VI.
ON LOAFING; TOGETHER WITH A SECOND ANECDOTE FROM
THE ENTERTAINMENTS OF KAPNIDES.
I TOOK my canoe the other day up that part of the river where only Masters of Arts are allowed to drown themselves without a certificate. None of them were doing it on the day I was there, and it was rather dull, and the boat went to sleep with its cold nose resting on the soft grass that edged the river.
So I just stopped there and lazed, and watched other boats go past. There is a prevalent notion apparently that nothing which is said in one boat can possibly be heard in another. As each boat went past, its occupants made humorous and uncomplimentary remarks upon me. The waiters in some of the inferior London restaurants have a similar notion that nobody understands French. Without these little delusions we should not be as happy as we are. In my case there seemed to be an idea that I had got stuck in the bank and couldn’t get out again. The impression was wrong. My boat was a little tired, and went to sleep. It had come a long way, and I was not brute enough to wake it up again.
I watched the other boats go past. There were very fine and noble people in some of them, but I did not see one proper loafer, and hardly any one who had elementary notions of the right way to loaf. There is no subject which is less understood. The spirit of asceticism, the spirit of extravagance for its own sake, and the spirit of utilitarianism are fast spoiling us.
The popular idea that loafing is in some way connected with laziness should be removed. Loafing is the science of living without trouble. There may be a time when it is easier to work than to laze. A man, when suffering badly from Tripos, may find it less trouble to read Thucydides than to stifle his conscience. The condition of mind is unhealthy and morbid; but, where it exists, it would certainly be better loafing to work than to laze. And no one objects more than the well-trained loafer to enforced laziness. When he is in London he will have his hat ironed at the barber’s rather than at the maker’s. In the first case he will have to pay for it, but he will be shaved while it is being done; in the second case no charge is made, but more than sixpennyworth of vitality is consumed in the irritation of having to wait. It is not the waiting which the loafer minds: it is the having to wait.
There are many who would loaf, but fail from want of a little thought. They do not take enough trouble to avoid trouble. They arrive at some result, and half a loaf is better than no bread; but nevertheless they do not get the perfect life.
Here is a problem in loafing.
There were four men—A, B, C, D—who rose one morning, and all found they wanted shaving.
A was too lazy, left his chin as it was, was miserable all that day, and simply had to shave next day.
B half-way through the morning got shaved at a barber’s.
C conquered his inclinations and shaved himself at once.
D, knowing that it was impossible to grow a beard at Cambridge, and being too lazy to shave or be shaved, had his things packed up, and “went down.”
The vanity of the man, the strength of the beard, and the distance from a barber are the same in each case; and it is supposed that the price of a shave is so small that it may be disregarded: which was the best loafer of the four?
There was not a perfect loafer among them, but the best was undoubtedly C, and the next best was D. This will seem strange to any one who has not studied the effect of anticipation on happiness and the reverse. Nothing is real to us except our imagination of it. What would the perfect loafer have done? I know; and you, my sympathetic reader, know. But I do not think any of the others do. And it would be of no use to tell them, because they would not believe it. The answer is too long and elaborate to be given in any case.
It should be remembered that loafing is not the science of living for pleasure, which is foolishness, but the science of living without trouble. We may believe, as it is said in “The New Republic,” that one of the two most lasting pleasures is the pleasure of saying a neat thing neatly; yet the perfect loafer will never become a conversationalist.
But it is of little use to preach. After all I have said about the quantity of cushions necessary for comfort in a Canadian canoe, I constantly see men going out with far too few. I am always hearing complaints that we are not taught engineering or some other horribly useful thing. But why are we not taught the art of perfect living, which is loafing?
Only a few out of my many books do I ever bring on the water. Some of the best would seem quite out of place. To-day I’ve got that curious old translation of the “Entertainments of Kapnides” with me. I was reminded of it by seeing those children going along in the meadow, picking flowers. Of course you know the story well enough, but I cannot be bothered to be original in every chapter. It is the story of the Child Siren.
