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!
Heresies
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.)
Hot Bath
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.
And now the bath; and now hot water gushing lavishly from a chromium tap into a white porcelain bed, spreading thin and clear, then verdurously bubbling round green and piney bath salts, assuming the tinge of a glasshouse full of ferns, or of tropical forests. Soaked in green light, with two small red ducks bobbing about me, I lie at ease, frayed nerves relaxed, numbed blood running round again on its appointed, circular mortal race, frozen brain melting, thawing, expanding into a strange exotic efflorescence in this warm pine forest. Bare winter suddenly is changed to spring,
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set.…
Like those Japanese paper flowers which gently unfold and bloom in bowls of water, thoughts and dreams burgeon, the mind puts out boughs and sprigs of blossom and ripe fruits, inebriating and enticing the charmed soul. Music seems to sound: is it that music of the spheres which only (so w
e are told) the chaste ear hears, or is it some strayed mermaid? Or does the dandled brain itself dream harmony, drowned in warm sweetness like a tropicked ship? The waters lap gently about the almost submerged island; sirens sing, the lotus flower opens, naiads move in rhythm, genius flows like wine, poems, tales and pictures create themselves, swim in heavenly brightness, and dissolve. I am in the Golden Age; in Paradise; in the Fortunate Isles; in the gardens of the Hesperides and of Alcinous; in the floating gardens of Montezuma. I lie in Eden’s bower, among odorous gums and balsams, or in a lake that to the fringed bank with myrtle crowned her crystal mirror holds, while universal Pan, knit with the Graces and the hours in dance, leads on the eternal spring. So, lulled in these flowers with dances and delight, I drowse entranced.
The Emperor Commodus is reported to have had a hot bath seven times a day; and who can blame him? Rich women have bathed themselves in milk, sometimes in the milk of five hundred she-asses at once. But water is better, for milk, if hot, would form a skin. The slimy touch of that white, crinkly skin on one’s own … but perhaps the rich women’s slaves kept the milk bath in continual motion, so that no skin could form. Fear of skin must have been the shadow that hung over those rich women’s baths. The shadow that hangs over mine is the fear of cooler water, dread lest the hot delight running from the taps should grow temperate, tepid, neither hot nor cold, to be spewed out of the mouth. That will be the end: it is already the end: the warm bower cools, its flowers fade, its songs die; the water, which I ruffle and splash to warm it, chills moment by moment.
Still I sojourn here, alone and palely loitering, though the sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing. For I sent the bath towel to the wash this morning, and omitted to put out another. I have no towel.
Ignorance
1. Of one’s neighbours
No, I do not know the names of anyone in this street, these flats, this square. No, I do not know who Mrs. Miller is, or where she lives. This flat is my flat, and quite self-contained; I do not know my neighbours. Pride and self-containment swell me; I keep myself to myself, and wish you to know it. Who and what is this Mrs. Miller, that you should suppose I know of her? Has Mrs. Miller the run of my home, or I of Mrs. Miller’s? The savage pride of the cave-dweller surges in me. No, I know nothing about any of the other caves, thank you. Their inhabitants are probably despicably uncivilised, and, for all I know, keep parrots. You will have to find out their names for yourself.
What? Something has happened at Mrs. Miller’s? There has been a burglary, a murder, a fire? The police are here, and do not know which door to break down? Alas, it is too late for me to be concerned with that now; you should have told me at once. How can I now conduct you to Mrs. Miller’s door and share in the fun? You must ask someone else, and next time you ask me anything, kindly state your reason first.
2. Of current literature
No, I am afraid I have not read that either. It is good, you say? I am sure you are right. But I have no time for all these novels and things. I cannot imagine how you make time for them. You find they are worth it? They do not look good. Not that I see them; but they do not sound good, from the advertisements and reviews. Not that I read advertisements and reviews. I like to keep myself clear from all this second rate stuff. Am I not afraid of missing something good? Well, I feel that the danger of reading something bad outweighs that risk. Yes, as you point out, I contribute to current literature myself. But then I scarcely read my own stuff, after all. And the point is, I get money for writing it. If anyone gave me money for reading, that would be another matter.
