Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith
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Logan Pearsall Smith >> Trivia
"But I do wish you would tell me what you really think?"
I fled to Africa, into the depths of the dark Ashanti forest.
There, in its gloomiest recesses, where the soil is stained with
the blood of the negroes He has eaten, dwells that monstrous
Deity of human shape and red colour, the great Fetish God,
Sasabonsum. I like Sasabonsum: other Gods are sometimes moved to
pity and forgiveness, but to Him such weakness is unknown. He is
utterly and absolutely implacable; no gifts or prayers, no
holocausts of human victims can appease, or ever, for one
moment, propitiate Him.
_Symptoms_
"But there are certain people I simply cannot stand. A
dreariness and sense of death come over me when I meet them--I
really find it difficult to breathe when they are in the room,
as if they had pumped all the air out of it. Wouldn't it
be dreadful to produce that effect on people! But they never
seem to be aware of it. I remember once meeting a famous
Bore; I really must tell you about it, it shows the unbelievable
obtuseness of such people."
I told this and another story or two with great gusto, and talked
on of my experiences and sensations, till suddenly I noticed, in
the appearance of my charming neighbour, something--a slightly
glazed look in her eyes, a just perceptible irregularity in her
breathing--which turned that occasion for me into a kind of
Nightmare.
_Shadowed_
I sometimes feel a little uneasy about that imagined self of
mine--the Me of my daydreams--who leads a melodramatic life of
his own, quite unrelated to my real existence. So one day I
shadowed him down the street. He loitered along for a while, and
then stood at a shop-window and dressed himself out in a gaudy
tie and yellow waistcoat. Then he bought a great sponge and two
stuffed birds and took them to lodgings, where he led for a
while a shady existence. Next he moved to a big house in
Mayfair, and gave grand dinner-parties, with splendid service
and costly wines. His amorous adventures in this region I pass
over. He soon sold his house and horses, gave up his motors,
dismissed his retinue of servants, and went--saving two young
ladies from being run over on the way--to live a life of heroic
self-sacrifice among the poor.
I was beginning to feel encouraged about him, when in passing a
fishmonger's, he pointed at a great salmon and said, "I caught
that fish."
_The Incredible_
"Yes, but they were rather afraid of you."
"Afraid of _me_?"
"Yes, so one of them told me afterwards."
I was fairly jiggered. If my personality can inspire fear or
respect the world must be a simpler place than I had thought it.
Afraid of a shadow, a poor make-believe like me? Are children
more absurdly terrified by a candle in a hollow turnip? Was
Bedlam at full moon ever scared by anything half so silly?
_Terror_
A pause suddenly fell on our conversation--one of those
uncomfortable lapses when we sit with fixed smiles, searching
our minds for some remark with which to fill up the unseasonable
silence. It was only a moment--"But suppose," I said to myself
with horrible curiosity, "suppose none of us had found a word to
say, and we had gone on sitting in silence?"
It is the dread of Something happening, Something unknown and
awful, that makes us do anything to keep the flicker of talk
from dying out. So travellers at night in an unknown forest keep
their fires ablaze, in fear of Wild Beasts lurking ready in the
darkness to leap upon them.
_Pathos_
When winter twilight falls on my street with the rain, a sense
of the horrible sadness of life descends upon me. I think of
drunken old women who drown themselves because nobody loves
them; I think of Napoleon at St. Helena, and of Byron growing
morose and fat in the enervating climate of Italy.
_Inconstancy_
The rose that one wears and throws away, the friend one forgets,
the music that passes--out of the well-known transitoriness of
mortal things I have made myself a maxim or precept to the
effect that it is foolish to look for one face, or to listen
long for one voice, in a world that is after all, as I know,
full of enchanting voices.
But all the same, I can never quite forget the enthusiasm with
which, as a boy, I read the praises of Constancy and True Love,
and the unchanged Northern Star.
_The Poplar_
There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage
floats high in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and
blackbirds, who fill the late, decorative sunshine with a
shimmer of golden sound. There the nightingale finds her green
cloister; and on those branches sometimes, like a great fruit,
hangs the lemon-coloured Moon. In the glare of August, when all
the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze in those
cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among
its lightly hung leaves.
