Personal Pleasures Page 2

  A clergyman: of course, Aunt Amy’s husband. A Tractarian, was he? Well, he was a little late for that; but I see what you mean, he was whatever High Church clergymen were in the eighties. Wrote tracts about the Eastward Position? I think he was so right. And, of course, they all face that way now, so that shows.

  Who is that old military man? He looks like a splendid walrus, with his long whiskers. Your paternal grandfather? Of course; the General. Didn’t he fight in the Crimea? Charged with the Light Brigade? How exciting! And how fortunate that he was one of those who rode back. He looks the kind of military man who might have been very much annoyed with whoever it was who had blundered. I should not care to face your grandfather if I had blundered. The lady in the crinoline is your grandmother, of course. She looks full of spirit; I dare say she needed it all. A crinoline gives such dignity, such deportment. No one could look dowdy in a crinoline. How her chatelaine hangs over it, full of the store-room keys. What a bore, to have to unlock the store-room whenever anyone wanted stores. I suppose stores are used by the cook daily, and always at the most inconvenient moment.

  Look at those lovely girls, all in crinolines, ready to swim along like balloons in a breeze. Your great aunts? They are very sweet. No doubt they had a delightful time, waltzing, shooting with bows and arrows, riding, skating with gentlemen (for there was real ice in those days, was there not?) See, there is one of them on a horse, in a long habit, her hair in a net under a dear little feathered hat. Great-aunt Helen? Famous all over the county for her riding and jumping? Broke her back at a water-jump, and lay crippled for forty years. … Oh, dear, let us turn the page.

  Here we have bustles. Your mother? Now, that is really the swan period. What a bend! The Grecian bend, was it not? The Greeks were first with everything, of course; but I do not recall this bend in any of their statues. Perhaps they could not hold it long enough to be sculptured. Of course, it is not altogether genuine; the bustle helped. But how adorable! How sorry your mother must have been when she had to go into those horrible clothes of the nineties, puff-sleeved jackets (by the way, I see they are in again; strange how even the worst things always come round) and stiff collars and sailor hats—yes, there she is in them.

  And your Aunt Elizabeth, in a college group wearing large cricket pads—Newnham, is it? What year? 1890. Well, of course Newnham had been going for about twenty years then. … It was quite the thing to go to college, I suppose; now it seems to be less thought of, to be considered no use for getting jobs. I dare say your Aunt Elizabeth didn’t have to think about jobs. Became a doctor, did she? I never knew Mrs. Robinson had been a doctor; why did she give it up? She left six forceps in? But that’s nothing, surely. … Oh, all in the same wound; yes, I suppose that would be rather many. … And three swabs? Well, I dare say her mind was on cricket. It may happen to anyone, they say. Most people who have ever had an operation are simply full of forceps and swabs, I believe; they think it is rheumatism or neuritis. … It is wonderful, I often think, what additions, as well as subtractions, the human frame can stand. I suppose really we are put together quite at random, and a few objects more or less make very little difference; though I must say, when you see a picture of our insides, you wonder where extra forceps and swabs would go. But of course, they take the place of whatever the surgeon has just taken away, I forgot that. … Well, perhaps your Aunt Elizabeth was right; she goes in for chickens now, doesn’t she?

  You as a child; how pretty. How people change; still, I would know you anywhere. Quite in the nude. That has the advantage that you can’t be dated by your clothes. Your school lacrosse team … and your first dance dress. Empire style. Clothes were pretty that year; nice high waists and simple lines.

  But let us turn back to the Victorians. They fascinate me. There is a je ne sais quoi about them, a subtlety; they might have strange experiences, commit strange deeds, and say nothing. They are proud, reserved, self-contained. Your Aunt Geraldine looks like a mermaid, your Uncle Frank, behind his moustaches, seems to brood on strange lands. Had to leave the country suddenly? That would account for it, I suppose. Poor Uncle Frank. Did he have to be long away? It was hushed up? That always takes a little time, of course. And then Uncle Frank came home, and married a Miss Jones. Had to leave the country again? What bad luck he had! Now-a-days, they seem to manage better, without so much travelling. Was he long abroad the second time? Always? Dear me. Yes, I see, this is his hacienda in the Argentine, with himself and Miss Jones, grown nice and plump, in the porch. … Oh, not Miss Jones? She stayed in England, with the children? Then this would be some other lady, more of the Argentine type. … I expect your uncle Frank was wise to settle there, among cattle; as your Aunt Elizabeth was wise to settle among chickens. Animals are a great resource. And so much nicer to rear them than to go and shoot them.

