Personal Pleasures Read online

  Personal Pleasures

  Rose Macaulay

  Contents

  Foreword

  Abroad

  Album

  Arm-Chair

  Astronomy

  Bakery in the Night

  Bathing

  1. Off the Florida Keys

  2. Off the Ligurian Coast

  3. In the Cam

  Bed

  1. Getting into it

  2. Not getting out of it

  Believing

  Bird in the Box

  Book Auctions

  Booksellers’ Catalogues

  Bulls

  Candlemas

  Canoeing

  Chasing Fireflies

  Christmas Morning

  Church-Going

  1. Anglican

  2. Roman Catholic

  3. Quaker

  4. Unitarian

  Cinema

  Clothes

  Cows

  Departure of Visitors

  Disbelieving

  Doves in the Chimney

  Driving a Car

  Easter in the Woods

  Eating and Drinking

  Elephants in Bloomsbury

  Fastest on Earth

  Finishing a Book

  Fire Engines

  Flattery

  Flower Shop in the Night

  Flying

  Following the Fashion

  Fraternal

  Getting Rid

  Hatching Eggs

  Heresies

  Hot Bath

  Ignorance

  1. Of one’s neighbours

  2. Of current literature

  3. Of gossip

  4. Of wickedness

  5. Of one’s pass-book

  Improving the Dictionary

  Listening In

  Logomachy

  Meals Out

  1. On the roof

  2. On the pavement

  New Year’s Eve

  Not Going to Parties

  Parties

  Play-Going

  Pretty Creatures

  Reading

  Shopping Abroad

  Showing Off

  Solitude

  Sunday

  Taking Umbrage

  Talking about a New Car

  Telling Travellers’ Tales

  Turtles in Hyde Park

  Walking

  Writing

  Foreword

  COMPILING, as I recently did, a selection from the records of the pleasures enjoyed by other people has forced on me the conclusion that other people, though they have doubtless (between them) enjoyed all the pleasures accessible to our mortal state, have left very many of them unrecorded in print. Be that as it may, everyone has his own pleasures, enjoyed after his own manner, and much perusal of those of others has moved me to record a few of my own. Necessarily only a few. Had I but world enough and time, I might have continued this agreeable pastime for ever, leaving no joy unspelt, unwrit, no mirthful hour unsung. When I look through my collection and note its gaps, I feel, like Clive, amazed at my own moderation. There are here, for instance, no games; that is, no set games, with rules. There are all too few picnics, no riding, no separate heading for conversation, no presents, no money, no friends, no maps. There are a thousand pleasures, even of my own, left unrecorded in this brief choice. But a choice it had to be, owing, as I say, to this perhaps fortunate limitation of world and time which sets so brief a term to all our undertakings. So I have set down a few pleasures randomly, as they came to mind. They are pleasures of different, sometimes of contrary, moods; they include parties, and not going to parties, believing and disbelieving, solitude and showing off, and other seemingly opposed diversions.

  But how true it is that every pleasure has also its reverse side, in brief, its pain. Or, if not wholly true, how nearly so. Therefore I have added to most of my pleasures the little flavour of bitterness, the flaw in their perfection, the canker in the damask, the worm at the root, the fear of loss, or of satiety, the fearful risks involved in their very existence, which tang their sweetness, and mind us of their mortality and of our own, and that nothing in this world is perfect.

  Abroad

  The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there? Delicious as is the prospect we see beyond this travail, shall we be enabled to conquer sloth’s enticements, and emerge from what Mr. Thomas Coryat, that enterprising Jacobean tourist, contemptuously termed our domestical lurking corners? Is there any peace, the voice of indolence protests, in ever climbing up the climbing wave?

  Let us hearken rather to the stirring exhortations of Mr. Coryat, who must have been minded much like Mr. Thomas Cook, and spoke with his very accents. “Let us,” cried Mr. Coryat, “propose before our eyes that most beautiful theatre of the universe, let us behold whatever is abroad in the world, let us look into provinces, see cities, run over kingdoms and empires. Surely we shall find,” said he, hopefully, “those people which have used no journeys to be rude, slothful, uncivil, rough, outrageous, foolish, barbarous, void of all humanity, civility and courteous entertainment, proud, arrogant, puffed up with self love and admiration of themselves, also effeminate, wanton, given to sleep, banquetings, dice and idleness, corrupted with the allurements of all pleasures and the enticements of all concupiscence.”

