Personal Pleasures (14 page)

And so much for flying like a bird, with wings attached to the body. But the mathematical Bishop preferred a flying chariot, which seemed to him altogether as probable and much more useful. It would be serviceable, said he, both for making discoveries in the Lunary World, and for the conveyance of a man to any remote place of this earth: as suppose to the Indies or Antipodes. How right he was!

Pull the stick towards you, calls the pilot (for there is a second stick in my cockpit, which I am now and then allowed to manipulate).

I pull, very gently; up goes our nose, seeking heaven.

Now push it from you.

We point earthward; it is like riding a bucking horse, his head and his heels up by turns. Then sideways;
we bank, and all the chequered face of earth tilts up, now left, now right.

Now, says the pilot, we shall side-slip.

We move crabwise, leftward, more steeply than before, towards earth. So this is a side-slip, of which one has always heard. It is definitely agreeable.

We are now only about three hundred feet up, nearing the aerodrome, facing into wind. We nose down, drift slowly over a hedge. Green pastures rush up at us; the earthly sense of speed returns; we land at forty. The wheels touch ground; the stick is pulled back, bringing the tail to earth, dragging us to a standstill after a seventy-five yards' run. We taxy back to the hangar.

Climbing out, I look up and see dark birds with spread wings zooming between earth and heaven. Was I too there? Did I so soar, sail between worlds and worlds, winnow the buxom air, gazed by terrestrial eyes?

It is a pity that one feels after it a negligible but a just noticeable trifle of giddiness. Do the fowls of the air also so? It is said that some fishes are sea-sick, even after all these æons.…

Still, enormous bliss.

I have a dress with puffed sleeves; the skirt is very long and full; about ten yards of silk, I think it took. It hangs in the wardrobe, taking a lot of room, because of the sleeves.

I have shoes with high heels; about three inches, I dare say. I can wear them if I want to.

I think I shall change my Morris, and get a small stream-lined green thing, and look smarter in the streets. It will not be so good for touring, but it will look better.

I may paint my nails red; or green, if that is coming in.

I shall write my memoirs, I think. I shall bring in every one I know, and have an index, so they can find themselves and their friends. There are plenty of things I can say about them. If they do not like it, they can lump it. It will serve them right, for having met me.

I may write a book about contemporary writers, too. They won't like that either, the things I shall say about them.

I can write tough-guy stories. What I mean is, I can write stories like this:

She was a grand girl. You're drunk, she said. But I
wasn't so drunk, either. I mean, I'd had a few, but I could see straight; and I could hold the wheel. I had the headlights on, too. To hell with those lamps, she said, and switched them down. Do you want to dazzle everything on the road, she said, so it rushes into us? You're nuts.

She was a grand girl. You're a grand girl, I said, and I switched on the big lamps again, and I held her waist with my left, and hugged her up to me close, so as I felt her warmth. That's the style, I said, and I saw the needle get up to sixty. Oh, you're crackers, she said. Driving like hell with the big lamps on and necking me with one arm. How to-night'll end, she said, I don't know. I really don't, do you? Like most nights end, I guess, said I, and that's when comes the dawn. Aw, you're crazy, said she. I told mother I'd be in by four. Well, you won't be in by four; maybe by eight. That's time enough for breakfast, isn't it? I know a swell place down the river. Oh, for heaven's sake, said she; we shall never get any place at this rate. And what must she do but start grabbing at the wheel, crying out I was all over the road. And so we were, after she started grabbing. Then she screamed out, and something hit us and we slewed right round.

There was the hell of a mess on the road. One of those little Austins, it was, and all crumpled up, and a man and a girl all crumpled up too. There was blood and glass and things around. But my Buick had only buckled a wing.

See here, I said, we can't do a thing. We'd best get on. She was being sick in the road; the blood had turned her up, I think. That and the shock. And seeing those two.

Here, I said, come on out of this. We can't do a thing. I put her in the Buick, and slewed around again and drove off. There was something banging loose, and I got out to look; it was the number plate, so I wrenched it off and took it inside. We didn't have the headlamps on now; the off one was smashed, anyway, by that bloody little Austin. I drove away. The steering was a bit funny, too. She never stopped crying and talking, it made me tired. Women can't get this: when a thing's done it's done. That's a thing no woman can ever get. They can't let it be. Hell, did I want that bloody little car to muscle into us that way? Aw, forget it.

All the time as I drive I seem to hear that damned radio saying, in its polite Oxford-Cambridge voice, “Before the news, there is a police message. Between two and three on Sunday morning an Austin seven car came into collision with another car, which apparently failed to stop.…” Failed nothing. I did stop, see? I stopped, and saw there wasn't a thing I could do, so I went on again.

Oh, to hell with your noise.…

Yes: I could write a story like that if I liked. Perhaps I will. Fine magazine stuff. What I mean is, a magazine would take it.

And I can write tough-guy poetry. A magazine would take that, too. I can write poetry like this (I call this one
To the Barricades
):

Mr. Jiggins goes to the circus
.

(
The girls, the hoops, the clowns, the seals, the hoopoes
.)

He has donned his Harrow tie
,

But Borstal was his alma mater true
.

He meets Mrs. Fortescue-Fox
,

With a jade cigarette-holder, long and green like asparagus or a dead woman's fingers

Or the pale weeds swaying in the duck-pond
,

But never a sprig of rue
.

You're so handsome, where you going?

Don't know where I'm going, where I am, where you are, where the sweet hell anyone is
.

(Forward to the barricades! To the barricades–where else?
)

Ohé! Ohé! mes brave petits! the fat is in the fire!

