The Argosy — page 132: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

120 Letters from Majorca. steps in, and the mood passes, and we return to our life clothed and in our right mind, and ready once more for battle. But all this does not apply to our life in Mallorca. Here we have many resources, and no time to think upon metaphysics or the philo- sophy of life. We take photographs, and come out, as you have seen, without our heads: a mystery neither metaphysical nor philo- sophical, but scientific or psychical. HH. C. sketches occasionally with great ardour, and I send you the result. More often he writes poetry, and then I spare you. We compare things and people, and fall into wise moods, which are so short-lived that we console ourselves with the old aphorism that great minds must sometimes unbend. We need a great deal of unbending, for it is our normal condition. We have only one subject for regret: it lies in that Eastern saying: ‘‘This also must pass away.” Les jours se suivent, les heures sonnent. One day finds us in Palma, the next at the very ends of this beautiful little island. But it is all so small that we do everything leisurely. There is no undue rushing about, no unneces- sary wear and tear of nervous tissue. All goes smoothly: all is merry as a marriage bell. A bad comparison, by the way, for the bells here cannot be merry ; they are cracked and tinny, and sound takes the place of melody. They begin the first thing in the morning. You are awakened from dreams of paradise to the furious din of a pandemonium. It is only possible to suppose that the bells in Palma have suddenly all gone mad—a raging madness in which there is no silence of melancholy whatever. The air is full of startling sounds—horrible, exasperating, yet so absurd that you laugh. The servants who are dévotes flock to church and cathedral and go through their matins. They tell their beads, and probably the while are thinking of the domestic duties of the day, and the bargains they are about to make in the market-place. I fancy that wandering thoughts are not regarded in the light of a grave fault ; or if they are, the priest will absolve them. What can they tell in their hours of confession? For my own part, I should not know where to begin or end, what to say or what to leave unsaid. It is difficult enough to post up one’s diary at the end of the day—those who keep diaries : I have never found it possible ; any more than I have ever found it possible to make a single note of any place I ever visited—but to carry one’s memory through a month’s small sins seems to me a labour that should in itself at once atone for them all. After telling their beads, the women flock to the market, and the early hour of seven is about the busiest of the day. Here loud voices take the place of the now silent bells. One hardly knows which of the two is the more unpleasant—the noise of the bells or the voices of the women. I have never heard such voices—out of Germany—as these Mallorquins and Mallorquinas possess. They are loud, harsh and grating. Men and women shout at you and at comicbooks.com