Personal Pleasures (7 page)

1104. Yonge (C.M.)
Der Erbe von Redcliffe, aus dem Englischen
… Vol. I only, Author's Own Copy, 5
s
., Leipzig, 1856. Dear Heir of Redcliffe: I should like to see how your flashing eye and curling upper lip would go in German; but I will not; it would be desecration;
Der Erbe
shall have no tick.

Nor shall any of these modern first editions. Why does anyone prefer a first edition of a modern book to a later one? I am told that this is one of the diseases that one cannot hope to understand unless one suffers from it. It is, I presume, called protophilism, or even protomania. Sufferers from it keep, perhaps, the first white stone they see when out walking, or the newspapers for the first day of each month, or the top button off each of their coats, or the first stamp out of each stamp-book, or the programmes of the first nights of plays, or the firstlings of the infant year. Jehovah collected firstborns, alike of men, beasts, and plants, saying, “They are mine,” so the instinct has high and ancient origin.

There are a number of firstlings in this catalogue. They are pathetically cheap. Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence,
John Halifax, Gentleman
, Jerome K. Jerome,
The Way of an Eagle
, and a company of others, many of them “nice copies,” and all about three shillings apiece. Does anyone buy them? I could, for my part, read lists of modern firsts for ever, and remain as full in purse as when I began; I never feel “they are mine.” I could wish that catalogues contained nothing else, and were not, instead, alive with more perilous seductions.

How these lure one down the page! We are arrived at the P's; PEZRON (M.)
The Antiquities of Nations; English by Mr. Jones
, 8vo. calf, stained, 1706. PLAYS. Samuel Foote, calf gilt, cracked, label missing,
8s 6d
, 1799. PLINY.
Naturall Historie of
C.
Plinius Secundus. Trans, by Philemon Holland, very worn
. … POL-WHELE (R.)
The Influence of Local Attachment with respect to Home
, joint cracked, 4s
6d
. POPISH CRUELTY EXEMPLIFIED
in the various Sufferings of Mr. Serres & several other French Gentlemen, done into English by Claud D'Assas
, calf, a few leaves stained, 5s
6d
, 1723. …

And so down to Zola and Zoology, the former of which seems to remain a bore, even in a catalogue, while the latter is so enticing that to read the names of its dryest manuals is a stimulant.

A stimulant: yes, the word is apt. To read these catalogues is like drinking wine in the middle of the morning; it elevates one into that state of felicitous intoxication in which one feels capable of anything. I must control myself, and not write to booksellers in haste: there must be a gap between the perusal of
the catalogue and my postcard. Drinking, said Dr. Johnson, should be practised with great prudence; one must have skill in inebriation. A man without such skill will undertake anything. … I will wait until the effects are worn off, and then write a postcard sober, temperate, moderate, brief, restrained. …

But, while I wait, those more intemperate than myself will have rushed in and bought
Mathematicall Magick
, the
New World in the Moon
, the
Theatre of Insects
, and the
Silkewormes
. It is obvious that I cannot wait. Probably I should telephone. …

I need a new bookshelf. I am short of money. I could have read all these books in the British Museum; some of them even from the London Library. In short, I am sober again. But I am glad that I was drunk.

How agreeable to watch, from the other side of the high stile, this mighty creature, this fat bull of Bashan, snorting, champing, pawing the earth, lashing the tail, breathing defiance at heaven and at me, crooning in ignoble rage (for rage is always ignoble when both causeless and ill directed). How mighty are his sinews, how stout and fierce his horns, how fiery his nostrils, how strong and huge his thews! Did he that made the lamb make him? He is a very king of cows. One sees him roaming the great prairies, lord of a herd, rounded up by cowboys with cracking whips.

That lordly Bull of mine. …

How loudly to the hills he croons
,

That croon to him again!

And now here he stands, so near and yet so far, his heart hot with hate, unable to climb a stile.

But suppose that, using his horns as battering-rams, he should rush at it and break it down?

