More Trivia.

by Logan Pearsall Smith.

A GREETING

'What funny clothes you wear, dear Readers! And your hats! The thought of your hats does make me laugh. And I think your s.e.x-theories quite horrid.'

Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my readers--urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the pleasure of reading 'More Trivia.'

MORE TRIVIA

REa.s.sURANCE

I look at my overcoat and my hat hanging in the hall with rea.s.surance; for although I go out of doors with one individuality to-day, when yesterday I had quite another, yet my clothes keep my various selves b.u.t.toned up together, and enable all these otherwise irreconcilable aggregates of psychological phenomena to pa.s.s themselves off as one person.

THE GREAT ADVENTURE

Before opening the front-door I paused, for a moment of profound consideration.

Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and m.u.f.fled, the tides of mult.i.tudinous traffic, sounding along their ways.

Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to adventure out into that dangerous world again?

Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.

THE BEATIFIC VISION

Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the clay beneath it, as I b.u.mp my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated; from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.

One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic--I leaning back like G.o.d on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.

FACES

Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his daydream-larder.

Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring on the tops of busses; and the G.o.ds themselves can be seen promenading up and down Piccadilly.

THE OBSERVER

Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of human insects I like to note and study.

Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs.

Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction.

Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and manoeuvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated sounds.

These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one of them, that I was observing these Bipeds.

CHAOS

Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a dream.

THE GHOST

When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets, the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent, which lurks in the plate-gla.s.s of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors to waylay me.

THE HOUR-GLa.s.s

At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus.

'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?'

'It's an hour-gla.s.s,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-gla.s.s to measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it!

See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all essences--Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows--but I say! There's your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!'