  Photographs of ancestors are really much more interesting than the paintings of them they had before, because the camera cannot lie, so we know that they really did look like that. Now-a-days they touch them up more; the camera has learnt to lie. Besides, do we look as interesting? I am sure we do not. I could look at our ancestors for ever. Thank you so much for showing me yours. It has been a charming evening. You must come and see mine.

  A charming evening. But as I drive home, the small cold wind of mortality hums round me with sighing breath. The way to dusty death seems to stretch before me, lit by those fading yellow oblongs wherefrom someone’s ancestors gaze, pale pasteboard prisoners, to be wondered about, recalled, lightly summed and dismissed by us as we turn a page. So too shall we gaze out some autumn evening, prisoned and defenceless, to stir in posterity a passing idle speculation, a moment’s memory. That? Oh, that is great-aunt Rose. … She wrote. Oh, nothing you would have heard of; I don’t think she was ever much read, even at the time; she just wrote. Novels, essays, verse—I forget what else; she just wrote away, as those Georgians did. Rather dull, I think. What besides? Well, I think she just went about; nothing special. There was some story … but it’s all so long ago, I’ve forgotten. She ended poor, having outlived whatever market she had, poor old thing. Yes, she went on writing, but no one read her … she died poor, killed, I think, in an aeroplane smash; she learnt to pilot too old; she should have stuck to motoring. But she would learn to fly, and finally smashed a friend’s plane and herself … silly, really. She had grown very tiresome before the end, they say. But look, here is someone more interesting. …

  It will be posterity’s charming evening then, and theirs to pity, if they will, their pasteboard prisoners, as I now pity Aunt Geraldine with her mermaid’s face and form, Uncle Frank who had to leave home so suddenly and so frequently, Great-Aunt Helen, of the rogue’s face and little feather, who fell at the water-jump sixty years ago, Grandpapa General, who rode back with the Light Brigade, Grandmama, who had to be so often locking and unlocking her stores, Aunt Elizabeth with her forceps and her chickens, Aunt Amy rippling so elegantly from the waist down and marrying the curate who wrote tracts about the Eastward Position.…

  Poor figures I feel we shall most of us cut beside them, when the Albums shall imprison us too.

  Arm-Chair

  I love it, I love it, and who shall dare

  To chide me for loving that old arm-chair?

  So, A century ago, defiantly enquired Miss Eliza Cook. Already, obviously, the sour and scornful denigrators of this article of furniture were busy with their cheap sneers, which one can only surmise to be based on envy. If Miss Cook’s question were answered, one would find that the sneerers at the arm-chair (and they are many, in these days) were men who do not possess such chairs. They may be smart, modern men, whose chairs have arms of steel. They may be poor men; who cannot, perhaps, afford arm-chairs; who, having purchased one, possibly, on the Pay-Way system (“we never mention money here, Mr. Everyman”), found it reft from them at the last owing to their too close adherence to this policy of reticent silence. They find themselves arm-chairless; they have to sit up straight on armless chairs, a
n embittering posture, or on the floor (an undignified one), or betake themselves to their clubs, where they find all the arm-chairs in chronic use by others, and are further embittered. So they sit down at one of the club writing-tables, on some hard, straight-backed seat, and, with a venomous eye roving round the room, proceed to write letters to newspapers about arm-chair critics, arm-chair pacifists, militarists, generals, reformers, statesmen, politicians, concert-goers, and the like. What they actually object to so strongly is arm-chair newspaper-sitters, who sit a clutch of journals as a hen sits eggs, without, for the most part, ever hatching out one of them, but if some callow chick of an idea should come cheeping out of the sitter’s head and find its chirping way to public print, he is denounced by the arm-chairless as an armchair critic. Possibly such denunciations also come from civil servants and those who have to sit at office tables to do their stuff. These can ill bear that criticisms and suggestions about life and the world should be emitted by the comfortable, slugging it at ease in their arm-chairs, lolling and lounging, twiring through their long spy-glasses at the scene which they with such bland and indolent effrontery criticize. No wonder that we who thus loll and twire rouse the wrath of those who must twire without lolling, those who have to do the work, and are peppered with the lazy fire from our arm-chair pea-shooters.

