Yet Again | Page 7

long and just so loud as the
occasion seemed to demand. If I were naturally a brilliant and copious
talker, I suppose that to stay in another's house would be no strain on
me. I should be able to impose myself on my host and hostess and their
guests without any effort, and at the end of the day retire quite
unfatigued, pleasantly flushed with the effect of my own magnetism.
Alas, there is no question of my imposing myself. I can repay
hospitality only by strict attention to the humble, arduous process of
making myself agreeable. When I go up to dress for dinner, I have
always a strong impulse to go to bed and sleep off my fatigue; and it is
only by exerting all my will-power that I can array myself for the final
labours: to wit, making myself agreeable to some man or woman for a
minute or two before dinner, to two women during dinner, to men after
dinner, then again to women in the drawing-room, and then once more
to men in the smoking-room. It is a dog's life. But one has to have
suffered before one gets the full savour out of joy. And I do not
grumble at the price I have to pay for the sensation of basking, at length,
in solitude and the glow of my own fireside.

Too tired to undress, too tired to think, I am more than content to watch
the noble and ever-changing pageant of the fire. The finest part of this
spectacle is surely when the flames sink, and gradually the red-gold
caverns are revealed, gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost recesses of
white heat. It is often thus that my fire welcomes me when the long
day's task is done. After I have gazed long into its depths, I close my
eyes to rest them, opening them again, with a start, whenever a coal
shifts its place, or some belated little tongue of flame spurts forth with a
hiss.... Vaguely I liken myself to the watchman one sees by night in
London, wherever a road is up, huddled half-awake in his tiny cabin of
wood, with a cresset of live coal before him.... I have come down in the
world, and am a night-watchman, and I find the life as pleasant as I had
always thought it must be, except when I let the fire out, and awake
shivering.... Shivering I awake, in the twilight of dawn. Ashes, white
and grey, some rusty cinders, a crag or so of coal, are all that is left
over from last night's splendour. Grey is the lawn beneath my window,
and little ghosts of rabbits are nibbling and hobbling there. But anon
the east will be red, and, ere I wake, the sky will be blue, and the grass
quite green again, and my fire will have arisen from its ashes, a
cackling and comfortable phoenix.
SEEING PEOPLE OFF
I am not good at it. To do it well seems to me one of the most difficult
things in the world, and probably seems so to you, too.
To see a friend off from Waterloo to Vauxhall were easy enough. But
we are never called on to perform that small feat. It is only when a
friend is going on a longish journey, and will be absent for a longish
time, that we turn up at the railway station. The dearer the friend, and
the longer the journey, and the longer the likely absence, the earlier do
we turn up, and the more lamentably do we fail. Our failure is in exact
ratio to the seriousness of the occasion, and to the depth of our feeling.
In a room, or even on a door-step, we can make the farewell quite
worthily. We can express in our faces the genuine sorrow we feel. Nor
do words fail us. There is no awkwardness, no restraint, on either side.
The thread of our intimacy has not been snapped. The leave- taking is
an ideal one. Why not, then, leave the leave-taking at that? Always,
departing friends implore us not to bother to come to the railway station
next morning. Always, we are deaf to these entreaties, knowing them to

be not quite sincere. The departing friends would think it very odd of us
if we took them at their word. Besides, they really do want to see us
again. And that wish is heartily reciprocated. We duly turn up. And
then, oh then, what a gulf yawns! We stretch our arms vainly across it.
We have utterly lost touch. We have nothing at all to say. We gaze at
each other as dumb animals gaze at human beings. We `make
conversation'--and such conversation! We know that these are the
friends from whom we parted