But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.
_On the Doorstep_
I rang the bell as of old; as of old I gazed at the great
shining Door and waited. But, alas! that flutter and beat of the
wild heart, that delicious doorstep Terror--it was gone; and
with it dear, fantastic, panic-stricken Youth had rung the bell,
flitted round the corner and vanished for ever.
_Old Clothes_
Shabby old waistcoat, what made the heart beat that you used to
cover? Funny-shaped hat, where are the thoughts that once nested
beneath you? Old shoes, hurrying along what dim paths of the
Past did I wear out your sole-leather?
_Youth_
Oh dear, this living and eating and growing old; these doubts
and aches in the back, and want of interest in the Moon and
Roses...
Am I the person who used to wake in the middle of the night and
laugh with the joy of living? Who worried about the existence of
God, and danced with young ladies till long after daybreak? Who
sang "Auld Lang Syne" and howled with sentiment, and more than
once gazed at the summer stars through a blur of great, romantic
tears?
_Consolation_
The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer
myself by thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there
wasn't one of them for which I seemed to care a hang--not
Wine, nor Friendship, nor Eating, nor Making Love, nor the
Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth while then going up in
a lift into a world that had nothing less trite to offer?
Then I thought of reading--the nice and subtle happiness of
reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this
polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long
intoxication.
_Sir Eustace Carr_
When I read the news about Sir Eustace Carr in the morning
paper, I was startled, like everyone else who knew, if only by
name this young man, whose wealth and good looks, whose
adventurous travels and whose brilliant and happy marriage, had
made of him an almost romantic figure.
Every now and then one hears of some strange happening of this
kind. But they are acts so anomalous, in such startling
contradiction to all our usual ways and accepted notions of life
and its value, that most of us are willing enough to accept the
familiar explanation of insanity, or any other commonplace cause
which may be alleged--financial trouble, or some passionate
entanglement, and the fear of scandal and exposure. And then the
Suicide is forgotten as soon as possible, and his memory
shuffled out of the way as something unpleasant to think of. But
with a curiosity that is perhaps a little morbid, I sometimes
let my thoughts dwell on these cases, wondering whether the dead
man may not have carried to the grave with him the secret of
some strange perplexity, some passion or craving or irresistible
impulse, of which perhaps his intimates, and certainly the
coroner's jury, can have had no inkling.
I had never met or spoken to Sir Eustace Carr--the worlds we
lived in were very different--but I had read of his explorations
in the East, and of the curious tombs he had discovered--somewhere,
was it not?--in the Nile Valley. Then too it happened (and this
was the main cause of my interest) that at one time I had seen
him more than once, under circumstances that were rather unusual.
And now I began to think of this incident. In away it was nothing,
and yet the impression haunted me that it was somehow connected
with this final act, for which no explanation, beyond that of
sudden mental derangement, had been offered. This explanation did
not seem to me wholly adequate, although it had been accepted,
I believe, both by his friends and the general public--and with
the more apparent reason on account of a strain of eccentricity,
amounting in some cases almost to insanity, which could be traced,
it was said, in his mother's family.
I found it not difficult to revive with a certain vividness the
memory of those cold and rainy November weeks that I had
happened to spend alone, some years ago, in Venice, and of the
churches which I had so frequently haunted. Especially I
remembered the great dreary church in the piazza near my
lodgings, into which I would often go on my way to my rooms in
the twilight. It was the season when all the Venice churches are
draped in black, and services for the dead are held in them at
dawn and twilight; and when I entered this Baroque interior,
with its twisted columns and volutes and high-piled, hideous
tombs, adorned with skeletons and allegorical figures and angels
blowing trumpets--all so agitated, and yet all so dead and empty
and frigid--I would find the fantastic darkness filled with
glimmering candles, and kneeling figures, and the discordant
noise of chanting. There I would sit, while outside night fell
with the rain on Venice; the palaces and green canals faded into
darkness, and the great bells, swinging against the low sky,
sent the melancholy sound of their voices far over the lagoons.
