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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
In "In a Canadian Canoe; The Nine Muses Minus One, and Other Stories," Barry Pain presents a rich tapestry of narratives that explore themes of adventure, identity, and the intricacies of human relationships. Pain's distinctive literary style combines wit with vivid imagery, creating an engaging backdrop for his stories that often capture the essence of the early 20th-century literary context. As a writer adept at situating his characters within both the natural landscape and social milieu, his prose oscillates between humorous observations and poignant reflections, providing readers with a multifaceted reading experience. Barry Pain, a prominent figure in the Victorian and Edwardian literary scenes, cultivated his narrative techniques through diverse experiences as an essayist, short story writer, and poet. Born in 1864 in England, Pain's travels and encounters greatly influenced his literature. His keen sensibility towards the absurdities of life and human foibles is palpable in this collection, revealing the underlying complexities that drive his characters to embark on their journeys of self-discovery. This book is highly recommended for readers who appreciate literary explorations of the individual against the backdrop of broader societal themes. Pain's stories will resonate with those drawn to the beauty of the written word and the depth of human emotion, inviting readers to engage with both the humor and bittersweet truths of existence.
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In a Canadian Canoe; The Nine Muses Minus One, and Other Stories
Table of Contents
PREFACE.
MY thanks are due to the Editor of “The Granta” for permission to reprint “In a Canadian Canoe,” “The Nine Muses Minus One,” and “The Celestial Grocery.” They have been carefully revised, and considerable additions have been made. The rest of the volume has not appeared before, so far as I know.
Although this book appears in a “Library of Wit and Humour,” I have not tried to make it all witty and humorous: I wanted there to be some background. I am not sure that I have not made it all background.
B. P.
Clement’s Inn,July 1891.
IN A CANADIAN CANOE.
I. ON ART AND SARDINES—BUT MORE ESPECIALLY SARDINES.
THERE is no pleasanter, sweeter, healthier spot than the Backs of the Colleges.
Get into your canoe at Silver Street. Put into that canoe:—
(1) The cushions of three other boats.
(2) Two pipes, in order that one may be always cool, and tobacco.
(3) One dozen boxes of matches, in order that one box may be always handy.
(4) The spiritual part of your nature, which will not take up much room, but is useful to talk to.
But do not take another man with you. I may frankly say, my reader, that you are absolutely the only man I know who has the keen appreciativeness, the capacity for quiet meditation, the dreaminess, the listlessness, the abominable laziness, that a Canadian canoe requires.
The man who would attempt to get pace on in a Canadian canoe probably would analyse the want of harmony in the death-song which a swan never sings—or worse than that.
The man who would try to make a Canadian canoe go where he wanted would be angry, because the inspiration of a poet does not always disappoint the expectations of a commonplace nature. You must go where the boat wants to go; and that depends upon wind and current, and on the number of other boats that run into you, and the way they do it, and the language of their occupants.
What a beautiful thing it is to lie at full length on the cushions, and see the sky through the trees—only the angels see the trees through the sky. My boat has taken me round to the back of Queen’s, and stopped just short of that little bridge. It is all old and familiar. The fowls coo as they cooed yesterday. The same two men in the same tub have the same little joke with one another in getting under the low bridge. Farther up, there is precisely the same number of flies on the same dead and putrescent animal. My boat went up to look at it, but could not stay. The recoil sent it back here; and here, apparently, it means to stop. You may take my word for it that a Canadian canoe knows a thing or two.
I wish I could paint the song of the birds and set the beauty of the trees to music. But there is a prejudice against it. Music is masculine, Art is feminine, and Poetry is their child. The baby Poetry will play with any one; but its parents observe the division of sexes. That is why Nature is so decent and pleasant. I would treat her to some poetry if I did but know the names of things. For instance, I have no idea what that bird is, and asparagus is the only tree which I recognise at sight.
I suppose you know that Art and Music are separated now. They sometimes meet, but they never speak. In the vacation I met them both one night by the edge of the sea; but they did not notice me. Art was busy in catching the effect of the moonlight and the lights on the pier. She did it well, and made it more beautiful than the reality seemed. Music listened to the wash of the waves, the thin sound of the little pebbles drawn back into the sea, and the constant noise of a low wind. He sat at a big organ, which was hidden from my sight by dark curtains of cloud; and as he played the music of all things came out into a song which was better than all things: for Art and Music are not only imitative, but creative. At present they are allowed to create only shadows, by the rules of the game. But I have been told that the old quarrel between them—I have no conception what the quarrel was about—will be made up one day, and they will love one another again. Their younger child, who will then be born, will take unto himself the strength and beauty of Art and Music and Poetry. He will be different from all three, and his name is not fixed yet.