  But we, calm and reposeful sedilians, do not resent such abuse or such envious contempt. We know that we have the best of it; that the most intelligent, as well as the easiest and most agreeable, criticism is emitted from the commodious depths of the easy chair wherein, tranquillo animo, we lie coiled in peace. (I speak as a female: for I am aware that gentlemen do not coil, but rather lie extended; this human law seems to apply also to bed.) Thus extended or coiled in our chairs, we vie happiness (as Evelyn wrote to Cowley about garden life, a far less comfortable affair) in a thousand easy and sweet diversions—“not forgetting,” added Mr. Evelyn, “the innocent toils which you cultivate, the leisure and the liberty, the books, the meditations, above all the learned and choice friendships which you enjoy. Who would not, like you, cacher sa vie?” And who could not cacher it with far more comfort in an arm-chair than in a garden? What happiness thus to

  waste away

  In gentle inactivity the day!

  Many of us, like the gentleman Steele knew, “fell into that way at the University, where the Youth are too apt to be lulled into a State of such Tranquillity as prejudices ’em against the Bustle of that Worldly Business, for which this part of their Education should prepare ’em. As he could with the utmost Secrecy be Idle in his own Chamber he says he was for some Years irrecoverably sunk and immers’d in the Luxury of an Easy Chair, tho’ at the same time, in the general Opinion, he passed for a hard Student.”

  Fortunate gentleman. But there was no reason but his own averseness from such a path why he should not have been, in fact, a hard student, however deeply sunk, and even immersed, in the luxury of his easy chair. Books can pile the floor around the chair; dictionaries, histories, works of divinity, philosophy and literature in all languages, can stand in the shelves within easy reach; pen and paper can lie on a table at hand, or slip down between the chair’s cushions and its arms. In our arm-chairs we may join the mob of gentlemen who write with ease; wit can amble well, go easily; masterpieces can trickle elegantly and indolently from our pens; imagination, dandled, pampered and stalled, can rise on spread wings and soar above Helicon, galloping among the seven planets, the firmament, and the empyreal heaven. What noble periods we conceive and pen; what stark and majestic lines, the starker in that our recumbent forms are so delicately stretched at ease.

  Or music visits us, belling and stroking the ambient air, filling our room with linkèd sweetness, or with pure and complicated harmonies. Sometimes it will come from the Queen’s Hall. Almost one can see that great assembly of listeners, sitting upright on hard chairs, afraid to stir or cough, straining forward to miss no chord, tier above tier of intent faces and rigid forms. While I am hearing the same sounds, or as near as makes no matter, reclined at ease in a warm and book-lined room, able to turn a switch and dismiss the whole affair when it no longer pleases. Does a soprano break out, shrilly tearing the air to tatters with a trilling scream? I turn the switch; she is gone; she troubles me no more than for one anguished second; peace and my arm-chair lap me about once more, like cloth of fine velvet of Turkey.

  But it is not necessary, just because one sits in an arm-chair, to pass the noon of one’s life, like the gentleman whose habits Steele deplored, “in the Solitude of a Monk and the Guilt of a Libertine.” One may have company, either in another arm-chair, should they be so fortunate, or on some other kind of chair, or even on the floor. Let the company sit where it likes, or where it can. So long as I am in my arm-chair, I do not care where or how it sits. Conversation flows; what witty things we say; what creeds we demolish and erect, what characters and literatures dissect, what tales recount, what revolutions deprecate or predict, what hot battles fight, what conceits and fantastications fangle! We tire the stars with talking and send them down the sky; the stars, and the moon, and all the celestial bodies, for they have no arm-chairs, they wander, they labour, or they are fixed, all tiring conditions. But ourselves we do not tire, lying at ease in our chairs, nothing active or labouring but our tongues. Night, day, and the crystal spheres revolve about us; in our arm-chairs we shall for ever sit, triumphing over Death and Chance and thee, O Time.