It was here, in this church, that I used to see Sir Eustace Carr;
would generally find him in the same corner when I entered, and
would sometimes watch his face, until the ceremonious extinguishing
of the candles, one by one, left us in shadowy night. It was a
handsome and thoughtful face, and I remember more than once
wondering what had brought him to Venice in that unseasonable
month, and why he came so regularly to this monotonous service.
It was as if some spell had drawn him; and now, with my curiosity
newly wakened, I asked myself what had been that spell? I also
must have been affected by it, for I had been there also in his
uncommunicating company. Here, I felt, was perhaps the answer to
my question, the secret of the enigma that puzzled me; and as I
went over my memories of that time, and revived its sombre and
almost sinister fascination, I seemed to see an answer looming
before my imagination. But it was an answer, an hypothesis or
supposition, so fantastic, that my common sense could hardly
accept it.
For I now saw that the spell which had been on us both at that
time in Venice had been nothing but the spell and tremendous
incantation of the Thought of Death. The dreary city with its
decaying palaces and great tomb-encumbered churches had really
seemed, in those dark and desolate weeks, to be the home and
metropolis of the great King of Terrors; and the services at
dawn and twilight, with their prayers for the Dead, and funereal
candles, had been the chanted ritual of his worship. Now suppose
(such was the notion that held my imagination) suppose this
spell, which I had felt but for a time and dimly, should become to
someone a real obsession, casting its shadow more and more completely
over a life otherwise prosperous and happy, might not this be the
clue to a history like that of Sir Eustace Carr's--not only his
interest in the buried East, his presence at that time in Venice,
but also his unexplained and mysterious end?
Musing on this half-believed notion, I thought of the great
personages and great nations we read of in ancient history, who
have seemed to live with a kind of morbid pleasure in the shadow
of this great Thought; who have surrounded themselves with
mementoes of Death, and hideous symbols of its power, and who,
like the Egyptians, have found their main interest, not in the
present, but in imaginary explorations of the unknown future;
not on the sunlit surface of this earth, but in the vaults and
dwelling-places of the Dead beneath it.
Since this preoccupation, this curiosity, this nostalgia, has
exercised so enormous a fascination in the past, I found it not
impossible to imagine some modern favourite of fortune falling a
victim to this malady of the soul; until at last, growing weary
of other satisfactions, he might be drawn to open for himself
the dark portal and join the inhabitants of that dim region,
"Kings and Counsellors of the earth, Princes that had gold, who
filled their houses with silver." This, as I say, was the notion
that haunted me, the link my imagination forged between Sir
Eustace Carr's presence in that dark Venetian church, and his
self-caused death some years later. But whether it is really a
clue to that unexplained mystery, or whether it is nothing more
than a somewhat sinister fancy, of course, I cannot say.
_The Lord Mayor_
An arctic wind was blowing; it cut through me as I stood there.
The boot-black was finishing his work and complaints.
"But I should be 'appy, sir, if only I could make four bob a
day," he said.
I looked down at him; it seemed absurd, the belief of this
crippled, half-frozen creature, that four-shillings would make
him happy. Happiness! the fabled treasure of some far-away
heaven I thought it that afternoon; not to be bought with gold,
not of this earth!
I said something to this effect. But four shillings a day was
enough for the boot-black.
"Why," he said, "I should be as 'appy as the Lord Mayor!"
_The Burden_
I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History
and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over
books; believing in geological periods, cave-dwellers, Chinese
Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me.
Why am I to blame for all that is wrong in the world? I didn't
invent Sin and Hate and Slaughter. Who made it my duty anyhow
to administer the Universe, and keep the planets to their
Copernican courses? My shoulders are bent beneath the weight
of the firmament; I grow weary of propping up, like Atlas,
this vast and erroneous Cosmos.
_Under An Umbrella_
From under the roof of my umbrella I saw the washed pavement
lapsing beneath my feet, the news-posters lying smeared with
dirt at the crossings, the tracks of the busses in the liquid
mud. On I went through this dreary world of wetness. And
through how many rains and years shall I still hurry down
wet streets--middle-aged, and then, perhaps, very old? And
on what errands?
Asking myself this cheerless question I fade from your vision,
Reader, into the distance, sloping my umbrella against the wind.
THE END