Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay

bath.

Disbelieving
    I believe very little: you will have to tell me something excessively credible before I believe it. Do not come to me with your ghosts, crystals, palmistries, cards, creeds, miracles, scandals, rumours, gossips, and all the little news of the town; your new moons, black cats, and piebald horses I cannot away with. Is there an earthquake in the Barbadoes, an eruption in Sicily, a war in Abyssinia, a revolution in Spain? It is possible: but I do not see them, and have heard such tales before.
    I have a friend who cannot believe in atrocities. All her life she has heard of atrocities, and earnestly sought them when travelling abroad (for it is abroad that atrocities occur), but she has been always disappointed, for she has never found one. She was once told (says she) of a Balkan atrocity exhibit, a woman of whom it was reported that Bulgarian atrocities seen and suffered by her had made her mad, so that she was kept in an asylum, a permanent exhibit. My friend, thinking, “Here is a veritable atrocity at last,” made a pilgrimage to the asylum and asked to see the woman, but found her quite sane, only annoyed by her confinement. So now, when she hears of atrocities, she always thinks of this woman whom atrocity had notdriven mad, and rejects them sadly. If you offer her past atrocities, such as those of Nero and Caligula, she rejects them too, feeling that Suetonius was unreliable. I do not go so far as this friend of mine; the atrociousness of human nature has not, I must conclude, been always without its vent. For my part, I decimate atrocities, which leaves me more than enough.
    But, concerning most relations made to me, I consider, as Sir Thomas Browne held of the digesting of iron by the ostrich or sparrow-camel, that the negative seems most reasonably entertained. Or anyhow, whether reasonably or not, the most easily. Tell me what you will of earth or heaven; with Montaigne, I feel that we should say most times, there is no such matter.
    It makes me feel agreeably aloof, not to be imposed on by all those strident, thundering events of which I hear, not to be taken in by rumour-mongers, magicians, gossips, quacks, moon’s men, old wives’ tales, “puerile hallucinations and anile delirations,” and, in fact, the whole rumour of the humming world.
    But sometimes a thought troubles me, and I ask myself, should I, many centuries back, have been numbered with those who denied the Antipodes, and the rotundity of earth? Of these Bishop Wilkins complained, mentioning among them Chrysostom, Austin, Lactantius, the Venerable Bede, Lucretius, Procopius, and the voluminous Abulensis, together with many Fathers, and with Herodotus, who wrote, “I cannot choose but laugh, to see so many men venture to describethe earth’s compass, relating those things that are without all sense, as that the sea flows about the world, and that the Earth itself is round as an orb.” While Lactantius exclaims, “What are they that think there are Antipodes, such as walk with their feet against ours? Is there anyone so foolish as to believe that there are men whose heels are higher than their heads, that the plants and trees grow downward? What shall we think, that men do cling like worms, or hang by their claws as cats?” with much other pleasantry such as the ignorant and unbelieving use.
    I must beware, then, of too wide and too deep an incredulity, and remember that there are many things yet hid from us, and that really everything is extremely peculiar.

Doves in the Chimney
    The voice of the turtle is heard in my chimney. It is the prettiest soft low crooning in the world, like the soughing of wind in a pine wood, or the low moan of seas imprisoned between rocks. When first it stole into my room, as I sat reading there, I thought I had been Steele’s pastoral lady friend, Mrs. Cornelia Lizard, “whose Head was so far turned … that she kept a Pair of Turtles cooing in her