  But this is getting to sound agreeable; if home offers all that, one might do worse than stay there. Our tourist perceives this, and hurries on in different vein: “Such is the sweetness of travelling and seeing the world, such the pleasure, such the delight, that I think that man void of all sense and of a stony hardness, which cannot be moved with so great a pleasure. … O sluggish, abject, servile, and most dejected mind, which includeth itself within the narrow bounds of his own house.”

  Perhaps it is the expense you dread? “As though the dice and dicing box, domestical idleness, domestical luxury, and the gulf of domestical gourmandizing, doth not far exceed the necessary charges of travel.”

  That is as may be. Perhaps one would do well not to balance the nicely calculated less and more, but to remember the spring cleaning, or the house painting, and consider how many by their travels have procured themselves evasion from domestical calamities and miseries.

  Arise, then, from abject and home-keeping sloth. Cease to regard with effeminate distaste those hurdles which stand between you and Abroad, looming high, barred, enthorned, only by the strong to be o’er-leapt. Do tickets, passports, money, travellers’ cheques, packing, reservations, boat trains, inns, crouch and snarl before you like those surly dragons that guard enchanted lands? A little firmness, a nice mingling of industry, negligence and guile, and the hurdles will be leaped, the dragons passed; snapping your fingers at what you have left undone, you launch yourself into space.

  Yes, you are on the boat train; you make once more the Grand Tour; you are full steam ahead for Dover, for Boulogne, for the silver seas whereon trumpet and pipe these enticing sirens against whose penetrating call even Ulysses would have cered his ears in vain. Hola, Captain! where is the packet for France? Here, Sir, here, and a fair wind in our sails. Honest gentlemen who will for Calais, let them make haste. To Calais ho! Aboard ho! The wind is at North, North, and North-West. Is the ship well armed, Captain? Fear nothing, Sir, for the ship is very well equipped with artillery and munition. Go into the prow. The wind blows, the tide swells, see the waves mount. The sea begins to rise and rage from the very bottom. See how those huge waves beat against the sides of our ship. Hear you these terrible whirlwinds, how they sing over our sailyards? We shall have by and by a storm. The tempest makes a great noise. The heaven begins to thunder from above. It thunders, it lightens, it rains, it hails; it is best to strike sail, and to veer
the cables. This wave will carry us to all the Devils. … O my friends on shore! O thrice and four times happy are those who are on firm land setting of beans! O St. James, St. Peter, and St. Christopher! O St. Michael, St. Nicholas! O God we are now at the bottom of the sea. I give eighteen hundred thousand crowns to him who will set me a land. Let’s land, let’s go a shore. Captain, I will give you all that I have in the world to set me a shore. Will you go a shore in the midst of the ocean sea, Sir? What a horrible tempest! By St. Grison what means this? Shall we take our sepulture here among these waves? I pardon all the world. I die, my friends. Fare you all well.

  The tempest is now ended. Oh, it is fine weather again. A fig for the waves. We are in the haven of Calais. We are saved. Cannoneer, shoot off a piece of artillery. Les passeports, s’il vous plait. Oh, yes, indeed, anything. Par ici pour la douane. By all means yes, even that. How delighted I am to be arrived! Here is all my luggage, and all its keys.

  Yes, you may look at everything, tumble everything about. No, nothing to declare, nothing at all; still, by all means rummage. This one too? Of course. And now you will chalk them; that is nice. Now for the train; allons, allons, facteur! Second-class, n’est-ce-pas. No, nothing else about it matters, and I have no reserved seat. Put me anywhere. What? All reserved? Then I must wait for another train, n’est-ce-pas. No, I never reserve seats in advance, it is quite too much trouble. What I say is, why make a business of what is meant for a pleasure? If a railway ticket does not get me on to a French train, then France is not the land of liberty, equality, or fraternity. But then, one never supposed that it was. There will be another train presently, free to all? That is excellent news. I will settle down; I will wait. Attention, there is a train. Allons, allons, facteur; deuxième classe, s’il vous plait. Ah, Ah, I am on the train, n’est-ce-pas. Mettez mes bagages on the rack, on the seat, on the floor, all about me. Je suis bien entourée, n’est-ce-pas. But see, there lacks one bagage; where can it be? Oh, Oh, you have left it on the platform over there. Vite, vite, facteur! The train departs. You have not been vite enough; the train is departed. I shall not see my bag again. Je me plaindrai au consul anglais.

