Then you see it!
At first you are amusedly contemptuous. "How perfectly hideous," you say to yourself. And then, in your idleness of mind, your eye follows the roses and ribbons in horrible contortions from the skirting board to the ceiling. Realising what you are doing, and knowing that in that direction madness lies, you immediately turn your gaze towards the window. You imagine that you have gained the day. But, alas! you are wrong! Comes a moment in the early morning when you wake up two hours before you wanted to, with nothing else to do except to lie awake thinking. And all the while the brown roses with their blue buds have unconsciously stretched their tendrils to seize your wandering regard. Before you realise what they are doing, your eyes are riveted on that horrible bunch half-way up the wall which being cut in half by the sudden termination of the width of one paper roll, does not exactly fit the corresponding half of the other. How it suddenly begins to irritate you—this break in the symmetry of the design! You force your eyes from contemplating its offence, only to discover that the bunches of roses which are exposed between the sides of the picture representing "The Soul's Awakening" and the illuminated text painted by your hostess when she was young, make an exact square. Above the pictures you perceive that these same bunches form a "diamond," resting on one of its right angles! That there are only five of these terrible bunches between the side of "The Soul's Awakening" and the corner of the wall, and six between that of "Trust in the Lord" and the door. And all the time you are becoming more and more irritable. You cannot close your eyes because you know that when you open them again the same illustrations from Euclid will await you. The only thing that comforts you is the determination to write immediately to your Member of Parliament insisting that he drafts a Bill creating a censor of wallpapers, with dire penalties for any "circumventors" of the law. That at least would put every seaside landlady in prison.
Our Irritating Habits
Far more than the Big Things are the Teeny Weeny Little Ones which more quickly divide lovers. A woman may conveniently overlook the fact that her husband poisoned his first wife in order to marry her, when she cannot ignore the perpetual example which he gives her of the truth that Satan finds some evil still for idle hands to do—by always picking his teeth. All of us possess some little irritating personal habit, which makes for us more enemies than those faults for which, on our knees, we beg forgiveness of Heaven. A woman can drink in the poetry of her lover's passionate eloquence for ever and ever, amen. But if, in the middle of the night, she wakes up to find her eloquent lover letting forth the most stentorian snores she, metaphorically, immediately sits up in bed and begins seriously to wonder. And the moment love begins to ask itself questions, it is, as it were, turning over the leaves of the time-table to discover the next boat for the Antipodes. As I said before, more homes are broken up, not by the flying fire-irons, but by the irritating little personal idiosyncrasies which men and women exhibit when they are, so they declare, "quite natural and at their ease." Only a mother's love can survive the accompaniment of suction noises with soup. Vice always makes the innocent suffer, but suffering is often bearable, and sometimes it ennobles us; but chewing raw tobacco—even perpetually chewing chewing gum—is unbearable, and has a most ignoble effect on the temper, especially the temper of life's Monday mornings.
Even for our virtues do we sometimes run the risk of being murdered by those who, because they think they know us best, consequently admire us least. Virtue which is waved overhead like a banner is always a perpetual challenge, and the moment we seem to issue a challenge—even though we merely challenge the surrounding ether—someone in the concrete bends down somewhere to pick up a brickbat and, gazing at us, mutters, "How far? Oh Lord, how far?" Even the expressions of love, in the wrong place, have been known to hear hatred as their echo. I once knew a man who left his wife because she could never speak to him without calling him "darling." She had so absorbed Barrie's theory that the bravest man is but a "child," that "home" for her husband became a kind of glorified nursery. At last his spirit became bilious with the cloying sweetness of it all. The climax came one evening when, after accidentally treading on her best corn and begging her pardon, she got up, put her loving arms around his neck and, kissing him, whispered, "Granted, darling, granted before you did it!" Soon after that he left her for a woman who, herself, trod on every corn he possessed, and had not the least inclination to say she was sorry. Of course, he lived to regret his first wife. Most men do.
"Tact," I suppose, is at the bottom of all the difficulty—tact not only to know instinctively what to do and when to do it, but when to realise that a wife is still an "audience" and when to realise that, so far as being completely natural in her company is concerned, she has absolutely ceased to exist. But, alas! no one has the heart to teach us this necessary lesson in "tact." We can tell a man of his sin when we dare not tell him it were the better plan to go right away by himself when he wishes to take his false teeth out. A wife will promote an angry scene with her husband over the "other woman"—of whom she is not in the least bit jealous—when she will never dream of telling him that he doesn't sufficiently wash—which was the real cause of their early estrangement. Everybody knows his own vices, whereas most people are blissfully ignorant of their own irritating idiosyncrasies. I would far sooner be told of my nasty habits than of my own special brand of original sin. Sin has to be in very disgusting form to evoke lasting dislike, whereas a "nasty habit" breeds DISGUST, which is a far more terrible emotion than hatred.
Away—Far Away!
"The bird was there, and rose and fell as formerly, pouring out his melody; but it was not the same. Something was missing from those last sweet languishing notes. Perhaps in the interval there had been some disturbing accident in his little wild life, though I could hardly believe it since his mate was still sitting about thirty yards from the tree on the five little mottled eggs in her nest. Or perhaps his midsummer's music had reached its highest point and was now in its declension. And perhaps the fault was in me. The virtue that draws and holds us does not hold us always nor very long; it departs from all things, and we wonder why. The loss is in ourselves, although we do not know it. Nature, the chosen mistress of our heart, does not change towards us, yet she is now, even to-day—
Less full of purple colour and hid spice,
and smiles and sparkles in vain to allure us, and when she touches us with her warm caressing touch, there is, compared with yesterday, only a faint response." I cull this paragraph from Mr. W. H. Hudson's enchanting book, "Birds in Town and Village," because, or so it seems to me, it expresses in beautiful language a fact which has puzzled me all through my life, making me fear to dare in many things, lest the enthusiasm I then felt were not repeated when the time for action arrived. We are all more or less creatures of mood, some more than others, and I, alas! among the moodiest majority. All through the long, dark, chilly, miserable winter I live in town, longing sadly, though rapturously, for the summer to come again, and with its advent my own migration into rural solitudes, far away from the crowd, surrounded by Nature and lost in her embrace. Yet the end of each summer finds me with my pilgrimage not yet undertaken. Something has held me back—a friendship, business, links which were only imaginary fetters, a host of trivial unimportances masquerading in my mood of the moment as serious affairs. So the summer has come and gone, and only for an all-too-brief period have I "got away." Nor have I particularly enjoyed my respite from the roar of omnibuses, the tramp, tramp, tramp of the crowded pavements. Somehow or other the war has robbed me of my love of solitude Somehow or other the peace and beauty and solitude of Nature still "hurt" me, as they used to hurt me during the years of the great world tragedy when, across the meadows brilliant with buttercups and daisies, there used to come the booming of the guns not so very far away "out there." So, in order to force my mood, and perhaps deaden remembrance of its pain, I have taken along with me some human companion, only once more to realise that, when with Nature, each of us should be alone. One yearns to watch and listen, listen and watch, to lie outstretched on the hill-side, gazing lazily, yet with mind alert, at every moving thing which happens to catch one's eye. You can rarely do this in company. So very, very few people can simply exist silently without sooner or later breaking into speech or falling fast asleep. Alone with Nature books are the only possible company—books and one's own unspoken thoughts.