Yes, I am going off on Monday for a month in the country. You were going to give me some of your review copies, did you say? But now you will sell them instead.… Oh, well …
3. Of gossip
They have quarrelled? No, I had not heard. I never hear about people’s quarrels. And Daphnis and Chloe are to divorce? I had not heard that either. You hear all these news; I do not. No one tells me; I am too busy to inquire. It is better not to know; it avoids embarrassing moments. When I meet people, there is no subject I need to avoid; I can say anything. It is better so. It would be so tiresome not being able to mention Phyllis to Chloe, or Corydon to Daphnis, just because there are entanglements. After all, is not all life one long entanglement, and is it worth while to inform oneself about every knot? It is so much simpler not to know. And such things are not really interesting. Human beings being what they are, affections, animosities, meetings, partings, intimacies, estrangements, libel actions, occur all the time; to keep au fait with them would tax the most alert mind and take all one’s time. As for me, I am happiest among my books.
You are going? But I thought you had something to tell me.…
4. Of wickedness
Can you understand wanting to act like that? I must say that I cannot. What I mean is, I am no saint, heaven knows, and I have my faults as much as anyone, but when it comes to things like that, one simply cannot enter into them. For instance, I can lose my temper, and say hasty things, but when it comes to real delight in cruelty, such as Nero’s, or Caligula’s, or the Nazis’, or our ancestors’, I simply cannot begin to understand it. Nor wanting to make marks in other people’s books. Nor taking books and not returning them. Nor stealing stockings. And all this pornography one hears of. It never comes my way. One hears of books, of films, of postcards, of pictures, but I never see any. No doubt I am very ignorant. Bishops seem always to contrive to see improper films. They must have an excellent information service; of course, bishops cannot afford to be ignorant. What a time they must have!
But I see you think me a prig. That is the worst of ignorance; people either think you stupid or a prig. Probably both.
5. Of one’s pass-book
This, I presume, is my pass-book, returned by the bank after being made up. I shall not open it; I shall put it away in a drawer as it is. It is one of those many books which are better unread. Am I Pandora, to open an odious box and set cares flying loose to sting me? Why should I depress myself by looking at all those figures, and the ridiculous sum they write in pencil at the end? I suppose they will tell me when they do not care to cash my cheques any more, and until then I shall go on drawing them, and shall not brood. The Bible tells us not to worry, but to take no thought for the morrow. If I were to begin poring over my pass-book (I cannot imagine why my bank should always give it a capital P and B, as if it were so desperately important) I should be paralysed, I could not live at all. Every mouthful would choke me; I could not so much as buy the means of subsistence, such as National Benzole or Shell, without hesitation and pain. While as for a wash and polish for my car, or a shampoo and set for my hair, I should cut them out altogether. And go nowhere, and see no one. I have anguish enough already at quarter days, what with rent and gas and electricity and telephone and bills, and that insolent income tax twice a year. If I were to read and remember my pass-book, it would be worse still.…
So I do not read it. I walk in trust, hoping that I am still well on the hither side of indigence, and that my estate will prosperously endure. I spend, I consume, I commune with the angels, I live, I turn to rude facts a genteel and well-bred back.
The day will come. My landlord, the Gas Light & Coke Company, the Borough Council Electricity Department, the Controller of the London Telephone Service, the Income Tax Inspector, the very milkman, will all one day receive back from their banks cheques marked R.D. I shall be run down, run out of my estate, finished. However then I may strive after Ignorance, that tranquil maid, I shall not be permitted to dwell with her again. Perhaps, if I were to open and read this sealed book now …
Yet ah! why should I know my fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would deny my paradise
No more! Where ignorance is bliss …
Enough. Return the thing to its drawer.
Improving the Dictionary
On a blank page at
the beginning of the Supplementary Volume of my Dictionary, I record emendations, corrections, additions, earlier uses of words, as I come on them in reading. Ah, I say, congratulating myself, here Messrs. Murray, Bradley, Craigie and Onions are nearly a century out; here were sailors, travellers and philosophers chattering of sea turtles from the fifteen sixties on, and the Dictionary will not have them before the sixteen-fifties. And how late they are with estancias, iguanas, anthropophagi, maize, cochineal, canoes, troglodytes, cannibals and hammocks. As to aniles, or old wives’ tales, they will not let us have this excellent noun at all.
Thus I say to myself, as I enter my words and dates. To amend so great a work gives me pleasure; I feel myself one of its architects; I am Sir James Murray, Dr. Bradley, Sir William Craigie, Dr. Onions, I belong to the Philological Society; I have delusions of grandeur. Had I but world enough and time, I would find earlier uses of all the half million words, I would publish another supplement of my own, I would achieve at last my early ambition to be a lexicographer.
Personal Pleasures Page 12