  Eh bien. Life is like that. Abroad, in particular, is like that. And now I am abroad; I am entrained; I am launched on my enchanting error across Europe. Where shall I go? France, Spain, Italy, everywhere; perhaps even Portugal. How fast and how loud foreigners talk! It is a gift; the British cannot talk so loud or so fast. They have too many centuries of fog in their throats. Besides, they are nervous; they dare not talk loud; they mumble and murmur, afraid lest some one will hear. Never mind them; forget them; too many of them are, indeed, on this train, on all trains, since the English cannot keep still or stay at home, but still we will ignore and forget them, we will feign that we are alone abroad among the foreigners. Allons, allons, mes braves compagnons! To Paris ho! But only to make a change of train; we will not linger in Paris, it is drab and cold. Across it quickly to the Gare de Lyons, the Gare d’Orléans, and off to the South. East or west, Marseilles or Bordeaux, Mediterranean or Atlantic, Italy or Spain, it matters not, it is all south. Palms, pines, pepper, eucalyptus, oranges, lemons, juniper, myrtle; Alps, Apennines, Pyrenees; Basque, Catalan, Castilian, Mallorquín, Ligurian, Tuscan, Sicilian, Venetian, Greek, Portuguese—any language you like, I have the phrase-books of some of them, and can do the rest by signs. To Greece with little English ladies and schoolmasters, questing after ancient Hellenes. To Athens! To Olympia! , Athens are beautiful. Oh, how beautiful Athens are! That is to say, they are vulgar and modern and dirty, but never mind, we rummage among them, we find the Acropolis. Schoolmasters, dons, little eager ladies, we swarm about the Acropolis, among the modern Hellenes, who do not comprehend their own ancient tongue when we speak it to them, who desire only that we should give them money. Over the hills to Corinth; Greece is terra-cotta coloured, and silver with olives; tortoises and lizards scuttle over it. The Vale of Tempe is dark and deep, and Peneius shines in it like an agate. All the plains of Thessaly; Olympus, Ossa and Pelion; Thermopylæ, Parnassus, Thebes, Cithæron; the schoolmasters, the dons, the little ladies, are overwhelmed. Greece is really excessive. One cannot idle in it, or be stupid or inert, no, not for a moment, or one will miss something, one wastes one’s time, since it is possible that one will not be this way again. One cannot, in Greece, be happy merely in being Abroad. For Abroad, Italy and France and Spain and Czecho-Slovakia and Scandinavia and the Americas and the South Seas are better. Back, then, to Italy; Sicily and Calabria and Naples; look how Vesuvius smokes! Stroll about Pompeii, so gay, so coloured, so still; if you are encouraging, one of the custodians will show you a house freshly dug, and perhaps embrace you in it. Rome, Florence, Siena, Umbria, Venice, the lakes; having seen all these, settle down on the Ligurian sea shore and bathe. Nothing to see here but sea and shore and fishermen and nets and mountains and some small town. No buildings, no pictures, no churches, nothing but Abroad. Buon giorno, signorina, sta bene oggi? Benissimo, grazie, signore; mi bagnerò nel mare, dopo di prendere il caffé. Caffè latte! how it froths into the thick white cup! Sugar tablets wrapped in paper, coarse white crusty roll, church bells clanging, fishermen shouting, small waves lisping on the sand. You can stay in the sea all day if you wish, coming out to dry and toast, and slipping in again. It is deep sky-blue, and there is a rock far out on which you can sit. Great Britain can give you buildings, picture galleries, cities, (though of no great moment and of inconsiderable antiquity) and scenery, but only Abroad can give you real bathing.