Oh, confound the boat! I wish I’d tied it up. It’s just taken the painter between its teeth, and whipped sharp round and bolted. Woa, my lass, steady! It’s a little fresh, you see, not having been out before this week. I beg your pardon, sir—entirely my fault.
I don’t think he need have been so offensively rude about it. It’s not as if I’d upset him.
A fish jumped.
I know not the names of fishes, but it was not salmon steak or filleted soles, of that I’m sure. My boat goes waggling its silly old bows as if it knew but would not tell me. Can it have been a sardine?
No; the sardine is a foreign fish. It comes from Sardinia, where the Great Napoleon was exiled, as likely as not. It cannot swim in fresh water, but is brought to us in tins, which are packed in crates on trucks. It comes en huiles, in fact. Hence the inscription.
I cannot help thinking of the sad story of those two historical sardines—a buck-sardine and a doe-sardine—that lived on opposite sides of an island, which happened to be in the Ægean Sea.
They loved one another dearly; but they never, never told their love. He had no self-confidence, and she had too much self-respect. They met but once before their last day. It was at a place of worship in the neighbourhood of the Goodwin Sands. She caught his eye, and the umpire gave it out, and he had to go out. “Am I a hymn?” he said, just a little bitterly, “that I should be given out?” He was not a hymn, but he was a he, and had a tender heart.
All day long he sat on a stone, tail uppermost, and felt his position acutely. “Ah, if she only knew!” he sighed to himself.
And she was the life and soul of a select party in the roaring Adriatic. She quipped, and quirked; she became so brilliant that the surface of the sea grew phosphorescent. And no one guessed that beneath that calm exterior the worm was gnawing at the heart of the poor doe-sardine. No one would have been so foolish. For is it not well known that when a worm and a fish meet it’s mostly the fish that does the gnawing? Still, the doe-sardine did feel a trifle weary. Why might she not tell her love? Why must she suffer?
“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” as the gong said when the butler hit it.
About this time a young man, who was dancing attendance on Queen Cleopatra, happened to be passing on a P.N.O. steamer. This was in the republican era, when Duilius introduced the P.N.O. line. The Carthaginian merchants, with a keen eye for business, always used P.T.O. steamers, which were insured far beyond their value by unsuspecting offices in the less tutored parts of Spain. These wild tribes did not know what P.T.O. signified, but the steamers did; so did the crews of low Teutonic slaves, who were thus saved all the worry and expense of burial.
But let us return to our sardines. The young man on the P.N.O. steamer was reading a novel of Ouida’s; and, misliking the book, he flung it into the ocean. The attendants of the doe-sardine brought it to their mistress, and she read it with avidity, and after that she became very elegant, and very French.
She sat in the rose-tinted boudoir, with a sad smile on her gills, dreaming of her love. “Ah!” she murmured faintly, “Si vous saviez.”
She could not sleep! No sooner had she closed her eyes than she was haunted by an awful vision of a man soldering up tins of fish. The doctors prescribed narcotics. When she had taken the morphia of the doctors she had no more fear of the dream. But she took too much of it. She took all there was of it. Then the doctors prescribed coral, and she took any amount of coral. She would have taken in a reef; but the auctioneer was away for his Easter holidays, and consequently there were no sales. So she took in washing instead. Then, and not till then, she knew that she must die.
A fishing-net was passing, and a conductor stood on the step. “’Ere yer are, lyedy!” he called out. “Hall the way—one penny! Benk, Benk, Gritty Benk!” He used to say this so quickly that he was called the lightning conductor. She entered the net, and as she did so she saw the buck-sardine seated there. She staggered, and nearly fell!
“Moind the step, lyedy,” cried the conductor.
And so they were brought to the gritty bank of the Mediterranean, and received temporary accommodation without sureties or publicity—on note-of-hand simply. As they came in with the tide, they were naturally paid into the current account.
They were preserved in the same tin, and served on the same piece of buttered toast.
As the man consumed the bodies of the buck-sardine and the doe-sardine, the two spiritualities of the two fishes walked down the empyrean, and cast two shadows.
When he had gulped down the last mouthful, the two shadows melted into one.
So they found peace at last; and I do not refer to buttered toast. But the queerest part of it is that they were both sprats.
