Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

"I've told you six times," snapped the man.

"What a bully you are," retorted the woman. Then they subsided into silence. Husband and wife, I thought—bursting with bad temper to such an extent that they boil over even in a bus full of people. Probably they have been snarling like that ever since their honeymoon, and will go on snarling until one puts on crape for the other.

But, on second thoughts, I concluded that this was probably unjust. They had come in out of the slush and the blackness, and had got the gloom of the London night in their souls. Most of us get it in our souls more or less. It makes us ill-humoured and depressed. In the early days there was a certain novelty in the darkened streets, and some ecstatic writers discovered that London had never been so beautiful before. They even wrote poems about it. When you blundered into a pillar-box and began making profuse apologies, or stumbled against the kerb-stone, or fell into the arms of some invisible but substantial part of the darkness, or scurried frantically across Trafalgar Square, you felt that it was all part of the great adventure of war and was in its way rather romantic and exhilarating. But three winters of that experience have exhausted our enthusiasm and have made London at night a mere debauch of depression except for those who make it a debauch of another kind.

But whatever the explanation of that little scene in the bus, there is no doubt that as the long strain goes on it plays havoc with our nerves and our tempers. We are tired and angry with this mad world, and since we cannot visit our anger on the enemy we visit it very unreasonably on each other. The shattered vase of life lies in ruins at our feet, and there is an overmastering temptation to grind the fragments to dust rather than piece them together for the healing future to restore. We have lost faith in men, in principles, in ideals, in ourselves, and are subdued to the naked barbarism into which civilisation has collapsed. Religion was never at so low an ebb, so openly repudiated, or, what is worse, so travestied by charlatans and blackguards. I heard the other day the description of an address at a public gathering by a person who mixed up his blasphemies about some new god of the creature's imagining with obscenities that would be impossible on a music-hall stage.

In the Divorce Court last week the counsel for the lady in the case gravely advanced the plea that in these days, when men are dying by the million in mud and filth, the women at home must not be denied their excitements, their flirtations and their late suppers. When Mars is abroad Venus must be abroad, too. Murder is the sole business of the world and lust is its proper pastime. Take a glance at any bookstall and note the garbage which lines its shelves. Dip into the morass of the popular Sunday newspapers with their millions of circulation, and see the broth of foulness in which the great public take their weekly intellectual bath. The tide has overwhelmed the Stage as it has overwhelmed the Church, and a wild levity companions our illimitable tragedy.

It is no new phenomenon. In time of peril humanity always reveals these extravagant contrasts, and Boccaccio, with the true instinct of the artist, set his tales of merriment and licentiousness against the background of a city perishing of plague. We live at once more intensely and more frivolously. The pendulum of our emotions swings violently from extreme to extreme and a defiant exhilaration answers the mood of depression and anxiety. I can conceive that that couple in the bus were quite merry when they saw the sun shine in the morning and read that Vimy Ridge had been won. There is, in Pepys' Diary, a delightful illustration of the swift transitions by which the mind in times of stress seeks to keep its equipoise. It is the 10th of September (Lord's Day), 1665. The plague is at its worst and the whole city seems doomed. The war with the Dutch is going badly. Mrs. Pepys's father is dying, and everything looks black. But there comes news of a success at sea and Pepys goes down the river to meet Lord Brouncker and Sir J. Minnes at Greenwich—

—where we supped [there was also Sir W. Doyly and Mr. Evelyn]; but the receipt of this news did put us all into such an extasy of joy that it inspired into Sir J. Minnes and Mr. Evelyn such a spirit of mirth that in all my life I never met so merry a two hours as our company this night. Among other humours, Mr. Evelyn's repeating of some verses made up of nothing but the various acceptations of may and can, and doing it so aptly upon occasion of something of that nature, and so fast, did make us all die almost with laughing, and did so stop the mouth of Sir J. Minnes in the middle of all his mirth that I never saw any man so out-done in all my life; and Sir J. Minnes's mirth to see himself out-done was the crown of all our mirth.

Isn't that a wonderful picture? And think of the grave John Evelyn having this gaiety in him! You will read the whole of his Diary and not get one smile from his severe countenance. I had the curiosity to turn to his own record of the same time. He has no entry for the 10th, but two days before, he says:

Came home, there perishing neere 10,000 poor creatures weekly; however, I went all along the City and suburbs from Kent Streete to St. James's, a dismal passage, and dangerous to see so many coffins expos'd in the streetes, now thin of people; the shops shut up and all in mourneful silence, as not knowing whose turn might be next.

And then, at the receipt of a bit of good news this austere man is seized with "such an extasy of joy" that he gives Pepys the merriest evening of his life. And Pepys was a good judge of merry evenings.