As Lucian pointed out, things can always be worse
.

Pink and stout he was, pranked out with rings and gold chains, he was
.

What a fool he looked!

Dites donc, monsieur, si qu'on irait se coucher, n'est-ce pas?

Festinare nocet, tempore quœque suo qui facit, ille sapit
.
In fact, no hurry
.

(March, march, march, the feet of a thousand men marching as one. No hurry?
)

They trample like artillery in my head
.

Allons, allons, faites donner la garde!

But Mrs. Fortescue-Fox
,

Unable to wait, flung herself upon the obdurate rocks
.

Life is like that
.

“
But never mine
,”
Mr. Jiggins cried
.

And up washed the running tide
,

Flowing up, casting corpses on the slimy beach
,

Casting statues, casting coins, casting mermen and mermaids and old bowler hats
.

Ting-a-ling-a-ling ring the bells of hell; where you bound now?

Allons, companions, we march to the barricades
.

In the grey dawn of yesterday

We wipe away all tears:–perhaps
.

There's another I call
Petrol Pumps
. But that's longer, and I won't print it here. It's fine magazine stuff too.

I like being in the fashion.

I may join the Communists.

Or I may write a novel a million words long, and very strong; the longest and strongest novel of the season.

The trouble about the fashions is, there are too
many going on at once, and you can't follow them all.

Sometimes I think I will give them all up, and just be dowdy.

In how Gentle and civilised an adult group we sit about the room! We talk, we read, we listen, we discuss, argue, contradict; but we are polite, considerate, forbearing: we behave, on the whole, grown-up. At meals, we pass things about; we help one another to food; we do not care who gets the most. We listen to one another's stories; we respect (within limits, and with considerable dissension) one another's opinions; we admire one another's several experiences and lives. We are assembled from far places; behind one of us is a background of hot Indian plains and rice swamps, of prowling snakes and tigers, of rice-devouring brown men. Behind another, prairies roll, skis and sledges glide over snow-bound plains, pineclad mountains guard great lakes, moose and coyotes and gophers leap. Each trails behind him or her the clouds of a separate environment, a strange and different life.

You pass me honey: you do not watch how much of it I shall take. For all you observe, I may take it all, and there will be none left for any one else. Time was when you would have said, “That is too much; leave some for the rest of us.” Time was when we should have eyed one another's plates with the zealous
justice of the savage, feeling that good things should be apportioned in equal shares; we approved Miss Edgeworth's Frank, bidden by his papa to divide the sugared cake into equal parts and weigh them with scales.

The years roll back: a curtain lifts. I am no more in a drawing-room among adult beings having tea. I am seated at a table, among my savage kind; a nurse presides, feeding us with bread and butter. One eats the crumb; one arranges the bitten crusts in a circle under one's saucer, out, so one hopes, of sight. One tilts one's chair back on its hind legs, rocking to and fro.

“Now then, Miss R., don't tilt your chair.”

“But A. is tilting his. May A. tilt his chair?”

Telling tales. We do not tell tales of one another now.…

Some one is licking the treacle from her bread.

“Now then, Miss J., that's not pretty. How often have I told you? …
Master W.!
”

Master W., in mood of ill-timed levity, has flung his bread and treacle at the ceiling. To our delight, it sticks there for a moment, before falling down. It leaves on the ceiling a sticky golden-brown smudge. Master W. is in trouble.

What undignified, what compromising situations have I seen you all in, brothers and sisters! Suspended head downwards by the knees from trees, like monkeys by their tails; rolling like barrels down green slopes to lie at the bottom and vomit; crawling along
the top of a high wall to inhale the drain-trap placed (surely oddly) thereon; sitting astride on an overturned canoe at sea; slithering bare-legged up and down a rope; prone in impassioned sobbing on the floor; rolling over and over in angry wrestling; pulling hair, pinching, fisticuffing, hiding books under chair-cushions, as a dog buries bones, that no other may have a turn of them. You, sitting reading there with your pipe, I remember your seizing my book and flinging it out of the window, that I might desist from reading. You, who do not smoke, I remember how you and I took the cigar tops cut off by uncles and smoked them; how we all trooped to the village toy-shop and bought Woodbines, and smoked them sitting in a row on the pig-sty roof. I could repeat the precise order in which we each met defeat at this pastime and retired. Yes: I remember all of you in the most ridiculous positions.…

We cannot hide from one another: we know too much. We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws. The remembered jungle is behind us, with its pleasures and pains, its follies, adventures and jests.

Jests: yes. We share a comic background, that could never be explained to others. A chance word may touch a spring set deep in the common stock of memory, and loose on us a joke, a surge of laughter, that
is out of all proportion to the word uttered, for it rises from those deeps where forgotten and remembered jokes lie tangled in a giggling past. Giggling is the word for the excessive, the uncontrollable mirth that shook us when young, that shakes us even now when together, and to which no other has the clue.

Contradiction is moderated. Argument, which still rages on every topic, political, theological, literary, sociological, factual, has grown more complex; it no longer tails off into the bald competition in endurance of “it is,” “it isn't,” “it is,” “it isn't,” “it is.” Activity has dwindled: no more do we sally forth to climb roofs or trees. Manners have improved: no more do we track passers-by along the street in furtive detective-formation, registering clues in hissing whispers as we go. We behave civilised, even when in a pack. But pack jokes remain. They may be no better than other jokes; they are often worse. But they are jokes by themselves, and are among the marks which distinguish the pleasures of fraternal association from any other.