the windows, the less faint humming of the engine, the running of the wind. The scenery is doubled in charm by being seen at this rate; it flashes by with the vividness of a string of jewels, glimpsed, admired, and gone. How tired we should get of it were we afoot, trudging along with pack on back! One should not give scenery the chance to fatigue one. Seen thus, it will glow in the memory like a fairy land scarce trodden, awaiting one's return.

The serpent in this Eden, the canker in this lovely bloom of speed, is (need one say it?) the other vehicles in our road. And particularly in the middle of our road, which is where cars, horse-carts, and cyclists love to travel. But, did all travellers keep, as they should, to their near side, driving would be too like heaven for sinful man below. As it is, when our time comes to go, when we fall in turn to the juggernaut, we may hope to be translated to some paradise traversed by great fair roads, to each soul a road to herself, along which her car shall dash at some supramundane speed, hugging (for souls shall be made perfect) the near border of thymey Elysian grass.

A Delicate shimmer of greenery flickers, a light veil, over purple and brown, and starry blackthorn and wild cherry-blossom riot, in flights gay and white like angels, over wood and hill. How the copses, all enverdured with larch and birch and thorn and springing beech, climb the steep brown hillsides, running down to cowslipped dells and banks, while at their feet the marshy bottoms, gold-starred with kingcups, lie! Standing here, my feet deep in brown beech leaves, on Wheatham Hill's steep shoulder, I can see the high hangers, copses, valleys, commons and farms, for miles around. There is the long, circling hanger called, in its different curves, Oakshott, Juniper, and Happersnapper, lying coiled, like a great snake of beech and oak, holly and birch, and alder, on the heights above Higher, Middle, and Lower Oakshott Farms; there are Moore's Copse, Cheesecombe, Cherrycombe, lying about Oakshott Stream to the north; in the nearer distance burgeon those three petty copses, Roundabout, Hazel Holt, and Naps. While to the south writhes the wild steep Shoulder-of-Mutton hill, all embeeched, and edged along the ridge, where the wood breaks into bare grass gnarled with wind-bent thorn-trees, by the little deep-set path of Cockshut
Lane. Eastward, in the near distance between the meadowy valley below these woods where I stand, and the running line of high moor and forest beyond, Wheatham Farm lies on its hill; its hens have laid Easter eggs, and their cries of content float to me through the soft still air, striking their own exotic galline note in the merry Easter concert that pours from the greenwood. What plumy people sing in every grove! What whistling, what warbling, what chiff chaffing, what lyric sopranos and coloraturas, what shrill sweet zest! Could humanity but sing like this. …

But I am waiting and listening for a voice overdue, a voice as yet unheard by me this year. Will it come to-day? The stage is all adorned and set for the entry of this monotonous but enchanting performer; here is blossom and greenwood, soft sunshine and blue shadow, light breezes and sweet air. But he tarries still. The stone-chat ejaculates, sharp and bright, from the furzy common; the wheat-ear nods and flirts and says “Chak chak”; the ring ouzel sings, wild and gay, doing, no doubt, his marriage dance in the patch of moory grass above the wood; the blackbird, already settled, a householder, mellowly and with prosperous dignity whistles a tune; the nightingale jugs, the robin warbles, the wren twees, the goldcrest (or is it a long-tailed tit?) zee-zee-zees, the Dartford Warbler pittews, the hedge-sparrow chirrups, the linnet trills. At least, this is what I believe that I am hearing; the sum of it, anyhow, is the finest merry melodious canticling you can hear in a Hampshire Easter week.

And then, from the brown heart of Roundabout Copse, breaks the cry, high, far and clear, of the roving bully who is just arrived for his season of pleasure and increase in these islands after his African tour, and carelessly brags the freedom of himself and spouse from household cares, from the tedium of domesticity, from the trouble of parenthood, from the monotony of monogamy. The cuckoo is a witty bird; hearing his gay, cool, exultant cry, one hails once more the eternal pleasurist. They know how to live, these cuckoos; they rove, they love (briefly, but effectively), they breed, they procreate, they lay their cheerful Easter eggs singly in homes of eggs like-hued, relying, with a confidence justified by the inherited experience of ages, on the frail intellects and kind hearts of non-cuculan birds; and so away to the greenwood they hie, having thus made ample and painless provision for a progeny they have no notion of ever seeing again. Family business thus brilliantly disposed of, all spring and summer stretches before them for song, riot and debauchery; and why in the world their name has been taken by humanity as a synonym for stupidity, passes conjecture. Wise birds; intelligent, unscrupulous, cynical, sensible birds, wearing their freedom like a panache, crying it like a witty brag. They seem to me to have a Renaissance touch, to be like Medici princes and popes, luxurious, clever, conscienceless, getting the better of simpler, better men and women, looting the world of its pleasures and giving in return only their own insolent enjoyment. Life is no trouble to cuckoos;
solvitur cantando
. Their gay boast rings over the April woods like bells, ringing in the merry summer. First far, then drifting nearer, from Roundabout to Hazel Holt, from Hazel Holt to Naps Copse, and so across the dell to Wheatham Hanger, and then all over and about the wood,
cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo
, so negligently, boldly gay, as if they mocked, as well as they may, the chorus of little warblers, the future foster-parents of their, as yet, unlaid young.
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!
the cry drifts westward, away and away towards Juniper Hanger. Follow it through the greening woods, up sweet dim twisting paths, among the alders and the great bare budding beeches and the young slim beeches springing green, rustling through the deep brown pile of the beech carpet (laid last autumn, and overlaid with the green running pattern of agrimony), by ancient chalk pits and blown bare ridges hawthorn-grown, across the deep grass track of Old Litten Lane, and so to the wild sweep of Juniper Hanger, where it climbs above the Oakshotts against a shifting, sea-hued sky. The cuckoo is away now, following his private ploys somewhere in Happersnapper woods, but he has left the spring behind him, its gay bravery and the eternal dip-and-come-up of the dauntless, resurrecting Easter world, with its cowslips, its singing, and its dancing sun.