It has turned chilly. No one but myself is left on the river, and the solitary end of the afternoon is good to look at. The thing that you and I want most is a power of expression. When I say you, I mean the sympathetic reader who can enter into the true spirit of loafing: the loafing of the body in the wayward Canadian canoe that does what it likes, and the loafing of the mind that does not take the nauseous trouble to think straight. I want the younger child who is to be born when Art and Music are reconciled again, who will never take aim and yet never miss the mark, who will be quite careless but quite true. That child will know all about the sympathy which exists between one man and one scene in which he finds himself, and may perhaps reveal it to us.
But I am sorry for poor Art. She is a woman, and, though her beauty will not leave her, she desires reconciliation and love.
I am taken with a sudden verse or two. Kindly excuse them:—
II. ON EXALTATION: TOGETHER WITH AN ANECDOTE FROM THE ENTERTAINMENTS OF KAPNIDES.
ON quiet days, when no wind blows, my canoe is particularly restful. It has perfect sympathy with the weather. It creeps down slowly to King’s, leans itself against the bank, and thinks. Then, later in the afternoon, it bears the organ humming in the chapel—a faint, sweet sound which produces religious exaltation; and it becomes necessary to wrestle with the canoe, because it desires to fly away and be at rest. It is owing to this rhythmic alternation of laziness and spirituality in the boat that I have given it the name which is blazoned on its bows—Zeitgeist.
I have said the boat has sympathy with the weather. It also has sympathy with me, or I have sympathy with it, which is the same thing. There was a time when I suffered only from rhythmic alternations of two kinds of laziness. Now exaltation is beginning to enter in as well, and I do not know the reason, unless I have caught it from the boat. Materialistic friends have told me that too much pudding will cause exaltation. I have not so much as looked upon pudding this day. An unknown poet comes swiftly past me. I hail him, and ask him for information. He tells me that he had been that way himself, and that with him it is generally caused by the scent of gardenias, or hyacinths, or narcissus.
I am glad he has gone away. I think if he had stayed a moment longer I should have been a little rude.
Anyway, I have got it. When one suffers from it, memory-vignettes come up quickly before the mental eye, and the mental eye has a rose-tinted glass stuck in it.
That is a memory-vignette. I am back again at school in a low form, and I am asked to parse “passi,” and I parse it humorously, and there is awful silence; and then one sharp click, because the master in nervous irritation snaps in two the cedar pencil in his hand. I hate him, and he hates me. For the meaning of the words I care nothing. Now I think over them again, and I see that Virgil is very intimate with me, and that he knows the way I feel.
Up comes another quotation, this time from a more modern author:—
Yes, and if he had said that the curled moon was like a bitten biscuit thrown out of window in a high wind, it would not have been much less true. But there is no poetry in a biscuit, and precious little sustenance. The gentle fall of a feather is full of poetry:—
Edgar Allan Poe quoted those lines in his lecture on The Poetic Principle, and remarked on their insouciance. Well, he’s dead.
There are no more memory-vignettes. I have no more exaltation left. For a certain young woman crossed the bridge, and she had a baby with her, and a young man behind her. And she had the impertinence to call the baby’s attention to my canoe. Then she spoke winged words to the infant, and these are the exact winged words she used:—
“Chickey-chickey-chickey, boatey-boatey-boatey, o-o-m! Do you love auntey?”
And she called to the young man, saying, “’Enry, cummere. ’Ere’s a boat.”
Then they staggered slowly away, and took my exaltation with them. Just as I was getting a little better, the wind set in the wrong direction, and I heard her say some of it over again.
There is magic in the words. They set a man thinking of his past, his bills, and things which he has done and wishes he had left undone. All at once it seems as if it were going to rain. The wind turns colder. The cushions of the canoe change to brickbats. Somebody nearly runs into me, and I drop my pipe, and remember I never posted that letter after all. I look at my watch, and, of course, it’s stopped. Mainspring broken, probably. The way that woman talked was enough to destroy the works of a steam-engine. And I have a twinge in my side which I am quite sure is heart disease. I had not hoped for Westminster Abbey quite so soon. “Deeply lamented. No flowers, by request.”
And all this is due to the fearful words which that woman spoke, or it may be merely reaction. If one gets too high, or too low, one pays for it afterwards; and the commonplace praises of aurea mediocritas are properly founded. The quietist never pays, because he incurs no debts. All the rest pay, and there is no dun like a Natural Law. It may agree to renew for a short time, on the consideration of that small glass of brandy, perhaps, or a week’s rest; but one has to pay for the accommodation, and the debt must be discharged in the end.