  For that matter, only Abroad can provide a great deal else. Meals, for example, in the streets. Trams that blow horns; indeed, traffic horns in general play a sweeter, liltier music than ever they play in Britain. How their gay tune, on two notes, like a cuckoo’s song reversed, lifts the heart! Mountains of a height, a jaggedness, a grandeur, that surpasses those of Caledonia, Westmorland and Wales. Terraces climbing up their lower slopes, set with olives, chestnuts, figs, and vines. Large white oxen drawing loads of marble. Mules drawing sand. Nets being hauled in from the sea heavy with bianchetti, and perhaps a tunny or two. Processions round the town, led by nasally chanting acolytes and magnificently dressed wax saints, and followed by the citizens. Rose petals scattered and flung from every window on to the Corpus Christi procession: Little St. John, the Baptist, his hair just released from a week’s curling-papers, leading his unruly lamb in the procession on his day. Brown and beautiful Basques dancing the fandango in the squares after a pelota match on Sunday evening. Redwood forests, giant cactuses in a pale Arizona desert, palms and orange trees and futbal in the plaza, the great blue sweep of Mexican mountains, the brown adobe of Mexican villages, the yucca standing high like blossoming swords, the wild roads not mended since the last revolution, the tiny burros carrying Mexicans, the estancias, haciendas, chile con carne, tortillas, the comida con vino incluso, the mandolins twanging in the plaza while you sit on the pavement and eat. The hot dog stalls, the camping cabins, San Francisco on her hills above the Golden Gate, Santa Barbara in white adobe, set with lit fir-trees on a warm Christmas night, San Diego, Tia Juana, and the Old Spanish Trail. The Florida seas and their leaning palmettos, the Keys and their twisted mangroves, Cuba across the straits. A small Provençal estaminet on the foothills, a mountain road twisting above it. Sunshine and warmth, sunshine and warmth, and the scent of lemons on the air. And, naturally, foreigners. I do not prefer foreigners to the English, except that they speak another language. Otherwise they are, I find, essentially much the same, though the Italians and Spanish are handsomer and browner, and the Americans more cordial. But they all belong to Abroad, that great, that delightful English picnic. So, like Walt Whitman, I make a salute to all foreigners. As he so exuberantly exclaimed, “You Sardinian, you Bavarian, Swabian, Saxon, Wallachian, Bulgarian! You Roman, Neapolitan, you Greek! You little Matador in the arena at Seville! You mountaineer living lawlessly on the Taurus or Caucasus! You thoughtful Armenian! You Japanese! All you continentals of
Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent of place! You benighted roamer of Amazonia! You Patagonian, you Feejeeman! … I do not say one word against you! Salut au monde!”

  He was right. It is all Abroad, all that vast camping-ground, pleasure garden or paradise in which we may wander at large; or might until recently, when passports, bureaucracy and suspicion are attempting to hamper and limit our tranquil and happy errors over our errant celestial ball. Les passeports s’il vous plait! Par ici pour la douane! Apra la sua valigia! Sin duda quejaré al consul ingles. I guess we’ll have to put you on Ellis Island, if that’s all the dollars you have.

  Yes; we are hampered, invigilated, kept in on every side, very likely flung into gaol, directly we step into our pleasure-ground. But, when governments and their watch-dogs have done their worst, it is still Abroad.

  Album

  How enchanting your relations are! Mine, too, look much the same. I suppose people do; I mean, so much depends on the clothes, does it not? I like your aunts; how they ripple from the waist down, bending in the middle like swans; their hair piled high in chignons; see, how much of it they have—or was some, perhaps, attached, or rolled over cushions? Your Aunt Amy, did you say? What long ear-rings! She is very elegant, mondaine, refined, yet capable, do you not think, de tout? Or was she not? Married a curate, do you say? One wonders what life in the curate-house was like, after your Aunt Amy entered it. Nine children? So that was what it was like. Yes, I see, here they all are. The little boys in sailor suits or jerseys, holding bats; the little girls in sashes, their hair cut across their foreheads. Du Maurier children. Oh, yes, I see, that is Phyllis, and there are Olive and Ruth. I should know them anywhere; by the way, I hear Ruth’s grandchildren are at that fashionable school in Dorset, and can already change wheels, top batteries, and milk cows. They are going to learn to read next year, you say? At ten and twelve? Isn’t that a little soon? One is so afraid of over-exciting their brains. Still, if they want to learn, anything is better than repressing them. …