But now the blue distances deepen to violet; rain sweeps across the Oakshotts from Selborne way, and patters light drops on the beeches. Decoyed from wood to wood by the teasing gay bird, as if by the
tee-heeing pixies, I am left now deserted by it as by these, with the Easter rain pattering on holt and hanger, and the chorus of good little birds warbling and weeting on every bough.

Here is a wonderful and delightful thing, that we should have furnished ourselves with orifices, with traps that open and shut, through which to push and pour alien objects that give us such pleasurable, such delicious sensations, and at the same time sustain us. A simple pleasure; a pleasure accessible, in normal circumstances and in varying degrees, to all, and that several times each day. An expensive pleasure, if calculated in the long run and over a lifetime; but count the cost of each mouthful as it comes, and it is (naturally) cheaper. You can, for instance, get a delicious plate of spaghetti and cheese, or fried mushrooms and onions, for very little; or practically anything else, except caviare, smoked salmon, the eggs of plovers, ostriches and humming-birds, and fauna and flora completely out of their appropriate seasons, which you will, of course, desire, but to indulge such desires is Gluttony, or Gule, against which the human race has always been warned. It was, of course, through Gule that our first parents fell. As the confessor of Gower's Amans told him, this vice of gluttony was in Paradise, most deplorably mistimed.

We shall never know what that fruit was, which so solicited the longing Eve, which smelt so savoury,
which tasted so delightful as greedily she ingorged it without restraint. The only fruit that has ever seemed to me to be worthy of the magnificently inebriating effects wrought by its consumption on both our parents is the mango. When I have eaten mangoes, I have felt like Eve.

Satiate at length
,

And hightn'd as with Wine, jocond and boon
,

Thus to her self she pleasingly began
.

O sovran, vertuous, precious of all trees

In Paradise, of operation blest. …

And like both of them together:

As with new Wine intoxicated both

They swim in mirth, and fansie that they feel

Divinitie within them breeding wings

Wherewith to scorn the Earth: but that false Fruit

Farr other operation first displaid. …

And so on. But, waking up the morning after mangoes, one does not feel such ill effects as was produced by that fallacious fruit when its exhilarating vapour bland had worn off. One feels, unless one has very grossly exceeded, satiate, happy and benign, turning sweet memories over on one's palate, desiring, for the present, no more of anything. The part of the soul (see Timæus) which desires meats and drinks lies torpid and replete by its manger, somewhere between midriff
and navel, for there the gods housed these desires, that wild animal chained up with man, which must be nourished if man is to exist, but must not be allowed to disturb the council chamber, the seat of reason. For the authors of our race, said Timæus, were aware that we should be intemperate in eating and drinking, and take a good deal more than was necessary or proper, by reason of gluttony. Prescient and kindly authors of our race! What a happy companion they allotted to mankind in this wild animal, whom I should rather call a domestic and pampered pet. How sweet it is to please it, to indulge it with delicious nourishment, with superfluous tit-bits and pretty little tiny kickshaws, with jellies, salads, dainty fowls and fishes, fruits and wines and pasties, fattened and entruffled livers of geese, sturgeon's eggs from Russia, salmon from the burn, omelettes and soufflés from the kitchen. I have always thought the Glutton in Piers Plowman a coarse and unresourceful fellow, who, on his way to church and shrift, was beguiled merely by a breweress's offer of ale. (How ungenteel Mr. H. W. Fowler must have thought her, and all of her century and many later centuries, for using this word, which he so condemns, for beer!) The Glutton asked, had she also any hot spices? and she assured him that she had pepper, paeony seeds, garlic, and fennel. And with this simple and unpleasing fare, Glutton was content, and made merry globbing it until night. Glutton was no gourmet, no Lucullus. Nothing recked he of rare and dainty dishes; nothing out of the ordinary entered his
imagination. Not for him the spitted lark, the artful sauce, the delicate salad of chopped herbs and frogs.