If indeed its true, as they say, that Regent Street is closed, and the weather not cold for the time of year If I forgot to write about the leak in the larder If I left my glove in the train If the ties of blood require to accept cordially the hand which is offered
Seven years since we met!
The last time in Venice.
And where are you living now?
Well, the late afternoon suits me the best[12].
But I knew you at once!
Still, the war is the war.
Such little arrows. One is launched. Another presses forward. What chance is there?
Of what? It becomes every minute more difficult to say why, in spite of everything, I sit here. I believe I cant now say what happened. I cant now say when it happened.
Did you see the procession?
The King looked cold.
No, no, no. But what was it?
She bought a house at Malmesbury.
How lucky to find one!
On the contrary, it is sure that she is damned. Whoever she may be. Why fidget? Why so anxious about the cloaks and gloves, whether to button or unbutton? Was it the sound of the second violin the ante-room? Here they come. Four black figures. They are carrying instruments. They seat themselves under the downpour of light. They rest the tips of their bows on the music stand. They lift them with a simultaneous movement. They poise them lightly. The first violin counts one, two, three
Flourish, spring, burgeon, burst! The pear tree on the top of the mountain. Fountains jet. Drops descend. But the waters of the Rhone flow swift and deep. They race under the arches. The fish rushed down by the swift waters. Now the fish swept into an eddy where. Its difficult. Conglomeration of fish all in a pool. Jolly old fishwives, obscene old women. How deeply they laugh and shake and rollick, when they walk, from side to side, hum, hah!
Thats an early Mozart, of course.
But the tune, like all his tunes, makes one despair[13]. I mean hope. What do I mean? Thats the worst of music! I want to dance. I want to laugh. I want to eat pink cakes, yellow cakes. I want to drink thin, sharp wine. Or an indecent story, nowI can relish that. The older ones like indecency. Hah, hah! Im laughing. What at? You said nothing. Nor did the old gentleman opposite. But supposesuppose Hush!
The moon comes through the willow boughs. I see your face. I hear your voice. The bird is singing. We pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Together, like reeds in moonlight. Crash!
The boat sinks. The figures ascend. But they taper to a dusky wraith which draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings. It unseals my sorrow. It thaws compassion. It floods with love the sunless world. Soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy.
Why then grieve? Ask what? Remain unsatisfied? Rose leaves are falling. Falling. Ah, but they cease. One rose leaf is falling from an enormous height. It is like a little parachute from an invisible balloon. It wont reach us.
No, no. I noticed nothing. Thats the worst of musicthese silly dreams. The second violin was late, you say?
Theres old Mrs. Munro, she goes out on this slippery floor. Poor woman. Blinder each year
Eyeless old age, grey-headed Sphinx. There she stands on the pavement. She is beckoning, so sternly, the red omnibus.
How lovely! How well they play! How-how-how!
Simplicity itself. The feathers in the hat are bright. They are pleasing as a childs rattle. Very strange, very exciting.
How-how-how! Hush!
These are the lovers on the grass.
If, madam, you take my hand
Sir, I can trust you with my heart. Moreover, we left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.
Then these are the embraces of our souls.
The lemons nod assent. The swan pushes from the bank. The swan floats into mid stream.
But to return. He followed me down the corridor. We turned the corner. He trod on the lace of my petticoat. I cried Ah! I stopped. He drew his sword. He cried, Mad! Mad! Mad! I screamed. The Prince came out in his velvet skull-cap and furred slippers. He snatched a rapier from the wall. The King of Spains gift, you know. I escaped. But listen! The horns!
The gentleman replies fast to the lady. She runs up the scale with witty exchange of compliment. The words are indistinguishable though the meaning is plain enough. Love, laughter, flight, pursuit, celestial bliss. The green garden, the pool, lemons, lovers, and fish are all dissolved in the opal sky. Tramp and trumpets. Clang and clangour. March of myriads.
But this city to which we travel has neither stone nor marble. It stands unshakable. The pillars are bare. The pillars are auspicious to none. They cast no shade. They are resplendent and severe. I fall back. I eager no more. I desire to go. I desire to find the street. I desire to mark the buildings. I desire to greet the applewoman. I desire to say to the maid who opens the door:
A starry night.
Good night, good night. You go this way?
Alas. I go that.
The Mark on the Wall
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year. I looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire. The steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book. Three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it was the winter time. We finished our tea. I remember that I was smoking a cigarette. I looked up. I saw the mark on the wall. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette. My eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals. That old fancy of the crimson flag on the castle tower came into my mind. I thought of the cavalcade of red knights. The sight of the mark interrupted the fancy. It is an old fancy, an automatic fancy. The mark was a small round mark. It was black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
Our thoughts swarm upon a new object. As ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. Was that mark made by a nail? It must be for a miniature. The miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations. Some people had this house before us. They chose an old picture for an old room. They were very interesting people. I think of them so often, in such queer places. I will never see them again. I will never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house. They wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said.
But for that mark, Im not sure about it. I dont believe it was made by a nail. Its too big. It is too round for that. I may get up. But if I get up and look at it, I wont be able to say for certain[14]. No one knows how it happened.
