More Trivia Part 12

ASK ME NO MORE

Where are the snows of yesteryear? Ask me no more the fate of Nightingales and Roses, and where the old Moons go, or what becomes of last year's Oxford Poets.

FAME

Somewhat furtively I bowed to the new Moon in Knightsbridge; the little old ceremony was a survival, no doubt, of dark superst.i.tion, but the Wish that I breathed was an inheritance from a much later epoch. 'Twas an echo of Greece and Rome, the ideal ambition of poets and heroes; the thought of it seemed to float through the air in starlight and music; I saw in a bright constellation those stately Immortals; their great names rang in my ears.

'May I, too,----' I whispered, incredulous, as I lifted my hat to the unconcerned Moon.

NEWS-ITEMS

In spite of the delicacy of my moral feelings, and my unrelaxed solicitude for the maintenance of the right principles of conduct, I find I can read without tears of the retired Colonels who forge cheques, and the ladies of unexceptionable position who are caught pilfering furs in shops. Somehow the sudden lapses of respected people, odd indecorums, backbitings, bigamies, embezzlements, and attempted chast.i.ties--the surprising leaps they make now and then out of propriety into the police-courts--somehow news-items of this kind do not altogether--how shall I put it?--well, they don't absolutely blacken the suns.h.i.+ne for me.

And Clergymen? If a Clergyman slips up, do not, I pray you, gentle Reader, grieve on my account too much.

JOY

Sometimes at breakfast, sometimes in a train or empty bus, or on the moving stairs at Charing Cross, I am happy; the earth turns to gold, and life becomes a magical adventure. Only yesterday, travelling alone to Suss.e.x, I became light-headed with this sudden joy. The train seemed to rush to its adorable destination through a world new-born in splendour, bathed in a beautiful element, fresh and clear as on the morning of Creation. Even the coloured photographs of South Coast watering-places in the railway carriage shone with the light of Paradise upon them.

Brighton faced me; next to it divine Southsea beckoned; then I saw the beach at Sidmouth, the Tilly Whim caves near Swanage--was it in those unhaunted caves, or amid the tumult of life which hums about the Worthing bandstand, that I should find Bliss in its quintessence?

Or on the pier at St Peter Port, perhaps, in the Channel Islands, amid that crowd who watch in eternal ecstasy the ever-arriving never-disembarking Weymouth steamer?

IN ARCADY

When I retire from London to my rural solitudes, and taste once more, as always, those pure delights of Nature which the Poets celebrate--walks in the unambitious meadows, and the ever-satisfying companions.h.i.+p of vegetables and flowers--I am nevertheless haunted now and then (but tell it not to Sh.e.l.ley's Skylark, nor whisper to Wordsworth's Daffodils, the disconcerting secret)--I am incongruously beset by longings of which the Lake Poets never sang. Echoes and images of the abandoned City discompose my arcadisings: I hear, in the babbling of brooks, the delicious sound of London gossip, and newsboys' voices in the cries of birds. Sometimes the gold-splashed distance of a country lane seems to gleam at sunset with the posters of the evening papers; I dream at dawn of dinner-invitations, when, like a telephone-call, I hear the Greenfinch trill his electric bell.

WORRIES

In the woods about my garden and familiar precincts lurk the fears of life; all threaten me, some I may escape, of others I am the destined and devoted victim. Sooner or later--and yet in any case how soon!--I shall fall, as I have seen others fall, touched by an unseen hand.

But I do not think of these Terrors often, though I seem to hear them sometimes moving in the thickets. It is the little transitory worries that bite and annoy me, querulous insects, born of the moment, and peris.h.i.+ng with the day.

THINGS TO WRITE

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest, those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my reach.

The childish and ever-baffled chase of these filmy nothings often seems, for one of sober years in a sad world, a trifling occupation. But have I not read of the great Kings of Persia who used to ride out to hawk for b.u.t.terflies, nor deemed this pastime beneath their royal dignity?

PROPERTY

I should be very reluctant to think that there was anything fishy or fraudulent about the time-honoured inst.i.tution of Private Property. It is endorsed by Society, defended by the Church, maintained by the Law; and the slightest tampering with it is severely punished by Judges in large horsehair wigs. Oh, certainly it must be all right; I have a feeling that it is all right; and one of these days I will get some one to explain why the world keeps on putting adequate sums of its currency into my pocket.

But of course it's all right--

IN A FIX

To go, or not to go? Did I want or not want to bicycle over to tea with the Hanbury-Belchers at Pokemore? Wouldn't it be pleasanter to stay at home?

I liked the Hanbury-Belchers--

Or did I really like them?

Still, it might be pleasant?

But how beforehand can one ever tell? Experience? I was still, I felt, as ignorant of life as a new-born infant; experience has taught me nothing; what I needed was some definite, a priori principle, some deep conception of the meaning of existence, in the light of which problems of this kind would solve themselves at once.

I leant my bicycle against the gate, and sat down to think the matter out. Calling to mind the moral debates of the old philosophers, I meditated on that _Summum Bonum_, or Sovereign Felicity of which they argued; but from their disputes and cogitations what came back most vividly--what seemed to fall upon one almost in a hush of terror--was that paralysis or dread balance of desire they imagined; the predicament in fact of that philosophic quadruped, who, because he found in each of them precisely the same attraction, stood, unable to move, between two bundles of hay, until he perished of hunger.

VERTIGO