The parroco came before each Candlemas Day to bless the house. He would walk about it, sprinkling holy water, and he would bring each year a tall and lovely candle of entwined and multi coloured wax, which he had blessed. We had, too, a number of little candles, made of long spirals of coloured wax twisted close and coiled up like a snake, to be uncoiled as they burned down. They were red and green and yellow and blue, and of great beauty. We took them out with us for our Candlemas picnic, which consisted of oranges, a few preserved fruits, dates and prunes, and fragments of rolls. This feast we took with us along the Savona or the Genoa road, or along the river, or up the hill path behind the house, that climbed, stony and steep, past the carob-tree to our rock houses. Arrived at these craggy piles and promontories, we sat down, lit our coloured candles, and stood them on stones. Rearing slim necks to heaven, they burned, frail and flickering golden buds, while we gnawed bread, sucked oranges, kept the exquisiteness of preserved fruits and French plums for the last
bonne bouche
, and, having finished all, but being still loth to cease, plucked myrtle berries and so prolonged the feast. Some of these were black and plump, almost
sweet, others immature and sharp. At any stage, they were better than juniper berries, which dried the mouth.

Thus we kept Candlemas, looking over a wide blue bay through a pink shimmer of almond blossom, while the town below made festa, and a procession wound, harshly chanting, through the deep and narrow streets to Santa Caterina's pink church at the hill's foot. In the still and resinous air our candle-flames burned like little tulips, the flower elongating as the stem dwindled. Thrifty, we would not unwind all the coils and burn them out. The feast done, we extinguished the tapers and put them by for future use. The Candlemas festa thus kept with pious rites, the rock houses became castles to be besieged.

But we had an annual Candlemas difference of opinion with our father, for we thought Candlemas should be a holiday from lessons. Not so he; and he won. So Candlemas Day was wasted until the afternoon.

A Great curve of smooth blue Mediterranean spreads between my frail bark and the distant line of shore. I slip down an azure orange, a swelling and limpid mountainside; I perceive about me what one has always heard, that the earth is indeed a ball. I can still just, when I turn my head and look, spy the bay, the shore, the town, the church towers, the house on the shore to the bay's east, nestling beneath and in front of a jagged line of piney, terraced hills and of the wild running steeps of higher Apennines behind these. But a few minutes, a few strokes of the paddle, and all but the hills will be sunk, vanished, drowned below the rim of the round world.

I turn again and look: the town, the shore, are gone; I am alone with a blue horizon ahead (beyond lies Corsica, but I shall not see that island), the mountain rim of the bay behind, a long jut of soft indigo grey (Savona) thrusting out into western sea and sky, the further and fainter blue point of Genoa lying twenty miles east, bounding the great bay, and beyond that Spezia, pale and shimmering as fairyland, for there, so one has been told, are marble mountains.

On the ocean's rim flies a far ship with spread sails, like a gull. I am alone; I navigate uncharted seas, where
the known stars are laid asleep in Tethys' lap; where neither birds can instruct to any near shore, nor any birds in the main Ocean to be seen; where without the compass all things are out of compass, and nothing but miracle or chance can save or serve. I am of the great company of hazardous mariners who brave the deep; I am Captain Cook, Columbus, Cabot, Magellan, Raleigh, Drake; I am Jack, Ralph and Peterkin exploring round their Coral Island; I am an officer of the Royal Navy, sent out on a lone mission to spy out slavers, pirates, French or Spanish men-of-war; or I seek treasure left absent-mindedly on a small island long since, and the secret chart, yellow with age, without which I can never arrive there, lies folded against my breast.

I am the first that ever burst into this silent sea. Perils beleaguer me on every side. There a sharp fin pierces the smooth surface like a sail; a white belly gleams as a giant shark turns on its back. He rushes on me through the deep, with open jaws: one lurch of his body beneath my canoe, and it and I would be hurled out of the water, and down again into that ravening mouth. Only one thing to do—the trick learned of the Coral Islanders: I wait until the monster is close, wait until he turns on his back, then, with a mighty thrust, insert the end of the paddle between his jaws. He threshes about in the water; the canoe is swirled round, as I cling fast to the paddle: but before long he chokes and sinks down into the deep, a corpse, fortunately spewing forth the paddle
before doing so. I am saved; but I believe that his widow and little ones, his infuriate and formidable bereaved (sharks being very family fish), are not far distant, and may at any moment apprehend the situation and give chase. It behoves me to be wary.

