By L. PEARSALL SMITH

At Solemn Music

I SAT there, hating the exuberance of her bust and her high-coloured wig. And how could I listen to the music in the close proximity of those loud stockings?

Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of musical, shared delight—these awful things will happen—our souls joined hands and sang like the morning stars together.

The Platitude

"It's after all, the little things in life that really matter!" I exclaimed, to my own surprise and the general consternation. I was as much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this involuntary outbreak; but from my reading of the Chinese mystics, and from much practice in crowded railway carriages, I have become expert in that Taoist art of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of "sitting and forgetting." I have learnt to lay aside my personality in awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading; to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on, according to the heaven's rolling, inert and unconcerned, with rocks and stones and trees.

The Communion of Souls

"So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?" Then lifting the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher level, "This notion of free will," I went on, "the notion, for instance, that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you think of it—at least to me it seems—a wretched notion really. I like to think I must follow the things of desire as—how shall I put it?—as the tide follows the moon; that my actions are due to necessary causes; that the world inside isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the Stars are governed."

"How I love the Stars!" murmured Lady Hyslop. "What things they say to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions—the promise of ineffable mitigations." "Mitigations?" I gasped, feeling a little giddy. But it didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most wonderful conversations. And is not their greatest charm precisely the fact that neither of us understands a word the other says?

Disenchantment

Life, I often thought, would be so different if I only had one; but in the meantime I went on fastening scraps of paper together with pins.

Opalescent, infinitely desirable, tinged with all the rainbow hues of fancy, inaccessible in the window of a stationer's shop around the corner, gleamed the paste-pot of my day-dreams. Every day I passed it, but every day some inhibition paralyzed my will; or my thoughts would be distracted in a golden dream or splendid disenchantment, some metaphysical perplexity, or giant preoccupation with the world's woe.

So time rolled on; the seasons followed in each other's footsteps. Empires rose and fell; and still that paste-pot hung, a dragon-guarded fruit of the Hesperides, in the window I walked by every day.

Then one morning, one awful morning, my pins gave out. I met this crisis with manly resolution: I was the master of my fate! Summoning all the forces of my moral nature, I put on my hat and went calmly out and bought that paste-pot. I bought three paste-pots, and carried them with me calmly home. At last the countercharm was found, the spell was broken, and the Devil finally defeated—but, oh, at what a cost! In the reaction, which immediately followed, I sat, facing those pots of nauseating paste, unnerved and disenchanted, beyond the reach of consolation, with nothing to wait for now but Death.

The Listener

The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it was the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I had been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they were all impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the fastidious lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me with almost ecstatic attention.

As in an eclipse the earth's shadow falls upon the moon, or as a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so a shadow fell, so from some morass of memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I brushed them aside: they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the lovely mirror of those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested explanation of their gaze. And anyhow—thus I laughed away the notion—how could she do it anyhow, even if she tried? Other people perhaps—but me? No, that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the words, "She mimics you to perfection," could be nothing but a bit of unintelligible jabber. For who can turn the rainbow or the lightning-flash into ridicule, make fun of the moon's splendour, or mimic the Daystar in his shining?

Shrinkage

Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations, then all the vast life of the universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks, it dwindles, and of all that flood of thought which over-brimmed the great Cosmos there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon.

The Lift

What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom, having completely forgotten the errand, which, just as I was going out, had carried me upstairs, leaping two steps at a time.

Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world bursting with misery, as Dr. Johnson describes it?

O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralizing way of regarding natural phenomena—this crying of vanity on the beautiful manifestation of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the law of gravitation—if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?

The Danger of Going to Church

As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor laughing. Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered across the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers, remembering some maledictions from the Prophets, and from the Psalms we had sung that evening. Yes, yes, their eyes should be darkened, and their lying lips put to silence. They should be smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a sore botch in the legs that cannot be healed. All the teeth should be broken in the mouths of those bloody men and daughters of backsliding; their faces should become as flames, and their heads be made utterly bald. Their little ones should be dashed to pieces before their eyes, and brimstone scattered upon their habitations. They should be led away with their buttocks uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.

But as for the Righteous Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be the blessings of those who walk in the right way. "These blessings"—the words came back to me from the Evening Lesson—"these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee." And suddenly, in the mild summer air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened, the blessings of the Old Testament were actually rushing after me. From the hot, remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the Oriental climate and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross good things were coming to reward me with benedictions for which I had not bargained. Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me, he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. My barns should burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop fatness. My face should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all my household and the beasts of my household should beget and bear increase; and as for the fruit of my own loins, it should be for multitude as the sands of the sea and as the stars of heaven. My sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the third and fourth generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet should be dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should flourish as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.

My Prayer Book began to smoke in my hand from the hot lava embedded in it; the meadow was scorched by the live coals of cursing and still more awful benediction I had so thoughtlessly raked out of the church furnace and brought down in a hot shower on myself and my neighbours.

The Wrong Word

We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since faced the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears, and was completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said, was a great mechanism; man, with his reason and moral judgments, was the chance product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon destroy him, he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate with passionless despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront a hostile universe with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the Gorgon face of Destiny, to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling defiance at the icy stars—this, he said, was his attitude, and it produced, as you can imagine, a very powerful impression on the company. As for me, I was completely carried away by my enthusiasm. "By Jove, that is a stunt!" I cried.

Interruption

"Life," said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever—"life is a perpetual toothache."

In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were discussed of food-restrictions, epidemics, cancer, and so on.

Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea, and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. "Well, I must say," she remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, "I must say I enjoy life."

"So do I," I whispered.

"When I enjoy things," she went on, "I know it. Eating, for instance, the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference," she added, as she got up to go with the others.

"All the difference in the world," I answered.

It's too bad that I had no chance for further conversation with that wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot to tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the mind with garbage: we make a better use of that divine and adorable endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and practice of our art.

The Rationalist

Occultisms, fairyisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond, intimations from another world—all kinds of supernaturalisms are most distasteful to me; I cling to the world of science and common sense and explicable phenomena; and I was much put out, therefore, to find this morning a cabalistic inscription written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB—what could be the meaning of these cryptic words, and how on earth had they got there? Like Belshazzar, my eyes were troubled by this writing, and my knees smote one against the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to look downward from her contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards for me, with a pitying smile, the homely, familiar, harmless inscription on the BATH MAT, which was lying there wrong side up.

Justification

Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon-party? Do I not owe it to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And how about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted, and Deborah sing without blame how she arose a mother in Israel? And didn't David boast of his triumph over the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in his confabulations with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the universe Himself take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance, His power, His glory?

Was I not made in His image?

Day-dream

"Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We dress, we go out to dinner," I went on, "but surely we walk in a vain show. How good this asparagus is! I often think asparagus is the most delicious of all vegetables. And yet I don't know—when one thinks of fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus as one can of strawberries—but tender green peas and peaches I could eat for ever. And there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. It's one of my favourite day-dreams for my declining years to live alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say, in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with apricots and figs and peaches; and there are precious pears, too, of my own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment pick a delicious pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to say——"

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