Oh! dear me! The mystery of life! The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have. What an accidental affair is this life?
What an accidental affair is our civilization? Let me take some things. Where are they? Did the cat gnaw them? Did the rat nibble them? Three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools[15]. Then there were the bird cages. Then the iron hoops. Then the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle. Then the bagatelle board, the hand organ. All gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds lie about the roots of turnips. The wonder is that I have any clothes on my back. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to the Tube. Fifty miles an hour! At the feet of God entirely naked! Yes, that can express the rapidity of life. Than can express the perpetual waste and repair. All is so casual. All is so haphazard.
But after life. Thick green stalks are pulling down slowly. The cup of the flower turns over. It deluges one with purple and red light. Why, after all, will one be born there? One is born helpless, speechless, unable to focus ones eyesight. One is born at the toes of the Giants. The trees are like men and women. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark. And they are intersected by thick stalks, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colourdim pinks and blues. They will, as time goes on, become more definite. They will becomeI dont know what.
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance. Such as a small rose leaf. I am not a very vigilant housekeeper. Look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example. The dust which, so they say, buried Troy. Only fragments of pots utterly refuse annihilation, as one can believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane. I want to think quietly. I want to think calmly. I want to think spaciously. I want to slip easily from one thing to another. I want to slip without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface. To steady myself, let me catch the first idea.
Shakespeare. Well, he will do[16] as well as another. A man in an arm-chair who looked into the fire, so. A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down. Through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand. People were looking in through the open door. It was a summers evening. But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesnt interest me at all.
And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said I saw a flower on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed saw the reign of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First? I asked.
But I dont remember the answer. Tall flowers with purple tassels. And so on. All the time I create the figure of myself in my own mind. It was lovingly, stealthily. It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry. It is very important.
The looking-glass smashes. The image disappears. The romantic figure with the green of forest depths disappears. We see only that shell of a person. It is an airless, shallow, bald, prominent shell. We face each other in omnibuses and underground railways. We are looking into the mirror. The novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections. Of course there is not one reflection. There is an almost infinite number. They will explore the depths. They will pursue the phantoms. Let us follow the example of the Greeks did and Shakespeare. But these generalizations are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls articles and cabinet ministers.
Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons. People sat all together in one room until a certain hour,. And nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was like this: they were made of tapestry with little yellow compartments upon them. Like the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking! How wonderful it was to discover that these real things were not entirely real. Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths. They were indeed half phantoms. The damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder? Men perhaps. The masculine point of view governs our lives. It sets the standard. It established Whitakers Table of Precedency[17], the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints[18], Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth. They leave us all with a sense of illegitimate freedom. If freedom exists, of course.
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems volumetric. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it cast a perceptible shadow. I run my finger down that strip of the wall. It will mount and descend. A smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are either tombs or camps. Of the two I prefer the tombs, like most English people. There must be some book about it. Some antiquary dug up those bones. He gave them a name.
What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired Colonels for the most part[19], I daresay. They examine clods of earth and stone. They get into correspondence with the clergy. The Colonel himself feels philosophic. He accumulates evidence. He finally believes in the camp. Suddenly a stroke kills him. His last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child. His last conscious thoughts are of the camp and that arrow-head there. It is now at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and Nelsons wineglass.
No, no, nothing is proved. Nothing is known. I get up at this very moment. I ascertain that the mark on the wall is really the head of a gigantic old nail. But what shall I gain? Knowledge?
And what is knowledge? Our learned men are the descendants of witches and hermits. They crouched in caves. They interrogated shrew-mice. They wrote down the language of the stars.
Yes, we can imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers. How peaceful it is down here! How peaceful it is in the centre of the world!
I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is. A nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
This thought is threatening mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality. Who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitakers Table of Precedency? The Lord High Chancellor[20] follows the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Archbishop of York follows the Lord High Chancellor. Everybody follows somebody. Such is the philosophy of Whitaker. The great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows. Let that comfort you.
I understand Natures game. I take action to end any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, our slight contempt for men of action comes. Men, we assume, who dont think. Still, I want to stop the disagreeable thoughts.
I feel a satisfying sense of reality. It turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite. Here is something real. Thus, one wakes from a midnight dream of horror. One hastily turns on the light. One lies quiescent. One worships the chest of drawers[21]. One worships solidity. One worships reality. One worships the impersonal world. The world is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of[22].
Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree. Trees grow. We dont know how they grow. For years and years they grow. They grow in meadows, in forests. They grow by the side of rivers.
The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons. They paint rivers green. I like to think of the fish. I like to think of water-beetles. I like to think of the tree itself. The slow, delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winters nights. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June.
One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth. Then the last storm comes. The high branches drive deep into the ground. Even so, life isnt done with[23]. There are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree. They are all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement. They are in lining rooms, where men and women sit after tea. This tree is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts. I want to take each one separately.
Where was I? What was it? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitakers Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I cant remember anything.
Everything is moving. Everything is falling. Everything is slipping. Everything is vanishing. Someone is standing over me. Someone is saying:
Im going out to buy a newspaper.