Personal Pleasures (3 page)

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!

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 are 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.

The moon is coming, cries someone; and, sure enough, a rose-gold haze flushes the eastern horizon, heralding the golden rim, like the segment of an orange, that will rise and rise from the dark sea until it is a whole orange climbing up the sky, to flood the night and dim the stars. My father quotes Ben Jonson, who was so wrong about Hesperus entreating the moon's light, for how should one of the sun's goddess lovers entreat the advent of another, who must dim her?

But, for our part, we welcome the moon, swinging up among silver flames, flinging her golden causeway across the bay to the ripples at our feet.

Astronomy is over. Like the monkeys and marmosets of whom Mutianus tells, we hop and dance beneath the moon. A pig chase, we cry: for this pastime always
concludes our astronomy. We race and chase about the brightening shore, up and down between the garden and the sea, in and out of the ripples that now glow gold as they curvet and spark, splashing lightly on damp sand. We flee and chase until we are as hot as if the moon were the sun, until we have no more breath to chase with or to flee.

At chasing and fleeing, I am as good as the next man; it is one of my stronger points. But deep in my heart there lies a shame; I am always the last to discern the Pole Star and the Bears. And sometimes I say that I see them without conviction, and fear, uneasily, that this may be an Untruth. Do the others really see these heavenly constellations as quickly as they make out?

How sweet a waft of warm bakery breathes up from the nether world below the pavement, as I pass the baker's at midnight! All night they are at it, it would seem, making and baking that doughy substance which smells so much better in the making than ever it tastes when made. Fried fish is otherwise; it tastes good, but smells terrible when frying. That is one of the things about fish; it always smells ill—fishy, in fact—but tastes good, and not fishy at all. There would be few ichthy-ophagi if we judged fishes by their smell. Some bold and hungry experimenter must have ventured long since to disregard the fishy savour and try it in the mouth; he was rewarded, justified, and the tradition was established. The same with meat. But bread, poor enough stuff in the mouth, is delicious, when preparing, to the nose. Unfortunately this wears off after baking, and a fresh loaf smells of nothing in particular, while a stale one smells of mould.

But so delicious is this warm and bready odour that breathes up through a grating in the pavement that I pause entranced to sniff. For a moment I am persuaded that the bread I shall eat to-morrow will taste like this celestial smell; it will be manna, not mere bread. Nay, it will be ambrosia, such as is heaped on the tables of
gods; it will be food for angels, for gourmets, for Lucullus at his solitary suppers. The sweet yeasty fragrance steals on the night, lingering on the air like the gentlest pretty insinuating tune. No wonder that men have sold their bodies and their souls for bread, if this is what bread is. Bread and circus games—the Romans were right in demanding these, in feeling that, together, they made the adequate life.

But, as I stand there and smell, strange unwelcome stories recur to my memory, of how bakers make bread. Has it not been said that, if we should watch them at it, bread-consumption would slump down, the staff of life would bend under us, and we should have recourse to potatoes and cabbage, rice, and even sago? It is the same, of course, with jam, with sausages, with veal. Better see no food prepared. Close the eyes, open the mouth, and say a grace that you were not there at the making of the pleasant finished product that slips so agreeably down your throat and into your system. And, if you come to that, what would your system look like, do you suppose, if you should have the misfortune to see
that?
It ill behoves us, with our insides, to be dainty about looking upon the manufacture of anything that goes into them; at its worst stage the object to be consumed can scarcely have presented so ill an appearance as does the place prepared for its reception.

Over the pale jade-green shallows, a tiny breeze runs, ruffling the surface of the Florida Straits into ribbed glass, setting little ripples slapping against the mangrove-grown clumps of earth that enisle these strange seas. You may wade a mile out from the white beach, palm-fringed, of the Keys; wade towards Havana, ankle-deep, knee-deep, thigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep. Can one wade right across the straits to Cuba or Havana? I do not know: evening falls, and I have reached neither. Evening falls, and the sea, sunset-drenched, glows from green to rose, like gardens of ripening fruit beneath a glass roof. On the ribbed floor of sand gleam the coral forests: I stoop and break off brittle twigs and branches and flowers, as one gathers mushrooms or raspberries in a field. Through the forests dart slippery fishes, silver, coral and turquoise, or striped black like little zebras; they glance through my hands. Here is a tiny goblin being in gleaming blue, with horns and a hump and goggling eyes; it is not fleet enough, and I cup it between my hands, and guide it to the nearest island, scoop a hole for it in the sand and fill it with water; it swims round and round,
goblin eyes seeking escape; it feels its position acutely; it must be turned adrift again into the Florida seas, to join its goblin kind.