Certain Personal Matters. Герберт Уэллс

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      Subtly the hazel's grainings go,

      Walnut's charm there is no gainsaying,

      Red as red wine is your rosewood's glow;

      Brave and brilliant the ash you show,

      Rich your mahogany's hepatite shine,

      Cool and sweet your enamel: But oh!

      Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?'

      "They have 'em in the catalogue at five guineas, with a picture – quite as good they are as the more expensive ones. To judge by the picture."

      "But that's scarcely the idea you started with," I began.

      "Not; it went wrong – ballades often do. The preoccupation of the 'Painted Pine' was too much for me. What's this? 'N.B. – Sludge sells music stools at – ' No. Here we are (first half unwritten): —

      "Comes round again, you see! Then L'Envoy: —

      "Prosaic! As all true poetry is, nowadays. But, how I tired as the afternoon moved on! At first I was interested in the shopman's amazing lack of imagination, and the glory of that fond dream of mine – love in a cottage, you know – still hung about me. I had ideas come – like that Ballade – and every now and then Annie told me to write notes. I think my last gleam of pleasure was in choosing the drawing-room chairs. There is scope for fantasy in chairs. Then – "

      He took some more whisky.

      "A kind of grey horror came upon me. I don't know if I can describe it. We went through vast vistas of chairs, of hall-tables, of machine-made pictures, of curtains, huge wildernesses of carpets, and ever this cold, unsympathetic shopman led us on, and ever and again made us buy this or that. He had a perfectly grey eye – the colour of an overcast sky in January – and he seemed neither to hate us nor to detest us, but simply to despise us, to feel such an overwhelming contempt for our petty means and our petty lives, as an archangel might feel for an apple-maggot. It made me think…"

      He lit a fresh cigarette.

      "I had a kind of vision. I do not know if you will understand. The Warehouse of Life, with our Individual Fate hurrying each of us through. Showing us with a covert sneer all the good things that we cannot afford. A magnificent Rosewood love affair, for instance, deep and rich, fitted complete, some hours of perfect life, some acts of perfect self-sacrifice, perfect self-devotion… You ask the price."

      He shrugged his shoulders.

      "Where are the wardrobes of Painted Pine?" I quoted.

      "That's it. All the things one might do, if the purse of one's courage were not so shallow. If it wasn't for the lack of that coinage, Bellows, every man might be magnificent. There's heroism, there's such nobility as no one has ever attained to, ready to hand. Anyone, if it were not for this lack of means, might be a human god in twenty-four hours… You see the article. You cannot buy it. No one buys it. It stands in the emporium, I suppose, for show – on the chance of a millionaire. And the shopman waves his hand to it on your way to the Painted Pine.

      "Then you meet other couples and solitary people going about, each with a gloomy salesman leading. The run of them look uncomfortable; some are hot about the ears and in the spiteful phase of ill-temper; all look sick of the business except the raw new-comers. It's the only time they will ever select any furniture, their first chance and their last. Most of their selections are hurried a little. The salesman must not be kept all day… Yet it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and find it just a 'special line' made to sell… We're all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing – or dying. Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have this so good, dear, I don't know how we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful housewife… So it is we do our shopping in the Great Emporium."

      "You will have to rewrite your Ballade," said I, "and put all that in."

      "I wish I could," said the poet.

      "And while you were having these very fine moods?"

      "Annie and the shopman settled most of the furniture between them. Perhaps it's just as well. I was never very good at the practical details of life… Cigarette's out! Have you any more matches?"

      "Horribly depressed you are!" I said.

      "There's to-morrow. Well, well…"

      And then he went off at a tangent to tell me what he expected to make by his next volume of poems, and so came to the congenial business of running down his contemporaries, and became again the cheerful little Poet that I know.

      THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS

      During the early Victorian revival of chivalry the Language of Flowers had some considerable vogue. The Romeo of the mutton-chop whiskers was expected to keep this delicate symbolism in view, and even to display his wit by some dainty conceits in it. An ignorance of the code was fraught with innumerable dangers. A sprig of lilac was a suggestion, a moss-rosebud pushed the matter, was indeed evidence to go to court upon; and unless Charlotte parried with white poplar – a by no means accessible flower – or apricot blossom, or failing these dabbed a cooling dock-leaf at the fellow, he was at her with tulip, heliotrope, and honeysuckle, peach-blossom, white jonquil, and pink, and a really overpowering and suffocating host of attentions. I suppose he got at last to three-cornered notes in the vernacular; and meanwhile what could a poor girl do? There was no downright "No!" in the language of flowers, nothing equivalent to "Go away, please," no flower for "Idiot!" The only possible defence was something in this way: "Your cruelty causes me sorrow," "Your absence is a pleasure." For this, according to the code of Mr. Thomas Miller (third edition, 1841, with elegantly coloured plates) you would have to get a sweet-pea blossom for Pleasure, wormwood for Absence, and indicate Sorrow by the yew, and Cruelty by the stinging-nettle. There is always a little risk of mixing your predicates in this kind of communication, and he might, for instance, read that his Absence caused you Sorrow, but he could scarcely miss the point of the stinging-nettle. That and the gorse carefully concealed were about the only gleams of humour possible in the language. But then it was the appointed tongue of lovers, and while their sickness is upon them they have neither humour nor wit.

      This Mr. Thomas Miller wrote abundant flowers of language in his book, and the plates were coloured by hand. By the bye, what a blessed thing colour-printing is! These hand-tinted plates, to an imaginative person, are about as distressing as any plates can very well be. Whenever I look at these triumphs of art over the beauties of nature, with all their weary dabs of crimson, green, blue, and yellow, I think of wretched, anæmic girls fading their youth away in some dismal attic over a publisher's, toiling through the whole edition tint by tint, and being mocked the while by Mr. Miller's alliterative erotics. And they are erotics! In one place he writes, "Beautiful art thou, O Broom! on the breezy bosom of the bee-haunted heath"; and throughout he buds and blossoms into similar delights. He wallows in doves and coy toyings and modest blushes, and bowers and meads. He always adds, "Wonderful boy!" to Chatterton's name СКАЧАТЬ