  But, alas, how rarely are they quite long enough in the seat!

  Astronomy

  The sand is cool to our bare feet, for the first time since breakfast. The sudden night has encompassed sea and shore, and, though they still hold the day’s warmth, the sand no longer burns. It is a night for astronomy, the moon unrisen, the clear purple heavens thick inlaid with patines of bright gold. Look at the stars! Look, look up at the skies! Oh, look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

  My father has set up the telescope, its three legs dug into soft sand, its questing proboscis peering inquisitively into the peculiar mysteries of the sky. We all look through it in turn, and see what we can see. We concern ourselves mainly with the major planets. We note that Mars is low and red, Venus brilliant, Jupiter enormous, Saturn triple-ringed and lackeyed by his myriad satellites, Mercury and Uranus negligible, Neptune not to be descried. (Or is not all this true of one night? Perhaps I confuse several.)

  Then we spy on the fixed stars; we trace out the Great and Little Bears, find the Pole Star, the constellation of Cassopeia, the Great Square of Pegasus, Perseus and Andromeda, Capella and the Kids, the Pleiades, Sirius, Arcturus, Algol, Betelgeuze, Orion and his belt. But Aldebaran, Cygnus, Vega, Rigel, and a myriad more, I cannot, I am sure, identify. Can my father? Presumably, since he is, says our cook, “proprio come il Signor Iddio, che sa tutto, tutto.” Alas, we are not like that. I perceive the heavenly bodies with the greatest difficulty: I lack siderial talent, with so much other. Still, I can find, after some search, the Bears and the Pole Star. For the rest, I say, with M. de Fontenelle’s Countess, I will believe of the stars all you would have me.

  And look, the Milky Way! Even I can find that, with my naked eye. “I wish you had a glass,” says M. de Fontenelle, agreeing with my father, “to see this ant-hill of stars, this cluster of worlds, if I may so call ’em. They are in some sort like the Maldivian Islands: those twelve thousand banks of sand, separated by narrow channels of the sea, which a man may leap as easily as over a ditch. So near together are the vortexes of the Milky Way, that the people in one world may talk and shake hands with those of another; at least I believe the birds of one world may easily fly into another, and that pigeons may be trained up to carry letters, as they do in the Levant.” This seems very probable, when one gazes up into that pale and beamy stream.

  “The Galaxy,” says my father. “From milk in Greek.”

  How many stars in the Galaxy? No one knows; no one has counted.

  Why not?

  For one thing, they a
re not all visible.

  Not even with the strongest telescope in the world, aren’t they visible?

  But my father is occupied with Sirius.

  Suppose one discovered a new star? New stars are born, every now and then. The Story of the Heavens says so. Suppose one should find a little new star, just, just hatched, like a fluffy yellow chick thrashing out of its egg. …

  Father, what would you do if you saw a quite new star?

  But my father, a modest man, whose profession is not astronomy, says that he would not know it for a new star.

  Would Uncle Willie know a new star?

  Probably.

  Well, what would Uncle Willie do if he found a new star?

  But my father is concerned with Jupiter and his satellites.

  Venus slides, glittering and bland, down the sky to her bed.

  A bright swoop down the western sky; a star shoots down, like Lucifer from heaven, and plunges into the dark horizon of the sea, to join the floating lights that mark the fishing-boats and the phosphorescent shoals that spark in their wake. Look, look, a falling star! Has it fallen into the sea? Did it make a great splash where it fell? Would it sink a ship, if it fell on it?

  No, stars do not fall into the sea, nor anywhere on earth. They career through space.

  But they might hit the earth, mightn’t they?

  My father replies that this would be unfortunate.

  Well, what would happen? Would it set us on fire? Would it kill us?

  But my father is occupied with Saturn and his rings.

  My mother once said that the great boulders of rock strewn about all up the bed of the river Teiro might be bits of fallen stars. My mother told us very interesting and wonderful things. She said that the white promontory of Spezia, which, on a clear day, we could see east of the Gulf of Genoa, was marble mountains. If we were to ask her what would happen if a whole star hit the earth, we should have a tremendous blaze and conflagration in a minute.