Do you remember that quaint old story told by Kapnides in his third book of Entertainments? Well, Kapnides is not enough read at Oxford or Cambridge. I doubt if he is read at all. He is a little artificial, perhaps, but he has his points. It is the story of a Greek boy.
No; it is not the story of the Spartan boy who lied about a fox, and subsequently died of the lies which were told about himself.
It is the story of an Athenian boy, who in the month of June sat quite alone in a thin tent by night. And the tent was pitched under the shadow of the long wall, and the night was hot and stifling.
He sat alone, for dead men are no company. His father and his eldest brother were in the tent with him; but he was alone. He had not been afraid to tend them in their sickness, for he had himself recovered from the pestilence; but it had taken away from him his beauty and his memory. He had been very beautiful, and his mind had been very full of fair memories. All were gone now. He kept only the few bare facts which his dying father had told him, that his mother had died long before; that they had lived in the country and had been ordered into the city; that Pericles had made a remarkably fine speech in the preceding year; and that his only surviving relation was his twin-brother, who had gone away into Eubœa with the sheep. On these few poor facts, and on the two dead manly bodies before him, he pondered as he sat. And the night grew late, and yet he could hear outside the tent people passing busily, and quarrels, and long horrible cries.
And suddenly the poor Greek boy, with the ghost of an old beauty haunting his dull eyes and scarred cheeks, looked up, because he was conscious of the presence of a deity; and there before him sat an old gentleman in a silk hat, a frock-coat worn shiny under the fore arm, pepper-and-salt trousers, with a pen stuck at the back of his ear.
“I perceive a divine fragrance,” the boy said. The fragrance was gin-and-water, but he knew it not. “And about thy neck there is a circle of brightness.” In this he was correct, because the old gentleman was wearing an indiarubber dickey covered with luminous paint, which saves washing and makes it possible to put in a stud in the dark. “And thy dress is not like unto mine. It cannot be but that thou art some god. And at the right time art thou come; for my heart is heavy, and none but a god can comfort me. And due worship have I ever rendered to the gods, but they love me not, and they have taken all things from me; and only my twin-brother is left, and he keeps the sheep in Eubœa. And what name dost thou most willingly hear?”
“Allow me,” said the old gentleman, and produced a card from his pocket, handing it to the boy. On it was printed:—
The Proleptical Cashier.
(Agent for Zeus & Co., Specialists in Punishments.)
“The tongue is barbarian,” said the boy, “and thy spoken words are barbarian, and yet I understand them; and now I know that the gods are kinder to me, because already I have greater wisdom than my fathers, and, perhaps, somewhat greater remains. Give to me, O cashier, the power to stay this pestilence.”
“For a young ’un,” said the cashier, “that’s pretty calm, seeing that I made that pestilence. I just want to go into your little account. Your great-grandpapa, my boy, incurred a little debt, and Zeus & Co. want the thing settled before they dissolve partnership. They’ve just taken those two lives.” He touched the body of the boy’s father lightly with his foot. “They’ve taken your beauty and your memory. How sweet the girls used to be on you, my lad! but you can’t recollect it, and you won’t experience it again. You are a bad sight. Now we shall just kill your brother, and give the sheep the rot, and then the thing will be square. Now then, it’s a hot night, and you’d better burn these two. I’ll show you how to do it on the cheap, without paying for it. As long as Zeus & Co. are paid I don’t care about the rest.”
The boy sat dazed, and did not speak.
“There’s a rich man built a first-class pyre twenty yards from your tent. They’ve gone to fetch his dead daughter to burn on it. We’ll collar it before they get back. I’ll take the old man, because he’s the lightest. You carry your brother. He was a hoplite, wasn’t he, one of them gentlemen that do parasangs? Oh, I know all about it.”
Still the boy did not speak. They took up the two bodies, passed out of the tent, and laid their burden on the pyre.
“You look as if something had hurt you,” said the old gentleman. “I like these shavings miles better than newspaper.” He pulled a box of matches from his pocket, and set light to the pyre. It flared up brightly.
Then the boy touched him on the shoulder, and pointed first in the direction of Eubœa, and then at himself. A word came into him from a future civilisation.
“Swop?” he said gently.
“All right,” grumbled the cashier. “I don’t mind. It gives a lot of trouble—altering the books. But I don’t mind, I’m sure. It’s a thirsty night.”
For a moment the boy stood motionless; then, with a little cry, leapt into the flames. And his life went to join his beauty and his memory in a land of which we know too little.
It’s begun to rain. I think I’ll be off. I do hate anachronisms.
