Personal Pleasures (15 page)

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 claim 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.

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.

For how many days I nursed this greenish and pregnant
treasure, this shrine of a fluffy golden being who should emerge in the fullness of time, who should owe its happy waddling life to me, I know not. They were glorious days, if few. I walked and gingerly ran, dream-wrapped; I was with duckling, and must walk warily. When in the slippery paths of youth with heedless steps I ran, the bouncing against my bosom of my duck-to-be recalled me to the cautiousness of prospective motherhood.

How I would love it! It would be my dandling, my nestlechick, my pet. With my own hands I would teach it to swim, to run, to jump (for we were accustomed to organise hurdle races for our pets, of whatever species). Mine would be the swiftest duck e'er entered for the stakes. It would accompany me everywhere, sitting on my lap at meals, at lessons, bathing with me in the sea. How, too, it would love me! Why does the duckling love her so, people would ask, as of Mary's lamb. Well, she loves the duck, you see, they would reply. And was I not giving it life, tending it, sacrificing for it other pleasures? Should it not, when it came to perception, gratefully quack, with Joseph Addison,

Unnumber'd comforts to my soul

Thy tender care bestow'd
,

Before my infant heart conceived

From whom those comforts flow'd?

Thus I mused in my maternal meditations, moving delicately about house, shore, road, hill-side, my hands
often crossed over my breast as in some holy picture. I felt safe, guarded, protected, with my dear and perilous burden; a thousand liveried angels lackeyed me, and I knew that this time a duck would be born. I would often take out the egg and put my ear to it as to a shell, to listen for faint cheepings, which I sometimes fancied that I heard. I wondered what would happen if it should hatch by night, beneath my pillow.… Suppose that I were to wake one morning and find a smothered duckling, whose cries had failed to wake me? But we had been told that chickens and ducklings usually hatched by day, so this chance seemed remote.

The end came, as usual. The liveried angels went off duty, and with heedless steps I ran across the slippery stone floor of a room, and fell prone on my chest. A horrid smash, and my pet flowed away, sticky, addled, smelling of the corruption of all mortality, and past return were all its dandled days.

In the ensuing mess and bitterness of baulked hope, my one and chilly comfort was that there had never, it seemed, been duck life in that shell. I had not been with duckling, only with egg; and with stale and ancient egg of date incalculable. My nestlechick had been but a fluffy golden vision, conceived in the pregnant rovings of my brain, never by duck and drake in sweet communion linked. It had been the child of my doting dreams alone. But, while they lasted, what doting and what dreams!

I know how the great heretics felt; I can enter into their fervorous assertions, their obstinate denials, their ingenious and fantastic inventions, their wild daydreams concerning the world, the heavens and themselves. I can share their triumphant firmness in error, which would keep them ergotising sleepless through days and nights, frapling one against another, pro and con, across some seeming-small but bridgeless gulf which yawned between them and their opponents; I know the proud self-confidence which, after all these eager ergotisms, so often sent them heaven or hellward encharioted in flames.

More, when I recall some of those peculiar heresies which have down the ages made men and women feel so strongly, argue so fiercely, slay and die with such a ruthless calm, I feel in myself a responsive pleasure in nearly all. There must have been something in these strange delusions, I tell myself, that they inspired such confidence. Indeed, they have a quality of persistence which discovers them to be deeply rooted in human nature; scarce one in past centuries that you will not find echoed to-day; scarce one which I do not find re-hereticised in my own soul, at one moment or another, for the soul has its days and moods.

I am often pleased, for instance, to be an Origenist, as have been so many amiable men, and to think that there shall be no man damned, but all saved at the last, including the Devil himself. There are moments when I like to be Eustathian, to look on marriage as sinful, and wish, with Sir Thomas Browne, that there were some more delicate way to populate the world; other moments when polygamy captivates me, and I desire, with the Anabaptists and Mormons, that everyone should wed to the top of his bent. On hot days in the south I am Adamite, and wish to stroll abroad clad only in what Jeremy Taylor called rustick impudence; when skies are cold and sad I turn Manichee and hate the flesh. Often I am Pelagian, and vainly talk against original sin, boasting the potency of man's will to virtue; or I embrace Arianism, Socinianism or Photinianism, defying Athanasian thunders. How frequently am I one with the Fraticelli, their partiality to not too monotonous affections, their distaste for manual labour; or the Dulcinists, who combined with these errors the repugnance felt by the Waldensians for the clergy, for the cult of the saints, for the rights of property, and for the indissolubility of marriage.

Often too, I belong to the Agonyclites, and will not kneel; I like to be Collyridian, Messalian, Quartodeciman, semi-Pelagian, in turn; I will even experiment in Partial-Diluvianism, and maintain that the Flood left parts of the earth's surface uncovered; I will participate in a hundred of those enthusiastic and fanatical
errors which are a heritage from our audacious, speculating and so wrong-headed fathers.

These damnable and damnèd tenets are charming to hold, these poisoned streams sweet to the palate. That humanity, so imperilled by hereticide, so close to ravening lion and crackling flame, could be so ingenious and so determined in straying from the true path, is not strange to him who peruses human history. That Montanist and Donatist, flung into the same arena by Emperors to encounter hungry Christianophagous animals, should turn their backs on one another with expressions of distaste and advance into the jaws of different lions, resolved not even to be joined in martyrdom, is natural enough to him who is familiar with odium theologicum. For heretics too, have their portion in the heritage of this great odium; while in the grip of one heresy I condemn and abominate the others as if I were a partridge in a cage. (
Like as a partridge taken and kept in a cage, so is the heart of the proud
. Ecclesiasticus xi. 30.)

A hot bath! I cry, as I sit down in it; and again, as I lie flat, a hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day. All day I have moved about in chill air, in fog, in bitter and annihilating blasts, in inclement elements for which the tender human frame, contrived for the balmy airs of Eden, was never made. I have sat upright in a chair and tapped with stiff fingers on a typewriter; I have wrung numb thoughts and words out of a frozen brain, transmitting them on to paper in a gellid trickle; I have walked through chill murk and contagious fogs, with sore eyes and throat, every breath a pain, the grime of a great ennebuled city choking pores and lungs, the mazed world a darkness and a doubt, the round red sun extinguished, quite put out. I have, in brief, suffered angry winter's chiding tongue and dark brief day.