Ligeia never cared about the child from the first. It interfered with business. It absolutely refused to play her accompaniments, and said it could not bear to see the sailors tempted to their death. On this particular day it had interrupted Ligeia just as she reached the most tender, pathetic, touching part of her song. The sob of the child broke into the sloppy waltz refrain, and spoiled the spell. And the helmsman had turned the ship’s prow out again from the coast, and there was another crew gone.
“You sinful little beast,” said Ligeia. “Get out of my sight.”
The child was not sorry to go. She climbed up the cliff, and then wandered on away from the sea, where the long grass came up to her waist. And as she wandered, the sun shone brightly, and the cool wind blew into her hair, and the birds sang above her, and only a little distance away sounded the drowsy murmurs of the waves.
And then for the first time in her life the passion for song came into her. She felt that she must sing. Always before she had shuddered at the thought of song, for the song of Ligeia and others had ever brought death with it. But now she felt that she must sing, and she knew not why; for a study of hereditary tendencies was not included in the Board School education of that period. She had reached an open space now. The ground was sandy, with here and there a stunted clump of grass, and in one place a beautiful golden poppy.
“No one will hear me,” she thought, “and if I do not sing my heart will break.” So she sang, standing there white and naked, with the sunlight upon her, holding a lyre in her little hands.
And the music came out of her soul, but she knew not whence the words came.
She sang that it was not sweet for the golden poppy to bloom there alone, though the sun made it warm, and the wind was fragrant about it. It was sweeter that she should pluck it in her little hands, which were warm with a better life than the life of the sun, and more fragrant than the west wind with its burden of the breath of the flowers. She paused, and her fingers rested lightly on the lyre. Her eyes were strained in looking up to the east, and she did not see that the poppy had bowed its golden head and withered away.
“And it is not sweet,” she sang again, “for you, white bird, to fly on and on, and never to rest. It is better to lie here, and let me touch you, and fondle you, and love you.”
And out from the eastern sky flew the white bird, and it nestled for one moment at the child’s breast, and then fell dead on the sand.
And the child saw what she had done, and she flung herself down beside the dead bird and the withered flower, and sobbed in the foolishest way.
So the afternoon wore on, and the sea still murmured, and she still lay there. And when it was evening a new wind sprang up from the south, and it whispered to her,—
“A girl’s voice for a bird’s life.”
She stood up, erect, with eyes that flashed brightly, though the tears still stood in them. She held the white bird in her little hands. “I’ll give you my voice,” she said, as she kissed it. And the bird flew far away from her, and the girl was dumb.
For a little while she stood there, and the old passion of song came back to her, and tore at her heart; but she could not sing, for she was dumb.
“And I have nothing else left,” she thought, “with which I may give back the life to the golden poppy.”
“Crimson for golden,” the south wind called softly in her ear.
So she lay down once more, and put her pretty mouth to the dead bloom of the poppy, and she could not speak, but she thought the words—“Drink my blood! Drink my life, and live!”
And the dead flower drained out her life, and she grew white and whiter, and when the moonlight fell upon her, not a tint of colour was in her cheeks.
Out of the forest the south wind crept, and he seemed a little excited as he saw the dead girl lying there.
“I’ll never do it again,” he swore; “if they want such things done, they must do them themselves. Curse them!” Then he howled, for his masters had overheard him and chastised him.
He went back to the forest, and brooded all day over what had happened. And that night he went mad, and came forth to do one or two things on his own account. There was the tall poppy growing by the head of the dead girl, and it had become crimson.
The south wind gave one puff, and blew it out of the ground into the sea.
And over the child’s body it blew the finest white sand that it could find, until a heavy drift lay over it.
And it went away to a lonely place where a solitary tree was standing, and in the tree sat the white bird in her nest. And he blew down the tree, and broke the nest, and chased the bird for days and days over the water, till at last the bird sank.
And still the wind was not satisfied. He had a faint idea that he had not been doing much good. He ought, by rights, to have killed his masters. He knew that, but his masters could not be killed. How they smiled as they sat up in cloudland, and watched their angry servant snarling over a child, a bird, and a flower! “He’s not satisfied,” said the first. “Very few people are,” grunted a second. “You’re right there,” snorted a third. Their conversation rarely rose above the intellectual level of a market ordinary; but they had the power, and could afford to be a little dull at times.