Also, that sail on the horizon is, beyond doubt, a pirate sail: if it should sight me, I am lost. And at any moment I might be surrounded by canoes fraught with savages. There are mermaids too, and mermen, leaping and diving, shooting up from the bottom of the monstrous world to spy and peer at the gallant young sailor in his frail bark. To entertain me, they strike their harps with a most melodious twang, and sing sea chanties. Here too are flying-fish, and there is that leviathan; he even spouts; every marvel of the perilous deep displays itself before the explorer's sophisticated and unastonished eyes.

Of a sudden the deep heaves and swells; the canoe lurches up and down. I am dismayed and astonished, I reel to and from like a drunken man. For a ship bears towards me; a real ship, a steamer in full tilt, rushing towards Genoa; in her wake the white foam flies, the furrow follows free; she disturbs the ocean with her passing, and like a cockle-shell my bark rocks. Peril assumes the sterner face of reality; pirates, mermaids, and sharks vanish into blue sea and air; I toss alone in a canoe on the heaving main; she may overturn. Often enough she overturns nearer shore, when the waves run high or the crew are restless; that makes no matter, for we sit on her bottom and navigate her upside
down. But to overturn alone, far out on the round sea's curve, out of sight, out of swimming distance, of land; perhaps to sink—that is another matter. As to sharks, they exist; one was thrown up on the beach near Cogoleto lately; a man bathing off Albissola was once killed. … Sharks are real, and the canoe is lurching up hills, valing down valleys, bobbing and leaping like a porpoise or a cork.

The ship passes on her way; the heaving sea's long roll lessens, little and little, until the blue level which is really a curve spreads again from east to west, from north to south.

But fear has looked in, chill phantom among golden dreams. I no more desire to paddle south into the boundless main, into the Ligurian sea towards Corsica, for ever sliding down the curving world, further with every stroke of the paddle from my home bay. I paddle shoreward quickly, as if a shoal of monsters of the deep gave chase; I climb the blue glass ball again, slipping higher and higher up its limpid side, until below the hills the coast road appears, and the little many-coloured town, curved around its bay, arises like a drowned city, a lost Atlantis from which an ocean drops, exposing it once more to view. Detail appears: churches, pink or yellow or striped black and white; the stone archways that lead from town to shore; palms, oranges, lemons, eucalyptus, luxuriantly topping garden walls and burgeoning on terraces (“from whence,” as Mr. John Evelyn, coasting the Riviera, wrote, “might perfectly be smelt the peculiar
joys of Italy in the perfumes of orange, citron, and jassmine flowers, for divers leagues seaward”). And now I can perceive the fishing-boats and nets lying on the sands; and the square red house beyond the town, with the slope of beach running down from its garden to the sea's edge.

Land; safety; port for the sailor home from the sea; the end of an adventure. The angelus ringing across the bay; hens clucking; the lisping and hissing of tiny waves on sand; the late afternoon soaking hills and shore with golden heat. Gliding in to shore with the ripples, stepping out into warm, knee-deep water, dragging the canoe until she rests on dry beach. Voices that plain like gulls—“It's not fair, taking her out alone and keeping her out all that time. We're going a voyage to the rocks. …”

Each midsummer eve, after dark, we would go a firefly walk. The way started through a little orto, where a vine trellis arched over a shadowed path, and orange and lemon-trees bordered it, standing against white walls and filling the velvet night with sweetness, as the frogs in every little reservoir and ditch filled it with melody. Beyond the orto, the path climbed up between terraces, where the olive trees cast delicate black shadows on the moonlit stairway, and orange and lemon groves still perfumed the night. Among them, and all about the myrtle shrubs and juniper and little pines, capered and leaped the fireflies, flying between the cold moon and the earth. They pranced and danced, they twinked and blinked, they sparked, they larked, they burned like flying stars, like leaping gems, and after them we sped beneath a huge golden moon, scrambling up rocks, jumping down terraces, plunging scratched hands into juniper bushes, standing still against sticky pine-trunks to tempt the brilliant creatures near. Too rarely our cupped hands closed on a spark and held it, while it blinked at us shyly, on and off, like a lighthouse. Not to all was it given to catch a firefly; it was an event, a triumph; to hold one was to hold a magicking imp, that now
burnt like a star, now darkly brooded, a sullen insect without joy.